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Mongolian Youth Alliance

group · documented 1947–1948

Nationalist youth political alliance (Monggol Jalagus-un Andalaga) founded in Nanjing on January 1, 1947 by Sechin Jagchid and colleagues, which courted American support against Soviet influence and confronted rival Mongol factions through the 1948 National Assembly; known to this atlas almost entirely through its co-founder's own memoir.

The governing fact about this entry is who wrote its only source. Sechin Jagchid was not an outside chronicler of the Mongolian Youth Alliance (MYA): he was a co-founder, and by his own account one of its more combative members, personally leading several of the confrontations described below. Every characterization here of the MYA’s aims, its allies, and above all its rivals and enemies is the alliance’s self-account, filtered through its founder’s pen decades later. It is reported below as the MYA’s own position and Jagchid’s own framing, never as neutral or established fact. This entry rests entirely on Jagchid’s memoir; no second source corroborates any of it, and that single-source limitation should be read into every paragraph, not just this one.

Founding and charter

The MYA (Mongol: Monggol Jalagus-un Andalaga) grew out of a conversation in Nanjing between Jagchid and Rashidondog, Beiping high-school schoolmates who found their views on “the Mongolian problem” nearly identical (Jagchid). They brought in Kokebagatur, a figure in the Mongolian Student Association in Beiping, and Urgungge Onon, Japan-educated and formerly a teacher at the Sunid Right Banner school, and then Jakhunju (Ji Zenfu), a section head in the Bureau of Education of the Bailingmiao Mongolian Political Council (Jagchid). The name took its second word, anda, from the Mongol term for sworn blood-brothers, marking the bond the founders meant to signal (Jagchid). Its three stated goals were: (1) to struggle for liberty, freedom, and independence, and to shun alien domination; (2) to pursue nonviolent democratization and to cleanse Mongolia of feudalistic institutions; and (3) to build a cooperative economy and struggle for equal development in the people’s livelihood (Jagchid). On these terms the MYA was formally established in Nanjing on January 1, 1947 (Jagchid).

Alongside the charter, the founders adopted four resolutions: (1) that “Youth” in the name meant youthful thought and action, not an age limit on membership; (2) that members should not be guided by localism; (3) that the alliance should expand and that Inner Mongolia’s political leadership was worth contesting; and (4) that international friendship should be actively sought to create a counterbalance of outside power, so that no single foreign influence could dominate Mongolia (Jagchid). Acting on the fourth resolution, the founders specifically decided to establish contact with United States authorities to counterbalance Soviet influence (Jagchid), a decision that shapes most of what this entry can document about the alliance’s activity.

Founding roster

Jagchid names seventeen founding members in all, several introduced with their banner and league ties, which this atlas’s other entries let a reader cross-check. Beyond the five founders above there was Dagwaodsar, a Hulunbuir man trained at the lama center at Koyasan who had worked as an interpreter for Japanese intelligence during the occupation. In that role he had warned Jagchid that the Japanese military meant to assassinate Demchugdongrub, and after Japan’s defeat he cultivated contacts at the Soviet embassy in Beiping, including the Mongolist Pankratov; Jagchid names him the first person he invited to join (Jagchid). Then: Magadburin Haltod, known as “Madai,” who died in Germany in 1975 after teaching Mongolian literature at Bonn; Lubsangnorbu, son of Buyandalai (head of the western Inner Mongolian Republican Provisional Government in 1945); Unensechen (Bao Guoyi), who later taught Chinese and Mongolian at UCLA; Gombojab Hangin, at the time Demchugdongrub’s secretary; and Oyongerel, Jagchid’s wife (Jagchid).

The roster also included Shongno, a National Assembly delegate and militia commander of the Urad Central Banner, son of Rinchinsengge, head of the Ulanchab League; Qi Quanxi, a National Assembly delegate and tusalagchi of the Ordos Left Central Banner, nephew of Tobshinjirgal, head of the Yekejuu League; Jorigtu, of the Naiman banner in Juu-uda League, Japan-educated and a former official of the Mongolian government at Kalgan; Oljeibuyan, of the Kharachin Right Banner in Josotu League, a Nanjing Central Political College graduate and former Kalgan-government official; Bai Dacheng, of the Khorchin Left Central Banner, a former Shilingol League official; and Namdag, a Torgud youth and member of the Xinjiang Mongolian Cultural Association, who was assassinated by a Kuomintang agent soon after returning to Xinjiang (Jagchid). Jagchid records that further members’ names were withheld “out of consideration for their political and personal welfare,” a brief, telling detail about the climate the alliance operated in (Jagchid).

The alliance’s map of its rivals

Jagchid frames the founders’ reasoning as a survey of the existing Mongol leadership, and it should be read as exactly that: one faction’s partisan sizing-up of everyone else, not a neutral account of 1947 Mongol politics. By the MYA’s own reckoning, Bai Yunti had “lost the spirit of struggle”; Li Yongxin and his circle “dared not advocate ideas different from those of the Chinese authorities”; the region’s older conservatives split between compromisers and men who had become, in Jagchid’s phrase, “yes-men” for Chinese border officials; and Mongol intellectuals drawn to the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists were, in the MYA’s judgment, naïve, since “nationalism is taboo in communist dogma” (Jagchid). Taken on its own terms this is a valuable primary map of factional alignment as the MYA’s founders saw it in 1947, not an assessment this atlas endorses.

Operations: contact with American intelligence and diplomats

On Dagwaodsar’s recommendation, the MYA made contact with what Jagchid calls “Bessac and Richardson’s group”: Frank Bessac and a Mr. Richardson, whom Jagchid describes as intelligence agents of the U.S. government. That characterization is relayed here as Jagchid’s own, not independently verified by this atlas (Jagchid). Around the same time the alliance reached Colonel David Barrett, the U.S. embassy’s military attaché in Beiping, who had earlier visited Bailingmiao, Yan’an, and Demchugdongrub himself (Jagchid). Both contacts served the fourth resolution’s aim of courting American attention as a counterweight to Soviet expansion.

The alliance’s most concerted push came in Nanjing, where, with Demchugdongrub’s blessing but, Jagchid stresses, on the MYA’s own initiative, members lobbied the U.S. Embassy. Through Bessac and Ruth Bean, Jagchid, Rashidondog, Hangin, and Urgungge Onon met the embassy’s political councilor, Schulties, a former University of Washington professor, and pressed the case for Mongol autonomy and national survival (Jagchid). The MYA also produced written statements delivered to General Wedemeyer’s 1947 mission at his visit to Nanjing (Jagchid). Later, arranged by Schulties and Bean, a fuller MYA delegation of Rashidondog, Hangin, Onon, Oyongerel, and Jagchid met Ambassador John Leighton Stuart directly, telling him Inner Mongolia was caught between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists and that Mongol hopes should not be neglected. Stuart expressed sympathy and said he would look for an opportunity to raise the matter with the Chinese government (Jagchid). It was soon after this meeting, per Jagchid, that word reached the MYA of Owen Lattimore’s Mongol program at Johns Hopkins University, and the alliance decided to send Hangin and Onon to the United States to make contact with it and promote the Mongol cause abroad. That decision is the origin of Hangin’s 1948 emigration recorded in his own entry (Jagchid; see Gombojab Hangin).

Operations: the Söderbom / UNRRA relief effort

Through Colonel Barrett, Jagchid met George Söderbom, a Swedish man born in Mongolia and long resident in Kalgan, fluent in Mongolian and Chinese, son of the former head of the Swedish Mongol Mission (Jagchid). Söderbom had served as Sven Hedin’s guide and interpreter on his Central Asian travels, before becoming a Kalgan merchant; this is the same Hedin whose 1929 eyewitness account of the West Sünit court is used elsewhere in this atlas. During the Japanese occupation Söderbom was tortured and shipped to a prison camp in Shandong, and after the war he was recruited into the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) on the strength of his knowledge of Mongolian culture (Jagchid). Note, per this atlas’s standing do-not-merge convention on similar names, that this Söderbom is a distinct person from any “Gombojab” figure in the atlas: a Swede, not a Mongol.

With a list of Mongol refugees in Beiping that Jagchid supplied him, Söderbom secured UNRRA relief for them, and later for Mongol banners in the Ulanchab and Yekejuu leagues, after, Jagchid notes, the Beiping municipal government and the Suiyuan provincial government had delivered none (Jagchid). Magadburin Haltod managed the relief effort under Söderbom’s supervision, and Söderbom separately helped Buriyad refugees, formerly under Rinchindorji, migrate to Kokonor (Jagchid). Jagchid’s own assessment of him is unambiguous: apolitical, never discussing Mongolian political questions, acting “out of a real love for the Mongol people.” In 1976, after Söderbom’s death, Jagchid visited a Stockholm folklore museum and found among his papers plans to improve Mongol animal husbandry, plans the Chinese civil war had cut short (Jagchid).

Operations: the 1948 National Assembly

Jagchid narrates the following confrontations as his own faction’s conduct, not as detached reporting, and this atlas presents them that way. At the First National Assembly, convened March 29, 1948, Li Yongxin circulated a petition to expand Bai Haifeng’s military forces and place additional Mongol troops under his command; the MYA refused to sign it (Jagchid). The MYA also pushed proposed amendments to the constitution over the objections of Bai Haifeng and Li Yongxin’s KMT-aligned bloc, who argued no amendments should be made at all. The amendments carried on a delegate majority, and Bai Haifeng’s side had to yield (Jagchid).

The sharpest episode came when Guan Baojia and seven other delegates from the Kokonor Mongol leagues rose to walk out of the proceedings. Several MYA militants led by Jorigtu locked the doors and declared that any Mongol delegate who left “will be beaten to a pulp”; Guan Baojia’s group returned to their seats but did not participate further (Jagchid). Jagchid records that Guan Baojia later told him the Kokonor delegates had acted on the warlord Ma Bufang’s own orders not to struggle for Mongol rights, an explanation offered after the fact, not independently confirmed here. This atlas reports the door-locking threat candidly, as Jagchid’s own account of his faction’s hardball tactics, not as neutral narration of events he merely observed.

In the same debates, Wu Heling, invited into the caucus that eventually drafted the Mongols’ joint proposal, used the occasion to call the MYA’s demands “unrealistic” and branded Jagchid and his group a “lunatic fringe”; Li Yongxin’s circle, for its part, called the MYA “separatists” (Jagchid). See Wu Heling’s own entry for that characterization in the context of his broader relationship with the alliance. Throughout this period the MYA deliberately withheld an invitation to Demchugdongrub to join as a member, precisely to keep his influence from becoming too dominant within it (Jagchid), though he was kept informed of the alliance’s existence and purpose.

Sources