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Bai Haifeng

person · documented 1930–1950

Mongol officer and politician who moved between the Communist, Nationalist, and Mongol-autonomist camps; profiled by CIA field reports of 1949–50 both as a defender of the Northwest Mongols and as a consistent opponent of Mongol autonomy who ended by working for the Chinese Communists.

Bai Haifeng is a figure the sources refuse to resolve into a single allegiance, and this entry keeps that contradiction open rather than settling it. Across a cluster of 1949–50 US intelligence reports he appears at once as a Mongol leader uniting to defend the Northwest against the Communists and seated on Demchugdongrub’s own August-1949 Peace Preservation Committee; as a man the “Racialist” Mongols distrusted and accused of fabricating an assassination to seize troops; as someone profiled as working consistently against Mongolian autonomy; and, by 1950, as a Chinese Communist emissary sent to win Demchugdongrub over. The reports these come from are contemporaneous CIA field intelligence: unevaluated informant reporting, often relayed from Nationalist-aligned sources and anti-Communist in slant, with troop numbers that are estimates rather than counts. One of them, the fullest, openly warns that its information came from people hostile to its subject, so the tensions below may partly reflect the partisanship of the informants as much as Bai Haifeng’s own turns. Until recently no scholarly monograph or memoir source used in this atlas treated Bai Haifeng directly, so this entry as written rests entirely on CIA field reporting of a single tier. That limitation is now addressable but not yet addressed: Christopher P. Atwood’s Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911–1931 (Brill, 2002) does treat him, and is now held by this atlas but has not been consulted for this entry. Verify-gate: consult Atwood 2002 and rebuild this entry’s sourcing before its CIA-only characterizations are allowed to stand as the atlas’s settled account of him.

The CC Clique profile

The fullest account (Source A, a July 1949 report on Mongol leaders and the Nationalists’ “CC Clique”) sketches a career of serial realignment. By this telling Bai Haifeng studied at a Far Eastern university in the Soviet Union and joined the Communist Party, but when the Third International sent him into Inner Mongolia he switched to the Kuomintang (Source A). He became chief of the Peace Preservation Section under Demchugdongrub’s Bailingmiao-era regime (the Bat-khaalag council of the mid-1930s), and was placed under surveillance after ordering the “Blue Shirt Society” to assassinate Han Fenglin, a pro-Japanese officer on Demchugdongrub’s staff (Source A). This Bailingmiao-based rebellion finds independent, if incidental, corroboration in Sechin Jagchid’s memoir, which notes in passing that the official Jakhunju had at that time followed Bai Haifeng, Yun Jixian, and most of the Peace Preservation Troops in a rebellion based at Bailingmiao (Jagchid). It is a rare point where the CIA informant account and an independent participant source agree. He then fled to the Chinese general Fu Zuoyi, urged Demchugdongrub’s Peace Preservation Corps to defect, and raised a Mongol cavalry unit that saw no action. After a break with Fu Zuoyi he joined Hu Zongnan, commanding a cavalry division and later a brigade at the rank of lieutenant general, before leaving the army in 1948 following a falling-out with Hu Zongnan (Source A).

The same report casts his politics as steadily anti-autonomist: in the 1948 National Assembly he helped defeat a Mongolian-autonomy bill and handed the Central Government a list of the names of Mongolian nationalists (Source A). That is consistent with Jagchid’s own, differently angled account of that Assembly, in which the Mongolian Youth Alliance refused to sign a petition circulated to expand Bai Haifeng’s own military forces, and Bai Haifeng’s bloc was outvoted when the alliance pushed constitutional amendments over its objections (Jagchid; see that entry for the fuller episode). As second-in-command of Fan Hanjie’s army group he also tried, without success, to raise a Northwest unit (Source A). The report’s assessment is blunt: that his presence in the Northwest was meant to prevent Mongolian autonomy and to seize the troops of the Mongol commander Wu Guting (Mongol name Ogodei), whom these reports render “Ukudui,” and that he was pushing Prince Ta of Alashan (Damzana) to oppose Demchugdongrub (Source A). But the report itself cautions that this material came from persons “strongly opposed to the CC Clique” and “may be colored by their attitude,” a caveat that should travel with every judgment in it.

The assassination rumor

A second report (Source B, May 1949) supplies a concrete instance of the distrust. During March 1949 a rumor circulated that Sühbaatar, the acting brigade commander of Wu Guting’s units, had been assassinated. Mongols returning from Shanba said Bai Haifeng had spread the story deliberately in order to seize the troops, and that Sühbaatar was in fact alive and in command (Source B). The report frames this as a rumor rather than an established act, and describes Bai Haifeng as “not very highly trusted,” again an informant’s characterization, not a verdict.

The counterweight, and the turn to the Communists

Against the anti-autonomist profile stands a report from the same season (Source C, April 1949) that lists Bai Haifeng among the leaders who “agreed to unite and defend the area against the Chinese Communists,” alongside Demchugdongrub and Prince Ta (Damzana), and places him in the January 1949 discussions at Lanzhou. On this footing he was, in mid-1949, a colleague of Demchugdongrub’s rather than an adversary. He sat on the August-1949 Peace Preservation Committee of Demchugdongrub’s Alashan government, which that entry treats in full. At Alashan, per Jagchid, Bai Haifeng also sided with Wu Heling’s realist bloc against Demchugdongrub’s plan for a government in exile in Tibet, arguing instead for staying and working out a plan to remain in Mongolia (Jagchid). This is the same episode in which Wu Heling talked Damzana and He Zhaolin out of the exile plan; see Wu Heling’s entry for that debate.

The sharpest turn comes a year later. A September 1950 report (Source D) describes Bai Haifeng, now called a member of the Communist Northwest Commission, being sent in May 1950, together with He Zhaolin, by the Chinese Communists’ Northwest Military and Political Commission to try to persuade Demchugdongrub to join them; the pair did not manage to see him and were reported to be making a second attempt (Source D). Set beside the 1949 material, this leaves Bai Haifeng having sat on Demchugdongrub’s own committee and, within a year, carrying the other side’s overture to him. The sources record that trajectory without explaining it, and this entry likewise leaves it unresolved.

The fuller characterization of Prince Ta of Alashan, Damzana (also Darijaya / Dali Zhai), whom Source A profiles as wealthy, Manchu-intermarried, raised in Beijing, and reportedly not fluent in Mongolian, belongs with the Alashan government entry, where he is a central figure.

Sources