Övör Mongol Atlas

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Merse

person · documented 1925–1932

Dahur Mongol nationalist intellectual (Chinese name Guo Daofu) who founded the Normal Academy of the Northeast Mongolian Banners in 1929; his fate after 1932 is unconfirmed.

Merse (also known by his Chinese name, Guo Daofu; rendered elsewhere in Sechin Jagchid’s book as Guo Taofu) was a Dahur Mongol intellectual from eastern Inner Mongolia’s Hulunbuir region, and one of the most influential nationalist organizers of his generation among the eastern Mongols (Jagchid). The start and end years given here mark the span of his political activity documented in the sources used for this entry, not birth and death dates, which are not established by those sources.

This entry’s biographical narrative (his early career, the Hulunbuir movement, the Normal Academy, and his disappearance) rests entirely on Jagchid’s account and should be read as his telling of it, not as independently verified. Nakami Tatsuo’s chapter in Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia adds a genuinely independent layer: it reconstructs Merse’s political thought from his own Chinese-language writings and gives its own, differing account of his fate. Where Nakami’s material appears below, it is attributed separately and weighed on its own terms rather than merged into Jagchid’s narrative. Christopher Atwood’s 1999 study of Saichungga, used elsewhere in this atlas, remains a plausible further candidate for corroborating the “Young Mongols” movement Merse helped found, but this atlas has not had that article in hand and does not assert what it says.

From student radical to Hulunbuir politics

Merse studied at the Beijing College of Law and Politics, where he developed radical, nationalist views. He allied with a group of eastern Inner Mongolian youth to found the Mongolian Youth Party, then joined the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party under Bai Yunti’s leadership (Jagchid). After Bai Yunti was pushed out by leftist rivals and left Ulaanbaatar, Merse was sent back to the Hulunbuir League. Having suffered these political setbacks, he moderated his leftist stance and built a working relationship with Lingsheng, the powerful conservative leader of Hulunbuir, who came to treat Merse as an advisor and, notably, sent him to Nanjing as his personal representative to welcome the Panchen Lama (Jagchid).

It was through the Panchen Lama’s circle that Merse and Demchugdongrub became acquainted. Jagchid describes both men as sharing “the zeal and determination to struggle for Mongolian survival,” and both sought the cooperation of the Mongol nobles gathered around the Panchen Lama for that cause (Jagchid).

Political thought

Nakami reconstructs part of Merse’s political thinking from his own Chinese-language writings of the mid-1920s. Merse used the Mongol word arad, derived from the Russian narod (“the people,” a term that in Russian usage carried class distinctions), but read it instead as meaning “the nation.” On that basis he interpreted the Soviet-sponsored “People’s Revolution” then under way in Outer Mongolia as, in substance, an exercise in nationalism rather than socialism (Nakami). The same ambiguity shows in his own party’s name. In Mongol it was the Dotaghadu Mongghol-un arad-un qubisqal-un nam, the “Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party”; in Chinese it was rendered Neimenggu guomin gemingdang, deliberately echoing the Guomindang. Nakami reads this bilingual doubleness as itself a reflection of the unsettled China–Mongolia relationship of the period (Nakami).

By Nakami’s account, Merse’s strategic thinking shifted markedly after he came to terms with the warlord Zhang Xueliang in September 1929. Jagchid instead places that reconciliation the following spring, after Soviet troops withdrew from Hulunbuir; the two sources are not reconciled here (Jagchid; Nakami). Concluding that a fully independent Mongol nation-state was not achievable, Merse moved from a politics of Mongol nationalism toward what Nakami calls “ethno-nationalism under China”: cultural autonomy pursued within a Chinese political framework rather than outside it (Nakami). His own reasoning, as Nakami reconstructs it, was clear-eyed to the point of bleakness. An alliance with a culturally and militarily more advanced power, whether Russia or Japan, risked the Mongols being “assimilated or annihilated,” so alliance with the comparatively “equally weak” Han Chinese was, to Merse, the safer course (Nakami).

Merse’s writings also warned early that Japanese “pan-Asianism” concealed designs on Mongolia; as evidence he pointed to the Japanese dealings of Babujab and of Grigorii Semenov (Nakami). See the Japanese pan-Mongol strategy (two fronts) theme entry, where Merse’s early diagnosis and the Semenov material (also treated in the Chinggis Khan worship / imagery entry) are set side by side. That entry also records a 1935 episode, reported by Lattimore, in which invoking Merse’s own name and reputation was what turned a group of Mongols in Japanese service from formal pro-Japanese answers to a franker statement of where their loyalties actually lay (Lattimore, via Nakami), his name itself functioning as a kind of password.

The Hulunbuir independence movement and the Normal Academy

In the winter of 1929, taking advantage of a Soviet military incursion into northern Manchuria, Merse and a former comrade, Fumingtai, launched a Hulunbuir independence movement centered on Hailar. When Soviet troops withdrew the following spring, Fumingtai left for the Mongolian People’s Republic, while Merse accepted an offer from Zhang Xueliang to found the Normal Academy of the Northeast Mongolian Banners at Mukden (Jagchid). There he trained a generation of young Mongol nationalist intellectuals, seeding both nationalist and socialist ideas among his students. Several went on to shape Inner Mongolia’s later politics, education, and economy, including Khafungga, whom Jagchid separately describes as “a former student of Merse” at this same school (Jagchid).

Nakami independently confirms this teacher-student line, naming Khafungga among the disciples who carried Merse’s nationalist current forward (Nakami). Nakami’s framing of that legacy complicates any clean reading of it: Merse, in Nakami’s words, “throughout his life exerted himself to educate Mongol youth,” and many of those students went on to work with the Japanese (Nakami).

Disintegration and disappearance

The Japanese seizure of Mukden during the Manchurian Incident of September 1931 deprived Merse of his institutional base: the Normal Academy, after only about two years of operation, disintegrated. Merse, deeply antagonized by Japan because of his earlier ties to the Comintern and the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, returned to his home region of Hulunbuir. When Japanese forces subsequently invaded that area, he went on to Ulaanbaatar.

His ultimate fate is where this entry’s three sources diverge most sharply, and the divergence itself, not a resolution, is the point. Jagchid’s own account is noncommittal: Merse simply “disappeared” after reaching Ulaanbaatar, and the one specific claim Jagchid records, that he was killed by Su Bingwen, a commander of Chinese remnant forces, is a rumor Jagchid himself discounts, stating outright that “there is no evidence to support this” (Jagchid). Lattimore’s account, as reported and then corrected by Nakami, is far more specific and points in a different direction: that a subordinate of Zhang Xueliang had Merse secretly assassinated, fearing he “might bring some Mongols over to the Japanese side” (Lattimore, via Nakami). Nakami rejects this version outright, writing that Merse “was in fact taken under guard from the Soviet consulate in Manchouli to the Soviet Union,” and stating plainly that Lattimore’s account is “not accurate” (Nakami).

This atlas does not adjudicate between Nakami’s rejection and Lattimore’s original claim. What can be said is only this: Nakami, writing later and specifically correcting Lattimore, offers the most confident account; Lattimore’s assassination story is a specific but now-disputed claim; and Jagchid’s version is the vaguest of the three and, in its one concrete detail, a rumor its own source does not credit.

Sources