Gada Meiren

person · documented 1929–1931

STUB: Mongol banner militia officer who led armed resistance to Chinese land reclamation on Darhan Banner pasture, 1929–31, killed in the suppression; dates and event details here are reference-tier only, pending the scholarly source named below.

PLACEHOLDER ENTRY. This is an intentional placeholder, not an unfinished or neglected entry: this atlas names and dates entities it cannot yet treat fully rather than omit them from the record, and this entry is deliberately held at minimal, reference-tier detail pending the specific scholarly source named in its VERIFY-GATE below.

Gada Meiren (personal name Nadmid; a meiren, banner militia officer) led resistance, then armed uprising, after the Fengtien warlord administration under Zhang Xueliang colluded with banner authorities in 1929 to sell or reclaim roughly three-quarters of Darhan Banner’s grassland (Khorchin Left Wing Middle Banner, Jirim League) to Han settlers. See the land-reclamation theme entry for this episode’s place in that atlas-wide thread. He was surrounded and killed at the Shar Mörön (Xar Moron) river around April 4–5, 1931, by a Fengtien force this atlas’s master chronology names as led by Li Shouxin (Buyandelger); the uprising dispersed after his death. Every date and specific here is reference-tier, not independently citable scholarship, except the Li Shouxin identification, which is recorded in Li Shouxin’s own entry and tagged SINGLE-SOURCE PERPETRATOR ACCOUNT, since it rests on Li’s own 1985 memoir as relayed via Narangerel Part 2. See that entry for the fuller (though still limited) treatment this atlas already gives that specific connection.

Folk memory vs. documented fact: a folk song and a 1979 narrative poem (composed roughly in the 1950s) commemorating Gada Meiren both cast the warlord Zhang Zuolin as villain. But Zhang Zuolin was assassinated in 1928, before the Darhan land sale; the actual backer was his son Zhang Xueliang’s Fengtien regime. Some lower-tier sources also wrongly identify the settlers as Japanese. This atlas’s master chronology records this as an explicit, unresolved conflict between folk memory and documented fact (see the land-reclamation entry), and it is not resolved here either.

VERIFY-GATE (source located and corrected; not yet consulted): the gating source is confirmed, its citation completed, and one date corrected. The “遼北荒 / 2003” reference resolves to Borjigin Burensain (also written Burensain Borjigin, b. 1963, Mongolist historian), “The Reclamation Issue of Liao-Bei-Huang and Gada Meirin’s Uprising,” Waseda Journal of Literature Researches 47(4): 113–126, dated 2002, not 2003 (year corrected here; the atlas’s prior “2003” appears to have been an approximation). The same material is also available in English as Chapter 4, “The Reclamation of the Liaobei Wasteland and Gada Meiren’s Uprising,” of Burensain’s book The Agricultural Mongols: Land Reclamation and the Formation of Mongolian Village Society in Modern China (Shumpusha, 2017; trans. Thomas White, rev. Uradyn E. Bulag), which is the more readily acquirable form for operational history. This atlas holds neither yet. The separate Li Shouxin strand still additionally requires Narangerel Part 2, tagged SINGLE-SOURCE PERPETRATOR ACCOUNT wherever used. Do not expand this entry’s account of the uprising itself until Burensain has been consulted.

Sources

Reference-tier encyclopedic material only, relayed via this atlas’s master chronology, for the uprising’s dates and outline. NOT independently citable; see this atlas’s project notes for the standing caveat on this source tier. No claim above should be treated as settled fact.
For the Li Shouxin/Shar Mörön connection specifically, see the Li Shouxin entry’s own Sources section (Narangerel, via the master chronology; SINGLE-SOURCE PERPETRATOR ACCOUNT).