Övör Mongol Atlas

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Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government

state · 1939–1941

Reorganized Japanese-sponsored Mongol government of September 1939 to August 1941, in which Demchugdongrub gained a grander title but lost real power, secretly contacted Chiang Kai-shek, and turned toward internal reform.

The Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government succeeded the Mongolian Allied League Autonomous Government on September 1, 1939, and continued under Demchugdongrub’s chairmanship until August 1, 1941, when it was renamed the Mongolian Autonomous State (Jagchid). Sechin Jagchid, who lived through this period inside the government as secretary to one of its ministers, frames these two years as the point at which “the course of Inner Mongolian politics reversed,” and describes Demchugdongrub’s morale as at its lowest: he “accepted a splendid title but lost the real power” of the earlier government (Jagchid).

Founding and structure

The change dissolved the Mongol-led Allied League government and merged it with the two Japanese puppet regimes of Southern Chahar and Northern Shanxi, with Kalgan as the shared capital. A fourth session of the Mongolian Congress declared the disbanding on August 29, 1939, and the founding ceremony took place at 9:00 a.m. on September 1, the morning Germany invaded Poland, in the courtyard of the Joint Committee of Mongolian Territory, directed by the Japanese advisor Kanai Shoji (Jagchid). Demchugdongrub became chairman, with Yu Pinqin and Xia Gong, the heads of the Southern Chahar and Northern Shanxi regimes, as deputy chairmen. The two Chinese regimes were demoted to political bureaus under a new Political Affairs Department, keeping their territories but losing independent standing (Jagchid). Kanai Shoji was installed as Supreme Advisor.

Demchugdongrub won two symbolic concessions, the name “Mongolia” rather than “Mongolian Territory” and dating by the Chinggis Khan calendar rather than the Republic of China’s, but the founding Declaration otherwise dismayed him. Written by the official Tegshibuyan, it attacked Chiang Kai-shek in violent language, and Demchugdongrub read only a few lines of the chairman’s oath aloud, leaving the deputy chairmen to proclaim the rest (Jagchid). A decade later, at Alashan in 1949, he told Jagchid directly that he had objected to “the words against Chiang Kai-shek” but that the document was already printed, and that he had rebuked Tegshibuyan for attacking an individual who “did not do any bad things to Mongolia” (Jagchid, p. 218). This government also introduced the seven-striped Mengjiang flag encoding an ethnic hierarchy under Japan. Demchugdongrub refused it in favor of the old Mongolian Military Government flag and relented only under direct Japanese pressure; see the Mengjiang entry for the flag’s symbolism and that dispute.

Among the new ministers was Prince Sungjingwangchug (1886–1948), the jasag prince of the Khauchid Left Banner and deputy head of the Shilingol League, appointed Minister of Civilian Affairs. Kanai had promoted his appointment hoping to build up a rival who could eventually replace Demchugdongrub, but Jagchid, who became Prince Sung’s secretary, records that the plan backfired: Sung proved loyal, and Demchugdongrub came to rely on him as a trusted intermediary with the Japanese (Jagchid).

Secret contact with Chiang Kai-shek

Demoralized by the loss of real authority, Demchugdongrub and Li Shouxin opened a covert channel to Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital at Chungking in 1939–40, through Chungking intelligence officers Gao Rong and Ma Hansan and the trusted Mongol intermediary Namur (Liu Jianhua), then head of the Hohhot police (Jagchid). Demchugdongrub told Gao Rong he was willing to leave Japanese-occupied territory for Chungking. Chiang instructed him to cross the Yellow River near Baotou, but Demchugdongrub preferred a northern route through Outer Mongolia and the Soviet Union, in part to avoid passing through territory held by Fu Zuoyi, whom Jagchid calls the prince’s “personal mortal enemy” (Jagchid). Chiang ultimately advised him to stay put and, in Jagchid’s paraphrase of what the prince later told him, to “tolerate the heavy oppression” and deceive the Japanese from within (Jagchid).

Japanese military intelligence uncovered the radio channel; arrests and torture followed. Several intermediaries were executed or died in custody, and Mergen and Xiao Zhaogeng were imprisoned for years before Demchugdongrub secured their release (Jagchid). Confronted, Demchugdongrub confessed to the Japanese commander Okabe Naosaburo and chief of staff Tanaka Shinichi, taking full responsibility and asking pardon for the others. Asked by Tanaka what he would do if Chiang granted Mongolian independence, he replied that he could not trust promises that had never materialized, a careful answer that, in Jagchid’s telling, preserved his standing with the Japanese (Jagchid). This episode is largely first-hand testimony: Jagchid draws on what Demchugdongrub told him directly, on an account Namur gave him in Taibei in 1982, and on the published diary of General Okabe, which dates the contact to the summer of 1940.

Subordination to Wang Jingwei and the clash at Wuyuan

In January 1940 the Japanese pressed Demchugdongrub to subordinate his government to Wang Jingwei’s new Japanese-sponsored regime in Nanjing, to be settled at a conference in Qingdao. Jagchid notes the reversal: the Japanese, who had spent years urging the Mongols to break from China, were now demanding they accept a Chinese authority (Jagchid). Demchugdongrub refused to attend and would not authorize a delegate, so the Japanese sent Li Shouxin without his permission. On March 24, 1940, Li signed an agreement recognizing Wang’s government as China’s legitimate central authority in exchange for regional autonomy, the Chinggis Khan calendar, and the existing flag, a compromise brokered by Itagaki Seishiro (Jagchid). Li’s image “darkened in the hearts of the Mongols” as a result (Jagchid).

Around the same time, Japanese and Mongol forces mounted a westward campaign against Fu Zuoyi into the grain lands inside the great bend of the Yellow River. They took Wuyuan on February 3, 1940, and Linhe two days later, but Fu counterattacked and retook both cities, killing the Japanese commander Kuwabara. The defeat halted Japanese westward expansion from Baotou for the rest of the war and raised Fu’s prestige (Jagchid). Jagchid ties the aftermath, heavier Chinese settlement and control in the Yekejuu (Ordos) area, directly to the March 1943 Yekejuu (Ikejuu) Incident, when Mongols of the Jasag Banner rebelled against Chinese domination.

Reform and self-strengthening

Even as the government’s external position weakened, Demchugdongrub turned toward internal reform. In the fall of 1940, encouraged by Wu Heling, who had been impressed by the Hokkaido dairy cooperative founder Kurosawa Torizo, he convened banner leaders at his Kalgan residence to found the Mongolian cooperatives, the khorshiya, deliberately choosing the Mongol term over the Chinese hezuoshe to avoid Japanese suspicion of its socialist echo (Jagchid). The cooperatives let each family buy shares (one required, 300 maximum, at ten Mengjiang yuan each) and were meant to let Mongol herders trade wool, hides, and animals directly with Beijing and Tianjin, bypassing both Chinese merchants and the Japanese-run Daimo gongsi (Great Mongolian Company) monopoly (Jagchid).

In early 1941 Demchugdongrub gathered the jasags of the ten Shilingol banners for a five-day conference at the Pandita Gegeen monastery (present-day Shilinhot), pointedly inviting no Japanese, to press them to adopt the administrative reforms he had pioneered in his own Sunid Right Banner: fixed banner budgets, a cap of five percent of the budget on a jasag’s personal and household spending, twenty-five percent of banner income devoted to education, and the immediate establishment of primary schools for girls (Jagchid). Later that year a visit to Kalgan by the Japanese army minister Tojo Hideki, who presented Demchugdongrub with 500 rifles for a personal bodyguard, signaled that Kanai Shoji no longer dominated Mongol affairs and encouraged the prince that nation-building might yet advance (Jagchid). Demchugdongrub used the gift to form a bodyguard unit he named the shitar cherig (“chess soldiers,” i.e. pawns) under Colonel Khatanbagatur.

The government was reorganized and renamed the Mongolian Autonomous State on August 1, 1941, with a Mongolian Rehabilitation Committee under Prince Sung created as one of its central instruments (Jagchid).

Independent corroboration, and a three-name conflict for one merger

This atlas’s master chronology independently corroborates the September 1, 1939 merger via two further sources, each naming the resulting government differently; the names are recorded here side by side rather than harmonized. Narangoa 2004 calls it the “Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government,” matching this atlas’s own house name exactly. Dudin 2015 (T3, low-tier; see this atlas’s project notes for the warning on this source) also records the same September 1, 1939 merger, but the copy this atlas’s material was relayed from is badly OCR-corrupted at exactly this point, garbling the government’s name as “Mengjiang, Chanani, Zigbee.” That is not a coherent name in any language this atlas can identify, and it is not independently reconstructable from what is in hand. This atlas records the garbled form here rather than silently dropping it or guessing at a correction, consistent with how it treats other OCR-damaged material. The United Committee of Mengchiang entry covers the Japanese-run body, the “Joint Committee of Mongolian Territory” above, that this September 1939 merger absorbed.

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