Övör Mongol Atlas

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Wu Heling

person · documented 1928–1949

Josotu League Mongol politician who rose as spokesman of the 1920s Mongol Delegation in Beiping, became a recurring rival and sometime ally of Demchugdongrub, and held senior office through most of Mengjiang's successive governments.

Wu Heling was the Josotu League’s delegate to a Mongol Delegation formed in Beiping in the late 1920s, during the Kuomintang’s Northern Expedition period. Sechin Jagchid, then a junior high school student whose father was politically active in the same circles, describes the delegation choosing Wu as its spokesman after Prince Sodnamrabdan of Shilingol League threw his support behind him (Jagchid). The years given here bracket the period of his activity documented in the sources used for this entry, not birth and death dates, which are not established by those sources.

Jagchid presents Wu as a young man singled out for leadership by his elders. The Beiping Mongol elders, among them Jagchid’s own father, Lubsangchoijur, and Ayulugei, agreed to entrust “the trustworthy youngster Wu Heling” with organizing the delegation, and Prince Gungsangnorbu endorsed the plan (Jagchid). Jagchid’s account should be read with the knowledge that he was closely tied to Wu, whom he identifies as the husband of his father’s niece, and yet later became Wu’s disgruntled secretary and factional counterweight; his portrayal thus carries both the intimacy and the friction of that relationship. As spokesman, Wu articulated the delegation’s core demands to the new Nationalist government: the dismantling of the newly created special-region provinces of Rehe, Chahar, and Suiyuan and the substitution of a Mongolian Regional Political Committee. The government rebuffed those demands as it converted those regions into provinces over Mongol objection in 1928 (Jagchid).

Mediator and rival to Demchugdongrub

Through the 1930s, Wu Heling headed the Nanjing Office of the Mongolian League and Banner Delegates and sat on the Mongolian-Tibetan Affairs Commission, positioning himself as a habitual mediator between Mongol leaders and the Chinese central government (Jagchid). This mediating role repeatedly put him at odds with Demchugdongrub. Jagchid records recurring political conflict between the two men even as they were sometimes forced into cooperation by circumstance, and Demchugdongrub at one point argued directly against what Jagchid calls “Wu Heling’s great accomplishment,” the Organizational Law of Mongolian Leagues, Tribes, and Banners (Jagchid). Some of Demchugdongrub’s own circle suspected Wu of being too close to the Chinese government to be fully trusted, a suspicion Jagchid neither fully confirms nor dismisses.

Office under Mengjiang, and exile to Japan

Wu Heling held a long sequence of senior offices across Mengjiang’s successive governments. Per a modern academic summary of his career, these included deputy general secretary of the Mongolian Military Government (1936–1937), chairman of the senate (1937–1939 and 1940–1941), and chairman of the State Administrative Council (1941–1944), among other posts (Dudin 2014). Jagchid, who served for a time as Wu’s personal secretary, gives a more intimate account of one period in this career: Wu’s effective exile to Japan, arranged by the Japanese advisor Kanai Shoji to remove him from Mengjiang politics under the pretext of deepening his knowledge of Japan. Jagchid accompanied him there from 1938, and the two studied together at Waseda University, though Jagchid found their working relationship difficult and resigned his secretarial post after about a year and a half (Jagchid).

The pragmatist against the young radicals

Wu Heling’s rivalry with Jagchid’s own postwar circle is a further complication in his profile, attributed here entirely to Jagchid. At the March 1948 National Assembly in Nanjing, Wu Heling, drafted into the caucus tasked with polishing the Mongol delegates’ joint constitutional proposal, used the occasion to dismiss the Mongolian Youth Alliance’s demands as “unrealistic” and branded Jagchid and his group a “lunatic fringe” (Jagchid). A year later, at Demchugdongrub’s Alashan government in Dingyuanying, Wu Heling played a comparable role on a larger stage. When the question arose of retreating through Tibet to India to form a government in exile, Wu argued the plan was unrealistic and urged Prince Damzana to think it over practically. This intervention is what turned Damzana, He Zhaolin, and eventually Bai Haifeng against the exile plan Demchugdongrub and Jagchid had favored; see the Mongolian Autonomous Government (Alashan) entry for that debate in fuller institutional context (Jagchid). Across both episodes, a year apart, Jagchid casts Wu Heling as the pragmatist-broker working against the younger radicals. That is a meaningful complication to weigh alongside his other roles in this atlas, and, as always with Jagchid on Wu, a characterization to read with the closeness and friction between the two men in mind.

Shortly after the Alashan debate, Bayankhan told Jagchid privately that Wu Heling “certainly [had] been working for Yan Xishan ever since the days of the Batukhaalag autonomy movement,” that he had situated himself between the central government and the Mongol leagues and banners, that during the Mengjiang period he had been doing Chiang Kai-shek’s bidding, and that he surely retained direct ties to the central government (Jagchid). This atlas records the accusation exactly as Jagchid frames it, including his own qualifier: that Bayankhan’s claim, “though very plausible, will perhaps always remain unverified” (Jagchid). It is presented here as an unverified allegation relayed by Bayankhan through Jagchid, not adopted as fact, and not omitted.

The 1949 Alashan government

After Mengjiang’s collapse, Wu Heling remained active in Mongol politics. In 1949 he joined Demchugdongrub’s final effort at self-rule, the Mongolian Autonomous Government based at Dingyuanying in Alashan, where he was elected speaker of the 31-member Mongolian Congress at the August 1949 delegate conference. That detail is corroborated independently by both Jagchid’s firsthand account and a modern academic history of the episode (Jagchid; Dudin).

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