Övör Mongol Atlas

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Mongolian Autonomous State

state · 1941–1945

The final and best-known iteration of Mengjiang, inaugurated at Kalgan in August 1941 under Demchugdongrub and dissolved with Japan's defeat in August 1945.

The Mongolian Autonomous State (Mongolian: Monggol-un Obesuben Jasakhu Ulus) was the final and internationally best-known form of the Mengjiang territory, succeeding the Mongolian Allied Autonomous Government. It was inaugurated on August 4, 1941 in Kalgan, with Demchugdongrub continuing as chairman, following his second visit to Japan (Jagchid).

Sechin Jagchid describes this as Demchugdongrub’s “second golden era,” though one that “came too late.” Real financial, police, and transport power remained largely in Japanese hands throughout, administered through a rotating cast of Japanese “supreme advisors,” including Kanai Shoji, removed in late 1941, and his successor Ohashi Chuichi, who himself clashed with the Japanese military over the state’s autonomy. A state formally autonomous but functionally leashed, even in its final and most developed form, matches the deliberate ambivalence one scholarly account attributes to Japanese Mongol policy across the whole Mengjiang period; see the Mengjiang entry for that framing. The Mongolian Autonomous State existed through the Pacific War (beginning December 1941) and dissolved with Japan’s surrender in August 1945, ending Demchugdongrub’s period of formal rule (Jagchid).

Reform, nationalism, and the queue campaign

Even under Japanese tutelage, Jagchid, a participant in these events, portrays these years as ones in which Demchugdongrub pressed a nationalist reform agenda and the movement’s own nationalism deepened. A vivid instance was the campaign against the queue. In the summer of 1944, Jagchid and Budabala, the vice head of the Shilingol League, urged Demchugdongrub to have Mongol men cut off their queues, arguing that the braid was not a style of Chinggis Khan’s era but a “shameful symbol” of subjugation imposed after the Manchu conquest. They proposed ordering the cut on August 4, the state’s anniversary, as a gesture of shaking off alien bonds (Jagchid). This appeal to an authentic Chinggisid past against a more recent imposed custom sits alongside the other uses of Chinggis Khan’s memory as a mobilizing symbol traced in the Chinggis Khan worship / imagery theme entry, including a separate, more direct instance of Mongol administrators invoking Chinggis Khan specifically against Japanese pressure. Demchugdongrub agreed only conditionally: Shilingol could order it outright, Ulanchab only after he explained it in person. He vowed that he personally would keep the queue on his own head until Mongolia truly won its independence (Jagchid). Jagchid concedes the practical effect was small, since most of Inner Mongolia outside Shilingol, Ulanchab, and part of Yekejuu had already abandoned the queue, but treats the order as politically significant.

The episode also shows how symbolic politics could fracture the movement. When Rinchinsengge, the vice head of the Ulanchab League, cut his queue without authorization, Demchugdongrub rebuked him and forced a public apology. The resulting insult to his father, the former league head Prince Babudorji, was exploited by the rival Chinese general Fu Zuoyi, who lured Babudorji’s family to defect to his headquarters, so that, in Jagchid’s telling, “a split was created in the unification effort through the cutting off of a queue” (Jagchid). Throughout the period, Demchugdongrub and Wu Heling also maneuvered to wrest control of the Mongolian Army back from the Japanese, establishing a Military Affairs Ministry toward that end (Jagchid).

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