Mengjiang

state · 1937–1945

Common name for the Japanese-sponsored Mongol autonomous territory in Chahar and Suiyuan, governed by a succession of Demchugdongrub-led administrations from 1936 to 1945.

“Mengjiang” (Mongolian Borderland) is the conventional name historians use for the succession of Japanese-sponsored Mongol autonomous governments that ruled parts of Inner Mongolia, Chahar, and Suiyuan from 1936 to Japan’s defeat in 1945. It was never the formal name of any single government. The term entered common use, in Chinese, in Japanese (as Mōkyō), and later in English-language scholarship, for the territory administered from Kalgan and Hohhot. Demchugdongrub led each successive administration in turn:

Mongolian Military Government (1936–1937)
Mongolian Allied League Autonomous Government (1937–1939)
Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government (1939–1941)
Mongolian Autonomous State (1941–1945), the final and internationally best-known iteration

Sechin Jagchid dates the name’s emergence specifically to November 22, 1937, when a Japanese-run “Joint Committee of Mongolian Territories” unified Demchugdongrub’s government with separate Japanese puppet regimes in Southern Chahar and Northern Shanxi (Jagchid). The term is also used more loosely for the whole run of governments back to 1936, since that first government was already Japanese-sponsored; hence the approximate startYear given here.

Population

Japanese wartime records cited by Tuo give Mengjiang’s 1939 population as roughly 5.21 million Han Chinese, 290,000 Mongols, and 94,000 Hui Muslims; a 1941 survey put it at about 4.86 million Han and roughly 300,000 Mongols, with the recorded Hui population at about 37,000 (Tuo). By either count, Mongols made up under six percent of the population of a state whose entire claimed purpose was Mongol self-rule.

Political evolution

Tuo dates the sequence in granular steps, though exact dates vary slightly across sources. In 1936, as the calendar was reset to the 731st year of Chinggis Khan, Demchugdongrub established a Mongolian army headquarters in the Sonid (Sünit) Right Banner and a Mongolian military government at Dehua (Tuo). The Sonid Right Banner is the same banner as West Sünit; “Right” is equivalent to “West.” Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, he founded the Mongolia Federation Autonomous Government in Hohhot (formerly Guisui, the prewar capital of Suiyuan Province) with Japanese backing on October 27, 1937 (Tuo). On November 22, 1937, a Mengjiang Federation Committee formed at Kalgan, uniting three puppet governments: South Chahar (at Kalgan), North Jin/Shanxi (at Datong), and the Mongolia Federation government (at Hohhot). These merged into a single Mengjiang Government on September 1, 1939 (Tuo). The territory dissolved with Japan’s defeat in August 1945.

Administration

At the start of 1943 the North Shansi and South Chahar governments were abolished and converted into ordinary provinces. Kalgan was thereafter administratively “regarded as the capital,” though League affairs reportedly continued to be directed mostly from Hohhot (called Houho in wartime sources), which Mongol leaders hoped would eventually become the real capital (Lückenhaus). The army was under the supreme command of Li Shouxin, and the regime’s calendar was dated from Chinggis Khan (Lückenhaus; Jagchid).

The flag. Mengjiang’s flag visually encoded this same ethnic hierarchy. Jagchid describes it as seven horizontal stripes: a broad red band in the center for the Japanese, two narrow white stripes for Muslims, two slightly wider blue stripes for Mongols, and yellow bands top and bottom, equal in width to the blue, for “the Chinese and other nationalities.” The whole design was meant to symbolize Japan as the country toward which the other nationalities of East Asia should “incline,” unifying under the new regime (Jagchid, p. 219). Jagchid also records that the flag was imposed over Demchugdongrub’s own objections: he initially refused it, preferring the earlier Mongolian Military Government’s flag, and only relented under direct pressure from Japanese officials (Jagchid).

Wartime self-image

A 1943 account by Alfred Lückenhaus is the regime’s most detailed wartime self-portrait, but it is not neutral reportage. Lückenhaus wrote for the DNB, Nazi Germany’s official state news agency, and published this piece in The XXth Century, a German-run, pro-Axis magazine operating in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. What follows is relayed here as the regime’s own wartime messaging, not as established fact.

According to Lückenhaus, Mengjiang presented itself as unified, developing, and orderly: a “remarkably quiet and pacified territory” building schools, an army, and industry, and reforming Lamaist religious institutions, all under Japanese “guidance.” Its messaging echoed Axis wartime rhetoric directly. The account claims the people of Mengjiang already enjoyed “freedom from want and freedom from fear” under Japanese tutelage, an evident jab at Franklin Roosevelt. Lückenhaus names a figure “Wu Hao-liang,” described in the piece as Mengjiang’s “Prime Minister” and quoted framing the regime’s purpose as twofold: realizing Mongol unification and helping Japan win the war, presented as complementary rather than competing aims. That name is a maintainer-confirmed identification with Wu Heling, whose name this atlas spells only that one way regardless of how a given source romanizes it, per house convention (compare the “Prince Te / Te Wang / Teh → Demchugdongrub” mapping-table row). The account’s economic claims follow the same pattern. It cites, for instance, an estimate of 29.3 billion tons of coal reserves in the Tatung field alone, a figure with no independent verification available here. The same source also gives population figures of its own, a total of roughly 6 million with fewer than 240,000 Mongol, alongside claims of 1.3 million Mongols in Manchukuo and 900,000 in Soviet-aligned Outer Mongolia, all likewise Japanese-supplied statistics relayed rather than verified.

Self-presentation extended to aerial imagery as well as text. The Japanese geography magazine Chiri kyōiku (Geography Education) ran a feature in its May 1940 issue titled “Sora kara mita Mōkyō sankei” (“Three Views of Mengjiang, as Seen from the Sky”), pairing aerial photographs of Baotou and the upper Yellow River with one of an Ordos lamasery its photographer said was “not even recorded on a map” (Ambaras and McDonald, “The View from Above,” citing Chiri kyōiku 32, no. 2). Ambaras and McDonald read this kind of aerial photography as part of a broader Japanese habit of treating the region’s open spaces, steppe as much as sky, as unbounded by conventional territoriality, a framing that served to justify Japanese disregard for Mongolian and Chinese sovereignty alike.

Japanese ambivalence and the limits of autonomy

A further scholarly framing comes from the edited volume Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (attribution to a specific chapter or page not verified; this atlas holds only pasted excerpts, not the full volume, see this atlas’s project notes for the standing caveat on this source). It reads Japan’s posture toward Mengjiang as deliberately ambivalent rather than simply exploitative or simply supportive: the Japanese valued the Mongols as a political counterweight to the Han Chinese majority in the territories they occupied, while repeatedly dangling, and ultimately withholding, genuine independence. On this account, the turning point came after Wang Jingwei’s Japanese-sponsored government was established in Nanjing in 1940 (see the Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government entry for Demchugdongrub’s own encounter with that government at the Qingdao Conference). Chinese border-integrity politics thereafter led Japan to refuse outright Mongol independence in favor of what the volume calls a “Mongolian Autonomous Dominion,” autonomous in name but formally still part of the Chinese Republic.

The same source also urges caution about the movement’s own character, a check worth recording against any romanticized reading of it. It argues that “genuine Mongol nationalism” is hard to assert flatly for this period, since what existed was a clear sense of Mongol ethnic identity expressed across a range of political aspirations, only some of which were nationalist in a fuller sense (Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia; the specific contributor is not identified in the excerpts held for this atlas). This is offered here as an evenhanded scholarly qualifier, not as a verdict on any individual actor covered elsewhere in this atlas.

The same volume gives a Japanese-era estimate of roughly one million Mongols living in Manchukuo out of a total population of about thirty million as of 1932, a figure the source itself acknowledges as unreliable, and presented here with that same flag rather than as a count. It sits uneasily, and unreconciled, against Lückenhaus’s own 1943 figure of 1.3 million Mongols in Manchukuo cited above. Both are Japanese-era estimates from different years and different purposes, and this atlas records the discrepancy rather than picking one.

Historiography

Tuo Jianing’s 2019 study of Hui Muslim intellectuals under Mengjiang, part of a broader look at the autonomy movement’s legacy, draws on Japanese-era records and Chinese-language local histories to give the founding chronology and demographic figures used above, and offers a critical counterweight to Lückenhaus’s regime self-portrait. Not every minority accepted the regime’s nationalist framing on its own terms. Tuo notes that while Mengjiang dated its calendar from Chinggis Khan, the Baotou Great Mosque continued using the Republic of China calendar, marking woven carpets “the 30th year of the Republic of China” in 1941 rather than the regime’s own year 736 (Tuo). Mengjiang’s Hui minority, though far smaller than the Han or Mongol populations, had its own Japanese-sponsored institutions, an Islamic Association of the Northwest, its own schools, and its own press, through which Japanese authorities sought to instrumentalize Hui identity much as they did Mongol identity (Tuo). This entry does not attempt a full account of the Hui under Mengjiang or of Wu Yaocheng, the Hui educator at the center of Tuo’s study; that would be a natural future expansion of this atlas.