Övör Mongol Atlas

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Li Shouxin

person · 1892–1970

Mongol general (1892–1970) from Josotu League who served as the military backbone of Demchugdongrub's successive governments from 1933 onward, then spent 1945–1949 trying and failing to rebuild an army in eastern Inner Mongolia before following Demchugdongrub into exile and, ultimately, imprisonment.

Li Shouxin was born July 11, 1892, a Mongol from the Tümed Right Banner of Josotu League (present-day Chaoyang, Liaoning), originally named Nasun Bayar; he adopted the name Li Shouxin after joining a Rehe guerrilla cavalry unit (Narangerel). He rose through the Northeastern Army under Zhang Xueliang as a cavalry brigade commander before allying with Japan in 1933, after which he held a series of military and administrative posts in Japanese-sponsored eastern Chahar (Narangerel). From 1936 he held continuous senior military and political office within Demchugdongrub’s governments. A modern academic source on his life describes his forces as the military backbone of the regime, and Sechin Jagchid records him as military commander of the Mongolian Allied League Autonomous Government and, per Lückenhaus’s 1943 account, supreme commander of the Mengjiang army under the name “Li Shou-hsin” (Narangerel; Jagchid; Lückenhaus).

Two accounts of his origins

The sources used here give strikingly different pictures of how Li reached prominence, and this atlas records the divergence rather than reconciling it. The modern biography by Narangerel has him rise conventionally through Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army as a cavalry brigade commander before allying with Japan (Narangerel). Jagchid instead tells an origin story of downward and then upward drift. Sent as a boy to a monastery to become a lama, Li was seized by Chinese bandits who forced him to tend their horses and then to travel with them; cut off from other Mongols to the point that, in Jagchid’s telling, he could no longer even speak Mongolian, he rose to lead the band himself, known as “Da-xin-zi” (“Big Xin”) along the Josotu and Juu Uda league borders (Jagchid). By this account his band was absorbed into the Rehe forces of the warlord Tang Yulin under the brigade commander Cui Xingwu. When the Japanese Kwantung Army overran Rehe in spring 1933 and Cui surrendered, the Japanese intelligence officer Matsumuro Takayoshi engineered Cui’s retirement and promoted Li to command the brigade, had the Manchukuo Army make him a lieutenant general, and reorganized his troops into the Kinggan Guerilla Division as a spearhead for the Japanese advance into western Inner Mongolia (Jagchid). The two accounts also differ on his name: Narangerel derives “Li Shouxin” from a Rehe cavalry unit he joined, while Jagchid notes his given name already contained the character xin (“faithful”), the root of his band’s nickname.

Jagchid, hostile to Li and writing as a partisan of Demchugdongrub, stresses that Li’s following was almost entirely Chinese rather than Mongol and judges him a man of “no national pride or sense of Mongolian identity,” “unconditionally faithful to the Japanese” yet “smooth, slick, and talented in manipulating circumstances” for his own benefit, whom the Japanese used as their number-two man in Mongolia to check Prince De (Jagchid). This is a pointed participant assessment and is recorded here as attributed characterization rather than settled fact.

The Gada Meiren uprising: a late-life confession

This section concerns Li Shouxin’s role in suppressing an armed uprising and the killing of its leader, and is handled with particular care. It involves a real death, a figure still honored in Mongol communal memory, and a source Li himself supplied late in life rather than one imposed on him by an accuser. Per Narangerel’s account of Li’s 1985 memoir (a distinct section of that article from the one this atlas otherwise draws on; see the note on sources below), Li volunteered, unprompted, a recollection of his role in suppressing the 1929 Gada Meiren uprising in the Jirim (Zhelimu) League, a Mongol revolt against land alienation whose leader, Gada Meiren, was killed in the suppression. He stated that on learning the true causes of the uprising he “felt very regretful” (memoir, p. 98, as quoted in Narangerel). This atlas treats that disclosure as a distinct category of evidence from anything else in this entry: a first-person admission against interest, volunteered by Li himself rather than attributed to him by Jagchid’s hostile testimony, an unevaluated CIA informant, or any other third party. That does not make it more reliable than those other kinds of evidence; a memoir composed late in life, after amnesty, has its own pull toward self-exculpation or selective remorse. It is a different kind of evidence, weighed on its own terms.

Narangerel’s own interpretation of the passage is kept here as attributed reading, not as this atlas’s conclusion. Narangerel suggests that how Li actually conducted the suppression, and the sincerity or full shape of his stated regret, may be “perhaps forever an unsolvable riddle,” and speculates that Li’s late-life remorse could connect to his own experience of Han-chauvinist (“大汉族主义”) mistreatment at the hands of Nationalist warlords later in his career. That is a speculative psychological reading offered by Narangerel, not a documented motive, and it is presented here as exactly that.

This atlas does not reconstruct the operational history of the 1929 suppression (dates, troop numbers, chain of command), because the source used here gives none of that detail and this entry will not supply it from assumption. A fuller account of the Gada Meiren uprising itself, including Li’s specific role in it, would need separate sourcing this atlas does not currently have; see the Gada Meiren stub entry, which carries forward the same “candidate future entry” logging from this atlas’s project notes. As with other points in this entry, this atlas records the matter as a self-reported confession set against an absence of independent corroboration, rather than resolving it either toward confirmation or doubt.

[Tagged SINGLE-SOURCE PERPETRATOR ACCOUNT] This atlas’s master chronology adds one further, more specific detail to the same episode: it names Li Shouxin (there rendered “Buyandelger”) as having led the Fengtien force that surrounded and killed Gada Meiren at the Shar Mörön (Xar Moron) river, around April 4–5, 1931. The location and specific date are reference-tier only, not independently citable scholarship (see the Gada Meiren stub entry), but the underlying claim, that Li Shouxin commanded the suppressing force, traces to the same Narangerel Part 2 / Li Shouxin 1985 memoir chain already described above, and carries the same single-source, self-reported-by-the-perpetrator caveat as the rest of this section. This atlas records it as an added specific rather than independent corroboration of Li’s role.

Under Japanese sponsorship: the Qingdao Conference

Jagchid also supplies a concrete instance of Li acting as the Japanese instrument against Demchugdongrub’s wishes. When Demchugdongrub refused in 1940 to subordinate his government to Wang Jingwei’s Japanese-backed regime in Nanjing, the Japanese sent Li to the Qingdao Conference in his place, without the prince’s permission. On March 24, 1940, Li signed an agreement recognizing Wang’s government as China’s central authority in exchange for regional autonomy, the Chinggis Khan calendar, and the existing flag, and his standing among Mongols suffered for it (Jagchid). See the Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government entry, which also covers Li’s participation with Demchugdongrub in the secret 1939–40 contact with Chiang Kai-shek.

The 1945 collapse and flight from Kalgan

When Japan’s surrender became known in Kalgan on August 15, 1945, Li Shouxin was with Demchugdongrub at the Mengjiang government’s seat. According to his own later account, he tried to concentrate his scattered forces at Hohhot through his subordinate Bao Guiting, but lost contact with him before the troops arrived; Bao’s men were absorbed instead by the Chinese warlord Fu Zuoyi (Narangerel). Offered a Communist surrender demand relayed by Chen Yi, Li forwarded it to Japanese military headquarters for guidance rather than deciding himself. The Japanese reply, as he recorded it, was that they would surrender only to the United States and Chiang Kai-shek, never to Soviet or Communist forces, and urged the Mongols to hand Kalgan to the Nationalists (Narangerel). Soviet aircraft dropped leaflets over the city denouncing Demchugdongrub as a traitor, and Soviet-Mongolian forces attacked; Li and Demchugdongrub fled Kalgan by train under Japanese protection on August 19. At Xuanhua the next day, Chiang Kai-shek’s government reorganized the Mongol Army as the Nationalist “10th Route Army” and named Li its commander. But his once roughly 20,000-strong force had by then largely dissolved under pressure from Fu Zuoyi and other Chinese warlords, leaving him, in the source’s phrase, “a commander without troops” (Narangerel).

Rebuilding and defeat in eastern Inner Mongolia, 1945–1947

Over the following two years Li Shouxin tried repeatedly to rebuild a fighting force in eastern Inner Mongolia and southern Manchuria, under continuous pressure from Nationalist secret police to keep fighting the Communists on their behalf while being denied real support or a return to his old territory (Narangerel). He absorbed defecting Mongol cavalry units through 1946, at times commanding several thousand men, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to subvert the Communist-aligned Mongol cavalry commander Qing Zhuolik tu (和子章). His campaign ended in decisive defeat at Kailu on February 25–26, 1947, when Communist-aligned Mongol cavalry under General Asigen stormed the city after roughly ten hours of fighting. Asigen is very likely the same “Ashkan” described elsewhere in this atlas as Khafungga’s brother-in-law and close political partner, meaning Li Shouxin’s decisive defeat came at the hands of a rival Mongol nationalist network, not only Chinese Communist forces (Narangerel).

Decline, Taiwan, and return to Demchugdongrub’s side

His remaining forces were folded into a Nationalist cavalry corps in 1947 and steadily downsized; by late that year Li held only a nominal advisory rank and lived under Nationalist surveillance in Beiping.

A CIA field report of May 1949 (Source Z), a US-government intelligence report of unevaluated informant reporting to be weighed below the atlas’s other sources, captures Li being courted from several directions in these last months. Before he left Beiping for Shanghai in November 1948, a message reached him through Zhang Jixiang, relaying Rong Chichen, a Whampoa-trained former brigadier who by then served Ulanhu’s Communist-aligned Inner Mongolian government (and who, despite the similar sound, is not one of the several men the sources call “Jirgalang”), urging Li, like Demchugdongrub and Wu Heling, to remain in Beiping and “lend assistance to the racial aspirations of the Mongols” (Source Z). In Shanghai that December an Englishman who said he was a Jardine Matheson official buying Ningxia wool and camel hair (the analyst guesses “Keswick”) drew Li into conversation and invited him to Hong Kong for “conferences with British officials regarding trade.” Having failed to get a Nationalist autonomy plan acted on in Nanjing, Li left for Hong Kong in early January 1949, saying he “did not object to the British idea of sponsoring him for an eventual return to Mongolia as a leading military man” (Source Z). The report judges him “a well known opportunist” with “a long record of cooperation with rightist Kuomintang elements,” and guesses he went on to Taichung, in Taiwan, to associate with CC-Clique Mongols (Source Z). Its itinerary for early 1949, ending in Hong Kong, is not easily squared with Narangerel’s, which has him at Nanjing and then Taipei; the two are set side by side here rather than reconciled. The opportunist label was echoed from the Mongol-nationalist side that same spring: the Mongolian Restoration Association, founded in March 1949, pointedly declined to invite Li as one of the “opportunistic CC Clique Mongols” (see that entry).

As the civil war turned against the Nationalists he moved to Shanghai, then Nanjing, where on January 1, 1949 he and Demchugdongrub were received by Chiang Kai-shek and directed to organize a Mongol autonomy movement at Dingyuanying in Alashan (Narangerel). Li instead returned to Shanghai and, as that city’s situation deteriorated, flew to Taipei with his family in April 1949. At Demchugdongrub’s invitation he traveled to Guangzhou that June, and on July 28, 1949 the two men left together for Alashan by way of Chongqing, Hanzhong, Lanzhou, and Yinchuan (Narangerel), joining what would become Demchugdongrub’s final government, the Mongolian Autonomous Government.

Arrest, imprisonment, and death

After that government’s collapse, Li Shouxin followed Demchugdongrub into the Mongolian People’s Republic, where he was arrested and extradited back to China, spending nearly fifteen years in custody (Narangerel). He was granted amnesty and released on December 28, 1964, at age seventy-three, and died in Hohhot in May 1970 (Narangerel).

A note on sources

The main source for this entry, a 2016 Chinese-language academic article by Narangerel of Inner Mongolia University, opens by noting that despite having been what it calls the “number two” figure in Demchugdongrub’s regime, Li Shouxin has never been the subject of a dedicated scholarly monograph. This entry follows that same underlying source material (principally Li’s own prison-era memoir, “Li Shouxin’s Self-Narrative” [李守信自述], compiled posthumously in 1985 in Inner Mongolia Historical Materials, vol. 20, and a companion volume of “puppet Mongol Army historical materials”) rather than independent verification. Most of this entry draws on Part 1 of Narangerel’s article, covering Li’s activity from 1945 onward, which this atlas holds and has read in full. The Gada Meiren passage above comes from Part 2 of the same article, covering his pre-1945 role, which this atlas has not held directly this pass; that passage is relayed per the maintainer’s own research notes on that section rather than independently checked against the full text, and is flagged as such.

Sources