Övör Mongol Atlas

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Khafungga

person · 1908–1978

Eastern Inner Mongolian nationalist and later Communist-aligned political figure (1908–1978), a contemporary of Demchugdongrub who organized covert resistance to Japan from within Manchukuo before helping found the Communist-aligned autonomy movement in the east.

Identification: two names for one man

Sechin Jagchid’s biography of Demchugdongrub mentions “Khafungga” only briefly, as one of the “most influential initiators” of an early-1930s eastern Mongol nationalist movement (Jagchid). A much longer biographical account, published on the Chinese platform meipian.cn and evidently compiled by descendants, covers the same period under the name “Hafeng’a” (哈丰阿), a different transliteration of the same Mongolian name. The identification rests on more than similar sounds: both sources independently describe the same formative detail, study under the Daur Mongol educator and political activist Merse (Chinese name Guo Daofu) at the Northeast Mongolian Banner Normal School he founded in Shenyang in 1929 (Jagchid; “Hafon A” biography). Nakami Tatsuo’s scholarly chapter on Inner Mongolia independently confirms this teacher-student tie, naming Khafungga among the disciples who carried Merse’s nationalist current forward (Nakami; see the Merse entry for that thread in fuller detail). This entry treats Jagchid’s “Khafungga” and the biography’s “Hafeng’a” as the same person.

The two sources disagree on his home banner: Jagchid gives “Bingtu Banner,” while the biography states he was born in Kezuo Zhong Qi (Horqin Left Middle Banner) of the Zhelimu (Jerim) League. Both place him in the same eastern Mongol milieu, but this atlas does not attempt to reconcile the specific banner name.

Early nationalist activity, 1931–1937

According to the biography, Khafungga was born March 16, 1908, the son of Renqin Ningbu, a local banner police and militia commander (“Hafon A” biography). After the Mukden Incident of September 1931, he joined the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Army, one of several eastern Mongol armed groups formed in its aftermath to press for an independent Mongol state (Jagchid; “Hafon A” biography). Jagchid names Khafungga, together with the Dahur intellectual Jirgalang and Ashkan (an intellectual from the Darkhan Banner), as the movement’s most influential organizers. When Japan moved to establish its Manchukuo puppet state instead, the movement disbanded under threat, and its leaders were offered official posts within the new Japanese-controlled administration, without their underlying commitment to Mongol self-determination changing, in Jagchid’s account (Jagchid).

The biography describes Khafungga’s brother-in-law Asigen (married to his sister Dalif), very likely the same person Jagchid calls Ashkan, as a close political partner through this period; the two were later compared to the “Sleeping Dragon” and “Young Phoenix” of Chinese legend for their shared influence in the region (“Hafon A” biography). Within the Autonomous Army, Khafungga made contact with Comintern-linked representatives and joined the Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party in April 1932 (“Hafon A” biography).

Covert resistance under Japanese rule, and the 1945 uprising

Khafungga studied in Japan twice during the 1930s, graduating from the Japanese Army University in 1938, and used positions inside the Japanese-sponsored Manchukuo military and educational system to work against Japanese interests, according to the biography. During the 1939 Nomonhan Incident on the Mongolian-Manchurian border, he reportedly encouraged Mongol soldiers to surrender to Soviet and Mongolian People’s Republic forces rather than fight them. From 1941–42, as an instructor at the puppet Xing’an Military Academy, he is said to have used history lessons on Korea’s colonization to cultivate anti-Japanese national sentiment among Mongol officer cadets (“Hafon A” biography). On August 11, 1945, in the war’s final days, more than a thousand officers and students at that academy rose up against their Japanese officers, an event the biography credits substantially to years of clandestine organizing by Khafungga and Asigen (“Hafon A” biography). This account of his wartime activity comes from a single, non-academic source and has not been independently verified for this atlas.

Nakami records a further Japan posting in 1941, when Khafungga went to Tokyo as a counsellor of the Manchukuo embassy there. This atlas does not attempt to reconcile that posting’s exact timing against the biography’s 1941–42 dating of his instructorship at the Xing’an Military Academy. Both may be true in sequence or overlap, but no source used here states how they fit together. In Tokyo, per Nakami, Khafungga gathered Mongol students around him and preached “Mongol nationalism,” reportedly predicting that Japan and Germany would be defeated and that Inner Mongolia’s unification might then be achieved with Soviet and Mongolian People’s Republic support (Nakami).

The Communist-aligned autonomy movement in the east

After Japan’s surrender, Khafungga and Asigen were central to organizing an armed, Communist-aligned Mongol autonomy movement in the east, a track distinct from, and in practice a rival to, both the Nationalist Chinese government and the western Inner Mongolian movement associated with Demchugdongrub and eventually Mengjiang. Asigen helped found the East Mongolian Autonomous Government at Wangye Temple (Ulanhot) in February 1946 and later joined the Chinese Communist Party outright (“Hafon A” biography).

Nakami gives a fuller account of Khafungga’s own political trajectory in these same months. Immediately after Japan’s defeat, per Nakami, Khafungga launched a political movement and traveled to Ulaanbaatar to appeal for the amalgamation of Inner and Outer Mongolia; Marshal Choibalsan rejected the appeal (Nakami). Khafungga’s aim then shifted to autonomy for Inner Mongolia alone, and after his process with the Ulanhu-led Chinese Communist Party broke down, the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Government was established in 1947, a form of Mongol unification achieved within a “China” framework, in keeping with Chinese Communist Party policy of the time (Nakami). That government is not built out as its own entry in this atlas; see this atlas’s project notes for it as a logged candidate. Khafungga went on to hold a series of positions within the Communist Party’s Inner Mongolian autonomy apparatus and, later, the cultural and publishing institutions of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, according to the biography. The source’s coverage of his later offices is difficult to disentangle from those of other relatives described in the same lengthy document, and is not reproduced here in detail for that reason.

Later life and death

Jagchid, writing decades later from outside China, states only that Khafungga, grouped with “most of his other compatriots who had struggled for Mongolian nationalistic aspirations,” did not escape persecution during the Cultural Revolution (Jagchid). The biography corroborates this in general terms, stating he suffered persecution as an intellectual during that period, without detailing its severity (“Hafon A” biography). He is reported to have died in Hohhot in July 1978.

A note on sources

The “Hafon A” biography is not an academic or peer-reviewed source. It is a lengthy personal or family-compiled account published on a Chinese blogging platform, covering Khafungga alongside numerous relatives and in-laws in a single sprawling document. It is used here only where it independently corroborates Jagchid or where a claim is clearly and specifically attributed to Khafungga himself; its more detailed institutional and career claims should be treated with the same caution this atlas applies to any single, non-scholarly source.

Sources