Övör Mongol Atlas

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Mongolian Restoration Association

group · documented 1949

Small émigré organization founded in Taiwan in March 1949 on Wu Heling's initiative to build a Taiwan-and-US base for a future Mongol nation should Demchugdongrub's position in the Northwest collapse; known chiefly through a CIA translation of its own founding document.

Almost everything known here about the Mongolian Restoration Association comes from a single source (Source G, July 1949): a CIA translation of the association’s own internal founding document. That provenance shapes how the material must be read. It is not neutral reporting but the organization describing and pitching itself, to a hoped-for American patron, so its claims to unity, popular representativeness, and fighting spirit are aspirational and self-presentational. They are recorded below as the association’s own account rather than as established fact. (On the CIA CREST class of source generally, see this atlas’s project notes.)

The association (Mongol name Monggol-i Mandghulqu Qural) was founded on 12 March 1949 at Pingtung, Taiwan, on the initiative of Wu Heling, together with the Mongol commander Wu Guting (Mongol name Ogodei; “Ukudui” in the document), a member of the Legislative Yuan the document names Jirgalang (a common name the sources warn is easily confused among several men), the historian Sechin Jagchid (whom the document renders, in Mongol name-order, “Jagchitsechin”), Urgunbo, and others (Source G). Its purposes, as the document states them, were layered against the possibility of failure in the Northwest: to establish a base and framework in Taiwan should Demchugdongrub’s position there become untenable; a hope that Taiwan itself would come under United Nations or United States protection; an overt body to plan a future Mongol nation and secure American aid; and, as a last resort, a “Mongolian Restoration Government in Exile” in the United States (Source G).

The founders were at pains, the document says, to secure the concurrence of the Northwest leaders before acting. They wanted the association understood as a step toward Mongol unity rather than a last-minute scramble for a safe niche, and they explicitly distanced it from the Japanese-sponsored wartime autonomy movement (Source G). It also drew a pointed boundary: it would not invite the “opportunistic CC Clique Mongols,” naming Bai Yunti, Li Yongxin, and Li Shouxin as men to be excluded, a detail the Li Shouxin entry notes from the other side (Source G).

A translated attachment set out the program: branch associations among the West Mongolia army in the Northwest, in Alashan, among Mongol students in Japan and Mongols in Peiping, and infiltrating the eastern movement at Wangye Temple (Ulanhot); sending young people to study in the United States; building an army around the units of Wu Guting and one Hsiung No; propaganda through a bookstore; and a detailed appeal for American funds, advisers, communications equipment, and transport, laid out as a one-year plan (Source G). The scale of that appeal, set against the association’s small membership, is itself a measure of how far its ambitions outran its means.

The document is candid about Wu Heling, its prime mover. It records that some Mongols resented him for a blunt, domineering manner and for his Kharachin origins, while crediting him as sincere in wanting racial freedom for the Mongols, a characterization consistent with the fuller portrait in his own entry. One of the founders named above is a familiar figure in this atlas: “Jagchitsechin” is Sechin Jagchid himself, the participant-historian whose biography of Demchugdongrub is the atlas’s most-cited source. The source this project leans on most was, in this instance, among the founders of a venture it records; his own entry weighs what that participant status means for his account.

Sources