214-649: Manchukuo was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Northeast China that existed from 1932 until its dissolution in 1945. It was ostensibly founded as a republic , its territory consisting of the lands seized in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria ; it was later declared to be a constitutional monarchy in 1934, though very little changed in the actual functioning of government. Manchukuo received limited diplomatic recognition , mostly from states aligned with
428-441: A war lasting several years to pacify the country. Manchukuo was proclaimed a monarchy on 1 March 1934, with Puyi assuming the throne with the era name of Kangde. He was nominally assisted in his executive duties by a Privy Council and a General Affairs State Council . This State Council was the center of political power, and consisted of several cabinet ministers, each assisted by a Japanese vice-minister. The commander-in-chief of
642-649: A "capitalist" economy. The American historian Joshua Fogel wrote about the young servants of Manchukuo: "Tremendous debates transpired on such things as the nature of the Chinese economy, and the lingua franca of these debates was always Marxism". To resolve this debate, various research teams of five or six young civil servants, guarded by detachments from the Kwantung Army of about 20 or 30 men, went out to do field research in Manchukuo, gathering material about
856-462: A 48 km (30 mi) long wall around Nanjing , as well as new palaces and government halls. The History of Ming states that as early as 1364 Zhu Yuanzhang had begun drafting a new Confucian law code, the Da Ming Lü , which was completed by 1397 and repeated certain clauses found in the old Tang Code of 653. Hongwu organized a military system known as the weisuo , which was similar to
1070-540: A Japanese population 240,000 strong, later growing to 837,000. In Xinjing, they made up 25% of the population. Accordingly, to the census of 1936, of the Japanese population of Manchukuo, 22% were civil servants and their families; 18% were working for the South Manchurian Railroad company; 25% had come to Manchukuo to establish a business, and 21% had come to work in industry. The Japanese working in
1284-488: A Soviet labor camp. The Japanese Ueda Kyōsuke labeled all 30 million people in Manchuria as "Manchus", including Han Chinese, despite the fact that most of them were not ethnic Manchu, and the Japanese written, "Great Manchukuo" built upon Ueda's argument to claim that all 30 million "Manchus" in Manchukuo had the right to independence to justify splitting Manchukuo from China. In 1942 the Japanese wrote "Ten Year History of
1498-785: A base of operations for the People's Liberation Army against the National Revolutionary Army in the Chinese Civil War . The Chinese Communists used Manchuria as a staging ground until the final Nationalist retreat to Taiwan in 1949. Many Manchukuo army and Japanese Kantōgun personnel served with the communist troops during the Chinese Civil War against the Nationalist forces. Most of the 1.5 million Japanese who had been left in Manchukuo at
1712-491: A batch of young farmers of 200,000 arrived in Manchukuo; joining this group after 1936 were 20,000 complete families. Of the Japanese settlers in Manchukuo, almost half came from the rural areas of Kyushu. When Japan lost sea and air control of the Yellow Sea in 1943–44, this migration stopped. Puppet state List of forms of government A puppet state , puppet régime , puppet government or dummy government
1926-467: A branch line from Harbin to Port Arthur , now known as Dalian . Under the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth, the Kwantung Army had the right to occupy southern Manchuria while the region fell into the Japanese economic sphere of influence. The Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railroad company had a market capitalization of 200 million yen, making it Asia's largest corporation, which went beyond just running
2140-469: A certain extent based on racism with the Japanese as the "great Yamato race", but there was always a certain dichotomy in Japanese thinking between an ideology based on racial differences based on bloodlines versus the idea of Pan-Asianism with Japan as the natural leader of all the Asian peoples. In 1940, ethnic Russians were included among the other nationalities of Manchukuo as candidates for conscription into
2354-673: A combined Soviet–Mongolian force defeated a Kwantung Army with limited Manchukuoan support. On 8 August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, in accordance with the agreement at the Yalta Conference , and invaded Manchukuo from Outer Manchuria and Outer Mongolia. During the Soviet offensive, the Manchukuo Imperial Army , on paper a 200,000-man force, performed poorly and whole units surrendered to
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#17327931159162568-767: A coup against the Tianshun Emperor out of fear of being next on his purge-list of those who aided him in the Wresting the Gate Incident. Cao's rebel force managed to set fire to the western and eastern gates of the Imperial City (doused by rain during the battle) and killed several leading ministers before his forces were finally cornered and he was forced to commit suicide. While the Yongle Emperor had staged five major offensives north of
2782-670: A eunuch servant, hanged himself on a tree in the imperial garden right outside the Forbidden City. Seizing opportunity, the Eight Banners crossed the Great Wall after the Ming border general Wu Sangui (1612–1678) opened the gates at Shanhai Pass . This occurred shortly after he learned about the fate of the capital and an army of Li Zicheng marching towards him; weighing his options of alliance, he decided to side with
2996-588: A force personally to face the Oirats after a recent Ming defeat; the emperor left the capital and put his half-brother Zhu Qiyu in charge of affairs as temporary regent. On 8 September, Esen routed Zhengtong's army, and Zhengtong was captured—an event known as the Tumu Crisis . The Oirats held the Zhengtong Emperor for ransom. However, this scheme was foiled once the emperor's younger brother assumed
3210-433: A historical work lambasting and belittling his political opponents. The instability at court came right as natural calamity, pestilence, rebellion, and foreign invasion came to a peak. The Chongzhen Emperor (r. 1627–44) had Wei dismissed from court, which led to Wei's suicide shortly after. The eunuchs built their own social structure, providing and gaining support to their birth clans. Instead of fathers promoting sons, it
3424-432: A low civil service rank. The one great advantage of the lesser functionaries over officials was that officials were periodically rotated and assigned to different regional posts and had to rely on the good service and cooperation of the local lesser functionaries. Eunuchs gained unprecedented power over state affairs during the Ming dynasty. One of the most effective means of control was the secret service stationed in what
3638-474: A major cause of "China's cultural stagnation and economic backwardness." However Benjamin Ellman argues there were some positive features, since the essay form was capable of fostering "abstract thinking, persuasiveness, and prosodic form" and that its elaborate structure discouraged a wandering, unfocused narrative". Scholar-officials who entered civil service through examinations acted as executive officials to
3852-447: A massive influx of South American silver. This abundance of specie remonetized the Ming economy, whose paper money had suffered repeated hyperinflation and was no longer trusted. While traditional Confucians opposed such a prominent role for commerce and the newly rich it created, the heterodoxy introduced by Wang Yangming permitted a more accommodating attitude. Zhang Juzheng 's initially successful reforms proved devastating when
4066-683: A matter of culture as of race. Around the same time the Soviet Union was advocating the Siberian Jewish Autonomous Oblast across the Manchukuo-Soviet border, some Japanese officials investigated a plan (known as the Fugu Plan ) to attract Jewish refugees to Manchukuo as part of their colonisation effort, which was never adopted as official policy. The Jewish community in Manchukuo was not subjected to
4280-498: A much larger body of non-ranked personnel called lesser functionaries. They outnumbered officials by four to one; Charles Hucker estimates that they were perhaps as many as 100,000 throughout the empire. These lesser functionaries performed clerical and technical tasks for government agencies. Yet they should not be confused with lowly lictors, runners, and bearers; lesser functionaries were given periodic merit evaluations like officials and after nine years of service might be accepted into
4494-715: A new crackdown on the left. In November 1941, the Social Research Unit of the South Manchurian Railroad Company, which was well known as a hotbed of Marxism since the early 1930s, was raided by the Kenpeitai , who arrested 50 of those working in the Social Research Unit. At least 44 of those working in the Social Research Unit were convicted of violating the Peace Preservation Law, which made thinking about "altering
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#17327931159164708-503: A process of brainwashing by the police of left-wing activists to make them accept that the Emperor was a god after all, whom they were best to serve. Tenko was a very successful process that turned young Japanese who once had been ardent liberals or leftists who rejected the idea that the Emperor was a god into fanatical rightists, who made up for their previous doubts about the divinity of the Emperor with militant enthusiasm. One tenkosha
4922-467: A rebellion that sparked a three-year civil war . Under the pretext of rescuing the young Jianwen from corrupting officials, Zhu Di personally led forces in the revolt; the palace in Nanjing was burned to the ground, along with Jianwen himself, his wife, mother, and courtiers. Zhu Di assumed the throne as the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–24); his reign is universally viewed by scholars as a "second founding" of
5136-564: A series of lit beacons and signalling stations to allow rapid warning to friendly units of advancing enemy troops. There were many problems—fiscal or other—facing Ming China that started during the reign of the Wanli Emperor (1572–1620). In the beginning of his reign, Wanli surrounded himself with able advisors and made a conscientious effort to handle state affairs. His Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng (1572–82) built up an effective network of alliances with senior officials. However, there
5350-471: A slowdown in agriculture was produced by the Little Ice Age . The value of silver rapidly increased because of a disruption in the supply of imported silver from Spanish and Portuguese sources, making it impossible for Chinese farmers to pay their taxes. Combined with crop failure, floods, and an epidemic , the dynasty collapsed in 1644 as Li Zicheng's rebel forces entered Beijing. Li then established
5564-525: A society of self-sufficient rural communities ordered in a rigid, immobile system that would guarantee and support a permanent class of soldiers for his dynasty: the empire's standing army exceeded one million troops and the navy 's dockyards in Nanjing were the largest in the world. He also took great care breaking the power of the court eunuchs and unrelated magnates, enfeoffing his many sons throughout China and attempting to guide these princes through
5778-455: A state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development, albeit not with same level of brutal exploitation as in Manchukuo. By the 1930s, Manchukuo's industrial system was among the most advanced making it one of the industrial powerhouses in the region. Manchukuo's steel production exceeded Japan's in the late 1930s. Many Manchurian cities were modernized during
5992-559: A vast imperial household, staffed with thousands of eunuchs, who were headed by the Directorate of Palace Attendants. The eunuchs were divided into different directorates in charge of staff surveillance, ceremonial rites, food, utensils, documents, stables, seals, apparel, and so on. The offices were in charge of providing fuel, music, paper, and baths. The bureaus were in charge of weapons, silverwork, laundering, headgear, bronze work, textile manufacture, wineries, and gardens. At times,
6206-442: A very expensive, sophisticated tutoring of the sort that wealthy gentry families specialized in providing their talented sons. In practice, 90 percent of the population was ineligible due to lack of education, but the upper 10 percent had equal chances for moving to the top. To be successful young men had to have extensive, expensive training in classical Chinese, the use of Mandarin in spoken conversation, calligraphy, and had to master
6420-518: A very strongly state-directed economy to achieve his goal of vastly increased industrial production while at the same time displaying utter indifference to the exploited Chinese workers toiling in Manchukuo's factories; the American historian Mark Driscoll described Kishi's system as a "necropolitical" system where the Chinese workers were literally treated as dehumanized cogs within a vast industrial machine. The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of
6634-408: Is a state that is de jure independent but de facto completely dependent upon an outside power and subject to its orders. Puppet states have nominal sovereignty , except that a foreign power effectively exercises control through economic or military support. By leaving a local government in existence the outside power evades all responsibility, while at the same time successfully paralysing
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6848-458: Is controversial". Professor Mariko Asano Tamanoi remarked that she would "use the term in quotation marks". Herbert Giles wrote that the name was unknown to the Manchu people themselves as a geographical designation. In 2012, Professor Chad D. Garcia noted that usage of the term was out of favor in "current scholarly practice", instead preferring "the northeast [of China]". The name of the country
7062-588: Is underrepresented in modern scholarship. Others note the Ming need for Central Asian horses and the need to maintain the tea-horse trade . The Ming sporadically sent armed forays into Tibet during the 14th century, which the Tibetans successfully resisted. Several scholars point out that unlike the preceding Mongols, the Ming dynasty did not garrison permanent troops in Tibet. The Wanli Emperor (r. 1572–1620) attempted to reestablish Sino-Tibetan relations in
7276-725: The Huang-Ming Zuxun , a set of published dynastic instructions. This failed when his teenage successor, the Jianwen Emperor , attempted to curtail his uncle's power, prompting the Jingnan campaign , an uprising that placed the Prince of Yan upon the throne as the Yongle Emperor in 1402. The Yongle Emperor established Yan as a secondary capital and renamed it Beijing , constructed the Forbidden City , and restored
7490-581: The fubing system of the Tang dynasty (618–907). In 1380 Hongwu had the Chancellor Hu Weiyong executed upon suspicion of a conspiracy plot to overthrow him; after that Hongwu abolished the Chancellery and assumed this role as chief executive and emperor, a precedent mostly followed throughout the Ming period. With a growing suspicion of his ministers and subjects, Hongwu established
7704-648: The Amur River outright, now known collectively as Outer Manchuria As the Qing continued to weaken, Russia made further efforts to take control of the rest of Manchuria. By the 1890s, the region was under strong Russian influence, symbolized by the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway that ran from Harbin to Vladivostok . The Japanese ultra-nationalist Black Dragon Society initially supported Sun Yat-sen 's activities against
7918-506: The Axis powers , with its existence widely seen as illegitimate. The region now known as Manchuria had historically been the homeland of the Manchu people , though by the 20th century they had long since become a minority in the region, with Han Chinese constituting by far the largest ethnic group. The Manchu-led Qing dynasty , which had governed China since 17th century, was overthrown with
8132-736: The Censorate , and the Chief Military Commission and personally took charge of the Six Ministries and the regional Five Military Commissions. Thus a whole level of administration was cut out and only partially rebuilt by subsequent rulers. The Grand Secretariat , at the beginning a secretarial institution that assisted the emperor with administrative paperwork, was instituted, but without employing grand counselors, or chancellors . The Hongwu Emperor sent his heir apparent to Shaanxi in 1391 to "tour and soothe" ( xunfu )
8346-713: The Chinese Eastern Railway , a Russian concession which was still owned by the Soviet Union inside Manchukuo. The Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to Japanese Manchukuo in 1935, giving Japan and Manchukuo full control over the railroads of Manchuria. The Japanese built an efficient railway system that still functions well today. Known as the South Manchuria Railway or Mantetsu , this large corporation came to own large stakes in many industrial projects throughout
8560-661: The Croatian War (1991–95). It was completely dependent on the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević , and was not recognised internationally. Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty ( / m ɪ ŋ / MING ), officially the Great Ming , was an imperial dynasty of China , ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol -led Yuan dynasty . The Ming dynasty was the last imperial dynasty of China ruled by
8774-489: The Embroidered Uniform Guard , and other peoples such as Jurchens were also prominent. He frequently wrote to Mongol, Japanese, Korean, Jurchen, Tibetan, and Southwest frontier rulers offering advice on their governmental and dynastic policy, and insisted on leaders from these regions visiting the Ming capital for audiences. He resettled 100,000 Mongols into his territory, with many serving as guards in
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8988-684: The Grand Canal and the primacy of the imperial examinations in official appointments. He rewarded his eunuch supporters and employed them as a counterweight against the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats . One eunuch, Zheng He , led seven enormous voyages of exploration into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and the eastern coasts of Africa. Hongwu and Yongle emperors had also expanded the empire's rule into Inner Asia . The rise of new emperors and new factions diminished such extravagances;
9202-546: The Great Wall against the Mongols and the Oirats, the constant threat of Oirat incursions prompted the Ming authorities to fortify the Great Wall from the late 15th century to the 16th century; nevertheless, John Fairbank notes that "it proved to be a futile military gesture but vividly expressed China's siege mentality." Yet the Great Wall was not meant to be a purely defensive fortification; its towers functioned rather as
9416-643: The Han River to Wuchang , and finally along the northern border of Jiangxi province, Li Zicheng died there in the summer of 1645, thus ending the Shun dynasty . One report says his death was a suicide; another states that he was beaten to death by peasants after he was caught stealing their food. Despite the loss of Beijing and the death of the emperor, the Ming were not yet totally destroyed. Nanjing, Fujian, Guangdong, Shanxi, and Yunnan were all strongholds of Ming resistance. However, there were several pretenders for
9630-700: The Han people , the majority ethnic group in China. Although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng (who established the short-lived Shun dynasty ), numerous rump regimes ruled by remnants of the Ming imperial family —collectively called the Southern Ming —survived until 1662. The Ming dynasty's founder, the Hongwu Emperor ( r. 1368–1398), attempted to create
9844-553: The Imperial House of Japan . He disclosed that Manchukuo was not intended "to benefit China or to help the Chinese people form a unified state. Instead, it should be viewed as a kind of makeshift trick prompted by a desire to cover up Japan’s policy of aggression.” The Legislative Council was largely a ceremonial body, existing to rubber-stamp decisions issued by the State Council. The only authorized political party
10058-509: The Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s. Ming officials declined the offer, but granted him the title of dragon-tiger general for his gesture. Recognizing the weakness of Ming authority in Manchuria at the time, he consolidated power by co-opting or conquering surrounding territories. In 1616 he declared himself Khan and established the Later Jin dynasty in reference to the previous Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty . In 1618 he openly renounced
10272-505: The Jinyiwei , a network of secret police drawn from his own palace guard. Some 100,000 people were executed in a series of purges during his rule. The Hongwu Emperor issued many edicts forbidding Mongol practices and proclaiming his intention to purify China of barbarian influence. However, he also sought to use the Yuan legacy to legitimize his authority in China and other areas ruled by
10486-597: The Kwantung Army also served as the official Japanese ambassador to the state. He functioned in a manner similar to resident officers in European colonial empires, with the added ability to veto decisions by the emperor. The Kwantung Army leadership placed Japanese vice ministers in his cabinet, while all Chinese advisors gradually resigned or were dismissed. Zheng Xiaoxu served as Manchukuo's first prime minister until 1935, when Zhang Jinghui succeeded him. Puyi
10700-403: The Kwantung Army . By the end of World War II, the South Manchuria Railway owned 70 companies and employed about 340,000 people in Manchukuo and occupied China. In 1908, the number of residents was 15,834,000, which rose to 30,000,000 in 1931 and 43,000,000 for the Manchukuo state. The population balance remained 123 men to 100 women and the total number in 1941 was 50,000,000. In early 1934,
10914-626: The Manchuria March whose verses proclaimed that the seizing of Manchuria in 1931–32 was a continuation of what Japan had fought for against Russia in 1904–05, and the ghosts of the Japanese soldiers killed in the Russo-Japanese war could now rest at ease as their sacrifices had not been in vain. In 1935, Manchukuo purchased the Chinese Eastern Railway from the Soviet Union. During the Second Sino-Japanese War ,
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#173279311591611128-793: The Mukden Incident . On 16 February 1932, the Imperial Army hosted the "Founding Conference" or "Big Four Conference" with Liaoning governor Zang Shiyi , Heilongjiang governor Zhang Jinghui , commander of the Kirin Provincial Army Xi Qia , and general Ma Zhanshan , in order to establish the Northeast Administrative Committee. On the committee's second meeting, the aforementioned four plus Tang Yulin , Ling Sheng, and Qimote Semupilei were appointed as chairmen. On 18 February,
11342-449: The Netherlands under French revolutionary protection. In Italy, the French First Republic encouraged a proliferation of small republics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, known as sister republics . In Eastern Europe, Napoleon 's First French Empire established the Polish client state of the Duchy of Warsaw . In 1896, Britain established a state in Zanzibar . During Japan's imperial period , and particularly during
11556-415: The Odendaal Commission . Three of them were granted self-rule. These Bantustans were replaced with separate ethnicity-based governments in 1980. The Republic of Kuwait was a short-lived pro-Iraqi state in the Persian Gulf that only existed three weeks before it was annexed by Iraq in 1990. The Republic of Serbian Krajina was a self-proclaimed territory ethnically cleansed by Serbian forces during
11770-439: The Pacific War (parts of which are considered the Pacific theatre of World War II ), the Imperial Japanese government established a number of dependent states. Several European governments under the domination of Germany and Italy during World War II have been described as "puppet régimes". The formal means of control in occupied Europe varied greatly. These states fall into several categories. The Axis demand for oil and
11984-419: The Qing dynasty in 1739—states that the Ming established itinerant commanderies overseeing Tibetan administration while also renewing titles of ex-Yuan dynasty officials from Tibet and conferring new princely titles on leaders of Tibetan Buddhist sects . However, Turrell V. Wylie states that censorship in the Mingshi in favor of bolstering the Ming emperor's prestige and reputation at all costs obfuscates
12198-410: The Second Manchu invasion of Korea and forced Joseon to become a Qing tributary. Shortly after, the Koreans renounced their long-held loyalty to the Ming dynasty. A peasant soldier named Li Zicheng mutinied with his fellow soldiers in western Shaanxi in the early 1630s after the Ming government failed to ship much-needed supplies there. In 1634 he was captured by a Ming general and released only on
12412-452: The Shaanxi earthquake of 1556 , occurred during the Jiajing Emperor 's reign, killing approximately 830,000 people. Originally a Ming vassal who officially considered himself a guardian of the Ming border and a local representative of imperial Ming power, Nurhaci , leader of the Jianzhou Jurchens , unified other Jurchen clans to create a new Manchu ethnic identity. He offered to lead his armies to support Ming and Joseon armies against
12626-501: The Shun dynasty , but it was defeated shortly afterwards by the Manchu -led Eight Banner armies of the Qing dynasty , with the help of the defecting Ming general Wu Sangui . The Mongol -led Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) ruled before the establishment of the Ming dynasty. Explanations for the demise of the Yuan include institutionalized ethnic discrimination against the Han people that stirred resentment and rebellion, overtaxation of areas hard-hit by inflation , and massive flooding of
12840-441: The Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945; its government was formally dissolved following the Japanese surrender in September. The territory was transferred to Chinese administration the following year. The name of the state is written with the same Han characters sharing the same meaning in both Japanese and Chinese, allowing for the use of the simplified and variant characters that exist in both languages. In Chinese,
13054-452: The Viceroy of the Three Northeast Provinces position was established to govern them. As the power of the court in Beijing weakened, many of the empire's outlying areas either broke free (such as Kashgar ) or fell under the control of the Western imperialist powers. The Russian Empire had set its sights on Qing's northern territories, and through unequal treaties signed in 1858 and 1860 ultimately annexed huge tracts of territory adjoining
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#173279311591613268-472: The Willow Palisade , with internal movement and migration regulated by ethnicity. These policies continued until after the end of the Second Opium War in the late 19th century, when the government started to encourage massive waves of Han migration to the northeast, collectively known as the Chuang Guandong , in order to prevent the Russian Empire from seizing more of the area. In 1907, the three provinces constituting Manchuria were officially constituted, and
13482-437: The Yellow River as a result of the abandonment of irrigation projects. Consequently, agriculture and the economy were in shambles, and rebellion broke out among the hundreds of thousands of peasants called upon to work on repairing the dykes of the Yellow River. A number of Han groups revolted, including the Red Turbans in 1351. The Red Turbans were affiliated with the White Lotus , a Buddhist secret society. Zhu Yuanzhang
13696-504: The conquest of Tibet by Güshi Khan (1582–1655) in 1642, establishing the Khoshut Khanate . The Hongwu Emperor specified his grandson Zhu Yunwen as his successor, and he assumed the throne as the Jianwen Emperor (r. 1398–1402) after Hongwu's death in 1398. The most powerful of Hongwu's sons, Zhu Di, then the militarily mighty disagreed with this, and soon a political showdown erupted between him and his nephew Jianwen. After Jianwen arrested many of Zhu Di's associates, Zhu Di plotted
13910-419: The kokutai " a crime in 1942–43 and were given long prison sentences, of whom four died due to the harsh conditions of prisons in Manchukuo. As the men working in the Social Research Unit had played important roles in Manchukuo's economic policy and were university graduates from good families, the Japanese historian Hotta Eri wrote that the Kenpeitai was ordered to "handle them with care", meaning no torture of
14124-454: The kokutai " was a crime, which led many leftist Japanese university graduates to go work in Manchukuo, where they believed they could achieve the sort of social revolution that was impossible in Japan. By 1933, the Japanese state had essentially destroyed both the Japanese Socialist Party and the Japanese Communist Party via mass arrests and Tenkō with both parties reduced down to mere rumps, which caused many Japanese student leftists to draw
14338-642: The 12th century. Ming era examinations were perhaps more difficult to pass since the 1487 requirement of completing the " eight-legged essay ", a departure from basing essays off progressing literary trends. The exams increased in difficulty as the student progressed from the local level, and appropriate titles were accordingly awarded successful applicants. Officials were classified in nine hierarchic grades, each grade divided into two degrees, with ranging salaries (nominally paid in piculs of rice) according to their rank. While provincial graduates who were appointed to office were immediately assigned to low-ranking posts like
14552-448: The 16th century, the expansion of European trade —though restricted to islands near Guangzhou such as Macau —spread the Columbian exchange of crops, plants, and animals into China, introducing chili peppers to Sichuan cuisine and highly productive maize and potatoes , which diminished famines and spurred population growth. The growth of Portuguese , Spanish , and Dutch trade created new demand for Chinese products and produced
14766-544: The 1920s, much of the younger intelligentsia in Japan had rejected their parents' values and had become active in various left-wing movements. Starting with the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 , which made the very act of thinking about 'altering the kokutai ' a crime, the government had embarked on a sustained campaign to stomp out all left-wing thought in Japan. However, many of the bright young university graduates active in left-wing movements in Japan were needed to serve as civil servants in Manchukuo, which Young noted led
14980-418: The 1920s, the Japanese Army under the influence of the Wehrstaat (Defense State) theories popular with the Reichswehr had started to advocate their own version of the Wehrstaat , the totalitarian "national defense state" which would mobilize an entire society for war in peacetime. An additional influence on the Japanese "total war" school who tended to be very anti-capitalist was the First Five Year Plan in
15194-429: The 1970s and 1980s, four ethnic Bantustans - some of which were extremely fragmented - called "homelands" by the government of the time, were carved out of South Africa and given nominal sovereignty . Mostly Xhosa people resided in the Ciskei and Transkei , Tswana people in Bophuthatswana , and Venda people in the Venda . The principal purpose of these states was to remove South African citizenship from
15408-573: The Bedchamber, Bureau of Handicrafts, and Office of Staff Surveillance. Starting in the 1420s, eunuchs began taking over these ladies' positions until only the Bureau of Apparel with its four subsidiary offices remained. Hongwu had his eunuchs organized into the Directorate of Palace Attendants, but as eunuch power at court increased, so did their administrative offices, with eventual twelve directorates, four offices, and eight bureaus. The dynasty had
15622-581: The Chinese, Mongols, Manchus, Koreans, and Japanese. At various times, the Japanese suggested that the Russians might be a "sixth race" of Manchukuo, but this was never officially declared. In 1936, the Manchukuo Almanac reported that were 33,592 Russians living in the city of Harbin—the "Moscow of the Orient"—and of whom only 5,580 had been granted Manchukuo citizenship. Japanese imperialism was to
15836-683: The Construction of Manchukuo" which attempted to emphasize the right of ethnic Japanese to the land of Manchukuo while attempting to delegitimize the Manchu's claim to Manchukuo as their native land, noting that most Manchus moved out during the Qing period and only returned later. Source: Beal, Edwin G (1945). "The 1940 Census of Manchuria". The Far Eastern Quarterly . 4 (3): 243–262. doi : 10.2307/2049515 . JSTOR 2049515 . S2CID 166016710 . In 1931–1932, there were 100,000 Japanese farmers; other sources mention 590,760 Japanese inhabitants. Other figures for Manchukuo speak of
16050-686: The Council issued a statement announcing that "the Northeast provinces are completely independent". On 18 February 1932 Manchukuo was proclaimed by the Northeast Supreme Administrative Council nominally in control of the region. On February 25, the Council decided that the name of the new country name (Manchukuo), the national flag, era name, and more. Manchukuo was formally established on 1 March in Xinjing , and
16264-917: The Far Eastern Jewish Council was created, chaired by the Harbin Jewish community leader Dr. Abraham Kaufman . Between 1937 and 1939 the city of Harbin in Manchukuo was the location of the Conference of Jewish Communities in the Far East. Following the Russian Red Army's invasion of Manchuria in 1945, Dr. Kaufman and several other Jewish community leaders were arrested by the Soviets and charged with anti-Soviet activities, resulting in Kaufman's imprisonment for ten years in
16478-477: The Japanese employees were mostly white-collar, meaning most of the Japanese living in Manchuria were middle-class people who saw themselves as an elite. In Japan, Manchuria was widely seen as analogous to the Wild West: a dangerous frontier region full of bandits, revolutionaries, and warlords, but also a land of boundless wealth and promise, where it was possible for ordinary people to become very well-off. During
16692-527: The Japanese liked to victimize them. Until World War II, the Japanese tended to leave alone those travelling to Manchukuo with a passport as they did not like to deal with protests from embassies in Tokyo about the mistreatment of their citizens. The Kwantung Army operated a secret biological-chemical warfare unit based in Pinfang, Unit 731, that performed gruesome experiments on people involving much visceration of
16906-499: The Japanese military underwent heavy losses, ultimately incurring about 500,000 casualties. The war caused many Japanese people to develop a more possessive attitude towards Manchuria, with Japan having sacrificed so much while fighting in Manchurian territory. From 1905 on, Japanese publications often described Manchuria as a "sacred" and "holy" land where many Japanese had died as martyrs. The war had almost bankrupted Japan, forcing
17120-716: The Japanese state to embark upon a contradictory policy of recruiting the same people active in the movements that it was seeking to crush." To rule Manchukuo, which right from the start had a very statist economy, the Japanese state needed university graduates who were fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and the 1920s–30s, many of the university graduates in Japan who knew Mandarin were "progressives" involved in left-wing causes. The fact that young Japanese civil servants in Manchukuo with their degrees in economics, sociology, etc., who had once been active in left-wing movements helps explain
17334-551: The Japanese state was creating an entire state anew, which meant that Manchukuo had a desperate need for university graduates to work in its newly founded civil service. In addition, the Pan-Asian rhetoric of Manchukuo and the prospect of Japan helping ordinary people in Manchuria greatly appealed to the idealistic youth of Japan. Young wrote about the young Japanese people who went to work in Manchukuo: "The men, and in some cases,
17548-463: The Japanese to accept the compromise Treaty of Portsmouth mediated by President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, under which Japan made gains, but nowhere to the extent that the Japanese public had been expecting. The Treaty of Portsmouth set off an anti-American riot in Tokyo between 5–7 September 1905 as the general viewpoint in Japan was that the Japanese had won the war but lost
17762-564: The Japanese to withdraw from the area, and Outer Manchuria would be under Soviet control by 1925. During the Warlord Era , Marshal Zhang Zuolin established himself in Manchuria with Japanese backing. Later, the Japanese Kwantung Army found him too independent, so he was assassinated in 1928. In assassinating Marshal Zhang, the 'Old Marshal', the Kwantung Army generals expected Manchuria to descend into anarchy, providing
17976-652: The Japanese used Manchukuo as a base to conduct their invasion of the rest of China. The Manchu general Tong Linge was killed in action by the Japanese in the Battle of Beiping–Tianjin , which marked the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. In the summer of 1939, a border dispute between Manchukuo and the Mongolian People's Republic resulted in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol . During this battle,
18190-534: The Japanese, was used to kidnap various "unreliable" Russians living in Manchukuo for Unit 731 to experiment upon. The children of the Russian exiles often married Han Chinese, and the resulting children were always known in Manchukuo as "mixed water" people, and were shunned by both the Russian and Chinese communities. Chinese accounts, both at the time and later, tended to portray the Russians living in Manchuria as all prostitutes and thieves, and almost always ignored
18404-429: The Kwantung Army and the Manchukuo state. Ohgami believed that his studies helped ordinary people, citing one study he did about water use in rural Manchukuo, where he noted a correlation between villages that were deprived of water and "banditry" (the codeword for anti-Japanese guerrillas), believing that the policy of improving water supply in villages was due to his study. The outbreak of the war with China in 1937 caused
18618-433: The Kwantung Army had assassinated his father, the "Young Marshal"—who unlike his father was a Chinese nationalist—had strong reasons to dislike Japan's privileged position in Manchuria. Marshal Zhang knew his forces were too weak to expel the Kwantung Army, but his relations with the Japanese were unfriendly right from the start. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japanese militarists moved forward to separate
18832-418: The Manchukuo era. However, much of the country's economy was often subordinated to Japanese interests and, during the war, raw material flowed into Japan to support the war effort. Traditional lands were taken and redistributed to Japanese farmers with local farmers relocated and forced into collective farming units over smaller areas of land. When Manchukuo was founded as a Japanese puppet state, it inherited
19046-478: The Manchukuo military. The British writer Peter Fleming visited Manchukuo in 1935, and while riding a train through the countryside of Manchukuo, a group of Japanese colonists mistook his Swiss traveling companion Kini for a Russian refugee, and began to beat her up. It was only after Fleming was able to prove to the Japanese that she was Swiss, not Russian, that the Japanese stopped and apologized, saying that they would never had beaten her up if they had known she
19260-529: The Manchus. The Eight Banners under the Manchu Prince Dorgon (1612–1650) and Wu Sangui approached Beijing after the army sent by Li was destroyed at Shanhaiguan ; the Prince of Shun's army fled the capital on the fourth of June. On 6 June, the Manchus and Wu entered the capital and proclaimed the young Shunzhi Emperor ruler of China. After being forced out of Xi'an by the Qing, chased along
19474-660: The Ming court in 1557 to settle Macau as their permanent trade base in China. Their role in providing silver was gradually surpassed by the Spanish , while even the Dutch challenged them for control of this trade. Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–1665) began cracking down on illegal smuggling of silver from New Spain and Peru across the Pacific through the Philippines towards China, in favor of shipping silver mined in
19688-454: The Ming dynasty since he reversed many of his father's policies. Yongle demoted Nanjing to a secondary capital and in 1403 announced the new capital of China was to be at his power base in Beijing . Construction of a new city there lasted from 1407 to 1420, employing hundreds of thousands of workers daily. At the center was the political node of the Imperial City , and at the center of this
19902-509: The Ming in campaigns against aboriginal tribes. In 1381, the Ming dynasty annexed the areas of the southwest that had once been part of the Kingdom of Dali following the successful effort by Hui Muslim Ming armies to defeat Yuan -loyalist Mongol and Hui Muslim troops holding out in Yunnan province. The Hui troops under General Mu Ying , who was appointed Governor of Yunnan, were resettled in
20116-538: The Ming overlordship and effectively declared war against the Ming with the " Seven Grievances ." In 1636, Nurhaci's son Hong Taiji renamed his dynasty the " Great Qing " at Mukden (modern Shenyang), which had been made their capital in 1625. Hong Taiji also adopted the Chinese imperial title huangdi , declared the Chongde ("Revering Virtue") era, and changed the ethnic name of his people from "Jurchen" to " Manchu ". In 1636, Banner Armies defeated Joseon during
20330-496: The Ming throne, and their forces were divided. These scattered Ming remnants in southern China after 1644 were collectively designated by 19th-century historians as the Southern Ming . Each bastion of resistance was individually defeated by the Qing until 1662, when the last Southern Ming emperor, Zhu Youlang , the Yongli Emperor, was captured and executed. Despite the Ming defeat, smaller loyalist movements continued until
20544-466: The Qing state, hoping that an overthrow of the Qing would enable a Japanese takeover of the Manchu homeland, with the belief that Han Chinese would not oppose it. Tōyama Mitsuru , who was the Society's leader as well as a member of the pan-Asian secret society Gen'yōsha , additionally believed that the anti-Qing revolutionaries would even aid the Japanese in taking over, as well as helping them to enlarge
20758-528: The Soviet Union, but Yugoslavia retained autonomy within its own borders. After the Tito–Stalin split in 1948, the relationship between the two countries deteriorated significantly. Yugoslavia was expelled from the international organisations of the Eastern Bloc . After Stalin's death and a period of de-Stalinization by Nikita Khrushchev , peace was restored, but the relationship between the two countries
20972-414: The Soviet Union, which provided an example of rapid industrial growth achieved without capitalism. At least part of the reason why the Kwantung Army seized Manchuria in 1931 was to use it as a laboratory for creating an economic system geared towards the "national defense state"; colonial Manchuria offered up possibilities for the army carrying out drastic economic changes that were not possible in Japan. From
21186-476: The Soviet economy, military, science, and technology. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of its former satellites moved towards democratisation. Only China, Cuba, Laos , and Vietnam remain one-party communist states. In 1992, all references to Marxism–Leninism in the constitution of North Korea were dropped by the Supreme People's Assembly and replaced with Juche . In 2009,
21400-649: The Soviets without firing a single shot; there were even cases of armed riots and mutinies against the Japanese forces. Puyi abdicated on 17 August and had hoped to escape to Japan to surrender to the Americans, but the Soviets captured him and eventually extradited him to the government of China, when the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, where the authorities had him imprisoned on charges of war crimes , along with all other captured Manchukuo officials. From 1945 to 1948, Manchuria served as
21614-606: The Spanish Latin American colonies through Spanish ports. People began hoarding precious silver as there was progressively less of it, forcing the ratio of the value of copper to silver into a steep decline. In the 1630s a string of one thousand copper coins equaled an ounce of silver; by 1640 that sum could fetch half an ounce; and, by 1643 only one-third of an ounce. For peasants this meant economic disaster, since they paid taxes in silver while conducting local trade and crop sales in copper. Historians have debated
21828-542: The Xhosa, Tswana, and Venda peoples, and so provide grounds for denying them their democratic rights. All four Bantustans were reincorporated into a democratic South Africa on 27 April 1994, under a new constitution . The South African authorities established ten Bantustans in South West Africa (present-day Namibia ), then illegally occupied by South Africa, in the late 1960s and early 1970s in accordance with
22042-655: The Yongle Emperor's reign (1402–1424) and afterwards managed huge imperial workshops, commanded armies, and participated in matters of appointment and promotion of officials. Yongle put 75 eunuchs in charge of foreign policy; they traveled frequently to vassal states including Annam, Mongolia, the Ryukyu Islands, and Tibet and less frequently to farther-flung places like Japan and Nepal. In the later 15th century, however, eunuch envoys generally only traveled to Korea. The eunuchs developed their own bureaucracy that
22256-792: The Yongle Emperor, the Ming Dynasty established the Nurgan Regional Military Commission on the banks of the Amur River , and Yishiha , a eunuch of Haixi Jurchen origin, was ordered to lead an expedition to the mouth of the Amur to pacify the Wild Jurchens. After the death of Yongle Emperor, the Nurgan Regional Military Commission was abolished in 1435, and the Ming court ceased to have substantial activities there, although
22470-468: The Yuan capital Dadu (present-day Beijing ) in 1368. The last Yuan emperor fled north to the upper capital Shangdu , and Zhu declared the founding of the Ming dynasty after razing the Yuan palaces in Dadu to the ground; the city was renamed Beiping in the same year. Zhu Yuanzhang took Hongwu, or "Vastly Martial", as his era name . Hongwu made an immediate effort to rebuild state infrastructure. He built
22684-402: The Yuan. He continued policies of the Yuan dynasty such as continued request for Korean concubines and eunuchs, Mongol-style hereditary military institutions, Mongol-style clothing and hats, promoting archery and horseback riding, and having large numbers of Mongols serve in the Ming military. Until the late 16th century Mongols still constituted one-in-three officers serving in capital forces like
22898-814: The aloof emperor and his officials; any senior official who wanted to discuss state matters had to persuade powerful eunuchs with a bribe simply to have his demands or message relayed to the emperor. There were several military campaigns, which included the Ordos campaign , Bozhou rebellion by the Chiefdom of Bozhou in southwestern China and the Imjin War , during the Wanli Emperor's reign. The Hongwu Emperor forbade eunuchs to learn how to read or engage in politics. Whether or not these restrictions were carried out with absolute success in his reign, eunuchs during
23112-501: The area became an industrial powerhouse. Manchukuo had its own issued banknotes and postage stamps . Several independent banks were founded as well. The conquest of Manchuria proved to be extremely popular with the Japanese people who saw the conquest as providing a much-needed economic "lifeline" to their economy which had been badly hurt by the Great Depression. The very image of a "lifeline" suggested that Manchuria—which
23326-458: The art transport networks like the famous Asia Express railroad line, and modern infrastructure that was going up all over Manchukuo, Japan's newest colony become a popular tourist destination for middle-class Japanese, who wanted to see the "Brave New Empire" that was going up in the mainland of Asia. The Japanese government had official plans projecting the emigration of 5 million Japanese to Manchukuo between 1936 and 1956. Between 1938 and 1942
23540-601: The beginning, the Army intended to turn Manchukuo into the industrial heartland of the empire, and starting in 1932, the Army sponsored a policy of forced industrialization that was closely modeled after the Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. Reflecting a dislike of capitalism, the Zaibatsu were excluded from Manchukuo and all of the heavy industrial factories were built and owned by Army-owned corporations. In 1935, there
23754-460: The capital. The emperor also strongly advertised the hospitality and role granted to Chinggisid nobles in his court. Hongwu insisted that he was not a rebel, and he attempted to justify his conquest of the other rebel warlords by claiming that he was a Yuan subject and had been divinely-appointed to restore order by crushing rebels. Most Chinese elites did not view the Yuan's Mongol ethnicity as grounds to resist or reject it. Hongwu emphasised that he
23968-550: The capture of the Emperor Yingzong of Ming during the 1449 Tumu Crisis ended them completely. The imperial navy was allowed to fall into disrepair while forced labor constructed the Liaodong palisade and connected and fortified the Great Wall into its modern form. Wide-ranging censuses of the entire empire were conducted decennially, but the desire to avoid labor and taxes and the difficulty of storing and reviewing
24182-713: The concern of the Allies that Germany would look to the oil-rich Middle East for a solution, caused the invasion of Iraq by the United Kingdom and the invasion of Iran by the UK and the Soviet Union. Pro-Axis governments in both Iraq and Iran were removed and replaced with Allied-dominated governments. As Soviet forces prevailed over the German Army on the Eastern Front during World War II, the Soviet Union supported
24396-443: The conclusion that change was impossible in Japan, but still possible in Manchukuo, where paradoxically the Kwantung Army was sponsoring the sort of policies that were unacceptable in Japan. Moreover, the Great Depression had made it very difficult for university graduates in Japan to find work, which made the prospect of a well-paying job in Manchukuo very attractive to otherwise underemployed Japanese university graduates. In Manchukuo,
24610-460: The conquest meant that newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbun that had initially opposed the war swiftly pivoted to support the war as the best way of improving sales. The conquest of Manchuria was also presented as resolving the "unfinished business" left over the Russo-Japanese war that finally undid one of the key terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth. The most popular song in Japan in 1932 was
24824-485: The constitution was quietly amended to not only remove all Marxist–Leninist references from the first draft, but also drop all references to communism . In some cases, the process of decolonisation has been managed by the decolonising power to create a neo-colony , that is a nominally independent state whose economy and politics permits continued foreign domination. Neo-colonies are not normally considered puppet states. The Netherlands formed several puppet states in
25038-423: The contributions made by middle-class Russians to community life. Mindful of the way that Americans and most Europeans enjoyed extraterritorial rights in China at the time, accounts in Chinese literature about the Russians living in Manchukuo and their "mixed water" children often display a certain schadenfreude recounting how the Russians in Manchukuo usually lived in poverty on the margins of Manchukuo society with
25252-652: The control imposed upon the Jurchens in Manchuria by the Mongols, yet it created a norm of organization that would ultimately serve as the main instrument for the relations with peoples along the northeast frontiers. By the end of the Hongwu reign, the essentials of a policy toward the Jurchens had taken shape. Most of the inhabitants of Manchuria, except for the Wild Jurchens , were at peace with China. In 1409, under
25466-470: The council was abolished. It received formal recognition from Japan on 15 September 1932 through the Japan–Manchukuo Protocol , after the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi . The city of Changchun —renamed 新京 ; Xīnjīng ; 'new capital'—became the capital of Manchukuo. The local Chinese organized volunteer armies to oppose the Japanese and the new state required
25680-441: The county graduates, those who passed the palace examination were awarded a jinshi ('presented scholar') degree and assured a high-level position. In 276 years of Ming rule and ninety palace examinations, the number of doctoral degrees granted by passing the palace examinations was 24,874. Ebrey states that "there were only two to four thousand of these jinshi at any given time, on the order of one out of 10,000 adult males." This
25894-609: The court of the Tianqi Emperor (r. 1620–1627) and had his political rivals tortured to death, mostly the vocal critics from the faction of the Donglin Society . He ordered temples built in his honor throughout the Ming Empire, and built personal palaces created with funds allocated for building the previous emperor's tombs. His friends and family gained important positions without qualifications. Wei also published
26108-479: The creation of communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. Specifically, the People's Republics in Poland , Romania , Czechoslovakia , Bulgaria , Hungary , and Albania were dominated by the Soviet Union . While all of these People's Republics did not "officially" take power until after WWII ended, they all have roots in pro-communist wartime governments. Yugoslavia was a communist state closely linked to
26322-466: The decidedly leftist thrust of social and economic policies in Manchukuo with the state playing an increasingly large role in society. Likewise, much of the debate between Japanese civil servants about the sort of social-economic policies Japan should follow in Manchukuo in the 1930s was framed in Marxist terms, with the civil servants arguing over whether Manchuria prior to September 1931 had a "feudal" or
26536-544: The emperor and ministers at times). The Secretariat operated as a coordinating agency, whereas the Six Ministries— Personnel , Revenue , Rites , War , Justice , and Public Works —were direct administrative organs of the state: The imperial household was staffed almost entirely by eunuchs and ladies with their own bureaus. Female servants were organized into the Bureau of Palace Attendance, Bureau of Ceremonies, Bureau of Apparel, Bureau of Foodstuffs, Bureau of
26750-531: The emperor, handling paperwork under the reign of the Yongle Emperor and later appointed as top officials of agencies and Grand Preceptor, a top-ranking, non-functional civil service post, under the Hongxi Emperor (r. 1424–25). The Grand Secretariat drew its members from the Hanlin Academy and were considered part of the imperial authority, not the ministerial one (hence being at odds with both
26964-497: The emperor. As in prior dynasties, the provincial administrations were monitored by a travelling inspector from the Censorate. Censors had the power to impeach officials on an irregular basis, unlike the senior officials who were to do so only in triennial evaluations of junior officials. Although decentralization of state power within the provinces occurred in the early Ming, the trend of central government officials delegated to
27178-492: The end of World War II were sent back to their homeland in 1946–1948 by U.S. Navy ships in the operation now known as the Japanese repatriation from Huludao . Historians generally consider Manchukuo a puppet state of Imperial Japan due to the Japanese military's continued occupation of the country and its direct control over the government. In 1994, the Yomiuri Shimbun conducted an interview with Prince Mikasa of
27392-454: The enormous archives at Nanjing hampered accurate figures. Estimates for the late-Ming population vary from 160 to 200 million, but necessary revenues were squeezed out of smaller and smaller numbers of farmers as more disappeared from the official records or "donated" their lands to tax-exempt eunuchs or temples. Haijin laws intended to protect the coasts from Japanese pirates instead turned many into smugglers and pirates themselves. By
27606-504: The establishment of the Xi dynasty , while Li's center of power was in Hubei with extended influence over Shaanxi and Henan. In 1640, masses of Chinese peasants who were starving, unable to pay their taxes, and no longer in fear of the frequently defeated Chinese army, began to form into huge bands of rebels. The Chinese military, caught between fruitless efforts to defeat the Manchu raiders from
27820-528: The ethnic balance did not change significantly, except that Japan increased the Korean population in China . From Japanese sources come these numbers: in 1940 the total population in Manchukuo of Longjiang , Rehe , Jilin , Fengtian , and Xing'an provinces at 43,233,954; or an Interior Ministry figure of 31,008,600. Another figure of the period estimated the total population as 36,933,000 residents. The majority of Han Chinese in Manchukuo believed that Manchuria
28034-466: The exam generally limited participants to those already coming from the landholding class. However, the government did exact provincial quotas while drafting officials. This was an effort to curb monopolization of power by landholding gentry who came from the most prosperous regions, where education was the most advanced. The expansion of the printing industry since Song times enhanced the spread of knowledge and number of potential exam candidates throughout
28248-514: The expression shakai [social] appeared in the title of a book, it was usually confiscated". Young also noted—with reference to Lord Acton's dictum that "Absolute power corrupts absolutely"—that for many of the idealistic young Japanese civil servants, who believed that they could affect a "revolution from above" that would make the lives of ordinary people better, that the absolute power that they enjoyed over millions of people "went to their heads", causing them to behave with abusive arrogance towards
28462-453: The fields of transportation, the government, and in business tended to be middle class, white-collar people such as executives, engineers, and managers, and those Japanese who working in Manchukuo as blue-collar employees tended to be skilled workers. In 1934, it was reported that a Japanese carpenter working in Manchukuo with its growing economy could earn twice as much as he could in Japan. With its gleaming modernist office buildings, state of
28676-605: The former Dutch East Indies as part of its effort to quell the Indonesian National Revolution . Following the Belgian Congo 's independence as Congo-Leopoldville in 1960, Belgian interests supported the short-lived breakaway State of Katanga (1960–1963). Indonesia established a Provisional Government of East Timor following its invasion of East Timor in December 1975. During
28890-529: The former Russian railroad network in southern Manchuria to owning the ports, mines, hotels, telephone lines, and sundry other businesses, dominating the economy of Manchuria. With the growth of the South Manchuria Railroad company ( Mantetsu ) came a growth in number of Japanese people living in Manchuria, from a Japanese population of 16,612 in 1906 to one of 233,749 in 1930. The majority of blue-collar employees for Mantetsu were Chinese, and
29104-504: The government to properly manage irrigation and flood-control projects caused widespread loss of life and normal civility. The central government, starved of resources, could do very little to mitigate the effects of these calamities. Making matters worse, a widespread epidemic, the Great Plague of 1633–1644 , spread across China from Zhejiang to Henan, killing an unknown but large number of people. The deadliest earthquake of all time,
29318-424: The guards continued to exist in Manchuria. Throughout its existence, the Ming established a total of 384 guards (衛, wei ) and 24 battalions (所, suo ) in Manchuria, but these were probably only nominal offices and did not necessarily imply political control. By the late Ming period, Ming's political presence in Manchuria has declined significantly. The Mingshi —the official history of the Ming dynasty compiled by
29532-427: The heady luxury of colonial consumption. They made it into a project of radical change, experimentation and possibility". The Kwantung Army for its part tolerated the talk of social revolution in Manchukuo as the best way of gaining support from the Han majority of Manchukuo, who did not want Manchuria to be severed from China. Even more active in going to Manchukuo were the products of Tenkō ('changing directions'),
29746-403: The interwar period, Manchuria once again became a political and military battleground between Russia, Japan, and China. Imperial Japan moved into Russia's far eastern territories, taking advantage of internal chaos following the Russian Revolution . However, in the years following the establishment of the Soviet Union, a combination of Soviet military successes and American economic pressure forced
29960-430: The intricate poetic requirements of the eight-legged essay. Not only did the traditional gentry dominated the system, they also learned that conservatism and resistance to new ideas was the path to success. For centuries critics had pointed out these problems, but the examination system only became more abstract and less relevant to the needs of China. The consensus of scholars is that the eight-legged essay can be blamed as
30174-632: The kingdoms visited by Zheng He, Yongle proclaimed the Kingdom of Cochin to be its protectorate. The Chinese had sent diplomatic missions over land since the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) and engaged in private overseas trade , but these missions were unprecedented in grandeur and scale. To service seven different tributary voyages, the Nanjing shipyards constructed two thousand vessels from 1403 to 1419, including treasure ships measuring 112 to 134 m (367 to 440 ft) in length and 45 to 54 m (148 to 177 ft) in width. Yongle used woodblock printing to spread Chinese culture. He also used
30388-489: The largest political division was the circuit ( lu 路). However, after the Jurchen invasion in 1127, the Song court established four semi-autonomous regional command systems based on territorial and military units, with a detached service secretariat that would become the provincial administrations of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Copied on the Yuan model, the Ming provincial bureaucracy contained three commissions: one civil, one military, and one for surveillance. Below
30602-399: The last opposing rebel faction, leaving Zhu Yuanzhang in uncontested control of the bountiful Yangtze River Valley and cementing his power in the south. After the dynastic head of the Red Turbans suspiciously died in 1367 while a guest of Zhu, there was no one left who was remotely capable of contesting his march to the throne, and he made his imperial ambitions known by sending an army toward
30816-413: The level of the province ( sheng 省) were prefectures ( fu 府) operating under a prefect ( zhifu 知府), followed by subprefectures ( zhou 州) under a subprefect. The lowest unit was the county ( xian 縣), overseen by a magistrate. Besides the provinces, there were also two large areas that belonged to no province, but were metropolitan areas ( jing 京) attached to Nanjing and Beijing. Departing from
31030-419: The life of ordinary people, to determine Manchukuo was in the "feudal" or "capitalist" stage of development. Starting in 1936, the Manchukuo state launched Five Year Plans for economic development, which were closely modeled after the Five Year Plans in the Soviet Union. In theory, the Japanese were creating an entirely new, independent state, and this allowed for a considerable level of experimentation regarding
31244-402: The local Chinese more economically successful. The South Korean historian Bong Inyoung noted when it came to writing about the "mixed water" people, Chinese writers tended to treat them as not entirely Chinese, but on the other hand were willing to accept these people as Chinese provided that would totally embrace Chinese culture by renouncing their Russian heritage, thus making Chineseness as much
31458-532: The local government they tolerate. Puppet states differ from allies , who choose their actions of their own initiative or in accordance with treaties they have voluntarily entered. Puppet states are forced into legally endorsing actions already taken by a foreign power. Puppet states are "endowed with the outward symbols of authority", such as a name, flag , anthem , constitution , law codes , motto , and government, but in reality are appendages of another state which creates, sponsors or otherwise controls
31672-409: The local peoples. After the overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty by the Ming dynasty in 1368, Manchuria remained under control of the Mongols of the Northern Yuan dynasty based in Mongolia . Naghachu , a former Yuan official and a Uriankhai general of the Northern Yuan dynasty, won hegemony over the Mongol tribes in Manchuria ( Liaoyang province of the former Yuan dynasty). He grew strong in
31886-401: The main central administrative system generally known as the Three Departments and Six Ministries system, which was instituted by various dynasties since late Han (202 BCE – 220 CE), the Ming administration had only one department, the Secretariat, that controlled the six ministries. Following the execution of the Chancellor Hu Weiyong in 1380, the Hongwu Emperor abolished the Secretariat,
32100-436: The military to expand China's borders. This included the brief occupation of Vietnam , from the initial invasion in 1406 until the Ming withdrawal in 1427 as a result of protracted guerrilla warfare led by Lê Lợi , the founder of the Vietnamese Lê dynasty . The Oirat leader Esen Tayisi launched an invasion into Ming China in July 1449. The chief eunuch Wang Zhen encouraged the Zhengtong Emperor (r. 1435–49) to lead
32314-546: The most influential eunuch in the Directorate of Ceremonial acted as a de facto dictator over the state. Although the imperial household was staffed mostly by eunuchs and palace ladies, there was a civil service office called the Seal Office, which cooperated with eunuch agencies in maintaining imperial seals, tallies, and stamps. There were also civil service offices to oversee the affairs of imperial princes. The Hongwu emperor from 1373 to 1384 staffed his bureaus with officials gathered through recommendations only. After that
32528-438: The name of Manchukuo has often been prefixed with 偽 ; wěi ; 'so-called' to stress its perceived illegitimacy. In English, 'Manchukuo' derives from the Wade–Giles romanization Man-chou-kuo , incorporating the anglicized demonym 'Manchu'. Other European languages used equivalent terms: Manchukuo was known to its Axis allies as Manciukuò in Italian and Mandschukuo or Mandschureich in German. Manchukuo
32742-430: The nominal transition from republic to empire, Puyi was proclaimed as the emperor of Manchukuo. The Japanese population of Manchuria increased dramatically during this period, largely due to Japan's efforts to resettle young, land-poor farmers from the inner islands . By 1945, more than a million Japanese people had settled within Manchukuo. The region's Korean population also increased during this period. Regions in
32956-422: The north and huge peasant revolts in the provinces, essentially fell apart. Unpaid and unfed, the army was defeated by Li Zicheng—now self-styled as the Prince of Shun —and deserted the capital without much of a fight. On 25 April 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng when the city gates were opened by rebel allies from within. During the turmoil, Chongzhen , the last Ming emperor, accompanied only by
33170-457: The northeast, with forces large enough (numbering hundreds of thousands) to threaten invasion of the newly founded Ming dynasty in order to restore the Mongols to power in China. The Ming decided to defeat him instead of waiting for the Mongols to attack. In 1387 the Ming sent a military campaign to attack Naghachu , which concluded with the surrender of Naghachu and Ming conquest of Manchuria. The early Ming court could not, and did not, aspire to
33384-412: The nuanced history of Sino-Tibetan relations during the Ming era. Modern scholars debate whether the Ming dynasty had sovereignty over Tibet. Some believe it was a relationship of loose suzerainty that was largely cut off when the Jiajing Emperor (r. 1521–67) persecuted Buddhism in favor of Daoism at court. Others argue that the significant religious nature of the relationship with Tibetan lamas
33598-404: The official persecution that Jews experienced under Japan's ally Nazi Germany, and Japanese authorities were involved in closing down local anti-Semitic publications such as the Russian Fascist Party's newspaper Nash Put . However, Jews in Manchukuo were victims of harassment by antisemitic elements among the White Russian population, one notable incident being the murder of Simon Kaspé . In 1937
33812-558: The opium trade that the Qing were currently trying to destroy. The Society would support Sun and other anti-Manchu revolutionaries until the Qing ultimately collapsed. In Japan, many anti-Qing revolutionaries gathered in exile, where they founded and operated the Tongmenghui resistance movement, whose first meeting was hosted by the Black Dragon Society. The Black Dragon Society had a large impact on Sun specifically, cultivating an intimate relationship with him. Sun often promoted pan-Asianism, and sometimes even passed himself off as Japanese. In
34026-406: The palace until the coup against the Jingtai Emperor in 1457 known as the "Wresting the Gate Incident". The former emperor retook the throne under the new era name Tianshun (r. 1457–64). Tianshun proved to be a troubled time and Mongol forces within the Ming military structure continued to be problematic. On 7 August 1461, the Chinese general Cao Qin and his Ming troops of Mongol descent staged
34240-497: The peace. The perception in Japan was the Treaty of Portsmouth was a humiliating diplomatic disaster that did not place all of Manchuria into the Japanese sphere of influence as widely expected, and the question of Manchuria was still "unfinished business" that would one day be resolved by the Imperial Army. In 1906, Japan established the South Manchurian Railway on the southern half of the former Chinese Eastern Railway built by Russia from Manzhouli to Vladivostok via Harbin with
34454-563: The permanent abolition of the dynastic system in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution , with Puyi , the final emperor of China , forced to abdicate at the age of six. In 1931, Manchuria was invaded and occupied by the Empire of Japan following the Mukden incident . A puppet government was set up the following year, with Puyi brought in by the Japanese to serve as its nominal regent, though he himself had no actual political power. Japanese officials ultimately made all pertinent decisions, and exercised total control over Puyi's court and personal safety. Upon
34668-423: The policies that the new state would be carrying out. Many university graduates in Japan who were ostensibly opposed to the social system within Japan itself, instead went to Manchukuo with the belief that they could implement reforms that might later inspire policy within Japan itself. This was especially the case since it was impossible to effect any reforms in Japan itself as the very act of thinking about "altering
34882-433: The pretext for seizing the region. Marshal Zhang was killed when the bridge his train was riding across was blown up while three Chinese men were murdered and explosive equipment was placed on their corpses to make it appear that they were the killers, but the plot was foiled when Zhang's son Zhang Xueliang, the 'Young Marshal', succeeded him without incident while Tokyo refused to send additional troops to Manchuria. Given that
35096-406: The proclamation of the Republic of China . Described as "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history" by Edwin O. Reischauer , John K. Fairbank and Albert M. Craig , the Ming emperors took over the provincial administration system of the Yuan dynasty, and the thirteen Ming provinces are the precursors of the modern provinces. Throughout the Song dynasty,
35310-553: The provinces as virtual provincial governors began in the 1420s. By the late Ming dynasty, there were central government officials delegated to two or more provinces as supreme commanders and viceroys, a system which reined in the power and influence of the military by the civil establishment. Governmental institutions in China conformed to a similar pattern for some two thousand years, but each dynasty installed special offices and bureaus, reflecting its own particular interests. The Ming administration utilized Grand Secretaries to assist
35524-427: The provinces. For young schoolchildren there were printed multiplication tables and primers for elementary vocabulary; for adult examination candidates there were mass-produced, inexpensive volumes of Confucian classics and successful examination answers. As in earlier periods, the focus of the examination was classical Confucian texts, while the bulk of test material centered on the Four Books outlined by Zhu Xi in
35738-455: The puppet government. International law does not recognise occupied puppet states as legitimate . Puppet states can cease to be puppets through: The term is a metaphor which compares a state or government to a puppet controlled by a puppeteer with strings. The first recorded use of the term "puppet government" was in 1884, in reference to the Khedivate of Egypt . In the Middle Ages , vassal states existed based on delegation of
35952-419: The railroad network of Manchuria that was built originally during an economic and military struggle between Russia and Japan over Chinese territory and became a focal point before and after the Russo-Japanese War . Chinese warlords had also aimed to build local lines when possible. Manchukuo's railroad system would consist mainly of the South Manchuria Railway , a Japanese concession in the Republic of China, and
36166-468: The region as part of a colonization effort. By the end of the 14th century, some 200,000 military colonists settled some 2,000,000 mu (350,000 acres) of land in what is now Yunnan and Guizhou . Roughly half a million more Chinese settlers came in later periods; these migrations caused a major shift in the ethnic make-up of the region, since formerly more than half of the population were non-Han peoples. Resentment over such massive changes in population and
36380-436: The region from Chinese control and to create a Japanese-aligned puppet state. To create an air of legitimacy, the last Emperor of China, Puyi , was invited to come with his followers and act as the head of state for Manchuria. One of his faithful companions was Zheng Xiaoxu , a Qing reformist and loyalist. The "Northeast Supreme Administrative Council" was established as a Japanese puppet organization in Manchuria following
36594-432: The region. Mantetsu personnel were involved in the economic exploitation of occupied China during World War II, and colonial planning at the behest of the Imperial Japanese Army. Many railway lines in Manchukuo were owned by the Manchukuo National Railway . After 1933, the Manchukuo National Railway was fully owned by the South Manchuria Railway/Mantetsu. Mantetsu had close to monopoly status and its properties were guarded by
36808-479: The region; in 1421 the Yongle Emperor commissioned 26 officials to travel the empire and uphold similar investigatory and patrimonial duties. By 1430 these xunfu assignments became institutionalized as " grand coordinators ". Hence, the Censorate was reinstalled and first staffed with investigating censors, later with censors-in-chief. By 1453, the grand coordinators were granted the title vice censor-in-chief or assistant censor-in-chief and were allowed direct access to
37022-448: The resulting government presence and policies sparked more Miao and Yao revolts in 1464 to 1466, which were crushed by an army of 30,000 Ming troops (including 1,000 Mongols) joining the 160,000 local Guangxi . After the scholar and philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) suppressed another rebellion in the region, he advocated single, unitary administration of Chinese and indigenous ethnic groups in order to bring about sinification of
37236-416: The right to establish a new dynasty . In 1363, Zhu Yuanzhang eliminated his archrival and leader of the rebel Han faction, Chen Youliang , in the Battle of Lake Poyang , arguably the largest naval battle in history . Known for its ambitious use of fire ships , Zhu's force of 200,000 Ming sailors were able to defeat a Han rebel force over triple their size, claimed to be 650,000-strong. The victory destroyed
37450-414: The rule of a country by a king to noble men of lower rank. Since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the concept of a nation came into existence where sovereignty was connected more to the people who inhabited the land than to the nobility who owned the land. An earlier similar concept is suzerainty , the control of the external affairs of one state by another. The Batavian Republic was established in
37664-406: The samurai caste, and almost all of the officers in the Imperial Japanese Army came from samurai families, which made the Kwantung Army very hostile towards any sort of land reform which might serve as an example for Japanese peasants. In October 1941, the Soviet spy ring headed by Richard Sorge was uncovered in Tokyo, which caused the authorities to become paranoid about Soviet espionage, and led to
37878-408: The scholar-officials who populated the many ranks of bureaucracy were recruited through a rigorous examination system that was initially established by the Sui dynasty (581–618). Theoretically the system of exams allowed anyone to join the ranks of imperial officials (although it was frowned upon for merchants to join); in reality the time and funding needed to support the study in preparation for
38092-414: The scrutiny of recorded evaluation, although they were expected to confess any of their faults. There were over 4,000 school instructors in county and prefectural schools who were subject to evaluations every nine years. The Chief Instructor on the prefectural level was classified as equal to a second-grade county graduate. The Supervisorate of Imperial Instruction oversaw the education of the heir apparent to
38306-441: The sort that the Kenpeitai normally employed in its investigations. When the Japanese surrender was announced on 15 August 1945, Puyi agreed to abdicate. Manchukuo was initially divided into three provinces. This number increased to five in 1934 when Sanjiang and Heihe were split off from Longjiang Province . A special ward of Beiman ( Chinese : 北滿特別區 ) existed between 1 July 1933 and 1 January 1936. In 1941, Manchukuo
38520-459: The state in Manchukuo to grow even bigger as a policy of "total war" came in, which meant there was a pressing demand for people with university degrees trained to think "scientifically". Fogel wrote that almost all of the university graduates from Japan who arrived in Manchukuo in the late 1930s were "largely left-wing Socialists and Communists. This was precisely at the time when Marxism had been all but banned in Japan, when (as Yamada Gōichi put) "if
38734-421: The subjects to see the effects of chemicals and germs on the human body. In the late 1930s, the doctors of Unit 731 demanded more European subjects to experiment upon in order to test the efficiency the strains of anthrax and plague that they were developing, leading to a great many of the Russians living in Manchukuo becoming the unwilling human guinea pigs of Unit 731. The Russian Fascist Party , which worked with
38948-407: The terms that he return to service. The agreement soon broke down when a local magistrate had thirty-six of his fellow rebels executed; Li's troops retaliated by killing the officials and continued to lead a rebellion based in Rongyang, central Henan province by 1635. By the 1640s, an ex-soldier and rival to Li— Zhang Xianzhong (1606–1647)—had created a firm rebel base in Chengdu , Sichuan , with
39162-407: The territory of their state, which among other regions included present-day Manchuria, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet, with the idea of 'China' itself, rejecting notions that only Han areas were core parts of China. The Qing thought of China as fundamentally multi-ethnic: the term 'Chinese people' referred to all the Han, Manchu and Mongol subjects within the empire; likewise, the term 'Chinese language'
39376-426: The throne under the era name Jingtai (r. 1449–57); the Oirats were also repelled once the Jingtai Emperor's confidant and defense minister Yu Qian (1398–1457) gained control of the Ming armed forces. Holding the Zhengtong Emperor in captivity was a useless bargaining chip for the Oirats as long as another sat on his throne, so they released him back into Ming China. The former emperor was placed under house arrest in
39590-408: The throne; this office was headed by a Grand Supervisor of Instruction, who was ranked as first class of grade three. Historians debate whether the examination system expanded or contracted upward social mobility. On the one hand, the exams were graded without regard to a candidate's social background, and were theoretically open to everyone. In actual practice, the successful candidates had years of
39804-426: The total population of Manchukuo was estimated as 30,880,000, with 6.1 persons the average family, and 122 men for each 100 women. These numbers included 29,510,000 Chinese (96%, which should have included the Manchu people ), 590,760 Japanese (2%), 680,000 Koreans (2%), and 98,431 (<1%) of other nationality: White Russians , Mongols , etc. Around 80% of the population was rural. During the existence of Manchukuo,
40018-456: The validity of the theory that silver shortages caused the downfall of the Ming dynasty. Famines became common in northern China in the early 17th century because of unusually dry and cold weather that shortened the growing season—effects of a larger ecological event now known as the Little Ice Age . Famine, alongside tax increases, widespread military desertions, a declining relief system, and natural disasters such as flooding and inability of
40232-503: The very people that they had gone to Manchukuo to help. Young wrote that it was a "monumental conceit" of the part of the young idealists to believe that they could use the Kwantung Army to achieve a "revolution from above" when it was the Kwantung Army that was using them. The ambitious plans for land reform in Manchukuo were vetoed by the Kwantung Army for precisely the reason that it might inspire similar reforms in Japan. The landlords in Japan tended to come from families who once belonged to
40446-401: The wake of a Mongol-Tibetan alliance initiated in 1578, an alliance which affected the foreign policy of the subsequent Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1912) in their support for the Dalai Lama of the Yellow Hat sect. By the late 16th century, the Mongols proved to be successful armed protectors of the Yellow Hat Dalai Lama after their increasing presence in the Amdo region, culminating in
40660-472: The wake of the Xinhai Revolution, the Black Dragons began infiltrating China, making inroads selling opium and spreading anti-Communist sentiment. Eventually, they also began directly agitating for a Japanese takeover of Manchuria. With the Russo-Japanese War , Japanese influence largely replaced that of Russia in Manchuria. Japan had mobilized one million soldiers to fight the Russians in Manchuria, one for every eight Japanese families. Despite shocking success,
40874-403: The western part of the country with large Mongolian populations were ruled under a slightly different system, reflecting the distinct traditions extant there. The southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula , now the city of Dalian , continued to be ruled directly by Japan as the Kwantung Leased Territory until the end of the war. The state was ultimately toppled at the end of World War II with
41088-445: The women, who answered the call of this land of opportunity, brought with them tremendous drive and ambition. In their efforts to remake their own lives, they remade an empire. They invested it with their preoccupations of modernity and their dreams of a Utopian future. They pushed it to embrace idealist rhetoric of social reform and justified itself in terms of Chinese nationalist aspiration. They turned it to architectural ostentation and
41302-476: Was Swiss, saying that they sincerely believed she was a Russian when they assaulted her. Fleming observed that in Manchukuo: "you can beat White Russians up till you are blue in the face, because they are people without status in the world, citizens of nowhere". Fleming further noted that the Japanese in Manchukuo had a strong dislike of all European people, and because the Russians in Manchukuo were stateless without an embassy to issue protests if they were victimized,
41516-586: Was Tachibana Shiraki, who had once been a Marxist Sinologist until after he was arrested and undergoing tenko became a fanatical right-winger. Tachibana went to Manchukuo in 1932, proclaiming that the theory of the "five races" working together was the best solution to Asia's problems and argued in his writings that only Japan could save China from itself, which was a complete change from his previous policies, where he criticized Japan for exploiting China. Other left-wing activists like Ohgami Suehiro did not undergo tenko , but still went to work in Manchukuo, believing it
41730-485: Was a change when the "reform bureaucrat" Nobusuke Kishi was appointed Deputy Minister of Industrial Development. Kishi persuaded the Army to allow the zaibatsu to invest in Manchukuo, arguing that having the state carry out the entire industrialization of Manchukuo was costing too much money. Kishi pioneered an elitist system where bureaucrats such as himself developed economic plans, which the zaibatsu had to then carry out. Kishi succeeded in marshaling private capital in
41944-441: Was a matter of uncles promoting nephews. The Heishanhui Society in Peking sponsored the temple that conducted rituals for worshiping the memory of Gang Tie, a powerful eunuch of the Yuan dynasty. The Temple became an influential base for highly placed eunuchs, and continued in a somewhat diminished role during the Qing dynasty. During the last years of the Wanli era and those of his two successors, an economic crisis developed that
42158-401: Was a penniless peasant and Buddhist monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352; he soon gained a reputation after marrying the foster daughter of a rebel commander. In 1356, Zhu's rebel force captured the city of Nanjing , which he would later establish as the capital of the Ming dynasty. With the Yuan dynasty crumbling, competing rebel groups began fighting for control of the country and thus
42372-417: Was centered on a sudden widespread lack of the empire's chief medium of exchange: silver. The Portuguese first established trade with China in 1516. Following the Ming Emperor's decision to ban direct trade with Japan, Portuguese traders acted as an intermediary between China and Japan by buying Chinese silks from China and selling it to Japan for silver. After some initial hostilities gained consent from
42586-417: Was changed to the 'Empire of Manchuria' in 1934 upon the coronation of Puyi as the Kangde Emperor. The name in Chinese and Japanese literally translates to 'Empire of Great Manchuria', with the prefixed 大 ; dà ; 'great' suggestive of official names for previous Chinese dynasties, such as ' Great Ming ' and ' Great Qing ', though this went largely unreflected in English translations. The Qing dynasty
42800-441: Was founded in the 17th century by Manchus hailing from northeastern China, conquering the ethnically Han Shun and Ming dynasties. Upon establishing themselves, the Qing referred to their state as 中國 ; Zhōngguó ; 'central country' in Chinese and equivalently as ᡩᡠᠯᡳᠮᠪᠠᡳ ᡤᡠᡵᡠᠨ ; Dulimbai gurun in Manchu. The name was used in official documents and treaties, and while conducting foreign affairs. The Qing equated
43014-536: Was in comparison to the 100,000 shengyuan ('government students'), the lowest tier of graduates, by the 16th century. The maximum tenure in office was nine years, but every three years officials were graded on their performance by senior officials. If they were graded as superior then they were promoted, if graded adequate then they retained their ranks, and if graded inadequate they were demoted one rank. In extreme cases, officials would be dismissed or punished. Only capital officials of grade 4 and above were exempt from
43228-469: Was never completely mended. Yugoslavia continued to pursue independent policies and became the founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement . The Soviet Union continued to exert some influence over the People's Republic of China before the Sino-Soviet split in 1961. Some other countries which once were Soviet puppet governments included Mongolia , North Korea , North Vietnam , the reunified Vietnam and Cuba , all of which had substantial dependence on
43442-431: Was no one after him skilled enough to maintain the stability of these alliances; officials soon banded together in opposing political factions. Over time Wanli grew tired of court affairs and frequent political quarreling amongst his ministers, preferring to stay behind the walls of the Forbidden City and out of his officials' sight. Scholar-officials lost prominence in administration as eunuchs became intermediaries between
43656-449: Was not conquering territory from the Yuan dynasty but rather from the rebel warlords. He used this line of argument to attempt to persuade Yuan loyalists to join his cause. The Ming used the tribute they received from former Yuan vassals as proof that the Ming had taken over the Yuan's legitimacy. Tribute missions were regularly celebrated with music and dance in the Ming court. Hui Muslim troops settled in Changde , Hunan , after serving
43870-416: Was nothing more than a figurehead and real authority rested in the hands of the Japanese military officials. An imperial palace was specially built for the emperor. The Manchu ministers all served as frontmen for their Japanese vice-ministers, who made all decisions. In this manner, Japan formally detached Manchukuo from China over the course of the 1930s. With Japanese investment and rich natural resources,
44084-456: Was often referred to in English simply as 'Manchuria', itself an unfamiliar term within China; its use had previously been widely encouraged by the Japanese in order to connote a level of separation from the rest of China. This was in stark contrast to the position held by the Qing, that Manchus were one of several integral Chinese peoples, with their homeland being an integral part of China. The historian Norman Smith wrote that "the term 'Manchuria'
44298-448: Was organized parallel to but was not subject to the civil service bureaucracy. Although there were several dictatorial eunuchs throughout the Ming, such as Wang Zhen , Wang Zhi, and Liu Jin , excessive tyrannical eunuch power did not become evident until the 1590s when the Wanli Emperor increased their rights over the civil bureaucracy and granted them power to collect provincial taxes. The eunuch Wei Zhongxian (1568–1627) dominated
44512-399: Was possible to effect social reforms that would end the "semi-feudal" condition of the Chinese peasants of Manchukuo, and that he could use the Kwantung Army to effect left-wing reforms in Manchukuo. Ohgami went to work in the "agricultural economy" desk of the Social Research Unit of the South Manchurian Railroad company, writing up reports about the rural economy of Manchukuo that were used by
44726-463: Was reorganized into 19 provinces, with the two special cities of Xinjing and Harbin. Each province was in turn divided in four (Xing'an dong) and 24 (Fengtian) prefectures . Harbin was later incorporated into Binjiang province . Andong and Jinzhou provinces separated themselves from Fengtian while Binjiang and Jiandao separated themselves from Jilin in the same year. Manchukuo experienced rapid economic growth and progress in its social systems. During
44940-539: Was rich in natural resources—was essential for Japan to recover from the Great Depression , which explains why the conquest was so popular at the time and later why the Japanese people were so completely hostile towards any suggestion of letting Manchuria go. At the time, censorship in Japan was nowhere near as stringent as it would later become, and the American historian Louise Young noted: "Had they wished, it would have been possible in 1931 and 1932 for journalists and editors to express anti-war sentiments". The popularity of
45154-443: Was rightfully part of China, and they both passively and violently resisted Japan's propaganda that Manchukuo was a "multinational state". After the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), thousands of Russians fled to Manchuria to join the Russian community already there. The Russians living in Manchuria were stateless and as whites had an ambiguous status in Manchukuo, which was meant to be a Pan-Asian state, whose official "five races" were
45368-438: Was the Forbidden City , the palatial residence of the emperor and his family. By 1553, the Outer City was added to the south, which brought the overall size of Beijing to 6.5 by 7 kilometres (4 by 4 + 1 ⁄ 2 miles). Beginning in 1405, the Yongle Emperor entrusted his favored eunuch commander Zheng He (1371–1433) as the admiral for a gigantic new fleet of ships designated for international tributary missions . Among
45582-409: Was the government-sponsored Concordia Association , although various émigré groups were permitted their own political associations such as the White Russian Russian Fascist Party . The American historian Louise Young noted that one of the most striking aspects of Manchukuo was that many of the young Japanese civil servants who went to work in Manchukuo were on the left, or at least had once been. In
45796-657: Was used to refer to the Manchu and Mongolian languages in addition to those language varieties that descended from Old Chinese . Moreover, the Qing stated explicitly in various edicts, as well as within the Treaty of Nerchinsk , that the Manchu home provinces belonged to China. The Manchu homeland was referred to as the 三東省 ; Sān dōngshěng ; 'three eastern provinces' during the Qing, those provinces being Jilin , Heilongjiang , and Liaoning . These regions were first delineated in 1683, but would not become actual provinces until 1907. Jilin and Heilongjiang, considered primarily Manchu, were separated from Han Liaoning along
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