The Cartographic Steppe: Mapping Environment and Ethnicity in Japan's Imperial Borderlands

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Citation Christmas, Sakura. 2016. The Cartographic Steppe: Mapping Environment and Ethnicity in Japan's Imperial Borderlands. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

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The Cartographic Steppe:

Mapping Environment and Ethnicity in Japan’s Imperial Borderlands

A dissertation presented

Sakura Marcelle Christmas

The Department of History

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of

History

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

August 2016

The Cartographic Steppe: Mapping Environment and Ethnicity in Japan’s Imperial Borderlands

ABSTRACT

This dissertation traces one of the origins of the autonomous region system in the

People’s Republic of China to the Japanese imperial project by focusing on Inner Mongolia in the 1930s. Here, Japanese technocrats demarcated the borderlands through categories of ethnicity and livelihood. At the center of this endeavor was the perceived problem of nomadic decline: the loss of the region’s deep history of transhumance to Chinese agricultural expansion and capitalist extraction. As Japanese occupiers and their collaborators witnessed the social costs of state-led modernization, they began to pursue radical solutions in ethnic cleansing and environmental engineering on the steppe. These chapters show how Japanese administrators strove to reconstitute the relationship between land and nomad through theories of Social Darwinism,

Marxian materialism, and cooperative evolution—theories they translated into technologies of rule on the periphery. Nomadism, often cast as incompatible to modernity, actually became integral to its conceit for the empire. Maps acted as the primary idiom through which Japanese planners sought to visualize the borderlands.

Using Japanese, Chinese, and Mongolian sources, the dissertation challenges the nation- based paradigms that have come to dominate the environmental history of East Asia. To view the colonies from afar as an extractive frontier removes us from environmental consequences of imperialism as much as it did for those living on the archipelago at the time. Rather, the social scientific theories and land surveying technologies, as discussed in these chapters, combined to

iii disrupt the lives of hunters, herders, and farmers with environmental consequences that persisted into the postwar. As such, the dissertation brings together the seemingly irreconcilable histories of the Japanese empire and the People’s Republic. The narrative here addresses the problematic practice in the literature on Japanese imperialism of overlooking the Mongolian territories as empty space. It also serves as an alternate understanding to the beginnings of the multiethnic framework of the People’s Republic. Instead of only seeing the beginnings of Communist rule as forged in the fires of war against the Japanese, the dissertation also points to the significance of the occupation in shaping the ethnic and ecological bounds of modern China.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT iii LIST OF FIGURES vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

INTRODUCTION CARTOGRAPHIC CHAOS IN THE IMPERIAL BORDERLANDS 1 Imperialist Nostalgia in the Borderlands 11 Historiographical Borderlands and the “Mongolian Question” 27 Mapping the Dissertation 36

CHAPTER ONE DELIMITING AUTONOMY 41 Geographies of Sovereignty 43 The Politics of Demarcation 58 Settling and Unsettling the Pale 74

CHAPTER TWO RATIONALIZING NOMADS 90 The Pastoral Preserve 93 Concentration-Villages and the Five Year Plan 103 Hybrid Sheep in the Alfalfa Empire 123

CHAPTER THREE EXHAUSTING THE EARTH 141 Climate and the Interpreter of Maladies 144 Settler Colonialism in the Orphan Banner 156 Soybean Imperialism and Selenium Deficiency 176

CHAPTER FOUR DISASSEMBLING THE FEUDAL 186 Nomadic Feudalism in Marxist Thought 188 The Mongol Land Offer 197 The Mongol Land Management Plan 213

CHAPTER FIVE ADVANCING THE AERIAL 233 Empire up in the Air 236 Technologies of the Gaze 245 A Cartographic Way of Thinking 254

CONCLUSION IMPERIALISM, COMMUNISM, AND THE TRANSWAR 271

BIBLIOGRAPHY 283

v LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 0.1 “Owen Lattimore’s Map of the Mongolian Territories in Manchukuo” from 4 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese, and Present Political Problems (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935). Figure 0.2 “Owen Lattimore’s Map of Ethnic Groups in Eastern Inner Mongolia” from 13 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese, and Present Political Problems (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935). Figure 0.3 “Owen Lattimore’s Map of Mongolia, Manchukuo, and China” from 16 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese, and Present Political Problems (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935). Figure 1.1 “Banners and Counties in Eastern Inner Mongolia by Kikutake Jitsuzō” 45 from Yamamoto Sansei, ed., Nihon chiri taikei, bekkan: Manshū oyobi Nan’yō hen, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kaizōsha, 1930). Figure 1.2 “Map of Qing League and Manchukuo Provincial Boundaries” from 55 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōchi no hanashi (Kōan kyoku, 1939). Figure 1.3 “Map of Qing League and Manchukuo Provincial Boundaries in English” 56 by Sakura Christmas Figure 1.4 “Map of Khinggan Province and the Former Mongol Territories” by Sakura 59 Christmas Figure 1.5 “Banner Jurisdictions from Republican to Manchukuo Periods” from Kōan 60 sōsho chōsaka, Shinkō no Kōan shō gaikan (Kōan sōsho chōsaka, 1934). Figure 1.6 “Map of Heilongjiang Province with League and County Boundaries” from 68 Heilongjiang sheng qingzhang quyu quantu (Shanghai: Shanghai zhonghua shuju, 1915). Figure 1.7 “Counties Disbanded within and Excised from Khinggan Province” from 72 Katakura Tadashi kankei monjo, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room, National Diet Library, Tokyo, Japan. Figure 1.8 “Ethnic Composition of Khinggan Border Counties” from “Kōan shōkyō 77 mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives. Figure 1.9 “Population Transfers into East Khinggan and Relief Aid” from 83 Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 112 (29 March 1933); Maki Tokuji, “Keitoku hachi nendo Kōan shinkō kōsaku kaisetsu” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 3, No. 1 (April 1941); Manshū teikoku kyōwakai chōsabu, Kōan Mōko (Shinkyō: Manshū jijō annaisho, 1943). Figure 2.1 “Map of Open and Closed Territories under Directive 105” from Takemura 98 Shigeaki, Mōchi no hanashi (Kōan kyoku, 1939). Figure 2.2 “Number and Cost in yuan of Livestock Borrowed per Banner” from 100

vi Mōseibu, Kōan kakushō sangyō gaikan (Typewritten manuscript, 1936), Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., United States. Figure 2.3 “Concentration-Villages Built in Manchukuo by Year” from Sōsaishitsu 113 kōhōka, Manshū ni okeru tokushu jichi seido (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha sōsaishitsu kōhōka, 1938). Figure 2.4 “Map of Sir-a khar-a aɣula, Naiman Banner” from Muraoka Shigeo, “Kōan 117 sei shō Naman ki Nishi Saryokukōrai ton no shizen jōken oyobi kōshu gaiyō” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 1944), 13–48. Figure 2.5 “Nomadic Households in Select Consolidated Villages of Jarud Banner” 119 from Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Kōan sei shō Satsurotoku ki Ajikajishin ki chikusan chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō, 1939). Figure 2.6 “Map of Seasonal Pastures in New Baraɣ Left Flank Banner” from Kōan 120 kyoku chōsa ka, Kōan hoku shō ni okeru bokuya narabini hōboku kankō chōsa hōkoku (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, 1939). Figure 2.7 “Map of Nomadic Migrations in Old Baraɣ Banner” from Kōan kyoku 121 chōsa ka, Kōan hoku shō ni okeru bokuya narabini hōboku kankō chōsa hōkoku (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, 1939). Figure 2.8 “Projected Yield for Target Crops in Khinggan Province for the Five Year 128 Plan” from Ishizaka Tadayuki, Manshūkoku sangyō kaihatsu gokanen keikaku no shiryōteki chōsa kenkyū, nōgyō bumon (Tokyo: Tō-A kenkyūjo, 1941). Figure 2.9 “Projected Surface Area for Target Crops in Khinggan Province for the Five 128 Year Plan” from Ishizaka Tadayuki, Manshūkoku sangyō kaihatsu gokanen keikaku no shiryōteki chōsa kenkyū, nōgyō bumon (Tokyo: Tō-A kenkyūjo, 1941). Figure 3.1 “Farming Village in Keshan County” from Kokuzan nōji shikenjō, Kokuzan 142 chihō nōka keizai (Shinkyō: Sangyōbu daijin kanbō shiryōka, 1937). Figure 3.2 “Chest Cavity X-Rays of Keshan Disease Patients” from Abe Toshio, 148 “Kokuzanbyō ni tsuite” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 62, No. 3091 (9 July 1938). Figure 3.3 “Hieda Kentarō’s Photograph of Kashin-Beck Patients” from Hieda 149 Kentarō, Manshū ni okeru chihōbyō ni tsuite (Kantō kyoku imin eisei chōsa iinkai, 1935). Figure 3.4 “Original Boundaries of Yekhe Mingɣan Banner” from Karte des Banners 159 der Yeke Mingghan (Nonni-Tal, Heilungkiang), Die Ostasienabteilung, Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, Germany. Figure 3.5 “Projected and Actual Rent for Yekhe Mingɣan on Former Territories” 170 from Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeian ki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939). Figure 4.1 “Map of the Open Territories under the Land Offer” from Kōan kyoku, 199 Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938). Figure 4.2 “Research Reports on the Mongol Lands Open to Reclamation Teams in 206 1938” from Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005).

vii Figure 4.3 “Surface Area of Open Territories Affected by the Mongol Land Offer” 211 from Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938). Figure 4.4 “Mongol Rent Collected from and Redistributed to Banners under the Land 212 Offer” from Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938). Figure 4.5 “Khinggan Survey Sites in Reports on the Research of Actual Conditions” 216 from Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941). Figure 4.6 “Map of Khinggan Survey Sites” from Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku 217 no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941). Figure 4.7 “Khinggan Survey Teams in Reports on the Research of Actual Conditions” 219 from Yoshida Jun’ichi, “Kōan yonshō jittai chōsa ni tsuite: Hikaihō Mōchi no chōsa wo chūshin ni” in Waseda daigaku daigakuin bungaku kenkyūka kiyō, Vol. 43 (1997), 57–71. Figure 4.8 “Definitions of Class Divisions in Reports on the Research of Actual 222 Conditions” from Kōan kyoku, Kō jitsu chō shi tōkei (Kōan kyoku, 1940). Figure 4.9 “Takemura Shigeaki’s Diagram of Labor Relations in Kharatoɣchin” from 226 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941). Figure 5.1 “Imanishi Kinji’s Migration Map of the Orochon” from Imanishi Kinji, Dai 235 Kōan rei tanken (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1952). Figure 6.1 “Map of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region” from Guanghua yu 277 dixue she, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xinditu (Shanghai: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1951).

viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation has left many debts of gratitude in its wake. First and foremost, I must acknowledge the patience and faith of my committee in this endeavor: to Ian J. Miller and Mark

C. Elliott, my two main advisors, whose unbounded enthusiasm for the transnational nature of the project propelled it forward even when I felt it had become almost impossible to finish; to

Andrew Gordon, whose careful scrutiny and generous comments have saved me from many embarrassing errors; and to Ruth Rogaski, whose ambitious vision of the work reminds me how much I have yet to do. I also owe David Howell a bottle of port not only for his sharp comments as outside reader, but also for his critical eye over the years. Thank you.

My project relied upon the generous financial support of several organizations and their staff. At Harvard University, I thank Ted Gilman, Catherine Glover, and Stacie Matsumoto at the

Reischauer Institute and Susan Pharr and Shinju Fujihira at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations for grants to conduct summer research and attend national conferences. The Foreign Language and Area Studies Program and Harvard University Asia Center both funded summers of training in Mandarin in the early years of graduate school. As for my years abroad, the Japan Foundation sponsored my eight-month residence in Tokyo, as well as visits to cities that spanned the length of the archipelago from Sapporo to Yamaguchi. Fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the Social Science Research Council made my ten months in Hohhot possible, as well as trips to

Beijing, Hailar, and Qiqihar. In my last year in Cambridge, the Fairbank Center housed and nourished me with its glaringly bright fluorescent lights and leftover conference food late into the night. The Mahindra Center for the Humanities, along with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, covered my finishing grant. Finally I thank the Harvard University History

ix Department, and especially Dan Bertwell, who dealt with the bureaucratic work of seeing me

through graduation.

While researching in Japan, Yanagisawa Akira kindly sponsored my affiliation at Waseda

University. Takagi Hiroshi, to whom I have yet to repay an intellectual debt since my college

years, accompanied me through the stacks of the Institute for Research in the Humanities Library

at Kyoto University. I also would like to recognize Nakami Tatsuo, Hirokawa Saho at Niigata

University, Suzuki Nirei, and Erdenchuluu Khohchahar for listening to me while I still worked

through inchoate thoughts about my project. Members of the Modern Japan Workshop at

Waseda University, run by Ryan Moran and Ariel Acosta, gave valuable comments in revising

my fifth chapter. I would like to recognize the staff at the university libraries of Hokkaido, Kyoto,

Takushoku, Toyama, and Yamaguchi, the National Diet Library, and the Tōyō Bunko, as well as at the archives at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Institute for Defense Studies for always accommodating my research requests, no matter how ridiculous, with grace. Assel

Bitabarova, Hannah Shepherd, Yamazaki Noriko, and Yokota Nobuko all scanned rare materials that remained out of reach for me. Mimaki Seiko sent me an important book from Tokyo that

Chinese authorities had confiscated from my belongings. My uncle Hiraiwa Shūgo has purchased multiple volumes for me from used book dealers as well. Over the last three years,

Shi-Lin Loh has saved me in so many research emergencies, despite an ocean separating us: document scans, library books, and endless hours of astutde advice. I will always have fond memories of triumph at the Coco Ichibanya Curry Challenge and the Takadanobaba Sutampu

Rarii with Andre Dekrow, Tom Gaubatz, Matt McMullen, and Pau Pitarch Fernández. To Ethan

Bushelle, Andrew Campana and Ed von Aderkas, Lena Hasanova, Ho Kayu, Ventsislav Kelchev

x and Ōhira Saki, Justyna Swiatkowska and Tsuruyama Kōhei, and Ueda Nanako and her sister

Wakana: thank you for welcoming me into homes when I had none.

In China, I faced grim prospects in researching my topic, an increasingly sensitive subject for the current regime. I remain deeply indebted to my advisor Sodbilig at the Institute for

Mongolian Studies, Inner Mongolia University, for his patient efforts in negotiating archival access on my behalf. Likewise I want to express profound gratitude to his graduate student and my reading tutor, Cholmon, for her friendship and openness throughout my stay and beyond. My first Mongolian language professor Erdenebaatar gave me lessons, bought me lunch, and presented me dictionaries. Zhou Taiping also at Inner Mongolia University always spurred me on with his infectious energy and zeal. Janet Upton and the staff of the Fulbright Office in Beijing arranged my institutional affiliation and provided guidance from afar. Other scholars offered valuable advice, gifted rare books, and granted archival access: Timur at the Inner Mongolia

Region Library, Oyungerel at Inner Mongolia University, Professor Soyolma at Hulunbuir

College, and Dashnima in the local government of the Evenk Autonomous Banner, whom I met by chance at a Buriyad wedding banquet on the steppe. Burged, at the Chinese Academy of

Social Sciences, continued my language training in Mongolian bičig later in Cambridge. Several friends, both old and new, insured that I would not leave China empty-handed. Uugan worked unfailingly as my intrepid research assistant. Helen Gao and Mirshad Ghalip helped me purchase used books online, while Chogmandola, now at the Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences, procured copies of oral histories on my behalf. Gu Songjie and Zhao Xiaotong photographed an entire book for me at Central Minorities University. Evelyn Boettcher aided in navigating the bureaucratic maze of Inner Mongolia University and secured my lodging. I thank Felicia Sonmez and Angela Sun for their gracious hospitality during my stay in Beijing. Okuyama Ariɣun and

xi his family hosted me for a weekend in the Hulunbuir grasslands. Dong Yuting and Hua Rui, my kōhai at Harvard, obliged me on a fool’s errand to track down a long lost copy of an economic survey in Harbin. We failed, but I know that some day we will find this document.

I relied on help from librarians and friends to access other collections in the United States.

At Harvard-Yenching, I thank Kuniko McVey, who first initiated me into the National Diet

Library when I was an undergraduate and has advised me ever since. David Weimer located cartographic depictions of Manchukuo at the Harvard Map Collection. Mari Nakahara, formerly of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress, guided me through their labyrinthine cache of materials. Gina Anne Tam conveyed precious, singular copies of books from Stanford University.

Brian Vivier helped me fill in the final pieces of the dissertation at the University of

Pennsylvania this summer.

Several conferences gave me the intellectual space to test out ideas for my nascent chapters. I thank Micah Muscolino, Miya Qiong, Norman Smith, Zhang Ling, among others, for organizing some of these spirited exchanges. In particular, the Association for Asian Studies and the Social Science Research Council hosted a workshop on “Dispossession, Capital, and the

State” which reoriented the dissertation at a critical time. At various stages of the project, conversations with and comments from David Atwill, Christopher Atwood, Azuma Eiichiro,

Dani Botsman, Susan Burns, Sarah Cameron, Arash Khazeni, Kate McDonald, Janis Mimura,

Mizuno Hiromi, Alyssa Park, Norman Smith, David Sneath, and Wang Yi shaped its framing enormously. Without the encouragement of Connie Chiang, Dallas Denery, Matthew Klingle,

Vyjayanthi Selinger, Emily Wanderer, and my writing partner, Peggy Wang, I would not have completed the dissertation while teaching at Bowdoin College.

xii I would like to declare a word of gratitude to my friends: to my sempai, Loretta Kim and

Lawrence Zhang, for taking me on my first archives trip ever to Harbin, Changchun, and

Shenyang nearly a decade ago, and for seeing the project through to the end; and the merry pranksters, Christopher Leighton, Jonathan Schlesinger, and Matthew Mosca, for an endless source of wit and wisdom. I found myself so lucky with a fantastic cohort of friends during my years in Cambridge and beyond: Rhae Lynn Barnes, Conrad Bauer, Bian He, Jamyung Choi,

Tarryn Chun, David Fedman, Devin Fitzgerald, Leanne Gaffney, Chessin Gertler, Kelly

Hammond, Macabe Keliher, Tae-Yeoun Keum, Matthew Kustenbauder, John Lee, Ian M. Miller,

Sean O’Reilly, Larissa Pitts, David Porter, Mircea Raianu, Jenn Saura, Kathryn Schwartz, Mira

Schwerda, Gina Anne Tam, Michael Thornton, Sixiang Wang, and Timothy Yang. I cherished the Skype conversations with Meghan McCormack in Bishkek and Lauren Yapp in Semarang, and wish that they did not live so far away. Towards the end, I could not have done without the camaraderie of Adrienne Fitzgerald, Hansun Hsiung, Holly Stephens, Eric Schluessel, and Victor

Seow. Lastly, John Kim has stood at my side physically, and if not that, electronically, every step of the way. I remain ever so grateful for his patience, humor, loyalty, and love.

The dissertation has taken me away from my family for too long. To my mother, Chihiro

Christmas, a visit home to North Carolina is now four years overdue. Even when I turned away from her career of choice—medicine—my mother has cheered me on to the finish. My sister

Mari and her partner Evan have always welcomed me with open hearts. Finally, I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my grandfather, Hiraiwa Taneji, who passed away the year before

I could finish, and to the near century-long life of my grandmother, Hiraiwa Chikako, whose model of fortitude and clarity I hope to emulate into old age.

xiii INTRODUCTION: CARTOGRAPHIC CHAOS IN THE IMPERIAL BORDERLANDS

In the eleventh month of 1929, after a spell of heavy snow on the steppe, some thirty

Mongols rose up in revolt in the Khorchin grasslands, the southwest corner of what would

become the Japanese client state of Manchukuo. The initial target of their protest, curiously, was

neither the local magistrate, nor their Republican overlords, nor even the thousands of Han

migrants now settling on their ancestral lands. Rather, it was the hapless government surveyors

who had come to map out their territory earlier that year.1 The surveyors wielded a weapon that many of these Mongols believed most threatening to the future of their livelihood as nomadic herders, much more so than the rifles circulating on the warlord economy. That weapon was the surveyor’s wheel. Their attack against this simple, rotating device used to measure out distances across land did not represent a resistance to modernity by indigenous subjects choosing to escape the purview of the state.2 Mongol officials, in fact, had submitted maps documenting their domain to Qing authorities, some of them for over two hundred years by this point.3

Nevertheless the early twentieth century brought new meanings of cartography to this region of

increasingly overlapping Mongol, Chinese, and Tungusic populations, which set off the

particular incident at hand, the Gada Meyiren Revolt. With its claims to objectivity, cartography

1 Dongsansheng lujun celiangju juzhang Feng, “Chengwei baogao kance Xijiahuang Mengmin zulan buneng jinxjing qingzhi banfa yibian zunshou shi” (1929.12.20) in Nei Menggu dongbu kenwu dang’an huiji 469–6–24–18, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Archives.

2 James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

3 Walther Heissig, Mongolische Ortsnamen: Mongolische Manuskriptkarten in Faksimila, Volume II (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1978); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 51–80; Kamimura Akira, “A Preliminary Analysis of Old Mongolian Manuscript Maps: Towards an Understanding of the Mongols’ Perception of the Landscape” in Landscapes Reflected in Old Mongolian Maps (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2005), 1–26; Peter Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia” in The International History Review, Vol. 20, No. 2 (June 1998), 263–286.

1 had entailed a systematic process of spatial quantification that not only measured and demarcated

the steppe as before; now it also evaluated and commodified it for state-sponsored colonization

by Han migrants. Spatial quantification worked to dispossess territory historically belonging to

Mongols and Tungus, and would transform their nomadic borderland into an agricultural

heartland. Indeed, the Mongolian translation for the Chinese phrase “opening and cultivating”

the frontier (Ch. kaiken) captures the environmental violence of agriculturalization, literally as

“shattering the earth” (Mo. qaγalburilaγsan).4

Culminating with the Gada Meyiren Revolt, the recurring unrest in the borderlands

demonstrated the tremendous difficulties in flattening the multiethnic character of the Qing

empire into the homogenous citizenry of the Republican nation-state, all the while preserving the

territorial integrity of the former realm after its dynastic disintegration.5 To this end, the warlord government in Northeast China had carried on the late Qing and early Republican policy of colonizing Manchuria and Inner Mongolia—buffer zones previously closed off to Han settlement—throughout the 1920s. It did so by expropriating indigenous territory, establishing

4 Almaz Khan, “Who are the Mongols?: State, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Representation in the PRC” in Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1996), 128.

5 James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Joseph Esherick, “How the Qing Became China” in Empire to Nation: HIstorial Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 229–259. Sechin Jagchid has identified several cases of ethnic violence in response to Han colonization in the eastern borderlands of Inner Mongolia in the decades leading up to 1929: the Töküm Revolt in Jasaghtu Banner (1899– 1901); Choghdalai Rebellion in Jalaid Banner (1907); Bayandalai Uprising (1908); Toghtogh Taiji Revolt in Jerim League (1908–1911); Ghombujab Rebellion in Jarud Left Flank Banner (1913); Utai Rashiminjur Revolt in Jerim League (1912); and the Babujab Incident (1913–1916). See Sechin Jagchid, “An Interpretation of ‘Mongol Bandits’ (Meng Fei)” in Altaica: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference (Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1976), 113–121. Other major uprisings include: the Jindandao Incident (1891), in which a Chinese secret society massacred over a hundred thousand Mongols, as well as the Barga Revolution in Hulunbuir (1926–1928), in which sought political autonomy for Mongols. See Borjigin Burensain, “The Complex Structure of Ethnic Conflict in the Frontier: Through the Debates around the ‘Jindandao Incident’ in 1891” in Inner Asia, Vol. 6, No.1 (2004), 41–60; Paul Hyer, The Chin-tan-tao Movement: A Chinese Revolt in Mongolia (1891), Altaica: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference (Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1976), 105–112; Christopher Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911–1931 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

2 reclamation bureaus to survey, sell, and tax that land as a national prerogative, and eventually

setting up Chinese-style county administrations.6 Despite Sun Yat-sen’s rhetoric of the “harmony of the five races,” this project continued to expand the ethnic boundaries of the majority Han population to correspond with the geographical borders of the former Qing empire, and secured that territory against Russian and Japanese encroachment (not to mention, generated much needed revenue for the state).

Opening up the steppe for cultivation, however, proved problematic beyond the conceptual reinvention of the Qing empire as the Republican nation-state. At the local level, thousands of Mongols and Tungus still had customary privileges to herd or hunt animals anywhere within their assigned banner, the primary unity of administration on the northern frontier.7 Nomadic herders and hunters found themselves on shrinking grounds, as Mongol dukes

and princes lost portions of their estates for homesteading schemes to pay off mounting debts

accrued in a rapidly commercializing market. Herein lay the origins of the Gada Meyiren Revolt.

By the 1920s, land tenure in eastern Inner Mongolia had evolved into a complex dual system of

banners and counties that struggled to manage both indigenous and settler populations, creating

what historian Raymond Craib has called “fugitive landscapes” of contested borders, overlapping

jurisdictions and usufructs, elusive place-names, and competing notions of space, all of which

6 Mei-Hua Lan, “China’s ‘New Administration’ in Mongolia” in Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 39–58; Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934); Robert Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 160; James Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644– 1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

7 Mongol banners transitioned from mobile military corps to territorially fixed entities during the late seventeenth century.

3 Figure 0.1 Owen Lattimore’s Map of the Mongolian Territories in Manchukuo (1934)

4 had become nearly impossible to pin down on maps.8 As the 1929 uprising throws into stark

relief, the borderlands between Manchuria and Mongolia had descended into cartographic chaos.

The revolt itself began when the residents of Darkhan Banner learned that their prince

had carved out two fertile sections of the Khorchin grasslands—Liaobeihuang and Xijiahuang—

for the provincial government in a seventh round of land sales.9 The loss of Liaobeihuang and

Xijiahuang to cultivation projects would have reduced the grazing zones for Mongols to scrub

desert, alkaline fields, and bodies of water.10 The entire transaction betrayed a particular concern

by the provincial government for spatial objectivity; its correspondence stressed the importance

of “accuracy” (Ch. queshi) in reproducing those physical borders on paper. After discovering

surveyors on the tracts in question (with some of them locally recruited), five hundred Mongols

met in the summer of 1929, and sent their banner lieutenant Nadmid of the Mültütü family

(1892–1931?)—also known in the Chinese archives as Meng Qingshan—with three other

representatives to the provincial capital to petition the prince of Darkhan, the governor of

Fengtian, and ultimately the marshal Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001). Upon their arrival in the

capital, the envoys from Darkhan immediately found themselves imprisoned by the authorities,

but escaped some months later with the help of Nadmid’s wife. Nadmid then returned to his

banner and with thirty followers ransacked the reclamation bureau. That winter, they destroyed

8 Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 12.

9 Officially, Darkhan Banner was named Khorchin Left Flank Middle Banner.

10 Da-qi Dong Xijiahuang kenwuju “Wei Xijiahuang jinxing yanhuan kenqing zaicui Da-qi zhi jie bing yuanbo caotu jiezhi bufu you” (1929.12.21) in Nei Menggu dongbu kenwu dang’an huiji 469–6–18–35, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Archives. The reclamation bureau wanted to establish two new counties, Liaobei and Fuyuan, on top of the other five entire counties already carved out of Darkhan Banner: Huaide (1877), Liaoyuan (1913), Lishu (1914), Tongliao (1918), and Shuangshan (1929), as well as parts of Kangping (1880), Changtu (1913), and Faku (1913).

5 boundary markers, burned property registers and land contracts, beat up the surveyors, and

smashed their equipment.

Over the next several months, the revolt intensified. Hundreds of insurgents dressed in

military uniforms and carrying firearms continued to wreak havoc in Darkhan Banner, occupying

Liaobeihuang and Xijiahuang in order to stop surveyors from completing their work. Even as the

prince of Darkhan pleaded to postpone the survey because of the “disruptive restlessness” by the

“Mongol masses,” the provincial authorities pressed on.11 The Chinese county administration in

Darkhan Banner denounced the rebel lieutenant Nadmid as “despicable” for “harboring evil intentions” and tricking “ignorant Mongols” into submitting fake petitions to the governor.12

Within a year, the movement had grown to a thousand people and occupied the nearby city of

Tongliao, with hostilities spilling over into the neighboring banners. Finally, the warlord government summoned the provincial army to quell the violence, which had taken on a separatist dimension. Nadmid reportedly died in battle in the spring of 1931, though sporadic fighting persisted well into the first year of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria.13 The Guandong

Army then requisitioned the rebel troops, in the end numbering nearly ten thousand men, and reconstituted them as the Mongolian section of the Manchukuo military under Japanese imperial

11 Darkhan Jasak, “Zha-sa-ke Da-er-han qin wang gonghan” (1929.12.18) in Nei Menggu dongbu kenwu dang’an huiji 469–6–18–36; Liaoyuan xian, “Wei baogao Xijiahuang Mengmin you juzhong qingxing qing zhuan chi yiti fangfan you” (1930.04.04) in Nei Menggu dongbu kenwu dang’an huiji 469–6–24–19; Zhangfang Dong Xijiahuang shiwuju zongban Liu Xiaokun, “Wei jubao shoujiao kangzhang Mengying qiang dan, jiqi, ji mapi, jiaju deng xiang, bing hufei renpiao yejing song xian xunban yangqi” (1930.12.20) in Nei Menggu dongbu kenwu dang’an huiji 469– 6–17–1, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Archives.

12 Da-qi Liaoyuan bangongchu, “Da qinwang zha-sa-ke gongshuzhu Liaoyuan bangongchu gonghan” (1929.08.19) in Nei Menggu dongbu kenwu dang’an huiji 469-6-18-29, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Archives.

13 The Danish explorer Henning Haslund-Christensen claimed to have met Nadmid (whom he referred to as “Graeda Merin”) in 1936, five years after the commander’s supposed death, hiding out in a village called Manchu Ail in the southern Khinggan Mountains. See Henning Haslund-Christensen, Mongolian Journey (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949), 59–67; “Xing’an ju zhiling di 5 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 25 (3 July 1932), 18–19.

6 rule. By one contemporary estimate, the Gada Meyiren Revolt left two thousand people dead and

drove thousands more women and children westward without winter provisions or animals.14

* * *

The Gada Meyiren Revolt stood as the last in a series of conflicts over colonization in the

borderlands before Japan invaded Northeast China.15 It stood as the last because the Japanese

occupation largely stopped Republican colonization programs and instead drafted blueprints for

establishing zones of ethnic autonomy in the borderlands. The Inner Mongolia Autonomous

Region would eventually become the first of these zones, founded in 1947, two years before the

People’s Republic of China even existed. This model now endures as one cornerstone in

legitimating the Communist occupation of China’s outlying territories. How the Japanese

mapped this territory out of cartographic chaos and the environmental repercussions of that

blueprint make up the contents of this dissertation. Instead of recounting the teleological

trajectory of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region as it exists today, the narrative at hand

shows a deeply contentious, contingent, and uneven process at work. In that sense, the

dissertation complicates this notion of cartography as a means to consolidating territory into a

14 Owen Lattimore, “Journal, August 1932 to March 1933” (8 October 1932) in Owen Lattimore Papers, Box 56, Folder 9, Library of Congress; Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 134; Bo Te-gu-si and Wang Shen, “Ga-da Mei-lin qiyi yishi” in Nei Menggu wenshi ziliao, Vol. 10 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1983), 1–27; Bo-er-zhi-jin Bu-ren-sai-yin [Borjigin Burensain], Jinxiandai Mengguren nonggeng cunluo shehui de xingcheng: Formation of the Mongolian Farming Village Society, trans. Naranggerel (Hohhot: Nei Menggu daxue chubanshe, 2007).

15 Besides calling the Gada Meyiren Revolt as “the last of its kind,” Walther Heissig emphasizes its particular brutality in comparison with the Barga Rebellion in 1928 further north which resulted in “no serious fighting” but remains much more well-known because it conforms nicely with the narrative of Inner Mongolia’s failed independence movement. See Walther Heissig, “Die Innere Mongolei, 1911–1939” in Die Mongolen: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte und Kultur (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986), 467–480.

7 modern, unified nation-state, and points to more experimental configurations of space and power

that emerged out of ethnic conflict.16

Initially, preserving nomadic livelihoods in the autonomous province helped bolster the modernist agenda of Japanese imperialism, despite the perceived primitiveness of this practice.

As an object of study, nomads—often cast as politically, socially, and economically incompatible with modernity—actually became integral to its conceit for the empire. The fraught process of demarcation within the client state of Manchukuo called for a cartographic ‘step’ in the borderlands where Japanese occupiers re-imagined the relationship between land and nomad through self-consciously modern theories of Social Darwinism, Marxian materialism, and cooperative evolution. They translated these theories into, again, self-consciously modern technologies of rule on the periphery: village surveys, economic studies, and aerial photography, all discussed in the chapters ahead, figured as crucial tools in charting land, territory, and population.

Not only did protecting nomadic practice serve to demonstrate modernist methods in the social sciences, it also exposed modernist “moments” of fascism on the frontier, or in the words of Alan Tansman, these attempts to “enchant a [Japanese] culture stripped of its magic by modernity.” As Tansman points out, “fascism drew inspiration from the past, not merely as an act of nostalgia, but as a means of providing a cure to malaise and anomie.”17 Not many scholars,

though, search beyond the metropole for the manifestations of these moments, nor contemplate

16 See, for example, Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

17 Alan Tansman, The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3, 9; Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asia Modern (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 187.

8 how they would have appeared in their colonial forms.18 Still, as in the idealized countryside of the archipelago, Japanese looked for the authenticity of ethnic identity in the supposedly primeval landscapes of Inner Mongolia. As these administrators witnessed the social costs of state-led modernization in the borderlands, they began to pursue radical solutions designed to limit what they saw as the loss of traditional livelihoods among the ancestral remnants of their bloodlines. Consequently, Japanese occupiers elevated this primordial nature of Inner Mongolia.

Even if individuals themselves never identified explicitly as fascist, they had become enmeshed in an ultranationalist discourse about nature that implicated them as such.

Nevertheless, the dissertation looks beyond the diagrammatic impressions of land onto paper, and beyond the abstraction of that paper into discourse. It also considers how thinking cartographically about the borderlands left consequential imprints on terrain itself. How did imperialists bring to life the imagined border between nomadic and sedentary lands? In documenting that shift from the ideological to the material, the chapters ahead reveal the brutal nature of rearranging communities and manipulating environments, all to match the reductive conceptions of ethnicity and ecology to territory in the Japanese empire. While fugitive landscapes may have had a tendency to escape state fixation, the new ecologies that resulted from these cartographic endeavors were, in fact, inescapable for the people that lived there.19

Rationalized livestock led to dead zones of vegetation and collapsing herd numbers, whereas on

18 See, for example, Ronald Dore and Ōuchi Tsutomu, “Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism” in The Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 181–210; Peter Duus and Daniel Okimoto, “Fascism and the History of Pre-War Japan: The Failure of a Concept” in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (November 1979), 65–76; Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 302–330; Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Alan Tansman, The Culture of Japanese Fascism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 179–208.

19 Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1–15.

9 the other side of the new provincial border, intensified agriculture brought on fatal outbreaks of

environmental disease.

Thus the dissertation argues that Japanese imperialism transformed “borderlands into

bordered lands,” aligning ethnic and environmental divides in the formation of this experimental

autonomous province, and it did so through internal territorialization.20 This approach contrasts

with sovereign territorialization, an outward process in which states construct national

boundaries and claim authority over people within them. As geographers Peter Vandergeest and

Nancy Peluso have defined it, internal territorialization seeks “to exclude or include people

within particular geographic boundaries ... controlling what people do and their access to natural

resources within those boundaries.”21 In the eastern borderlands of Inner Mongolia, Japanese occupiers at first collaborated with the indigenous elite to delineate artificial boundaries, then transferred populations and engineered environments to make up these new, “pure” territories with Mongol herders and Tungus hunters versus Han farmers. Of course, that fact that Mongols and Tungus had adopted varying degrees of agriculture, and that nearly half of their ancestral land had already transferred to the Chinese county administration made these “pure” territories not only an impossibly unattainable and nostalgic ideal, but that much more of a regressive and disastrous scheme. Sharpened to an unprecedented degree of precision, this cartographic knowledge ultimately disrupted the lives of hunters, herders, farmers, and the people in-between with violent consequences that persisted into the postwar Chinese state.

20 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History” in American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 3 (June 1999), 814–841.

21 Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Peluso, “Territorialization and State Power in Thailand” in Theory and Society, Vol. 24, No. 3 (June 1995), 385.

10 IMPERIALIST NOSTALGIA IN THE BORDERLANDS

Before the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the status of the eastern borderlands within the

Republic of China had emerged as one of the central concerns behind the “Mongolian Question,”

debated not only by Mongols and Chinese themselves, but also by Japanese and Russian

interests.22 As such, the eastern borderlands and the “Mongolian Question” require substantial

explanation here. Eastern Inner Mongolia did not comprise any sort of coherent administrative,

ethnic, or geographic entity by the 1920s.23 As defined in this dissertation, the area encompassed the former territories held by Mongols and Tungus during the Qing, or the western half of

Manchuria. Still, three different banner systems operated in the borderlands, even after the Qing collapse. The misleading and general term “banner” (Ch. qi, Mo. qosiγu) obscures the complex configurations of power in the region, which Christopher Atwood has characterized under the

Qing as “a deeply personalized particularity and universal rule through an architectonic structure of legal rights, titles, sumptuary laws, and ritual.”24 First, the banners of Inner Mongolia

preserved an autonomous aristocracy that answered indirectly to the Qing through the Court of

Outer Dependencies (Ch. Lifanyuan). Eastern Inner Mongolia consisted of three leagues that

oversaw banners, from east to west: Jerim, Josotu, and Ju uda. These residents spoke various

Mongolian dialects originally separated by banner, such as the Baγarin, Khalkha, Kharachin, and

22 The Barga Rebellion of 1928 called attention to the “Mongolian Question” in China, as evinced by the sudden emergence of the term in print; see for example, Hua Qiyun, Menggu wenti (Shanghai: Liming shuju, 1930); Xie Bin, Menggu wenti (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1931); Xie Xiaozhong, Menggu wenti (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1930); Wang Qinyu, Menggu wenti (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1930); Zhang Yintang, Menggu wenti (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937), with the exception of Wang Xiang, Menggu wenti (Fengtian: Yusheng mingzhiju, 1916), published after the Babujab Incident.

23 For the shifting perceptions of what territory constituted “Eastern Inner Mongolia” (J. Higashi Mōko) for Japanese, see James Boyd, Japanese-Mongolian Relations, 1873–1945: Faith, Race, and Strategy (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2011), 12–20.

24 Christopher Atwood, “State Service, Lineage, and Locality in Hulun Buir” in East Asian History, No. 30 (December 2005), 5–22.

11 Khorchin, and lived on the southwestern Manchurian plain. Second, and further north in the

Khinggan Mountains and the Naun River Valley, the Eight Banners under direct Manchu control

had incorporated two Tungusic branches known then as the Orochen and Solon, and also the

Daγur, who used a strikingly aberrant Mongolic language, into their military hierarchy. Third,

and to the northwest on the Hulunbuir steppe, a hybrid administration blended these two systems

and managed Oirats, New and Old Baraγ Mongols, as well as Daγur, Solon, and Orochen

enclaves, all of whom often intermarried.25 More recently, Buryiat Mongols and Tungusic

Yakuts had fled to Hulunbuir from the upheavals of the Russian Revolution. Owing to the waves

of voluntary migration and forced relocation from the seventeenth century onwards, none of

these groups shared a common history or ethnic identity until the independence movements of

the 1920s.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, the creation of counties under Chinese

magistrates, which did not report to the banners, added to this convoluted nature of rule in the

eastern borderlands. Though the Republican regime pushed to integrate frontier regions into

China proper by expanding the functions of these county administrations, in reality, the state

continued to work through the same aristocratic institutions left behind by the Qing. In retaining

the banners, however weak, decentralized, and insolvent they were by this point, the warlord

25 For various views on how Mongol and Tungusic identity became territorialized in the Qing, see Pamela Crossley, “Making Mongols” in Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, eds. Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 58–82; Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Juha Janhunen, Manchuria: An Ethnic History (Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society, 1996); Loretta Kim, “Marginal Constituencies: Qing Borderland Policies and Vernacular Histories of Five Tribes on the Sino-Russian Frontier” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2009).

12 Figure 0.2 Owen Lattimore’s Map of Ethnic Groups in Eastern Inner Mongolia (1934)

13 government aimed to transmit conservative, modernizing reforms through the Mongolian

nobility.26

The “Mongolian Question” grew out of anxieties over ethnic competition and natural selection as native populations began to recede from the northern borderlands in the face of colonization. This extinction discourse occupied the minds of political intelligentsia as they began to think in more racialized categories, and ones that became tied to territories and livelihoods. Observing the drastic drop in the nomadic population during these years, Japanese,

Chinese, and Mongols alike forecasted the disappearance of indigenous communities from the eastern borderlands. The number of Mongols and Tungus within the present-day borders of Inner

Mongolia decreased from roughly one million people in 1800 to 860,000 people in 1937. A case study of the Orochen suggests an even more alarming trend: the population halved in one decade from 5800 people in 1928 to 2948 people in 1938, but one must bear in mind the social construction of statistics more broadly and the unreliability and elusiveness of demographics in the borderlands in particular. Even as new regimes redefined ethnic categories or geographic boundaries, as surveyors accidentally counted households instead of individuals, missed entire settlements, or recorded them twice, and as those surveyed—in fear of conscription or taxation— tried to evade enumeration altogether, all of these factors cannot detract from the reality that

Mongols and Tungus did face some kind of population crisis.27

26 Arthur Waldron, From War to Nationalism: China’s Turning Point, 1924–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11–34.

27 On the social construction of statistics for ethnic groups during the censuses of the late Qing, see Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 50-74; for population figures themselves, see Hurelbaatar, “Mongols in Present-Day China” in Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan, eds. Stephen Kotkin and Bruce Elleman (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 194. In the Republican era, for instance, Heilongjiang Province recorded 4011 people as Orochon in 1917 while the Russians of the Chinese Eastern Railway tallied 5800 people in 1928. Afterwards, during the Manchukuo regime, provincial governments counted 3700 people as Oroqen in 1934, 2200 or 4112 people in 1935, 2867 people in 1937, 2948 people in 1938, and 2697 people in 1940; see Abe Takeshi, Kōan hokushō oyobi tōshō ni okeru nihon imin tekichi (Harbin: Mantetsu Hoku-Man keizai chōsasho, 1938), 66;

14 Japanese agents of imperialism took special note of this crisis as they sought to expand

informal influence in the eastern borderlands. To explain this demographic collapse, they argued

that environmental degradation in the early twentieth century undercut nomadic modes of

livelihood on the steppe. Japanese commentary saw the loss of borderland minorities as

imminent and inevitable, describing them as a “dying race” (J. horobiyuku minzoku) that faced

“decline” (J. minzoku suibō), “obsolescence” (J. ishuku), “destruction” (J. metsubō), and finally

“extinction” (J. genmetsu).28 In particular travelogues and gazetteers appropriated Social

Darwinist language from earlier descriptions of the Ainu; the explicit comparisons between these indigenous populations indicate that the Japanese experience with assimilating the Ainu at the turn of the century informed their views on Mongols and Tungus in the 1920s and 30s.29 From

the late nineteenth century, the Ainu—first in Hokkaido, then the Kuriles and Sakhalin—had

become subject to assimilative projects of the Meiji government to transform them into “useful

citizens.” Their designation as a “dying race” in both official policy and popular literature invited

state intervention through the Hokkaido Former Natives Protection Act (1899) to turn Ainu

wage-laborers—that is, fishers, lumberjacks, and construction workers—into marginal

cultivators with basic education and healthcare. As David Howell explains, “the debate over the

Ainu’s fate in modern Japan was thus not over the question of whether they would disappear—

Chen Binhua and Gao Jiangang, Elunchunzu renkou gaikuang (Hohhot: Neimenggu daxue chubanshe, 1989), 17; Kawamura Kiyoshi, Manshūkoku no genjū minzoku (Shinkyō: Manshū jijō annaijo, 1940), 20; Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 222; Manshūkoku sōmuchō jōhōsho, Kokka shō hen, Vol. 3 of Shōsei iran (Xinjiing: Kokumuin sōmuchō jōhō sho, 1935–1937), 312. One of the researchers attributed the census discrepancies to the Oroqen “frequently thinking that if they still underreport the number of family members, then their taxes will be reduced.” See Naitō Kazuo, “Orochon zoku ni tsuite” in Takushoku bunka, Vol. 15, No. 3 (12 December 1935) in Manshū kaihatsuron: Takushoku daigaku shusshinsha ni yoru (Tokyo: Takushoku daigaku, 2003), 399.

28 Manshū annai jijō sho, Manshūkoku no genjū minzoku (Shinkyō: Manshū annai jijō, 1936), 23, 35.

29 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Becoming Japanese: Imperial Expansion and Identity Crises in the Early Twentieth Century” in Sharon Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Nation, 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 157–180.

15 Figure 0.3 Owen Lattimore’s Map of Mongolia, Manchukuo, and China (1934)

16 much less whether they ought to disappear—but, rather, over the circumstances and meaning of

their extinction as a distinct population.”30 Encountering nomads in the Mongolian territories could have only reminded Japanese observers of the Ainu population decline and cultural dispossession from a few decades before, but they did not replicate the debates over the circumstances and meaning of Ainu extinction that Howell has described.

Comparisons between Ainu and Mongols and Tungus began to appear in the archive just before Japan staked formal claims to the banners under the Twenty-One Demands.31 As seen in

Chapter One, tropes of the “dying race” would resurface again and again in policy debates. That

Japanese observers compared Mongols and Tungus to Ainu suggests a pervasive and perverse

understanding of how the environment determined the modern fate of minority peoples of the

north, placing them on similarly downward trajectories of development. While these ethnic

hierarchies regarded Ainu as consistently primitive since time immemorial, they cast the

Mongols as having reached a civilizational apex in the twelfth century only for their vast

Eurasian empire to fall apart, making their decline all the more of a momentous event for human

history. In 1913, Fukuda Masatarō (1866–1932), a colonel in the General Staff in the Guandong

Leasehold, lamented to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Mongols no longer held the

“unparalleled courage” of the Chinggisid reign:

The dawn of [their] civilization now far, they give off the impression that they do not understand the way things are going, that they have just been passing the

30 Richard Siddle, Race, Resistance, and the Ainu of Japan (London: Routledge, 1996), 97–112; David Howell, “Making ‘Useful Citizens’ of Ainu Subjects in Early Twentieth-Century Japan” in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 63, No. 1 (February 2004), 13.

31 According to Group II of the Twenty-One Demands, “the Japanese Government and the Chinese Government, in view of the fact that the Chinese Government has always recognized the predominant position of Japan in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia agree to the following ... Japanese subjects shall be permitted ... to lease or own land ... have the liberty to enter, reside, and travel, and to carry on business of various kinds ... the Chinese government grant to the Japanese subjects the right of mining.” See John V. A. MacMurray, Treaties and Agreements with and Concerning China, 1894–1919, Vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1921), 1231– 1233.

17 years in vain, with no ideology or no objectives, blindly following those in power. Thus if they abandon their current circumstances and follow along with the pressures of development from the Han ... over time the Mongols of Inner Mongolia, like our ‘Ainu’ ... will diminish and die out (J. genmetsu suru).32

First circulating among the upper ranks of the colonial bureaucracy, ideas like Fukuda’s would make their way into popular literature—often annotated with furigana to accommodate even the most rudimentary readers—for consumption on the home islands in the 1920s. For example, one newspaper reporter for the Tokyo Nichinichi and Osaka Mainichi, Fujioka Hiraku

(1899–?), published an account based on four years of interviewing various officials much like

Fukuda in the Mantetsu railway concession and beyond. Fujioka narrated “a sorrowful history of decline” (J. metsubō no suishi) of “the Dying Race of Inner Mongols” (J. horobiyuku Uchi Mō minzoku), where “ancestral lands are being invaded beyond recognition because of the swiftly crowding Han.” He also blamed the Mongol aristocracy, persuaded by the “crafty Han” to open up the land for reclamation, for quickening this trend. The reporter predicted:

As the world fills to the brim with people, we should not expect that this great wave of ethnic struggle would leave only the realm of Mongolia as an eternal paradise. Even shepherding, the livelihood of God’s apostles ... beset by Han invading from the east and Red Russia advancing from the west, face the straits of destruction (J. metsubō no seto).

Fujioka wondered in a mawkish display of feeling, “who would not suppress sympathetic tears at the thought of the Inner Mongols drawing to an end, a great race that gave birth to

Chinggis Khan and gave rise to the [fear] of the Yellow Peril in Western Europe?” In that moment of downfall, however, Fujioka saw opportunity—in particular, economic opportunity for

“the advancement of the great Yamato race in Mongolia” by exploiting the natural resources of

32 Fukuda Masatarō, “Mōko jijō” (13 December 1913) in Kaku kuni naisei kankei zasshū: Shina no bu, Mōko, Vol. 3, 1–6–1–4–2–4, 1743–1744, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives. Fukuda would go on to become a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, the commander of martial law after the Great Kantō Earthquake, and a member of the Privy Council.

18 the territories. “In thinking about how we must achieve a new stage,” he wrote, “[we] feel a kind

of strange leap forward, the taste of thrill [in] having heard heaven’s orders.”33 Indeed in this rhetoric of manifest destiny, Japanese imagined themselves as the imperial inheritors of the

Mongol horde.

By the 1930s, however, Japanese political ideology moved away from the Social

Darwinism seen in booster literature like Fujioka’s and towards an ultranationalist narrative of a singular and harmonious relationship with nature. On the archipelago, ethnographers such as

Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) saw the destabilizing forces of capitalist modernity as effacing much of the past—a past thought of as ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic,’ and now found only in the romanticized villages of the ever-receding countryside. Marilyn Ivy calls this recognition of loss

“modernist nostalgia,” contending that “despite its labors to recover the past and deny the losses of ‘tradition,’” it “must preserve ... the sense of absence that motivates its desires.”34 An imperial perspective on the shifting nature of Japanese political ideology questions this nostalgia as a discourse solely confined to the nation-state narrative.

Indeed, it was this epistemology of loss that would come to restructure much of the relationship between colonizer and colonized in the absence of stark racial differences in the

Japanese empire. Within the imperial context, this discourse expressed itself as primitive nostalgia, or in the words of Prasenjit Duara, “a yearning of the colonizer to see his true self in the primitive, through a glass darkly ... a technique that linked the self to the primitive even while it distanced itself in the security of civilized status—a technique enabled by the narrative of History.” Primitive nostalgia diverged from the racial difference that defined nineteenth-

33 Fujioka Hiraku, Man-Mō wo atarashiku miyo (Tokyo: Gaikō jihōsha, 1928), 225–226, 228–229.

34 Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 176–180; Marilyn Ivy, Discourse of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9–10, 12.

19 century colonialism in that this new ideology sanctioned the territorial rights of twentieth-century

occupiers on the basis of shared ethnicity and culture. As Taylor Atkins documents this

phenomenon in colonial Korea, primitive nostalgia conjured images of pre-modern ‘others’

against which it could contrast the modern ‘self.’ At the same time, however, primitive nostalgia

evoked a romanticism for supposedly simpler, communal livelihoods before industrialization.

Thus, this discourse “maximized Korean difference to ... dramatize the urgent necessity of

Japan’s civilizing influence” while it “simultaneously minimized Korean difference in

accordance with ... the ideology of common ancestry so as to make the annexation appear as a

smooth integration of backward cousins into the Japanese family-state.” Robert Tierney likewise

notes that the South Seas occupied a similarly evocative space in the imperial imagination, as an

“alter ego” that preserved what modern Japan had lost. Here, savagery in the culture of Japanese

imperialism ultimately serves as a trope for colonizers, where the archaic, estranged ‘other’

allowed for Japanese to tap into primordial desires in order to make sense of their own narrative

as a people. Through this self-referential discourse, Japanese reconfigured marginal, colonial

spaces into the very crucible of their own culture.35

Still, these arguments do not take into account how interwar ideas of ethnic self-

determination and anti-colonialism globally also took part in refiguring Japanese political

ideology from Social Darwinism to primitive nostalgia. These dynamics became strikingly

apparent in the Mongolian territories where indigenous activists mobilized the same Social

Darwinist tropes to ‘awaken’ the disempowered to awareness of their impending extinction.36 In

35 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asia Modern (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 187; E. Taylor Atkins, Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 53; Robert Tierney, Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 4–5.

36 Christopher Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911–1931 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 114–168; Uradyn Bulag, Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s

20 the fervor of the Wilsonian Moment, it would seem as if the ideology of national self-

determination—as an expression of anti-colonialism—stood at odds with that of imperial

domination as the legitimate mode of political belonging in a new world order, but both national

self-determination and imperial domination, however, drew from extinction discourse.37 As expressed through the language of Social Darwinism, Mongol dissidents reacted against Chinese settler colonialism in their ancestral lands, just as Chinese nationalists petitioned against foreign imperial presence in their treaty ports and rail concessions. These nested and contentious nationalisms exposed the incommensurability between new modes of belonging within the boundaries of Republican China with the former practice of incorporating diverse identities into the territories of the Qing empire. That incommensurability meant Mongol elites later would refuse to partake in the Chinese nation-state in favor of collaborating with Japanese occupiers in

Manchukuo.38

Among this interwar generation of “Young Mongols,” Mersé (Ch. Guo Daofu, Mo.

Mersentei, 1894–1934?) emerged as the most prominent in articulating the indigenous response to extinction discourse. Born into Daγur nobility near Hailar, Mersé studied at the Russian

Language Institute under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, then returned home to set up

Mongolian Frontier (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 206; Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 75–77, 98–107; John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 23–66; Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2002), 117–150; for a comparative study on Korea, see Vladimir Tikhonov, Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (1880s–1910s) (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

37 Kevin Doak, “Culture, Ethnicity, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Japan” in Sharon Minichiello, ed., Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Nation, 1900–1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 181–205; Erez Manela covers Chinese and Korean nationalist reactions to Japanese imperialism in the aftermath of World War I, but does not acknowledge the attempts by sub-national groups, like that of the Mongols, who complicate China’s position as ‘victimized’ by foreign powers. See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self- Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99–136.

38 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asia Modern (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 18, 33, 180.

21 modern schools in the Hulunbuir region. In the Wilsonian Moment, Mersé sought Pan-Mongolist

connections with Buryiat organizers in the Soviet Union alongside other representatives, such as

Lingsheng (1886–1936) and Erkhimbatu (1882–1951), who would go on to become successive

governors under the Japanese occupation.39 Commenting on the Republican presence in Inner

Mongolia, Mersé once pointed out: “today five million Mongol compatriots are citizens of a

republic in name, [but] in fact they are slaves under despotism.”40 Elsewhere in his writings, he condemned Inner Mongolia’s “civilization as effete; her population is decreasing. She is further handicapped by the natural limitations of a desert terrain. Hemmed in by international influences she can never again do what her people once did during the Yuan dynasty.”41 The Pan-

Mongolists would ultimately fail to send delegates to the Paris Peace Conference, but Mersé

nonetheless embraced the zeitgeist of national self-determination, especially in his pamphlet, The

Mongolian Question (Ch. Menggu wenti).

Printed in 1923, The Mongolian Question expressed themes of both ethnic “awakening”

and decline, as roused up by the political consequences of World War I in Northeast Asia.

Through his extensive political connections, Mersé had the reform thinker Liang Qichao (1873–

1929) and Guomindang representative Serengdongrub (Ch. Bai Yunti, 1894–1980) write the

prefaces to The Mongolian Question. Liang saw the same spirit of “ethnic self-determination”

among Mongols and Tibetans in the borderlands as among Chinese in the foreign concessions of

Shandong and Manchuria during the May Fourth Movement. Recognizing that continuing settler

39 They attempted to send delegates to the Paris Peace Conference to advocate for Mongolian self-determination but prevented from boarding ship in Tokyo. See Christopher Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911– 1931 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 135–137; Thomas Ewing, Between the Hammer and the Anvil?: Chinese and Russian Policies in Outer Mongolia, 1911–1921 (Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 1980), 117–128.

40 Guo Moxi [Mersentei], “Wei Menggu dai daowen” in Hu-lun-bei-er zhilüe, ed. Zhang Jiafan (Shanghai, 1924), 305.

41 Kuo Tao-Fu [Mersentei], “Modern Mongolia” in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 8 (August 1930), 760.

22 colonialism in Inner Mongolia would undermine the fragile integrity of Republican China, Liang

believed that “it is not too late to mend the fold after the sheep has been lost.” Rather than pursue

assimilative policies in the banners at all costs, he hoped that that the Nationalists would instead

serve as a role model to Mongols. Liang wrote: “we Han have completely awoken [Ch. juexing]

and should help the Mongols cultivate the capability to govern themselves. In the future, with the

mutual prosperity of the federal model, the Mongols should also completely awaken under the

five colors of the national flag.”42 Serengdongrub likewise drew inspiration from Wilsonianism

by comparing Mongols under Republican “autocracy” to Koreans under Japanese colonialism.

He lambasted his own people for “lacking organization, awareness, and the spirit of self-

determination ... Are we Mongols nothing more than just perpetually oppressed slaves?”

Serengdongrub asked, “before long, [our] race [Ch. zhongzu] will also fall into ... extinction [Ch.

miewang]. Alas! We ordinary Mongols, why can’t we realize the truth [Ch. xingwu] as soon as

possible, come together, and fight for our Mongolian race?”43

In the manifesto itself, Mersé voiced concern about the Mongols ending dead last in the

Social Darwinist contest for survival. As he urged in The Mongolian Question:

Rise up, rise up, ambitious youth of our race, the tide of global reform has flooded the world. A revolution in human thought ... has already smashed the universe and awakened (Ch. huanxing) us ... Now the most ancient Indian and Han peoples, with the most degraded black and red races, all vie for the last prize. What a pity, if we, Mongolia, in representing the yellow race, were to slumber forever without waking and pass into oblivion (Ch. chenlun)?44

Mersé argued that the real “Yellow Peril” of the twentieth century lay in the geopolitical conflict between China, Japan, and Soviet Union over the Mongolian territories, not a resurgence

42 Liang Qichao “Xuyan” in Guo Daofu [Mersentei], Menggu wenti: Yiming huanghuo zhi fuhuo (1923), 1.

43 Bai Yunti [Serengdongrub], “Xuyan” in Guo Daofu [Mersentei], Menggu wenti: Yiming huanghuo zhi fuhuo (1923), 3.

44 Guo Daofu [Mersentei], Menggu wenti: Yiming huanghuo zhi fuhuo (1923), 17–18.

23 of the Mongolian horde itself.45 According to Mersé, dissension within the ranks of the ruling

elite had made Mongols into “pawns” of the Soviet Union and Japan. His manifesto proposed

that Mongols develop their livestock industry in order to recover territorial autonomy. Mersé

presumed that at some point in the future, the United States and Australia would exhaust their

own supply and the Mongolian territories could instead purvey the world’s meat and milk, tallow

and grease, leather and hides, hair and wool. He nonetheless watched as Japanese prospectors

under the Twenty-One Demands took surveys of natural resources, set up cattle ranches and

trading companies, and brokered alliances with young princes and lamas in the banners. Most

frustratingly for Mersé, the international community had accepted all of these enterprises as

“legitimate activities.”46 Owing to a shared history, territory, and trade, Mersé insisted that China

had a responsibility towards Mongolia in this predicament. Instead China had “swallowed up”

the territories via autocratic rule and open migration, causing Sun Zhongshan’s “Republic of the

Five Races to self-destruct.” Mersé concluded that with a foreign occupation and the subsequent

exploitation of indigenous labor, “it certainly will not be ten years before [the situation] will turn

into the Second World War. The reason is that ... the revival of the Yellow Peril [Ch. huanghuo

zhi fuhuo] will not start from the Mongols themselves but from the Mongolian territories, like

how Europe’s Great War began in the Balkans.”47 The Mongolian Question rendered the seemingly isolated territories relevant by situating them within a global context of anti-colonial,

45 For the late nineteenth century origins of the term “Yellow Peril,” especially used to describe Japanese and Chinese, see Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 125–144.

46 Kuo Tao-Fu [Mersentei], “Modern Mongolia” in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 8 (August 1930), 762.

47 Guo Daofu [Mersentei], Menggu wenti: Yiming huanghuo zhi fuhuo (1923), 25–26, 69–70.

24 ethno-nationalist movements after World War I.48 Mersé’s ominous warning of this region as the

“Balkans of the Orient” would persist into the 1930s as Japanese co-opted this term to justify

their occupation.49

The Wilsonian Moment compelled Japanese imperialists to reckon with the new political

clout of ethno-nationalism, rather than to treat the Mongolian territories as blank slates for naked

resource exploitation. Such a volte-face surfaced, for example, in the writings of Tanaka Suehiro

(1895–?) of Dalian’s Eastern Colonization Association (J. Tōhō takushoku kyōkai), who built his

career on writing booster literature about the archipelago’s resource crisis and suddenly had to

take into account indigenous claims to the very territory and raw materials Japan had been

coveting. Echoing Mersé’s own proposal, Tanaka hoped to introduce new environmental

protection laws and rationalize hunting and herding to preserve nature as a resource, and through

48 The Mongolian Question outlined Mersé’s political agenda for the rest of the decade. In 1925, he helped found the People’s Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia, an organization that tried to address the ideologies of both the Guomindang and the People’s Revolutionary Party of Mongolia. Three years later, he staged an armed insurrection to establish local autonomy vis-à-vis Soviet economic influence and Chinese administrative oversight in Hulunbuir. Without the arms and funding promised by the Comintern, however, the Barga Revolt quickly failed, though remnants jointed with the Gada Meyiren Revolt further south. Mersé continued to work as an educator, this time in Shenyang, and attended to Zhang Xueliang as his personal secretary. He vanished shortly after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, arrested by Soviet agents and sentenced to death for espionage. Rehabilitation records from 1989 show that Mersé had traveled to the Soviet consulate in Manzhouli where the police arrested him and tried him for espionage. The Soviets later commuted his death sentence to ten years in the gulag in 1934, after which it seems Mersé did not survive. On Mersé’s life and the Baraγ Revolt, see Christopher Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911–1931 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 114–168, 861–920; A. Enkebatu and Erhenbayar, “Women suo liaojie de Guo Daofu” in Dawo’er zu yanjiu, Vol. 1 (1987), 159–194; Nozu Akira, “Uchi Mōko ni okeru sekishoku undō no hensen” in Kōain chōsa geppō, Vol. 3, No. 10 (October 1942), 1– 65; on Mersé’s conception of ethnicity, citizenship, and nationhood, see Nakami Tatsuo, “Mongol Nationalism and Japan” in Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945, eds. Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 96–100; Nakami Tatsuo, “Nasho’narizumu kara esuno nasho’narizumu he: Mongoru jin Meruse ni totte no kokka, chiiki, minzoku” in Chūka sekai: Aidentiti no zaihen, Vol. 7 of Gendai Chūgoku no kōzō hendō, ed. Mōri Kazuko (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2001), 121–149; on the afterlives of Mersé in the politics of post-revolutionary historiography, see Uradyn Bulag, The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and Politics of National Unity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 137–182.

49 See, for example, Ishizuka Tadashi, Nazo no Mōko (Tokyo: Nichi-Mō bōeki kyōkai, 1929), 1–3; Manshū jijō annai sho, Manshū kokkyō jijō (Shinkyō: Manshū jijō annai sho, 1939), 27–41; Sōsaishitsu kōhōka, Manshūkoku ni okeru minzoku mondai: Omotoshite Kyōwakai wo tōshite (Minami Mantetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1939), 14; Tanaka Minoru, “Barukan wo mite Manshūkoku wo shinobu” in Man-Mō kōza, Vol. 1, ed. Kyōka shinkō kai (Tokyo: Ritsumeikan shuppanbu, 1933).

25 those means, revitalize Mongols and Tungus. He declared the campaign to “Save the Dying

Ethnic Minorities (J. iminzoku)—protect the ethnic minorities of Manchukuo!” as no longer simply idealist cause. Tanaka accused the Han for introducing syphilis and small pox, alcohol and opium to the borderlands, thus “expelling the ethnic contest [J. minzoku kyoso] to the outer periphery.” Furthermore the Han supposedly “trampled” all over the steppe “without reflecting on the problem of natural resources.” The farmland had gone to ruin, the woodland had succumbed to fire and overcutting, and the rivers had flooded. As a result of this “rapacious exploitation ... nomadic livelihood faced imminent collapse [J. kyūhaku seru suibō jōtai].” In

Tanak’s own words, regenerating Mongols and Tungus and restoring the steppe and forests went hand in hand as a “consistently inseparable policy.”50 In this way, the fates of ethnicity and environment in the borderlands became inextricably intertwined in the minds of Japanese occupiers. By the early 1930s, then, primitive nostalgia reversed the policy of assimilating peoples of the northern borderlands to conserving remnants of indigenous identities that Japanese saw as endangered by Han colonization.

Thus these debates on nomadic decline that began in the early 1900s would lead to an entirely different approach to managing the steppe during the years of the Japanese occupation.

As later chapters show, Japanese imperialism would transform a policy of assimilation— originally aimed at integrating frontier regions into the Republican nation-state. Specifically, the rise of national self-determination and primitive nostalgia, as compelling political forces after

World War I, forced Japanese to redress earlier failures of Ainu assimilation. Extinction discourse in the Japanese empire therefore began to diverge from similar ideology in Anglo-

American contexts, where a backlash against fascist thought had led to a widespread questioning

50 Tanaka Suehiro, Man-Mō fukugyō shigen tokuhon (Tokyo: Ritsumeikan shuppanbu, 1934), 86-87, 93-95, 100.

26 of Social Darwinism by the 1930s.51 In comparison, extinction discourse in the Japanese empire centered on indigenous peoples who shared ancestry with their colonizers, like Mongols and

Tungus, and as a result, it was fascism (or something very much like it) that would end assumptions about the inevitability of the “dying race.” In responding to ethnic conflicts in the borderlands and in reflecting on their own ambivalence towards industrial modernity, Japanese occupiers shifted their outlook on ethnic extinction from seeing it as an inevitable conclusion to a preventable crisis. Only through imperial intervention, they began to assert, could Mongols and

Tungus revive their livelihoods. Recognizing this momentary alignment between ethnic self- determination, on the one hand, and primitive nostalgia on the other, as they both arose from discourses on ethnic extinction, helps explain how seemingly contradictory forces for Mongol autonomy and Japanese imperialism would briefly converge to shape the ethnic and environmental boundaries of a new autonomous province in the eastern borderlands.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BORDERLANDS AND THE “MONGOLIAN QUESTION”

As seen in the interwar discourse above, the “Mongolian Question” conveyed anxieties over the future of borderland indigenes in the face of territorial expropriation and ethnic decline.

Although contemporary commentators recognized the “Mongolian Question” as a critical issue—one that threatened to destabilize the region as a whole—few historians today have thought to consider how this problem could reorient our understanding of the Japanese empire through its links to the People’s Republic of China. The brunt of attention given to urban studies of colonial cities like Seoul, Dalian, Harbin, or Tianjin, or to the imperial center in Tokyo, suggests that nothing really happened ‘out there’ in the so-called empty space between

51 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 6.

27 Manchuria and Mongolia.52 Yet something did happen because holdings from the Japanese occupation in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Archives remain off-limits by government fiat for security reasons to this day. Indeed, as Rana Mitter shows, the myth of resistance against Japan’s occupation by the people of Northeast China endures as one of the most compelling narratives in the founding of the People’s Republic, despite extensive and entrenched collaboration with the enemy.53 All of this points to the existence of our own

“Mongolian Question” in the historiography of not only the Japanese empire, but also the

People’s Republic of China.54

This dissertation brings together the seemingly incompatible histories of the Japanese

empire and the People’s Republic of China through a study of the eastern borderlands of Inner

Mongolia. As such, it speaks to debates in the following three fields: the history of Japanese

52 For studies on urban space in Tokyo, see Timothy Unverzagt Goddard, “Teito Tokyo: Empire, Modernity, and the Metropolitan Imagination (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2013); Ian Jared Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003); Jordan Sand, Teikoku Nihon no seikatsu bunkashi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2015); Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); for Korea, see Todd Henry, Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); for Manchukuo, see Miriam Kingsberg, Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Thomas Lahusen, “Harbin and Manchuria: Place, Space, and Identity” (Special Issue) in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Winter 2000); Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015); William Sewell, “Japanese Imperialism and Civic Construction in Manchuria: Changchun, 1905–1945” (PhD Dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2000); David Tucker, “Building ‘Our Manchukuo’: Japanese City Planning, Architecture, and Nation-building, 1931–1945” (PhD Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1999); for China, see Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and for scholarly volumes on multiple colonial cities in the Japanese empire, see Tristan Grunow, “Empire by Design: Railways, Architecture, and Urban Planning in Tokyo, Taipei, and Seoul” (PhD Dissertation, University of Oregon, 2015); Kuroishi Izumi, Constructing the Colonized Land: Entwined Perspectives of East Asia around WWII (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014); Nishizawa Yasuhiko, Nihon shokuminchi kenchikuron (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2008); Laura Victoir and Victor Zatsepine, Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840–1940 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013).

53 Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

54 Here I draw on the rhetorical moves of Andre Schmid, “Colonialism and the ‘Korea Problem’ in the Historiography of Modern Japan” in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 4 (November 2000), 951–976.

28 imperialism, the history of the People’s Republic of China, and the environmental history of East

Asia more broadly. Instead of only seeing the beginnings of the People’s Republic as forged in

the fires of war against the Japanese, we must also realize the significance of the occupation

itself in shaping the bounds of modern China in entangled ethnic and environmental ways. First,

this section addresses the problematic but pervasive practice in the literature on Japanese

imperialism of merging Eastern Inner Mongolia into Manchuria as one vague geopolitical entity

known as Man-Mō, if not eliminating the borderlands from the map altogether.55 Failure to recognize, to even name the Mongolian territories, has helped to conceal the transwar consistencies in the borderlands from the imperial occupation to Communist rule. This leads to the dissertation’s second line of inquiry: the narrative uncovered here serves as an alternative understanding to recent works on the origins of the multiethnic framework of the People’s

Republic of China. That is not to say that histories of Inner Mongolia at the local, regional, or even imperial level have not existed until now. Rather, those accounts by scholars in Japan and

China have simplified, if not vastly underestimated, the impact of imperialism on the land itself; they do not consider how the misplaced nostalgia for nature by Japanese occupiers also played part in political decisions or social relations in the borderlands, and how those same decisions or relations likewise held profound environmental consequences. Consequently, they have not done enough to explain the totality of vision by Japanese imperialists and native collaborators nor captured the extent and complexity of nature’s transformation in the borderlands. As the third intervention, then, the evidence attesting to this transformation in this project ultimately challenges the nation-based paradigms that have come to dominate the environmental history of modern East Asia.

55 Suzuki Nirei has called for this intervention in Manshūkoku to Uchi Mongoru: Man-Mō seisaku kara Kōan-shō tōchi e (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012), 410–412.

29 First, within the scholarship on Japanese imperialism, Manchukuo has become the

paragon of experimental high modernism over the past two decades. In perhaps the most

definitive account of Japan’s occupation of and preoccupation with the Northeast, Louise Young

has argued that Manchukuo demonstrated a dialectic between modernity and imperialism in the

twentieth century: “just as modernization conditioned the growth of empire,” she writes, “the

process of imperialism shaped the conditions of modern life.” As a colonial project, Manchukuo

galvanized thousands of ordinary Japanese citizen-subjects alongside their leaders, as

distinctions between state and society became increasingly blurred not only in the pursuit of

empire, but also in the emergence of fascism. Despite this comprehensive account, Young sees

the “Mongolian Question” as external and therefore irrelevant to the client state, describing how

Japan “simply expanded its formulas devised for Manchukuo to encompass first north China,

then Inner Mongolia, then central and south China.” To look at Manchuria through “Japanese

eyes” also means to acknowledge that the Mongolian territories overlapped with half of the

surface area that would become Manchukuo. Instead Young casts this region as “imagined as

empty, flat space—a vast frontier awaiting Japanese settlement.”56 In presuming the blank-slate

mentality of the colonizers themselves, Young’s framework cannot accommodate even the

Japanese-language sources that understood this landscape as the overlapping migrations of

various peoples and sought to accommodate the ethnic complexity of Manchukuo’s internal

borderlands.57

56 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 12, 15, 222.

57 Young’s model stands in contrast to Tanaka’s, which examines the Japanese construct of “the Orient” through the work of turn-of-the-century linguists, historians, and anthropologists. See Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Other works that pursue the intersection between empire and modernity include from the Japanese perspective: Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 (Cambridge: Harvard University

30 Since Young, others have gone beyond the Japanese imagination of Manchuria to

illustrate the client state as a site of transnational tension that wrestled with questions of identity

and identification. Mariko Tamanoi has documented the contradictory classifications of race

used in Manchukuo in order to deconstruct the Japanese ideology of the “Harmony of the Five

Races”—usually meaning the Han, Japanese, Koreans, Manchus, and Mongols. Nevertheless,

these population statistics and their categories yield an incomplete picture of how processes of

identity formation varied across ethnicities in relation to territory in Manchukuo. In response,

Shao Dan has focused on displaced Manchus who recovered their “homeland” in Manchuria

after Chinese nationalists in the early twentieth century urged to expel them from China proper.

Prasenjit Duara has turned to Tungusic hunters who embodied the “authentic” wilderness of

Manchuria for Japanese and Chinese ethnographers seeking to subsume the frontier into their

respective nation-states. Hyun Ok Park has looked at Korean migrants who invested in

Manchuria as property, a colonial venture that both ensnared them into networks of global

capitalism and inspired them to communist mobilization. Each of these attempts in claiming or

reclaiming territory shaped the contours of ethnic identity within the matrix of Japanese

imperialism.58 Yet, they have tended to take this chimerical combination of Man-Mō for granted.

It was only the Mongols—or the collection of indigenous communities categorically designated as such—who received an autonomous province under Japanese rule explicitly designed as their

Asia Center, 2001); Janis Mimura, Planning For Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Emer O’Dwyer, Significant Soil: Settler Colonialism and Japan’s Urban Empire in Manchuria (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).

58 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asia Modern (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 179–208; Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Shao Dan, Remote Homeland, Recovered Borderland: Manchus, Manchoukuo, Manchuria, 1907–1985 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011); Mariko Tamanoi, “Knowledge, Power, and Racial Classifications: The ‘Japanese’ in ‘Manchuria’” in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 2 (May 2000), 248–276.

31 own. While this dissertation seeks not to disaggregate these two entities of Man-Mō necessarily,

it picks up where Owen Lattimore left off in his groundbreaking account, The Mongols of

Manchuria.59 The project lays bare the nested relationship of the Mongolian territories within

Manchukuo, and shows how fraught and fragile acts of circumscribing ethnicity and environment unfolded over the course of the occupation.

Second, erasing the borderlands between Manchuria and Mongolia from the historiographic map also suppresses other ways to explain the heterogeneous territorial and ethnic composition of the People’s Republic of China. Thomas Mullaney has examined the

Ethnic Classification Project—or “the largest social engineering project in human history”—and how it determined minority representation at the National People’s Congress in 1954. Using

Yunnan Province in southwestern China as a case study, he documents the “categorical compression” of hundreds of ethnic groups into the currently recognized fifty-six. Mullaney questions the immutability of identity since time immemorial and, instead, reveals the

“ethnotaxonomic volatility” of classification as social scientists struggled to render this dazzling array of human diversity legible to the state.60 Still the social construction of ethnicity in Yunnan

in the first half of the twentieth century did not necessarily reflect the process in the rest of China.

Besides mandating minority representation at the National People’s Congress, moreover, the new

state recognized it on the map as well; the classification project also helped legitimize borders

for autonomous counties, banners, prefectures, and entire regions, including that of Inner

Mongolia.

59 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934).

60 Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 2–3, 9.

32 Compared to Yunnan, Inner Mongolia contended with more coherent ethnic identities by

the early Communist period.61 These categories were not produced out of the classification

project so as much as they were articulated from the 1910s to 1940s, through pan-Mongol

movements and, later, during the Japanese occupation of Manchukuo and Mengjiang.

Christopher Atwood, Uradyn Bulag, James Leibold, and Liu Xiaoyuan have discussed how the

Mongolian Question “directly reflects the entangled evolution of territoriality and nationhood in

twentieth-century East Asia.” Integrating their research into one narrative portrays a threefold

conflict in the borderlands: interethnic strife between Mongols and Han over local territory,

inter-partisan struggles between Communists and Nationalists over Chinese sovereignty, and

finally inter-bloc friction between the Soviet Union and the United States over global hegemony.

Here, Japan presented more of a foil, rather than a viable force in the establishment of Inner

Mongolia as an autonomous region. Atwood nonetheless does point out that only under the

Japanese did “the first modern supra-banner governments to be run by Mongols” emerge from a

generation of indigenous men who had gone to Moscow or Ulaanbaatar for study, and yet

paradoxically collaborated with the imperial occupation afterwards. While acknowledging the

“modernizing” effects of the Japanese occupation for the sake of context, these scholars choose

instead to reinforce the party narrative of Mongol communists in founding the autonomous

region.62

61 The final classification of Mongols and Tungus in Eastern Inner Mongolia, ratified in 1957 and controversial to this day, named the Daγur, Evenki, and Orochon as separate ethnic groups, but left the Barga, Buriyat, and Oirat as members of the Mongols.

62 Christopher Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911–1931 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 978; Liu Xiaoyuan, Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 118– 127; see also Uradyn Bulag, Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China’s Mongolian Frontier (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2010); Uradyn Bulag, The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002); James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

33 Only in the last decade have academics in Japan and China begun to take the imperial

occupation in the borderlands on its own terms. For instance, Hirokawa Saho, Khurcha, and

Suzuki Nirei have painstakingly reconstructed the political institutions involved in establishing

and maintaining internal borders in the Mongolian territories. Their careful attention to ethnic

tension underlying administrative modernization of the banners has brought to light the

contingent bonds between Japanese imperialists and the indigenous elite.63 Others, such as

Altanγaraγ and Borjigin Burensain, have narrowed their research to social histories of a single banner across the successive regimes of the twentieth century. Microcosmic studies of the banner have characterized the Mongolian Question as a matter of property rights and oversimplify the ecological consequences of land tenure as merely desertification. A focus on the banner itself makes it difficult to develop a holistic or comparative understanding of the ecological transformation both within and beyond the bounds of the Mongolian territories. While the project at hand builds upon the tremendous archival depth of these scholars, it also confronts the inexorable and inextricable role that nature plays in this history as a third and final intervention.

Japanese visions of ecological modernity and their accompanying technologies of rule transfigured environmental relations in ways still practiced in Inner Mongolia today.64 This

2007); Liu Xiaoyuan, Frontier Passages: Ethnopolitics and the Rise of Chinese Communism, 1921–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

63 A-la-teng-ga-ri-ga [Altanγaraγ], Jinxiandai Nei Menggu youmu bianqian yanjiu: Yi Zha-lai-te qi wei li (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 2012); Bo-er-zhi-jin Bu-ren-sai-yin [Borjigin Burensain], Jinxiandai Mengguren nonggeng cunluo shehui de xingcheng: Formation of the Mongolian Farming Village Society (Hohhot: Nei Menggu daxue chubanshe, 2007); Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005); Hu-ri-cha [Khurcha], “Nihon no Tōbu Uchi Mongoru tōchi no kenkyū (1932–1945): ‘Manshūkoku’ no tai Mongoru minzoku seisaku no kōzō to katei wo chūshin ni” (PhD Dissertation, Tokyo gaikokugo daigaku, 2011); Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese, and Present Political Problems (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935); Suzuki Nirei, Manshūkoku to Uchi Mongoru: Man-Mō seisaku kara Kōan-shō tōchi e (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012).

64 For anthropological evidence in Inner Mongolia, see Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath, The End of Nomadism?: Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath, Culture and Environment in Inner Asia (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1996); David

34 dissertation therefore considers how Japanese imperialism set uneasy precedents that rationalized

nature for communist objectives in the present.

Documenting the environmental footprint of the continental empire defies how recent

historians of Japan have framed nature largely in national terms or within national bounds.65

Environmental history questions modernist dichotomies between nature and culture and seeks

ways to overcome them, but in the context of East Asia, it has reinforced other boundaries,

particularly ones between the metropole and its periphery.66 In the words of Brett Walker, for

example, industrial pollution—as caused by the twinned forces of modernity and

rationalization—induces “pain [that] ranks even higher than national myths and a shared

language in creating Japan’s national communities.” Whereas corporations like Chisso, as

Walker chronicles, produced the mercury-laced chemicals that would cause Minamata disease in

the 1950s, these companies built upon an imperial legacy of soy-based fertilizers that had also

triggered selenium deficiency disorders in the Mongolian territories. To view the colonies from

Sneath, Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Dee Mack Williams, Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

65 Preliminary work on the environmental impact of Japanese imperialism has begun in the field, as seen in David Fedman, “The Saw and the Seed: Japanese Forestry in Colonial Korea, 1895–1945 (PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2015); Micah Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Micah Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Ruth Rogaski, “Vampires in Plagueland: The Multiple Meanings of Weisheng in Manchuria” in Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 132–159; Victor Seow, “Carbon Technocracy: East Asian Energy Regimes and the Industrial Modern, 1900–1957” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2014); William Tsutsui, “Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan,” in Environmental History Vol. 8, No. 2 (April 2003), 294–311; William M. Tsutsui, “The Pelagic Empire: Reconsidering Japanese Expansion” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 21–38.

66 See for example, Ian Jared Miller, Julia Adeney Thomas, and Brett Walker, Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013); Ian Jared Miller, The Nature of the Beasts: Empire and Exhibition at the Tokyo Imperial Zoo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Robert Stolz, Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).

35 afar as an extractive frontier—as zookeepers did when collecting exotic animals or zaibatsu did

when importing Manchurian coal—removes readers from the environmental consequences of

imperialism, as much as it did for those living on the archipelago at the time. Despite the fact that

communities defined and redefined nature for their own purposes of nation-building, these

“national ecologies” largely absolves Japan from the extractive economies it developed through

the expansion of its empire, so necessary for its modernization.67 By exporting externalities, like sheep or soy from the borderlands, the worst environmental effects sometimes cropped up far beyond Japan’s national borders, and therefore, beyond the realm of concern for colonizers and scholars alike. By situating Inner Mongolia at the center of this environmental transformation, then, the ecological costs of imperialism become that much more unmistakable and undeniable to the historian’s eye.

MAPPING THE DISSERTATION

The liminal nature of borderlands history has required a transnational, multilingual, and

interdisciplinary perspective towards research. “The Cartographic Steppe” relies on sources such

as scientific journals, government memos, land surveys, and aerial photographs, among other

materials from archives, libraries, and databases across China, Japan, and the United States. The

geographic scope of this research demonstrates that in the abrupt disintegration of the Japanese

empire, its archival debris did not so neatly conform to national boundaries in the postwar period.

Moreover, reading Chinese, English, and some Mongolian voices against Japanese sources has

brought to light some of the more insidious aspects of imperial rule in the borderlands typically

expunged by the colonial archive. The dissertation adds an Asian dimension to important themes

67 Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 9, 38.

36 in world history: the hardening of borders, the role of science in the imperial enterprise, and the

entangled relationship between nature and culture in modern times.

Chapter One, “Delimiting Autonomy,” begins in the aftermath of the Gada Meyiren

Revolt, when Japanese occupiers set up Khinggan Province for Mongols and Tungus in

Manchukuo. Rather than pursuing a policy of assimilation as they had with the Ainu, Japanese

authorities collaborated with Mongol leaders to ‘protect’ hunting and herding minorities in the

face of increasing Chinese colonization. The chapter charts the controversial process in debating

and delineating that internal border in a collaborative process between young Japanese officers

and conservative Mongol elites. Together they decided what banners would count for this new

autonomous province and why, based on a combination of demographics and geography.

Nevertheless, riots erupted across the pale as a result of this decision. So that the ethnic

composition would reflect the reality of this internal boundary, Mongol governors organized

population transfers to relocate thousands of people into the autonomous province. The

following two chapters then trace the environmental ramifications of breaking up the borderlands.

The second chapter, “Rationalizing the Nomad,” examines the ecological engineering

projects that took place within Khinggan Province. There, ethnicity and environment became

conflated in such a way that the imperial project to “revive” the Mongols also led to conserving

what remained of the steppe for pastoral practice. The provincial administration designated much

of the region as communal property. Land laws banned further reclamation. With the

inauguration of the Five Year Plan in 1936, though, this program sought to eliminate the

nomadic features of herding because its Japanese architects did not see seasonal migration as a

“rational” use of resources. Rather, they viewed it as the root of overgrazing and land degradation in the Mongolian territories. Such dramatic and sweeping claims by the imperial

37 state did the political work of motivating grassland protection policies in rearranging the

livelihoods of herders. Japanese planners sought to settle Mongols in ethnic enclaves, known as

“concentration-villages,” to produce meat, wool, and leather in industrial quantities for the

empire. Japanese experimental farms began disseminating alien grasses and hybrid animals

whose intensive care required sedentary patterns of livelihood, subverting nomadic practice over

time. The introduction of alfalfa and merino fostered these ecologies of betrayal: while the

steppe would continue to look like the steppe, the resultant scientific stock-farming would also

refigure an underlying ecology of transhumance into one of sedentary extraction.

On the other side of the internal border in Chapter Three, “Exhausting the Earth” follows the environmental transformation of the banners left out of the autonomous province and now largely converted into Chinese counties. This chapter focuses on a fatal spate of “climatic disease” discovered in Keshan in 1935, now known to be a selenium deficiency disorder. Until the late nineteenth century, this county had served as pasture for exiled Oirat Mongols. Opening up the land for reclamation by Han farmers put greater pressure per acre to produce more food, and with a limited supply of selenium in the soil, the mineral intake of crops decreased over time.

Intensifying agriculture to produce soybeans for a global market in the Japanese occupation compounded the deficiency. Consuming that harvest ultimately resulted in the disfigured bodies of farmers that so fascinated colonial scientists. In the 1930s, theories on “climate” defined the civilizational hierarchies between Japanese doctors and Chinese settlers in the Mongolian borderlands. The irony was that what had made Chinese during the late Qing and Republican regimes “civilized”—namely, turning “wasteland” into farmland through settler colonialism— had uncivilized them in the Japanese occupation.

38 Chapter Four, “Disassembling the Feudal,” details the second stage of demarcating the

borderlands: erasing the existence of banners excluded from Khinggan Province. The chapter

details the origins, implementation, and consequences of the Mongol Land Offer, a law passed in

1938 that expropriated outside banners and incorporated these territories into Manchukuo’s

county administration. Within a greater context of evaluating peasant society on the continent,

Japanese researchers from Mantetsu, or the South Manchuria Railway Company, took

comprehensive village surveys to record the extent to which Mongols had taken up farming in, or

had retreated from, their own territory. These leftists reworked Marxian theory in order to

recognize the nomadic territories as a special case of feudalism, where not only status, but also

livelihood lay as the cause of a perceived economic stagnation. Consequently, in order to

standardize customary law, the Land Offer targeted Mongol aristocrats by cutting off their rent

income from their Han tenants in the areas with the densest Chinese population, and redirecting

those funds to the national treasury. This extensive classification project led to significant

territorial dispossession, the curtailing of indigenous power, and ultimately the final effacement

of Mongolian identity from the map.

In the final chapter, “Advancing the Aerial,” brings into focus a new kind of cartography

of the steppe and how this technology re-conceptualized nomadism in global discourse. The

aerial perspective led to an unprecedented precision in measuring and mapping terrain. Aerial surveys by the photography bureau of Manchukuo National Airways delineated space in new calculative regimes beyond earlier methods of triangulation from the ground. These photographs figured into the theories of Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinji, who developed “a cartographic way of thinking” in the 1940s after collaborating with Manchukuo National Airways in Inner

Mongolia. Through aerial photography, Imanishi saw the source of nomadic obsolescence lying

39 in the all-too-perfect workings of a matured ecosystem. By linking speed and scale, time and space, Imanishi staged nomadic history in terms of cooperative evolution, a vision inspired by the interconnected universe of Nishida Kitarō and the philosophy of the Kyoto School.

Ultimately, in what at first seems like isolated history on the inner margins of northeast Asia, the chapters ahead emphasize the global significance of nomadic obsolescence and how it defined a new imperial modernity.

40 CHAPTER ONE: DELIMITING AUTONOMY

Drafting an autonomous region on paper never came down to the simple technical procedures of mapmaking. It of course reflected profoundly political practices, ones shaped by both a Japanese ambivalence towards ethnicity and clashing conceptions of imperial versus indigenous space. That cartographic process rested on a longer history of the alternating relations between ethnicity and territory, one that dated to the seventeenth century for Mongolian and

Tungusic peoples. It was the Qing that assigned nomadic tribes to a circumscribed tract with fixed boundaries for the first time. Members of the banner could maintain their nomadic livelihoods freely within its borders, but transgressing those borders became expressly forbidden.

By designating the limits of each banner, Manchu overlords ascribed a degree of identification between the tribe and a given piece of land, thus restraining the movement of hunters and herders through territorialization. In this way, the state could assume an authority over both the people and the land at the same time. From the perspective of the Qing empire, however, tribes still took precedence over territories.

In the nineteenth century, though, the emerging world system of nation-states emphasized the territorialized state as the agent of history; the geographically defined “Mongolia” thus prevailed over tribally based “Mongols,” as Yi Wang has so eloquently argued. Scientific and systematic knowledge produced about the borderlands by foreign expeditions, in particular, reinforced this new epistemology of territory as a category of practice. The fundamental shift in priority from tribes to territories indicated the ways in which states flipped the relationship between people and the land, allowing for the displacement of indigenes in favor of natural resources. Furthermore, with settler colonialism in the Republican era, the state apparatus aimed to assimilate the borderlands into the Chinese nation, undoing the ties between the land and the

41 people that dated from the Qing. This unraveling allowed for the Republican regime to uproot

Mongols from native hunting and herding grounds, drive them to ever distant areas, and replace

this perceived “emptiness” and “wasteland” with Chinese counties and provinces.68

In demarcating a new autonomous province in the early 1930s, then, Japanese occupiers sought to restore the ties between people and the land, but under an imperially imposed, explicitly modern framework. They could not simply adopt the old boundaries of the Qing banners as the indigenous elite had wanted. State planners had to reckon with the thousands of

Han migrants who had settled in the borderlands in the intervening decades. Both Suzuki Nirei and Khurcha have also documented the contested and contingent nature of marking internal borders, but they have yet to elaborate on the meanings and repercussions of affixing ethnicities and livelihoods to particular spaces.69 Japanese technocrats effaced a specifically “Mongolian” identity from the territories by expanding the category of indigeneity (J. genjū minzoku) to include the Daγur, Solon, Orochen, among others. This alteration allowed for the autonomous province to encompass their lands in the Naun River Valley. The artificial union of territories— the “nomadic” banners of the Mongols on the one hand and the “garrison” banners of these other minorities, both under different systems of administration—would become naturalized as the

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the early years of the People’s Republic of China.

To create stark divides within the borderlands meant not only to consolidate, rationalize, and sometimes erase banners and counties from the map, but also, as seen in Chapters Two and

Three, expunge environmental evidence of their existence on the land itself. Soon, Japanese

68 Yi Wang, “Transforming the Frontier: Land, Commerce, and Chinese Colonization in Inner Mongolia, 1700–1911” (PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2013), 21–24.

69 Hu-ri-cha [Khurcha], “Nihon no Tōbu Uchi Mongoru tōchi no kenkyū (1932–1945): ‘Manshūkoku’ no tai Mongoru minzoku seisaku no kōzō to katei wo chūshin ni” (PhD Dissertation, Tokyo gaikokugo daigaku, 2011); Suzuki Nirei, Manshūkoku to Uchi Mongoru: Man-Mō seisaku kara Kōan-shō tōchi e (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012).

42 occupiers realized the impossibility of drawing lines through a mottled borderland of various livelihoods; the Demarcation itself prompted riots along ethnic divides. They revised provincial borders and resorted to population transfers so that the ethnic homeland would match the map, rather than the other way around. Ultimately imperial administrators deferred to Han farming communities already living in the borderlands rather than agreeing to indigenous demands. The underlying logic of this decision centered on the belief that agriculture represented a permanent and irreversible change to the land, whereas hunting and herding indicated a nomadic transience of people that could move and live in any place dictated by the state. This dangerous assumption contributed to the further marginalization of borderland indigenes under the guise of “autonomy” and “protection.”

GEOGRAPHIES OF SOVEREIGNTY

Debates over the geography of sovereignty in the borderlands between imperialists and indigenes revolved around one issue: defining this territory by its present-day occupants and their livelihoods or defining by historical claims to the land. Only through negotiations and compromise did a coherent sense of an autonomous region emerge; it did not exist a priori. The main figure who took responsibility in demarcating the borderlands was a Mantetsu expert named Kikutake Jitsuzō (1889–1946) in Zhengjiatun, one of the portals into the Mongolian territories. Kikutake brought the Kantō Army and the Mongolian elite together to broker the terms of the autonomous province. That story of how the Kantō Army eventually co-opted

Mongolian dreams of autonomy into their vision of a new client state after the Manchurian

Invasion remains preserved in the archive of the youngest member of the General Staff at the time, Lieutenant Katakura Tadashi (1898–1991). As an assistant to the Chief of Intelligence,

43 Katakura read all incoming correspondence, as well as drafted telegrams, memos, and reports on

behalf of his superiors.70 Present at all decision-making conferences of the Kantō Army,

Katakura recorded those details in his journal. Katakura’s archive, alongside confidential

ministry memos, exposes the contingent process behind the official pronouncements in the

Manchukuo government communiqué, known as the Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao (J.

Manshūkoku seifu kōhō), and the seemingly naturalized borders presented in local gazetteers.

Oral histories from the 1980s by collaborators and survivors of the occupation suggest how these

highly technocratic schemes later unfolded.

In the late 1920s, separatist activities among Mongols coalesced around the border town

of Zhengjiatun (also known as Liaoyuan). Built in 1926, Zhengjiatun Station stood at the fork of

two railway lines, just off the main trunk from Fengtian to Changchun. To the west, the line led

to Tongliao and into Khorchin territory. To the north, it ran along the edge of the steppe through

Taonan and Tao’an to Qiqihar. As the gateway into the banners, Zhengjiatun witnessed the

comings and goings of the Mongolian political elite, many of whom would later collaborate with

the Japanese in the new autonomous region. The amorphous group included venerable aristocrats,

such as Chimedsempil (1874–1942), the jasak of Gorlos Front Banner and the leader of Jirem

League; Yangsangjab (1873–1941), the prince of Khorchin Left Flank Middle Banner;

Yeshekhayisan (1893–1944), the prince of Khorchin Right Flank Middle Banner; as well as

younger radicals in the militant independence campaign, such as Ganjuurjab (1903–1971),

70 Katakura Tadashi, Senjin zuiroku (Tokyo: Keizai ōraisha, 1972), 103–110; Sadako Ogata, Defiance in Manchuria: The Making of Japanese Foreign Policy 1931–1932 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 60. Ogata bases her account primarily on this collection of material but leaves out the Mongolian Question entirely.

44 Figure 1.1 Banners and Counties in Eastern Inner Mongolia by Kikutake Jitsuzō (1929)

45 briefly the husband of Kawashima Yoshiko (1907–1948), his brother Jinjuurjab (1906–1968),

and Khafengga (1908–1970), one of Mersé’s former students.71

It was here in Zhengjiatun that Kikutake Jitsuzō oversaw the web of tenuous connections

between these men as the bureau chief of the Mantetsu Research Department. The Zhengjiatun

office maintained surveillance on banditry and militia movements throughout the borderlands for

the Kantō Army. The location could not have suited Kikutake’s expertise more. The graduate

from the Keio School of Commerce and Industry had studied Mongolian for three years at the

Tokyo School of Foreign Languages before moving to the continent permanently, first in the

employ of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu and then as the manager of an alcohol distillery. Mantetsu

hired Kikutake in 1921 and promoted him to bureau chief in 1927. Kikutake’s position at

Mantetsu gave him the opportunity to delve deeply in Mongolian language, history, and culture,

the fruits of which he published in a series of pamphlets throughout the 1920s under a Chinese

pseudonym; he certainly knew about the Gada Meyiren Revolt as well as the other disturbances

erupting across the banners.72 What Kikutake wrote in one of these reports intimates his own political allegiance in these ethnic conflicts: “Eastern Mongolia now is not the Mongolia of the

Mongols but that of the Han.” Kikutake’s personal contacts with the Mongol elite would give the

Kantō Army unprecedented access to critical information on the borderlands. For example, he frequented the residence of Yeshkhayisan and worked alongside Jinjuurjab in the Mantetsu

71 Suzuki Nirei, Manshūkoku to Uchi Mongoru: Man-Mō seisaku kara Kōan-shō tōchi e (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012), 115–118; Zheng-zhu-er-zha-bu [Jinjuurjab], “Caozong wei Mengjun xirao Nei Meng” in Riben diguo zhuyi qinhua dang’an ziliao xuanbian: ‘Jiu yi ba’ shibian, eds. Zhongyang dang’an guan, Zhongguo di’er lishi dang’an guan, Jilin sheng shehui kexueyuan (Changchun: Jilin remin chubanshe, 1993), Vol. 1, 477–482; for biographies of the Mongol elite in the 1930s, see Kōan sōsho chōsaka, Mōko jin meiroku (Kōan sōsho chōsaka, 1933).

72 Na-mu-hai-zha-bu [Namkhaijab], “Huiyi ‘Tailai huiyi’ qianhou” in Nei Menggu wenshi ziliao: Wei Manzhouguo Xing’an ziliao, Vol. 34 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1989), 2.

46 office.73 The Kantō Army would come to rely on all of this experience accrued over a decade in

Inner Mongolia when assembling the new autonomous province in the borderlands.

Kikutake played a crucial role in these border negotiations, not only as an intermediary

between the Mongols and Japanese, but also as the architect of the autonomous province itself.

When the Kantō Army staged the invasion of Manchuria in September of 1931, its leaders knew

almost nothing about the Mongolian territories, nor had any meaningful relationships with their

inhabitants. Still, their “Draft Outline for Governing the Republic of Manchuria-Mongolia”

expressed the need to “definitively divide the administrative areas of Manchuria and Mongolia in

order to rescue the Mongols from Han oppression.” In order to do so, the outline resolved to

relocate Han farmers from Inner Mongolia to Northern Manchuria. The Kantō Army first

recruited Kikutake to transport two hundred rifles through Zhengjiatun to Ganjuurjab’s forces in

the immediate months after the Mukden Incident. Kikutake met with Katakura and his supervisor,

Itagaki Seishirō (1885–1948), in Fengtian in November and began advising the creation of a

“Mongol Autonomous Territory” (J. Mōko jichi ryō), though still a vague entity, in order to

secure the entire Northeast.74 At this meeting, Katakura resolved in a ten-point plan for the

invasion “to foster the independence movement that would potentially unify [Inner] Mongolia.”75

At the same time, Kikutake mediated between prominent Mongols who advocated for divergent versions of the autonomous province. Preserved in Katakura’s files, these formulations lay bare the spectrum of indigenous demands in the borderlands, but seem to have cleaved along status

73 Suzuki Nirei, Manshūkoku to Uchi Mongoru: Man-Mō seisaku kara Kōan-shō tōchi e (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012), 376–384; Nisshin kōshinjo, Manshū shinshi shinshō roku (Nisshin kōshinjo, 1927), 441–442.

74 “Man-Mō kyōwakoku tōji taikō an” (21 October 1931) and “Man-Mō jiyū koku setsuritsu an taikō” (7 November 1931) in Manshū jihen, Vol. 7 of Gendaishi shiryō, eds. Kobayashi Tatsuo and Shimada Toshihiko (Tokyo: Misuzu shōbo, 1964), 228, 253; Katakura Tadashi, Kaisō no Manshūkoku (Tokyo: Keizai ōraisha, 1978), 130.

75 Katakura Tadashi, “Manshū jihen kimitsu senryaku nisshi, sono ichi” (20 October 1931) in Manshū jihen, Vol. 7 of Gendaishi shiryō, eds. Inaba Masao, Kobayashi Tatsuo, Shimada Toshihiko (Tokyo: Misuzu shōbo, 1965), 223.

47 differences and generational lines. As this section details, Kikutake first solicited opinions from

the landed aristocracy, then heard proposals from the “Young Mongols” through a series of

carefully orchestrated conferences. Kikutake adopted the territorial scheme of the latter group to

a great extent, and thus began drawing a map of the autonomous province out of abstraction.

Mongol nobility wanted to recover all of their ancestral lands, which represented so much

more than the Japanese officers were willing to concede. In October 1931, Yangsangjab, the

prince of Khorchin Left Flank Middle Banner, petitioned on the behalf of the “bannermen of

Mongolia” to enlist Japanese support against the Zhang regime which had “grabbed power” and

“wrecked the Mongol banners.” Yangsangjab’s first and foremost request called for “protect[ing]

the autonomy of the region of the Mongol banners.” He also worried about the Mongol

population that now lived under the Chinese county administration and hoped to “safeguard”

their livelihoods as well. Then Yangsangjab asked the Kantō Army for two thousand repeating

rifles, two thousand Mauser semiautomatic pistols, a hundred standard pistols, ten machine guns,

six trench mortars, a hundred military sabers, and corresponding 3.6 million rounds of

ammunition all to “maintain the security of this region.” While Yangsangjab called for direct

action that would militarize the borderlands even further, he did not specify the boundaries of

autonomy nor suggest internal reforms within the banners themselves. Rather, it seems that

Yangsangjab, given his own titled rank, took a reactionary stance to the Mongolian Question,

one that aspired to return the original Mongol territories to an idealized, status society before

Han migration. Upon reading this petition, Katakura concluded that Yangsangjab must have

meant consolidating Jirem, Ju Uda, and Sili-yin Gool Leagues, the last of which actually lay west

outside of Manchukuo.76

76 The Kantō Army ultimately provided about a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition; see Katakura Tadashi, Kaisō no Manshūkoku (Tokyo: Keizai ōraisha, 1978), 131; Yang-cang-zha-bu [Yangsangjab], “Yijianshu” (20

48 The subsequent Tailai Conference, hosted by Japanese officers, reaffirmed the

aristocratic position to recover the historical holdings of the Mongols, if not to expand into

banners under previous Manchu administration.77 Sumingga (1885–1947), then the head of the

Mongolian Affairs Department in the Fengtian Military Government, convened this first conference in Tailai on December 14, 1931. For the Kantō agents, the meeting opened “an opportunity once in a thousand years for nobles and herders alike, and any banner without question, to break off from the Han—with whom they cannot live under the same sky—and become an independent, autonomous state with Japan’s compassion.”78 Representatives, drawn primarily from the ruling elite in the Jirem League banners as well as those from neighboring

Butkha, Qiqihar, and Yekhe Mingγan, declared first and foremost: “Every league and banner would henceforth secede from the Chinese government.” The Mongol delegates decided that from a “geographical standpoint,” the new province would consist of all ten banners within Jirem

League—except for Gorlos Front Banner since it contained the Manchukuo capital of Xinjing— and the adjoining administrations in Butkha, Qiqihar, and Yekhe Mingγan. The inclusion of

Hulunbuir still remained noticeably absent in this iteration. The conference, moreover, proclaimed that “the territory of [Inner] Mongolia will include all the former lands” of the Qing.

Here, the Japanese side expressed reservations that they would count all ten banners, not to mention all land historically within those banners, in the province. The staff officers pointed out that land reclamation and county installations had gone too far in Dorbet, Gorlos Front and Rear,

October 1931) in Katakura Tadashi monjo 20–I–1, Archives at the University of Tokyo Department of Advanced Social and International Studies; Katakura Tadashi, “Manshū jihen kimitsu senryaku nisshi, sono ichi” (20 October 1931) in Manshū jihen, Vol. 7 of Gendaishi shiryō, eds. Kobayashi Tatsuo and Shimada Toshihiko (Tokyo: Misuzu shōbo, 1964), 225.

77 Katakura Tadashi, Kaisō no Manshūkoku (Tokyo: Keizai ōraisha, 1978), 130–136.

78 Matsui Seisuke, “Mōko ōkō kaigi jōkyō narabi shoken hōkoku” (15 February 1932) in Katakura Tadashi kankei monjo 642, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room, National Diet Library.

49 and Yekhe Mingγan Banner. The environmental consequences of this process in Yekhe Mingγan,

in particular, would become all too clear, as described in Chapter Three. Sumingga instead raised

the possibility that the railroad line from Zhengjiatun to Qiqhar serve as the eastern boundary of

the province, which also cut into several more banners in Jirem League. Thus, the Tailai

Conference made it apparent that these Mongols had hoped to reclaim all of their territory in

Jirem League that they lost from land reclamation, as well as include the additional banners

formerly under Manchu military organization. The Japanese however had decided to draw the

border based on present ethnic composition, reducing the area by over a third.79

In comparison, the younger generation presented a more radical solution to the

Mongolian Question: fusing together banners of disparate administrations and shifting the provincial center of gravity from the southwest to the northeast. In a meeting at Zhengjiatun on

December 30, Kikutake invited delegates from the same fourteen banners as before in talks with the Kantō officers Katakura Tadashi, Matsui Seisuke, Takeshita Yoshiharu (1891–1979), and

Wachi Takaji (1893–1978). This time, however, the participants represented the Young

Mongols; Kikutake deliberately selected Ganjuurjab, Jirgalang, Khafungga, among others—men who did not hold aristocratic titles—to convene on the future of the borderlands. For

“geographical” reasons, the attendants again wanted to set up the autonomous province in Jirem

League first, then expand into other leagues and banners. Members of this conference accused

the Chinese Republic of hoisting the banner of equal and republican self- determination and autonomous rule for the last twenty years, and yet set up a tyrannical government that has conquered, assimilated, oppressed, and trampled

79 The meeting established the formation of the “Inner Mongolia Autonomy Preparation Office” which swore allegiance to the militias of Ganjuurjab and Khafengga and aimed to research the matter of “autonomy or independence” further. See “Nei Menggu Tailai huiyi yijue caoan” (14 December 1931) in Katakura Tadashi monjo 20–I–4, Archives at the University of Tokyo Department of Advanced Social and International Studies; Na-mu-hai- zha-bu [Namkhaijab], “Huiyi ‘Tailai huiyi’ qianhou” in Nei Menggu wenshi ziliao: Wei Manzhouguo Xing’an ziliao, Vol. 34 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1989), 2–4.

50 us Mongols, causing us to lose the function to develop our way of life and deteriorate by the day.

As a result, the Young Mongols at the meeting “happily welcomed the [Kantō] army to

eliminate the warlords and free us ... from bondage and oppression.” These men however

underestimated the extent to which Japanese would insinuate themselves in the borderlands.80

After the first Zhengjiatun Conference, Jirgalang (1904–1995)—also known in Chinese as De Gulai—articulated the boundaries of the autonomous zone in more concrete terms. A

Daγur educated in Beijing and Nagasaki, Jirgalang returned home to East Butkha and befriended the revolutionary Mersé before the latter’s untimely disappearance in 1931. Whereas Mersé had grown suspicious of intervening Japanese, Jirgalang sought alliances with them, as evidenced in his position paper from January 1932.81 Jirgalang, who would later work for the Manchukuo

government, situated the Mongolian Question in grandiose terms of world history to Katakura,

namely as the “cries for ethnic nationalism by the oppressed peoples of Asia” during this

“coming of the age of the Pacific.”

Jirgalang reiterated launching the autonomous province in the “geographically related”

Jirem League, then expanding the borders eastward to include East and West Butkha, Qiqihar,

and for the first time, Hulunbuir—all of which historically had Manchu military administrations

rather than Mongolian aristocratic rule—as well as the irregular banners of Yekhe Mingγan and

Old and New Suruk. Under this plan, Han residents of the banners would fall under the

jurisdiction of the new autonomous province. Jirgalang recommended cutting out those counties

80 Kikutake Jitsuzō, “Mōko tōji shidō seigansho dentei no ken” (22 January 1932) and “Menggu zizhi choubei weiyuanhui gonghan diyihao” (30 December 1931) in Katakura Tadashi monjo 20–I–3, Archives at the University of Tokyo Department of Advanced Social and International Studies.

81 Guo Mingsheng, “Ji De Gulai xiansheng” in Da-wo-er ziliao ji: Daor bitegei horiewu debtlien, ed. Da-wo-er ziliao ji bianji weiyuanhui, Quanguo shaoshu minzu guji zhengli yanjiushi, Vol. 8 (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2008), 50–53.

51 already occupying banner land with a completely Han population, while splitting up areas with

mixed populations. To take Jirgalang’s blueprint literally, however, meant to gerrymander the

province into spatial ineffectiveness, illegibility, and incoherence.

In order to realize this territorial scheme, Jirgalang believed that the Japanese would

broker an arrangement between the Republic of China and the Manchukuo state to set up

something akin to “independent Outer Mongolia.” Jirgalang therefore emphasized that the Kantō

Army should not view Manchuria-Mongolia as a single entity, but rather as two separate

problems. Katakura read these sections particularly carefully, underlining Jirgalang’s

explanation:

as the Han have overwhelmingly penetrated Manchuria and intermixed [with the Manchus], Manchuria has lost its inherent culture (J. koyū bunka) and has reached the current state of not even being able to separate out its ethnic boundaries ... Mongolia still has preserved (J. hōji) its inherent culture and the ethnic boundaries remain strikingly divided.

Nevertheless, Jirgalang betrayed his insurrectionist agenda in the sweeping reforms he

anticipated within the autonomous region. Recognizing the “nature of Mongols in yearning for

independence, freedom, and that romanticized livelihood,” he warned against continuing on with

the aristocratic regime that the older Yangsangjab embodied. Katakura took note. Jirgalang argued that the Mongolian territories had “not distanced themselves from a system of slavery”

where the ownership of both the land and labor remained in the privileged hands of princes.

Jirgalang accused nobles in making “harsh extractions and exorbitant demands” from their

subjects, as they had in the Gada Meyiren Revolt. Instead Jirgalang wanted to confiscate

aristocratic property and their private wealth, and in so doing, “abolish the tyranny that is the

slave system of the past.” Evoking the revolutionary language of Mersé, he resolved to

“internally, awaken the people, and externally, announce our position and demands to the world.

52 With ethnic self-determination as our basic principle, make them recognize our spontaneous actions by demonstrating clearly Japan’s position and righteousness ... Enacting ethnic self- determination as inherent to the land [J. koyū tochi] should be self-evident and undeniable.”82

Tellingly, this program for land reform would materialize to some extent in 1938, as seen in

Chapter Four. Kikutake brought together both generations to a tenuous consensus at a second conference in Zhengjiatun on February 20, 1932, vowing the creation of a “Mongol Autonomous

Administrative Region,” a ban on further land reclamation, and special protections for ethnic brethren living outside this province.83

Taking into account the above opinions and negotiations, the draft outline written by

Kikutake and released by the Kantō Army, “Guidelines for Dealing with the Mongolia Question alongside the Establishment of Manchuria-Mongolia,” settled the makeup of the new province once and for all. It would consist of combining “eastern Inner Mongolia” and Hulunbuir, as

Jirgalang had wanted. The designation “eastern Inner Mongolia” seems purposefully vague, but likely meant not only Jirem League, but also parts of Butkha, Mergen, and Qiqihar. Kikutake moreover envisioned the eventual extension of this province beyond the western border of

Manchukuo to include Chakhar and Sili-yin Gool, which implied that at some point either

Manchukuo itself would radically expand or the autonomous province would break off and unite with a potential client state in Inner Mongolia. (Of course, neither happened; the autonomous province awkwardly remained an inalienable part of Manchukuo even after the establishment of

Mengjiang in 1937.) Given the more immediate merger between the two different power bases in

82 De Gulai [Jirgalang], “Ikensho” (14 January 1932) in Katakura Tadashi monjo 20–I–3, Archives at the University of Tokyo Department of Advanced Social and International Studies.

83 Na-mu-hai-zha-bu [Namkhaijab] and Da-wa-ao-si-er [Dabaγa-Ochir], “Canjia ‘Zhengjiatun huiyi’ de huiyi” in Nei Menggu wenshi ziliao: Wei Manzhouguo Xing’an ziliao, Vol. 34 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1989), 5–6; “Mōko minzoku no kenpaku” in Manshū jihen, Vol. 7 of Gendaishi shiryō, eds. Kobayashi Tatsuo and Shimada Toshihiko (Tokyo: Misuzu shōbo, 1964), 388–389.

53 the borderlands—Jirem versus Hulunbuir, Mongols versus Daγurs—the Japanese leadership named the province “Khinggan” (Ch. Xing’an, J. Kōan, Mo. Kiŋγan) after the mountain range that bisected it.84 As a name, Khinggan would “revive ethnic consciousness,” and yet, as

Kikutake cynically pointed out a decade later, it would remain capacious enough to subdue “the sensitive nature of ethnic problems that were reflected in an ethnonym like Mongolia.” That is, the name “Khinggan” could encompass other ethnicities living in the province like the Baraγ,

Buriyat, Daγur, Oirat, Orochen, or Solon, who might not have necessarily identified themselves under the general category of “Mongolia.”

Kikutake and Kantō officers refused to recover the historical territory of the Mongols now lost to Han migration and reclamation, much to the frustration of the aristocracy. They would therefore have to draw a new eastern boundary to define Khinggan Province vis-à-vis the rest of Manchukuo. That demarcation, examined in the next section, ultimately left out Dorbet,

Gorlos Front and Rear, and Yekhe Mingγan Banners entirely, not to mention significant portions of Jirem League and the Manchu banners of Butkha, Mergen, and Qiqihar. Still, in the

“Guidelines for Dealing with the Mongolia Question,” the Kantō leadership guaranteed the separate management of Mongols in the mixed zones of settlement as a provisional measure. By excising much of the mixed zone of settlement, Kikutake believed that they could maintain the

“purity” of the territories, ethnically and environmentally, in “one special province for Mongols that will carry out autonomous rule through a pastoral economy,” an ideal further explained in indicate a deliberate tactic of confusion by the occupiers to disorient its subjects. Rather the

84 Khinggan means “ridge” or “mountain” in Mongolian.

54 Figure 1.2 Map of Qing League and Manchukuo Provincial Boundaries (1934)

55 Figure 1.3 Map of Qing League and Manchukuo Provincial Boundaries in English

56 Chapter Two.85 The uncertainty around what areas to incorporate in Khinggan Province did not

indicate a deliberate tactic of confusion by the occupiers to disorient its subjects. Rather the

contingency and disorder reveal that Japanese and Mongols alike continued to wrestle with

defining and demarcating territory as an expression of identity, as either based on historical

claims to land or the present demographic distribution.

Finally, after six months of dialogue, Khinggan Province became a cartographic reality

when Prime Minister Zheng Xiaoxu (1860–1938) announced Directive 12 on March 9, 1932,

only three weeks after the founding of Manchukuo. Zheng named Chimedsempil, the former

leader of Jirem League as the head of the Khinggan Bureau (Ch. Xing’an ju, J. Kōan kyoku) with

Kikutake as second-in-command to oversee the province itself. Khinggan Province consisted of

three components: the North, formerly all of Hulunbuir, led by Lingsheng (1886–1936); the East,

formerly parts of Butkha, Mergen, and Qiqihar, led by Oronchun (1880–1938); and the South,

formerly parts of Jirem League, led by Yeshekhayisan.86 The responsibility of “delimiting the

[eastern] boundary” (Ch. huading jingjie), however, the prime minister left up to Kikutake, and

dividing up the borderlands would commence another round of territorial compromise for its

residents.87

85 Kantō gun shirei bu, “Manmō kensetsu ni tomonau Mōko mondai shori yōkō” (6 February 1932) in Katakura Tadashi monjo 11-A-15, Archives at the University of Tokyo Department of Advanced Social and International Studies; Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 19.

86 Oronchun, purportedly the uncle of De Gulai, had acted as the head of the Butkha Eight Banners and then worked in the department of military affairs in Heilongjiang Province before the Manchurian Invasion. Lingsheng, the son of the Hulunbuir garrison lieutenant general Guifu, had represented Daγur interests in various committees in Fengtian and Nanjing. See Kōan sōsho chōsaka, Mōko jin meiroku (Kōan sōsho chōsaka, 1933), 29, 49.

87 “Jiaoling di 12 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 1 (1 April 1932), 26.

57 THE POLITICS OF DEMARCATION

Settling both the external and internal limits of Khinggan Province relied less on the

technical procedures of surveying than it did on imperial conceptions of nomadic space—a

territory largely occupied by one ethnicity and one livelihood, no matter how much this clear

vision diverged from the jumbled realities on the ground. Rather than satisfying revanchist

claims of the Mongol elite, Japanese occupiers drew a new border based on the agricultural pale

and ethnic composition as they stood in 1932. Still, official sources deceptively spoke of this

process as “reinstating” (J. fukki) banners within Khinggan Province, even when this entity itself

was a modern invention. Through “reinstatement,” the state converted the uneven space of the

borderlands into uniform administrations: in the categorizations of Kikutake, the “nomadic”

banners of Jirem and Ju Uda Leagues and the “garrison” banners of Butkha, Hulunbuir, and

Mergen all became identical components of Khinggan Province.88 Smaller, exceptional banners that previously had no distinctly “tribal” identity likewise experienced rationalization, such as the lamasery quarter of Sireγe Khüree, the imperial pastures of Suruk, and the exile community of Yekhe Mingγan. Cartographically speaking, “reinstatement” required excising Chinese counties from the territories, consolidating smaller units in banners of roughly equal size, and sometimes fabricating borders to affix populations to the map, some for the first time.

Directive 39 first crystallized provincial and banner boundaries in June 1932. In

“demarcating [Ch. huading] the area of the province, each sub-province, and each banner,”

Directive 39 listed borders in extreme detail, using names of rivers and mountains, counties and villages, monasteries and cairns (Mo. oboγ-a) to orient the reader. Only once did Directive 39

88 Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 28.

58 Figure 1.4 Map of Khinggan Province and the Former Mongol Territories (1934)

59 Figure 1.5 Banner Jurisdictions from Republican to Manchukuo Periods

à (1934) Rehe (1937) Rehe

Khinggan West West Khinggan 錦州省

à 熱河省熱河省 à 熱河省 ehe Manchukuo Province Manchukuo Jinzhou Rehe R Rehe Rehe West Khinggan 興安西省 Khinggan South South Khinggan 興安南省 (1934)

吐默特中翼旗吐默特右翼旗吐默特左翼旗敖漢旗庫倫旗扎魯特旗 Manchukuo Banner (c. 1934) (c. Banner Manchukuo Right Tümed Middle Tümed Left Tümed Khüree Aokhan Jarud

喀喇沁中旗

喀喇沁右旗

喀喇沁左旗唐古特喀爾喀旗翁牛特右翼旗

敖漢南旗錫埒圖庫倫旗敖漢右翼旗巴林右翼旗阿魯科爾沁旗翁牛特左翼旗吐默特右翼旗敖漢左翼旗巴林左翼旗喀爾喀左翼旗吐默特左翼旗扎魯特右翼旗扎魯特左翼旗克什克騰旗奈曼旗 (c.1930)

Khüree Khüree ud Left Left ud Right ud e ɣ ɣ ɣ arin Right arin Left arin ɣ ɣ Banner Right Tümed Left Tümed Right Kharachin Middle Kharachin Left Kharachin Khalkh Tangut Sire Left Khalkh Naiman Ongi Ongi South Aokhan Right Aokhan Left Aokhan Ba Ba Khesigten JarudRight JarudLeft Khorchin Aru

Rehe 熱河省 Republican Republican Province

Josotu JuuUda 桌索圖盟昭烏達盟 Qing Qing Division

League Mongol Mongol System

60 Figure 1.5 Banner Jurisdictions from Republican to Manchukuo Periods (Continued)

à

龍江省濱江省吉林省 Khinggan South South Khinggan 興安南省 Jilin Binjiang South Khinggan Longjiang East Khinggan 興安東省 East Khinggan Khinggan South (1940) South Khinggan

莫力達瓦旗 a ɣ 喜札嘎爾旗阿榮旗巴彥旗 ar ar 布特哈旗那文旗

ɣ un ɣ Khorchin Right Front Right Khorchin Counties into Disbanded Counties into Disbanded Daba Morin Butha Ari Naun Bayan Khija 科爾沁右翼前旗

東布特哈八旗科爾沁右翼中旗

莫爾根八旗齊齊哈爾八旗科爾沁左翼中旗科爾沁右翼前旗科爾沁右翼後旗

科爾沁左翼前旗科爾沁左翼後旗索倫縣依克明安旗郭爾羅斯前旗郭爾羅斯後旗 an ght Back ght ɣ 杜爾伯特旗蘇魯科旗扎賚特旗

Suruk Front Right Khorchin Middle Right Khorchin Ri Khorchin Front Left Khorchin Middle Left Khorchin Back Left Khorchin Front Gorlos Back Gorlos Jalaid Dorbet Ming Yeke Banners Eight Qiqihar Banners Eight Butha East Banners Eight Butha West 西布特哈八旗 Banners Eight Mergen County Suolon

奉天省 Fengtian 黑龍江省 ilin 吉林省 J Heilongjiang

Jirem 哲里木盟

Eight Eight League Mongol Mongol Banners Manchu Manchu

61 Figure 1.5 Banner Jurisdictions from Republican to Manchukuo Periods (Continued)

Khinggan North Khinggan 興安北省額爾古納右翼旗額爾古納左翼旗索倫旗

Solon Right Ergunë Left Ergunë 新巴爾虎右翼旗新巴爾虎左翼旗索倫右翼旗 Right Right Left

索倫左翼旗陳巴爾虎旗

ɣ ɣ 鄂倫春旗 ɣ

布里雅特旗額魯特旗 Old Bara Old Bara New Bara New Right Solon Left Solon Buriyat Oirat Orochon

黑龍江省 Heilongjiang

呼倫貝爾 Hulunbuir

Eight Eight Manchu Manchu Banners

62 use latitudinal lines, the only example of cartographic objectivity encoded in this law.89 The

Demarcation under Directive 39 did not represent a single, definitive break of Khinggan

Province from the rest of Manchukuo that June, but more broadly, several attempts to adjust and readjust the border over two years (and arguably the entire occupation). In the most contentious areas where no natural features could divide the land as neatly as the Japanese had wanted, borderland banners had to present compelling evidence of their ethnic composition and pastoral livelihood to qualify as a part of Khinggan Province.

Directive 39 made clear that borderland indigenes would not be able to recover their historical claims to the land. Kikutake decided that the new eastern boundary, from north to south, would run down the Naun River (Ch. Nenjiang), follow the Chaγan kerem (Ch. Baibian qiang, Changchun qiang), a white-colored earthen barrier built to divide the Mongols from the

Jurchens in the thirteenth century, and then cut into the Khorchin territories.90 The Demarcation

along the Naun broke up the former Qing banner administration in the river valley, splitting

Mergen, retaining West Butkha within Khinggan Province on one side, but disevering East

Butkha and Qiqihar on the other. Thus, the bureau erased East Butkha in favor of its elemental

counties; similar processes took place in Mergen and Qiqihar as well. While cartographically

convenient, the Naun border also halved Daγur, Orochen, and Solon communities that had

existed on either side of the river. As a result, the Demarcation isolated thousands of Mongols

and Tungus in Chinese counties within Manchukuo proper. The ensuing problem of ethnic

89 “Jiaoling di 39 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 18 (27 June 1932), 2–4.

90 “Jiaoling di 39 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 18 (27 June 1932), 2–4; Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 42; Western travelogues called this structure the “Khinggan Wall,” see Peter Fleming, A Forgotten Journey (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), 165–166; Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 45.

63 enclaves provoked a refugee crisis that would lead to mass population transfers across the

Khinggan divide.

Further south, Directive 39 compromised the territorial integrity of Jirem League, cutting

off four banners from the original group: Dorbet, Gorlos Front and Rear, and Yekhe Mingγan.

Kikutake justified this decision by arguing that these four “outside” banners had shifted to

agrarian economy, and saw them instead as a “cheek to cover” the autonomous zone from further

Han colonization. Kikutake believed that these banners could act as a “release valve” to

Khinggan Province for Mongols moving there from elsewhere in Manchukuo. As a result, he

decided to approve nearly all ten Chinese counties in each of these banners, which left just

slivers of the original banner territory in Mongol hands.91 Regardless of thousands of Mongols living in these four banners, the environmental relations with the land—that is, agricultural instead of pastoral—overrode ethnic identity in determining where to draw the border.

The Demarcation through the Khorchin banners in South Khinggan caused the most dissension. Sumingga and other leaders had hoped to salvage some territory using the

Zhengjiatun-Qiqihar railway as a convenient divider, but Han settlement in this area had become too dense. Instead, the Japanese side made the excuse that they could not find hardly any documentation that had “codified” this border into Republican law. Further investigation on the ground remained impossible because ongoing bandit attacks were thwarting Japanese attempts to conduct field surveys. Kikutake as a result relied on self-reporting from the banners themselves to draw the line through the borderlands.92 Thus mere weeks after issuing Directive 39, the

Khinggan Bureau required each banner in the “mixed zone” of settlement (Ch. zaju quyu) to

91 Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 59.

92 Manshūkoku Kōan kyoku chōsaka, Manshū teikoku Mōsei jūnen shi (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1942), 7.

64 complete a detailed survey that would confirm which territories along the pale would become a

part of the new province. The questionnaire asked for current conditions of land tenure, natural

resources, resident troops, financial affairs, local government, population distribution,

transportation infrastructure, and lines of communication. The first section of the study, and most

likely taking the most pressing priority, queried about land rights, but in markedly different

language than what Republican records had used before: how much of the land counted as

“privately sold by Mongols” versus “seized” (Ch. qinzhan) or “cultivated under duress” (Ch.

qiangken)? Rather than discussing cultivation as a euphemistic question of “opening” (Ch.

kaifang) or “homesteading” (Ch. kaiken) by Han settlers, the unprecedented study shifted the

focus of inquiry onto the dispossession of Mongols themselves.

Following up on this survey, the Khinggan Bureau demanded a map of each banner since

charts and statistics alone would “easily cause [previously] unknown conflicts over boundaries.”

Emphasizing the urgency of the matter, the instructions warned: “do not be sluggish!”93 The

maps returned to the bureau, however, pointed to diverging epistemologies of space between the

foreign occupiers and native residents. The Japanese groused about “all of these rough sketches

[J. mitorizu] drafted by Mongol hands” that had “inaccurately” positioned cartographic markers

like rivers, mountains, and villages. Even place names contradicted each other. As a result, they

made the Mongols redraw their maps three times.94 The lack of scientific precision—exacted by

surveying instruments, rather than estimated by the eye or recalled from memory—frustrated the

93 “Xing’an ju gonghan” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 28 (23 July 1932), 10–14; “Xing’an ju gonghan” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 31 (3 August 1932), 1; “Xing’an zongshu xunling di 190 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 79 (21 December 1932), 6–7. The survey request applied to the historically Mongolian banners of Dorbet, Gorlos Front and Rear, Jalaid, Khorchin Left Flank Front and Middle, Suruk, and Yekhe Mingγan, as well as the mixed Daur and Solon areas of East Butkha, Mergen and Qiqihar banners.

94 Manshūkoku Kōan kyoku chōsaka, Manshū teikoku Mōsei jūnen shi (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1942), 7.

65 Japanese who saw cartographic objectivity as the only way to resolve ethnic and environmental

conflicts over the land.

Although Directive 39 promised to recover all land that “had been occupied by force”

(Ch. qiangzhan), dispossession under the Demarcation was still simply enormous. Kikutake

argued to retain the tracts that had sparked the Gada Meyiren Revolt because they had “violated

the integrity of the original banner” (J. sonritsu wo hakasu mono).95 Even so, Kikutake cut away

sixteen Chinese counties along the edge of the other Khorchin banners. The surface area lost by

Jirem League amounted to 22,000 square miles, or about two-thirds the size of Hokkaido.96 This vast expanse also included Tongliao, a Han community completely circumscribed by Mongol lands. Whereas the Mongol elite wanted to name Tongliao as the capital of Khinggan Province,

Kikutake provisionally designated it as an “enclave” (J. tobichi) of Fengtian Province until they could “lull” an already alarmed population “to peace.” Kikutake remained hesitant about

“reinstating” Tongliao and other cities in Khinggan Province, such as Hailar and Manzhouli, because their “complete commercialization by the Han” would otherwise reorient the banner economy towards the urban center, creating a “hinterland existence” (J. kōhaichi no sonzai) out of the surrounding Mongolian territories. Kikutake’s fraught decision to isolate Tongliao, rather than to assimilate it into the surrounding banner, satisfied no one: Han residents felt threatened by the sudden reversal of Chinese colonization, whereas Mongolian inhabitants insisted that the occupation had not gone far enough in recovering lost ground.97 Ultimately Japanese concessions

95 “Jiaoling di 39 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 18 (27 June 1932), 2–4; Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 57.

96 Manshūkoku Kōan kyoku chōsaka, Manshū teikoku Mōsei jūnen shi (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1942), 7.

97 Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 56; Kikutake Jitsuzō, “Kōan in kansei bikō” (11 March 1932) in Katakura Tadashi kankei monjo 290, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room, National Diet Library; Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 209.

66 to allow the continued existence of Tongliao presaged Han priorities over Mongol ones in the

counties along the provincial border.

Besides settling the eastern boundary of the province, the Khinggan authorities worked to

fix internal divides between the banners as well; it drew fresh perimeters in East Khinggan and

rationalized historical borders in North Khinggan. Because East Khinggan represented an

entirely “synthetic political product,” the bureau drafted completely invented boundaries on the

map after dissolving three counties in the area.98 Only Suolun County in the southwest corner of

East Khinggan retained its shape, but now it officially became Khijaγar Banner. Imagined in

Chinese atlases as a largely blank space, partitioned only away at its edges by new counties, this

area now featured permanent and totalizing administrative markings on paper under the Japanese

occupation.99 Under the Qing, Tungusic hunters, loosely organized in the Manchu Eight Banners, had collected sable for imperial tribute in the Naun River Valley. The configuration of the valleys running from the watershed of the Khinggan Range to the Naun River broadly determined the nomadic range of these communities.100 These unofficial limits may have informed the initial parameters of the banners because the Khinggan Bureau used geographical

98 Kōan sōsho chōsaka, Shinkō no Kōan shō gaikan (Kōan sōsho chōsaka, 1934), 14; Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 191.

99 See, for example, these Qing and Republican maps of Heilongjiang and Jilin: “Heilongjiang yutu shuo” (Dalian: Youwen ge, Liaohai shushe, 1934); “Heilongjiang quansheng yutu” (Heilongjiang diaocha ju, 1911); “Heilongjiang sheng ditu” (Tianjin: Beiyang lujun canmou chu, 1906); “Jilin sheng ditu” (Tianjin: Beiyang lujun canmou chu, 1906); “Nenjiang shuilu tu” (Shanghai: Shanghai zhonghua shuju, 1915). Qing and Republican gazetteers provide vague descriptions of garrison locations in relation to cardinal directions; see Guangxu Hu-lun-bei-er zhi shugao (c. 1900), 17–23; Cheng Tingheng and Zhang Jiafan, Minguo Hu-lun-bei-er zhilüe (1923), 457–458 in Zhongguo difang zhi shucheng: Nei Menggu fuxian zhiji, Vol. 16 (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2012); Meng Dinggong, Bu-te-ha zhilüe (Liaohai shushe, 1935).

100 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 185; S. M. Shirokogoroff, Social Organization of the Northern Tungus with Introductory Chapters Concerning Geographical Distribution and the History of These Groups (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, Limited, 1929), 62–81.

67 Figure 1.6 Map of Heilongjiang Province with League and County Boundaries (1915)

landmarks such as mountains and rivers as intuitive dividers.101 The new names of these banners

also embodied physical features of the land or its natural bounty in local languages, rather than

signaling explicit tribal ownership: Ariγun (pure), Bayan (wealthy), Butkha (hunting grounds),

Khijaγar (frontier), Morin Dabaγa (winding pass), and Naun referred to the river itself.102 When confronted with seeming cartographic emptiness, then, Japanese resorted to dividing up the land by natural barriers and choosing indigenous names based on nature, not on peoples, so as to counteract further ethnic entrenchment in fixed areas.

Unlike the complete cartographic fabrication that constituted East Khinggan, historical precedents dominated boundary-making in the largely nomadic North Khinggan. These boundaries nevertheless had the infuriating tendency of escaping the map: the eleven banners arranged by military affiliation under the Qing had proliferated into seventeen, and then twenty- one banners organized by “tribal” identity during the Republican period.103 By 1932, however,

101 See Kōan tōshō sōmuka, Kōan tōshō gaikan (Jalantun: Kōan tōshō sōmuka, 1938), 8–10. For example, to make up Ariγun Banner, planners assembled Yalu County Police District No. 3, Buxi County Police District No. 5, and a hamlet in Gannan County, but the Ariγun Banner gazetteer does not elucidate how these districts mapped onto Qing banner garrisons in the area and earlier hunting grounds. See Mōseibu chōsaka, Aei ki jijō (Mimeograph, 1936), Yamaguchi University Library; Manshūkoku Kōan tōshō Bakuryakutachiga ki kōsho, Bakuryakutachiga ki jijō (Handwritten manuscript, 1936), Special Collections at the Department of Economics, Toyama University; Kōan sōcho chōsa ka, Kisakaru ki jijō (Typewritten manuscript, 1934), Yamaguchi University Library.

102 Bayan Banner absorbed Naun Banner in July 1933 for unexplained reasons; East and West Butkha also merged into Butkha Banner that year. Note that the Manchukuo location of East Butkha before the merger did not correspond to its previous site under the Qing and Republic; see Senuma Kazuo, ed., Manshūkoku gensei (Shinkyō: Manshūkoku tūshinsha, 1938), 219.

103 For example, see the map in the back of Kōan sōsho chōsaka, Shinkō no Kōan shō gaikan (Kōan sōsho chōsaka, 1934). The Republican gazetteer for Hulunbuir provides textual but not diagrammatic, boundaries for banner pastures, such as the Solon Bordered Yellow and Plain White Banners lying “south east of the garrison” with the following borders: “Zha-dun River to the east, Yi-min River to the west, the east bank of the Xi-ni-ke River to the south, the north bank of the Khailar River to the south.” See Cheng Tingheng and Zhang Jiafan, Minguo Hu-lun-bei- er zhilüe (1923) in Zhongguo difang zhi shucheng: Nei Menggu fuxian zhiji, Vol. 16 (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2012), 457–458. Under the Qing, the eleven Hulunbuir banners consisted of two Solon units under Old Baraγ, eight Baraγ units under New Baraγ, and one Oirat unit. In 1912, Solon Left Wing divided into four Solon units while Solon Right Wing divided into two Solon units and two Old Baraγ units (also known as Chipchin) for a total of seventeen units. The Oirat banner split into two parts by ethnicity: the original Oirat unit and the Kirghiz unit. The local administration also created, for the first time, a banner for the Orochon who were “rapidly ‘turning

69 the local government had collapsed these twenty-one banners to eight in number, by putative

ethnic categories: New Baraγ Right and Left Flank, Old Baraγ, Buriyat, Oirat, Orochen, and

Solon Right and Left Flank Banners, none of which seemed to have “clearly articulated” borders

to the Japanese. Directive 39, however, did not elucidate any further decisions in North

Khinggan, opting instead to “determine the territory of every banner later.”104 The next year,

banner leaders met in Hailar, debated jurisdictional lines, and “set the boundaries of the banners

for the first time.” Japanese officers wanted to rename all of the banners after local rivers in

order to flatten interethnic differences into one overarching “Mongolian” identity as they had in

East Khinggan, but dropped the matter due to fierce opposition.105 Ultimately, the bureau did

away with the Chinese counties founded in the Republican period, namely Hulun, Lubin, Qigan,

and Shiwei. It also merged the disparate but proximate Buriyat, Oirat, Solon Right and Left

Flank Banners into one entity renamed Solon Banner. The Khinggan Bureau then created two

new districts out of Orochen Banner in an area north of the Ergune River populated by Tungusic

hunters, as well as Cossack farmers who had fled the Russian Revolution. On the map, that

empty northwest corner of Manchukuo now became Ergune Left and Right Flank Banners. The

fact that these new banners seemed roughly equal in surface area suggests that Japanese planners

sought a cartographic reality that overrode some of the particularities of ethnic identification to a

specific space in favor of administrative uniformity and simplicity.

Mongol,’ and are now sufficiently ‘tribal’ to be organized in the modern Mongol style on a tribal-territorial basis” and two banners for refugee Buriyats from the Soviet Union, for a total of twenty one banners. See Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 162–163; Cheng Tingheng and Zhang Jiafan, Minguo Hu-lun-bei-er zhilüe (1923) in Zhongguo difang zhi shucheng: Nei Menggu fuxian zhiji, Vol. 16 (Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe, 2012), 414–415.

104 “Jiaoling di 39 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 18 (27 June 1932), 2–4.

105 Manshūkoku Kōan kyoku chōsaka, Manshū teikoku Mōsei jūnen shi (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1942), 9.

70 Complicating what would count as the Mongolian territories even further, the Kantō

Army captured Rehe Province in February 1933 and expanded the boundaries of Manchukuo

westward. The annexation also brought the seven banners of Josotu League and thirteen banners

of Juu Uda League into the Japanese fold. Like in Hulunbuir, some of these banners underwent

consolidation, likely for reasons of legibility and simplification: Aokhan, Jarud, and Khüree. In

the last case, for example, Khüree formerly consisted of three banners: Khalkh Left Flank,

Tangut Khalkh, and Sireγe Khüree. Both Khalkh Left Flank and Tangut Khalkh only spanned

territory of about fifteen miles across each, with no strong “tribal” affiliation, whereas Sireγe

Khüree consisted of a monastery precinct rather than an actual banner, hence the decision to

integrate these disparate units into one territorial body.106

Four months later, the bureau carved out some of the banners from Juu Uda League and

created West Khinggan: Aru Khorchin, Baγarin Left and Right Flank, Jarud, and Khesigten

Banner. While the bureau chose to retain Kailu and Linxi as actual counties within the province

(and the only ones at that), it dismantled another five completely because “those had yet to

complete setting up their county administrations.” Kikutake decided that the Sir-a Mören River

(Ch. Xi-la-mu-lun) would serve as the southern border of Khinggan Province because he

believed that the those banners located below the river had turned completely to agriculture.

Therefore he initially excluded: Aokhan; Kharachin Right, Middle, and Left Flank; Khüree;

Naiman; Ongniγud Right and Left Flank; and Tümed Right, Middle, and Left Flank Banners.

Instead, he planned to assimilate them into the Chinese county administration because “the

Sinicization of each banner had already become pronounced.” In December 1934, however, the

106 Kōan sōsho chōsaka, Haruha Saki Chaharu Karukaki jijō (Mimeograph, 1934), Yamaguchi University Library; Kōan sōsho chōsaka, Tangūto Karukaki jijō (Mimeograph, 1934), Yamaguchi University Library; Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 253–260, 267–268.

71 Figure 1.7 Counties Disbanded within and Excised from Khinggan Province

Jurisdiction Banner Counties Disbanded within Counties Excised from Khinggan Province Khinggan Province North Ergune Left Shiwei 室韋 Khinggan 額爾古納左翼旗 Ergune Right Qigan 奇乾額爾古納右翼旗 New Baraγ Right Lubin 盧濱新巴爾虎右旗 Solon 索倫旗 Hulun 呼倫 East East Butkha Dedu 德都, Hailun 海倫, Kedong Khinggan 東布特哈八旗克東, Keshan 克山, Longmen 龍門, Nehe 訥河, Tongbei 通北 West Butkha Buxi 布西, Gannan 甘南, Suolun 西布特哈八旗索倫, Yalu 雅魯 Mergen 墨爾根八旗 Nenjiang 嫩江 and all territory east Qiqihar 齊齊哈爾八旗 Gannan 甘南, Longjiang 龍江 Fuyu 富裕 South Jalaid 扎賚特旗 Jingxing 景星, Wuxing 武興 Dalai 大賚, Tailai 泰來, Wuxing Khinggan (partial) 武興 (partial) Khorchin Left Front Faku 法庫, Kangping 康平科爾沁左翼前旗 Khorchin Left Middle Liaobeihuang 遼北荒, Changtu 昌圖, Faku 法庫, 科爾沁左翼中旗 Xijiahuang 西夾荒 (tracts) Huaide 懷德, Kangping 康平, Liaoyuan 遼源, Lishu 梨樹, Shuangshan 雙山, Tongliao 通遼 Khorchin Left Back Changtu 昌圖, Faku 法庫, 科爾沁左翼後旗 Kangping 康平, Liaoyuan 遼源 Khorchin Right Front Tuquan 突泉 Kaitong 開通, Taoan 洮安科爾沁右翼前旗 (Baicheng 白城), Taonan 洮南 Khorchin Right Middle Danyu 膽榆, Tuquan 突泉 Dalai 大賚科爾沁右翼中旗 Khorchin Right Back Zhenbei 鎮北 Anguang 安廣, Zhendong 鎮東科爾沁右翼後旗 West Aru Khorchin Tianshan 天山 Khinggan 阿魯科爾沁旗 Baγarin Left 巴林左翼 Lindong 林東 Baγarin Right 巴林右旗 Lindong 林東 Linxi 林西 Jarud Left Lubei 魯北扎魯特左翼旗 Jarud Right Lubei 魯北, Tianshan 天山 Kailu 開魯扎魯特右翼旗 Khesigten 克什克騰旗 Jingpeng 經棚 Jilin Gorlos Front Gan’an 乾安 Changchun 長春, Changling 長郭爾羅斯前旗嶺, Dehui 德惠, Jiutai 九台, Nongan 農安

72 Figure 1.7 Counties Disbanded within and Excised from Khinggan Province (Continued)

Heilongjiang Gorlos Back Zhaodong 肇東, Zhaozhou 肇州郭爾羅斯後旗 Dorbet 杜爾伯特旗 Taikang 泰康 Anda 安達, Lindian 林甸 Yekhe Mingγan Baiquan 拜泉, Kedong 克東, 依克明安旗 Keshan 克山, Yian 依安 Rehe Aokhan 敖漢旗 Jianping 建平 (later Xinhui 新惠) Kharachin Left Lingnan 陵南, Lingyuan 陵源喀喇沁左旗 (both later Jianchang 建昌) Kharachin Middle Ningcheng 寧城, Pingquan 平泉喀喇沁中旗 (later Ningcheng) Kharachin Right Jianping 建平, Ningcheng 寧城喀喇沁右旗 (later Jianping) Naiman 奈曼旗 Suidong 綏東 Ongniγud Left Chifeng 赤峰 (later Wudan 烏丹) 翁牛特左旗 Ongniγud Right Chifeng 赤峰翁牛特右旗 Jinzhou Tümed Left 吐默特左旗 Fuxin 阜新 Tümed Right Chaoyang 朝陽吐默特右旗

bureau—realizing how Mongols still kept pastoral livelihoods in some areas—reassessed the Sir-

a Mören as the border and redistricted Khüree, Naiman, and Ongniγud Left Flank Banner into

South and West Khinggan.107 Revising this southern border indicates that despite the Sir-a

Mören serving as a convenient divide, the underlying legitimacy of the province lay in its pastoral livelihood as much as it did in its indigenous identity, and as such, environmental relations helped define autonomy in the borderlands.

The Demarcation relied upon an imperial conviction that nomadic herding and sedentary agriculture could not coexist in Khinggan Province. Converting the heterogeneous and interdependent space of the borderlands into homogeneous and autonomous territory required a number of strategies by the state: adopting natural features as new provincial and banner boundaries, excising Chinese counties from the province based on differences in livelihoods, and

107 Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 58; Suzuki Nirei, Manshūkoku to Uchi Mongoru: Man-Mō seisaku kara Kōan-shō tōchi e (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012), 363.

73 grouping together smaller, neighboring banners into one unit regardless of ethnic affiliation. By

1934 the Khinggan Bureau had dissolved nearly twenty Qing and Republican counties within the

province. Even so, from its inception, the demographic makeup never reflected the ethnic “purity”

of Kikutake’s vision; Mongols—many of whom were farmers—comprised about sixty percent of

the total population, and the balance would tip in favor of the Han living primarily in the

province’s urban centers over the next ten years. East of the Naun River and south of the Sir-a

Mören, Kikutake had left out fifteen banners and confirmed almost forty counties in Manchukuo

proper, and became known as the “former Mongol lands” (J. Kyū Mōchi). All told, the area of

this territory lost in the Demarcation amounted to an estimated figure of 40,000 square miles or

more. The Khinggan Bureau would continue to calibrate the map—incorporating Tuquan County

into the province late in 1944, for example—but the basic blueprint of these banners would

largely remain stable throughout the Japanese occupation.108

SETTLING AND UNSETTLING THE PALE

The Demarcation, however, provoked a series of riots along the pale, exposing the inability of the Japanese regime to match artificial boundaries to actual populations or their livelihoods. The drama unfolded in the pages of the Manchukuo government communiqué over the next two years. Even after the Demarcation, in-county Mongols in Manchukuo proper still wanted to “recover” the land that had belonged to their banner during the Qing. In responding to their petitions in the spring of 1933, Chimedsempil described the tense state of affairs: “since

108 Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 56–60; Kikutake Jitsuzō, “Kōan in kansei bikō” (11 March 1932) in Katakura Tadashi kankei monjo 290, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room, National Diet Library. In 1944, the Khinggan Bureau redistricted Jarud, Jalaid, Khijaγar, Khorchin Right Flank Front, Middle, and Rear Banners, and Tuquan County into a central province.

74 hearing of the directive in the southern part of the province, either the people have revolted or the

counties have objected to the proposals from the very beginning.” He lamented that “it has

already been a year since the country’s founding and these administrative districts still have not

been able to demarcate [a boundary], making [us] a laughingstock among nations [Ch. tengxiao

liebang].” Even worse, Chimedsempil feared that the “intentional [attempts] at blocking the

directive would cause the province to collapse.” According to the governor, the primary

obstacles to completing the survey lay in “a cabal of evil gentry ... passing off their own opinions

as the people’s will or local officials feeling too attached to their realm.” He openly accused the

Civil Ministry of cowardice in handling these functionaries and demanded that the office forbid

them from protesting Directive 39. Chimedsempil insisted that the Khinggan Bureau was only

partitioning banners and counties, not actually pitting Mongols against Han at the individual

level, but the “ethnic harmony” it had hoped to achieve represented one of segregation, not

integration. In separating counties from banners, the governor aimed to keep Mongols and Han

from ethnic conflict; however, that very process generated waves of unexpected violence. “Both

sides refuse to give in,” he wrote in exasperation, “and I fear that our country’s administration

will never be settled.” Instead, the state had to dispatch soldiers various counties to contain the

violence; discontented residents blocked the police while assaulting and driving out local leaders

from town. One county declared martial law and the officers left in charge went on rampages in

the villages.109

Resistance to redistricting concentrated in five countries along the Khinggan provincial

border: from south to north, Kangping and Tuquan in Fengtian Province and Tailai, Jingxing,

and Nenjiang in Heilongjiang Province. The remainder of this section discusses the reactions and

109 “Xing’an zongshu zi di 33 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 110 (24 March 1933), 12–13; “Xing’an zongshu zi di 96 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 159 (8 July 1933), 3.

75 revisions to Directive 39 as they unfolded on a county-by-county basis along this divide. In

Kangping County, Han migrants from Zhili Province had begun homesteading in the area from

the late seventeenth century and by the 1930s, they vastly outnumbered the “original” Mongols,

in some districts by as much as 250 to 1. Kangping County, as a result, dealt with over two

hundred years of ethnic strife between Han and Mongols who fought over what had basically

become desert by the twentieth century. Even so, Directive 39 required the county administration

to give up a substantial amount of land to Khinggan Province: half of District 2, most of Districts

3, 5, 6, and all of Districts 7 and 8. Since Kangping featured no natural landmarks, the Japanese

authorities gave up drawing out the provincial boundaries within these districts. When the Civil

Ministry discovered that most of the Mongol settlements in the county centered around one

particular temple in District 8, it instead decided to “reinstate” just this part to Khinggan

Province.110 Faced with a seemingly blank landscape in Kangping, the Manchukuo government ultimately chose boundaries based on current demographic distribution, rather than trying to disentangle a long history of land relations.

Over two hundred miles northwest of Kangping lay Tuquan County, the second site of contention. According to another directive released in July 1933, Tuquan County—with a population breakdown of over forty thousand Han and 3200 Mongols—would cease to exist:

Khorchin Right Flank Middle Banner in Khinggan Province would repossess the northern three- fourths of the county (Districts 4, 5, 6, 7, and most of 2), while Taonan County in Fengtian

Province would subsume the rump administration (Districts 1 and 3). Manchukuo authorities called village headmen and community leaders into Fengtian for this announcement and had them return home to spread the word. The reaction was one of shock: “after decades of Han

110 Minseibu, “Kōan shōkyō mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, 758–760, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

76 Figure 1.8 Ethnic Composition of Khinggan Border Counties

County, Province District Mongols Han Households People Households People Jingxing, Heilongjiang 128 720 1995 13800 Nenjiang, Heilongjiang District 5 300 1800 600 3400 Tailai, Heilongjiang Anzi 50 350 3000 20000 Qizi 5 30 4000 38000 Wangzi 130 800 1300 10000 Kangping, Fengtian District 2 4 20 1200 5000 District 3 0 10 1000 4800 District 5 20 100 1800 11000 District 6 20 100 2400 15000 District 7 10 1000 3000 24000 District 8 80 800 4700 26000 Tuquan, Fengtian District 2 200 1000 2230 15600 District 4 100 500 1800 11000 District 5 150 800 1020 6600 District 6 240 1600 1147 7400 District 7 150 900 90 480 and Mongols calmly living side by side,” observed Japanese commentators, “the sudden redistricting has caused an uproar among the residents of the county, stirring a feeling of stormy waves upon the plain.” Hearing of their county’s dissolution, “magistrates and denizens responded as if it were a life-or-death situation.”111 On July 28, 1933, a rogue police officer named Liu Rui (ethnicity unknown) from the Tian’en Precinct of South Khinggan took matters into his own hands, and with a dozen Mongol soldiers entered District 4 and attempted to divert the collection of rent in Tuquan toward banner coffers. In effect Liu Rui had declared District 4 as Mongol land, much to the hostility of the eleven thousand Han settlers living there. The ensuing ethnic clashes—described in the sources as an “extremely reckless” kind of “disruptive behavior ... that shook public sentiment”—posed a “real threat to the security of Fengtian

Province.”112 County elites submitted three or four different appeals to the Civil Ministry in

111 Hōten chihō jimusho chō, Kōan shō kōsei kuiki henkō ni tomonafu Kō-Hō ryōshō no kyōgai mondai (Hōten shō kōsho keimuchō hō) (Typewritten manuscript, 23 August 1933), Yamaguchi University Library.

112 “Kōan shō tai Tossen ken funsō” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 5, No. 9 (26 August 1933), 280; “Tossen ken hen’nyū ha hitomazu chūshi” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 5, No. 11 (9 September 1933), 343–344.

77 Xinjing, leading to the central government assembling a team of national and provincial officials

to tour Tuquan with local representatives.

The Japanese reports from this investigation heavily favored the Han petitioners.

Tuquan’s topography—a “very hilly county with no natural features to use as a foundation for

drawing borders”—had impeded all attempts at a clear delineation of land rights, which accrued

a history of contestations dating from the late nineteenth century.113 As a result, analysts concluded that Khinggan Province “exploited the directive as a shield to take over these areas.”

The Mantetsu office in Fengtian, in particular, critiqued this attempted land grab, arguing that its inadvertent consequences would undermine the vision of Khinggan Province by its planners. The anonymous researcher claimed that “until now, the level of Han culture has been lopsidedly higher than that of the Mongols. Looking at the developmental process recently, those with high culture and economic power can gradually assimilate and embrace other ethnic groups of lower standing.” Believing that the Han farmers in Tuquan could end up absorbing Mongols in this way, the author wrote:

If Khinggan Province redistricts [Tuquan] in order to protect the Mongols, then it must also consider the Han who are ten times in number as compared to the Mongols ... Because of this, the fact that we cannot expect the Mongols to develop becomes clear, as indicated by the Japanese government increasing special protections vis-à-vis the Ainu and yet actually letting them slowly decline.114

Pointing out the failure of the Former Natives Protection Act (1899) over the last forty

years, the Mantetsu office in Fengtian feared that redistricting efforts in Khinggan Province

would likewise lead to a similarly dismal end for Mongols as it did for the Ainu. The logic of

113 Minseibu, “Kōan shōkyō mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, 755–757, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

114 Hōten chihō jimusho chō, Kōan shō kōsei kuiki henkō ni tomonafu Kō-Hō ryōshō no kyōgai mondai (Hōten shō kōsho keimuchō hō) (Typewritten manuscript, 23 August 1933), Yamaguchi University Library.

78 Social Darwinism dictated that if Khinggan Province incorporated Tuquan County, the

overwhelming number of Han farmers living there would assimilate their Mongol neighbors.

Although assimilation would also lead to “development,” the report favored Mongols doing this

on their own terms, as Chimedsempil had wanted. Nevertheless it took issue with

Chimedsempil’s approach: the historical justification for repossessing the former Mongols lands

no longer held because planners had to consider the reality of thousands of Han living in Tuquan.

Still, the Mantetsu office in Fengtian refused to consider relocating the farmers themselves

(unlike what would happen to Mongols in Heilongjiang Province, as discussed later in this

section). Citing “ethnic” and “geographical” reasons, not to mention the “burning desire” of the

peasants themselves, the Civil Ministry ultimately decided to return parts of District 2 and 6 to

Khinggan Province, along with the entirety of District 7 since it supported a population of nine

hundred Mongols to nearly five hundred Han.115

Northeast from Tuquan, along the Naun River, Tailai, Jingxing, and Nenjiang County

stood squarely on the new border between Khinggan and Heilongjiang Province. In Tailai, where

Japanese and Mongol leaders had met for their first conference, the Demarcation had taken into

account patterns of recent land ownership and population distribution, which resulted in an

“unnatural” perimeter. Directive 39 had also claimed the small town of Tazicheng for Khinggan

Province. The economic future of the county, however, completely depended on Tazicheng’s

revenue. While some residents—“egotistical types who sought the bounty of tax breaks for the

simple purpose of immediate profit”—supported redistricting, most submitted petitions of protest.

The local police force also destroyed vehicles at the town fair and refused to withdraw from

Tazicheng. Local elites then set up their own autonomous government, declaring independence

115 Minseibu, “Kōan shōkyō mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, 755–757, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

79 from Khinggan Province. Anxious about the mounting violence, the Civil Ministry sought a

more clear-cut settlement that followed the natural features of the land and returned Tazicheng to

Heilongjiang Province. As in Kangping County, though, the Japanese authorities identified a

concentration of Mongols surrounding a temple, carved out this portion, and reassigned it to

Khinggan Province.116

Like the boundaries of Tailai County, those of Jingxing County largely remained untouched because of local protesting. Han Chinese, who had settled the region from the late nineteenth century, outnumbered Mongols nearly twenty to one, and had staged a “fierce campaign” against Directive 39. Residents had become so agitated that the Civil Ministry feared that if it took the “wrong countermeasure by mistake, it would turn into a major problem.” In the end, instead of incorporating Jingxing County into Khinggan Province, the Japanese authorities reinforced Republican-era boundaries by noting rivers, hamlets, and temples as official landmarks.117

Meanwhile further north in Nenjiang County, which straddled the two banks of the Naun

River, the Khinggan Bureau had reassigned the villages on the western shore to Bayan Banner in the new province. Japanese authorities in the Civil Ministry, however, remained firm about using the Naun as the boundary line between Heilongjiang and Khinggan Province, justifying the

“expedience” of using “natural geography” as the basis for this divide. The villages on the eastern side, known as District 5, therefore remained in Nenjiang County in Heilongjiang.

District 5, which bore the brunt of the violence throughout 1933, comprised of six hundred Han

116 Minseibu, “Kōan shōkyō mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, 752, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives; “Kōan shō tai Tairai ken funsō” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 5, No. 9 (26 August 1933), 280.

117 Minseibu, “Kōan shōkyō mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, 753–754, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

80 and three hundred Mongol families, but officials recognized that had they not counted all of the

“mix-blooded children” as Han to begin with, the actual ethnic breakdown would have

approached parity. Still, the convenience of the river as a physical barrier overrode this

consideration.118 The decision to leave District 5 in Nenjiang County alarmed the Mongols living

in Heilongjiang, sparking a refugee crisis that spread east into the rest of northern Manchukuo

and scorched relations between the national administration and East Khinggan for years to come.

The refugee crisis exposed an empire riven by ethnic strife at its periphery from the highest

echelons of the state bureaucracy to the dispossessed migrants on the ground. It began when

Oronchun, the governor of East Khinggan, realized that the communities east of the Naun would

not qualify for admission into the autonomous region. In early March 1933, he requested state

funds from the Khinggan Bureau to finance a mass population transfer from the former banners

of East Butkha, Mergen, and Qiqihar to his domain. He wrote: “with the reclamation of the

wastelands in the Republican period, the Mongols in this area have lost their places to hunt and

herd, and have no fixed property or occupation ... They live in mixed areas with the Han and

their customs and dispositions have become jumbled up.” Oronchun claimed that these Mongols

“came one after another and requested to transfer to Khinggan Province, hearing that they could

work together with one accord, live together and prosper” (Ch. hezhong gongji gongcun

gongrong). A more recent memoir, however, suggests that banner authorities sent officials into

Heilongjiang to recruit immigrants to new villages in Khinggan Province.119 From the dismantled Butkha banners, 500 families would move to Morin Dabaγa Banner, 150 families to

118 “Xing’an zongshu gonghan di 181 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 156 (5 July 1933), 12; Minseibu, “Kōan shōkyō mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, 750, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

119 Bulin, “Wei Man yimin yijiu” in Da-wo-er ziliao ji: Daor bitegei horiewu debtlien, ed. Da-wo-er ziliao ji bianji weiyuanhui, Quanguo shaoshu minzu guji zhengli yanjiushi, Vol. 8 (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2008), 92.

81 Butkha Left Flank Banner, and 200 families to Bayan Banner, including an indeterminate

number of Orochen hunters. From the Qiqihar banners, 200 families would resettle in Butkha

Left Flank Banner and 200 families in Khijaγar Banner. From the Mergen banners, 200 families

would relocate to Naun Banner. Given the low population figures for Mongols and Tungus in

Manchukuo throughout the 1930s, the nearly fifteen hundred households—about seven thousand

people—crossing over the river into East Khinggan meant not an insignificant portion of the

population.120 Khinggan Province represented an opportunity, especially for destitute Mongols,

to reclaim their past livelihood; they had become both political and economic refugees,

unwelcome in their own ancestral lands, not only because the Heilongjiang provincial

administration no longer recognized their historical rights there, but also because the emerging

market-based farming economy could not accommodate pastoralism as a viable mode of

subsistence. These two processes did not unfold as mutually exclusive phenomena in the Mongol

lands, but as imbricated events of making modern territory and capital.

Oronchun himself orchestrated the population transfer by writing to the head of Khijaγar

Banner, Buyankhisigtu, to ask about the possibility of this area accepting Mongol refugees.

Khijaγar Banner at the time consisted of less than three hundred households surrounded by fields

made fallow from Republican banditry. Consequently, Oronchun saw a mass evacuation of

Mongols from Qiqihar to Khijaγar as “the most appropriate solution [where] the increased

120 “Xing’an zongshu zhiling di 93 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 112 (29 March 1933), 10–11. The Khinggan Bureau included Oronchun’s original petition, dated 8 March 1933, along with its response, dated 29 March 1933; Mantetsu Hoku-Man chōsa iinkai, Kōan tō shō kaihatsu keikaku chitai chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1940), 110; Mo-li-da-wa Da-wo-er zu zizhiqi Bayan E-wen-ke minzu xiang gaikuang (“Bayan E-wen-ke minzu xiang gaikuang” bianxie zu, 1988), 11; “Guanyu shiba hu E-ren yu Manzhou shibian shi qian zhi Bayan qi bing bei pian ruji wenti” (15 April 1936) in Ku-ma-er lu E-lun-chun zu dang’an cailiao, Vol. 3 (Nei Menggu dongbei shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha zu, 1958), 19–20. According the above archival documents, about eighteen Orochon households from the Hūmar area, migrated to Nenjiang County, and then crossed over to Bayan Banner.

82 Figure 1.9 Population Transfers into East Khinggan and Relief Aid (in yuan)

Banner 1933 Population Transfer 1940 Population Transfer Projected Population Transfer (Yearly, 1943–1948) Households Relief Aid Households Relief Aid Households Relief Aid3 Ariγun 200 16000 100 8000 Bayan 200 4000 400 32000 350 28000 Butkha 350 7000 350 28000 300 24000 Khijaγar 200 4000 50 4000 502 4000 Morin 500 10000 300 24000 200 16000 Dabaγa Naun1 200 4000 Total 1450 29000 1300 102000 1000 80000

1 Redistricted into Bayan Banner in 1933.

2 Estimated based on Six Year Plan to migrate one thousand households into East Khinggan.

3 Calculated based on relief aid budget for 1940.

population could ‘naturally undertake what others had left undone’ [Ch. baifei ziran juxing].”121

The Khinggan Bureau approved Oronchun’s request for relief aid at the end of March, realizing that it could do little to stop the rush of people pouring over the perimeter. Oronchun had asked that each family receive 25 yuan to help them set up new households over a hundred miles west of the Naun, invoking the responsibility of the bureau to “the policy of the Kingly Way in maintaining the autonomy of the Mongols.” Chimedsempil, however, would only provide 20 yuan for each family, or a total of 29,000 yuan, and required a list of the names of all newcomers with a choice of four discrete occupations—farmer, fisher, herder, or hunter—when most people took on multiple roles.122 According to one gazetteer, the number of refugees doubled, even tripled, the original population living in these banners. In the case of Khijaγar Banner, though, the total households taken in that year actually exceeded the total households that would live

121 “Xing’an zongshu zhiling di 86 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 110 (24 March 1933), 11–12.

122 “Xing’an zongshu zhiling di 93 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 112 (29 March 1933), 10–11.

83 there in 1937.123 Oronchun must have given an estimated projection of the numbers, but the

incongruent figures speak more to the reality that many of these migrants likely did not stay in

their newly assigned communities, but moved on to somewhere else, or the fugitive nature of

demographic statistics in the borderlands—that they seemed to escape the objective grasp of

surveyors.

Regardless of the 1933 relocation, Oronchun still pressed for the government to repossess

the area east of the Naun. He reckoned that the “humanity” (J. ninjō) of Mongols on both sides of

the river remained “completely the same” despite the drawing up of artificial lines, and the only

way to make Khinggan Province truly “uniform” would mean including Butkha, Mergen, and

Qiqihar banners within its bounds. To Oronchun, it made little sense that Longjiang County,

northeast of Qiqihar, for instance, would stay in Heilongjiang when it had a population of 70,000

Mongols versus 20,000 Han. Consequently, throughout the early 1930s, Oronchun submitted a

number of petitions, but the Japanese authorities blatantly disregarded these appeals. At a

conference with top officials in 1936, a representative from Council of State Affairs put off

Oronchun’s demands, explaining that the Khinggan administration needed cooperation from the

Civil Ministry since redistricting involved disbanding the counties already set up in these areas.

Longjiang County, in particular, would “lose its economic base,” since most of it would have

qualified to become a part of Khinggan Province.124 The transcript of this meeting suggests

increasingly hostile relations between the leaders of Khinggan Province and the bureaucrats of

the Civil Ministry—relations that would come to a brutal end with a series of political purges

known as the Lingsheng Incident, as examined in the next chapter.

123 According to a 1937 census, 205 Mongol families lived in Ariγun Banner, 1022 families lived in Bayan Banner, 425 families lived in Butkha Banner, 948 families lived in Morin Dabaγa Banner, and 191 families lived in Khijaγar Banner. See Kōan tōsho gaikan (Jalantun: Kōan tōsho sōmuka, 1938), 10.

124 Mōseibu, Dai ikkai Kōan kakushō shōchō kaigi giji roku (1936) [microfilm], 191, 241–242.

84 The governors sought to reassemble communities by ethnicity within Khinggan Province

as well. In late 1932, Lingsheng—who ran North Khinggan—wrote to inquire about what to do

with the sixty-some Orochen families under his jurisdiction. This particular population had

grown out of a military unit dispatched by Qing authorities from the Butkha banners in 1894.125

Chimedsempil responded by ordering the entire population, about 240 people living on the

Hailar and Gen Rivers, to reunite with the Orochon in East Khinggan, two hundred miles away.

He dismissed the Orochen as “living in no fixed place, but rather, living conveniently wherever they hunt the animals.” This compulsory move therefore represented an act of “economic and administrative convenience,” where the mobility of nomads would ease transferring populations into homogenized ethnic enclaves. The Orochon, he assumed, could roam the land anywhere. So it came as a surprise to Chimedsempil when these Orochon petitioned to stay in North Khinggan because they had hunted there for years. Ultimately, Chimedsempil yielded to “popular sentiment” and granted their request, but the incident shows how ethnic enclaves served as an underlying principle of organization in sorting out the mottled landscape of the Mongolian territories, and thus legible to state intervention.126

The very mobility of those with “no fixed property or occupation” justified a state logic about nomad policy: to the planners involved with the making of Khinggan Province, a mass population transfer of Mongols and other minorities seemed like a convenient and draconian solution, as compared to extending the border beyond the Naun River or moving Han settlers out of the former banners. Rather than give up territory, Japanese authorities would continue to allow

125 Heilongjiang jiangjun, “Tuo he lu E-lun-chun qianlai Hu-lun-bei-er zhi yuanyou” (GX 1894.06.23) in Hulunbei’er fudutong yamen, Hulunbei’er fudutong yamen cebao zhigao, trans. Bian Changshun and Xu Zhanjiang (Hailar: Hulunbei’er meng lishi yanjiu hui, 1986), 35.

126 “Mengzheng bu zhiling di 54 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 266 (22 January 1935), 151; Nagata Haruka, Manshū ni okeru Orochon zoku no kenkyū (Shenyang: Chianbu sanbōshi chōsaka, 1939), 46–47.

85 voluntary migration to Khinggan Province, which led to the dispossession of ancestral pastures

by default. Thus, 1933 marked only the first of series of evacuations throughout the decade. The

Civil Ministry considered the first attempt so successful that it planned to call together all of the

Mongols in Heilongjiang and concentrate them within Nenjiang County, giving them the

possibility to move to Khinggan Province at a later date.127 In 1935, Oronchun began looking into relocating as many as 60,000 Mongols from Dedu and Nehe Counties, near Qiqihar, to

North Khinggan Province, noting that the Solon members of this group might want to reunite with their Tungusic brethren in Hulunbuir, as well as another thousand Mongols from Fuyu

County and Gorlos Rear Banner much farther south in Jilin Province, though it remains unknown if these population transfers took place.128 In 1940, East Khinggan sponsored yet another mass migration of seven thousand or more people out of Heilongjiang over the course of a three-year plan to move a total of a thousand families. The authorities provided 80 yuan per family to help set up new households. Of the 1300 Daγur and Solon families from the villages of Chichiγar,

Samajie, and Amuniu in Longjiang County, or roughly about ten percent of the Mongol population there, 200 moved to Ariγun Banner, 400 to Bayan, 350 to Butkha, 300 to Morin

Dabaγa, and 50 to Khijaγar. From 1943 onwards, Khinggan Province pledged to sponsor the relocation of a thousand “Mongol” families yearly from east of the Naun River and redistribute them among the banners in a six-year plan whose ambitious program likely later collapsed with the escalating Pacific War.129

127 Minseibu, “Kōan shōkyō mondai to sono kaiketsu an” (28 November 1933) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S9–1–30, 750, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

128 “Mōkojin no Horonbairu ijyū” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 8, No. 16 (20 April 1935), 21; Mantetsu Hoku-Man chōsa iinkai, Kōan tō shō kaihatsu keikaku chitai chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1940), 111.

129 Maki Tokuji, “Keitoku hachi nendo Kōan shinkō kōsaku kaisetsu” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 3, No. 1 (April 1941), 96; Manshū teikoku kyōwakai chōsabu, Kōan Mōko (Shinkyō: Manshū jijō annaisho, 1943), 189–190. The anthropologist Urgunge Onon lived in one such village called Bokorchien which the Japanese moved across the

86 This seemingly easy decision on paper to displace families, in fact, had crippling

consequences on the ground. In response to the population transfer, banner officials in Khijaγar,

critiqued: “After migration, if we misrecognize what looks like practical advice, it is hard to keep

this painstaking plan from not collapsing ... running with just Japanese-style academic theories in

vain.”130 A description of these new migrant communities in a 1938 report from Butkha Banner paints a dire picture of hardship and poverty. Provincial officials had labeled the thousand or so people moving from Qiqihar to Butkha Banner in 1933 as “Mongols,” but they were actually

Daγur and Solon who arrived with “just the clothes on their back.” Supposedly, the banner allowed these newcomers to choose their own tracts of land to settle. The refugees set up seven villages, where they practiced “communal farming,” but the soil there lacked minerals, and soon many succumbed to selenium deficiency disorders, as discussed further in Chapter Three.131 For

the first three winters, these hamlets stood on the brink of failure until the Ministry of

Agriculture sent advisers and lent tools in order to bring “stability into these Mongols’ lives.”

Residents then doubled the amount of arable land, planting corn, millet, wheat, and oats while

tending to a thriving livestock population. By 1940, Japanese sources had all but forgotten the

controversial relocation policy and began celebrating these farm aid programs in East Khinggan

as “an excellent success [that] guaranteed their livelihood and a promise for the future.”132

* * *

Naun River to Horli around 1936 in a process of “rationalizing the population.” See Caroline Humphrey and Urgunge Onon, Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 13.

130 Kōan sōcho chōsa ka, Kisakaru ki jijō (Typewritten manuscript, 1934), Yamaguchi University Library.

131 Futokukō ki kōsho, Chichiharu sato Mōkojin imin buraku gaikyō (Typewritten manuscript, 1938), Keio University Library; Bulin, “Wei Man yimin yijiu” in Da-wo-er ziliao ji: Daor bitegei horiewu debtlien, ed. Da-wo- er ziliao ji bianji weiyuanhui, Quanguo shaoshu minzu guji zhengli yanjiushi, Vol. 8 (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2008), 92.

132 “Kōan shinkō kōsaku kaisetsu” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 1940), 140.

87 The chapter has revealed the controversial nature of demarcating indigenous autonomy in

the borderlands. The making of Khinggan Province compelled Mongols and Tungus to surrender

to Japanese conceptions of identity, as they clarified a new border out of a hybrid space of

various ethnicities, landscapes, and livelihoods. The old aristocracy wanted to reclaim all of the

territories lost to Chinese migration over the last several decades, which Japanese occupiers

could not guarantee. Khinggan Province, as a result, would encompass the historical lands of

Hulunbuir, as well as about half of Jirem and Juu Uda League and the eight banners in the Naun

River Valley. Directive 39 cut out the Chinese parts of these territories with a rationale largely

based on three shifting factors: first, if possible, geographical features as convenient divides, and

when that failed, a majority population of Han rather than Mongols, and finally, evidence of

sedentary agriculture as the predominant mode of living over nomadic pastoralism. Indigenous

autonomy in the imperial imagination therefore lay in overlapping categories of ethnic identity

and environmental relations to the land. As a consequence of this technocratic thinking, many

indigenous communities that had turned to farming before the 1930s ended up not in Khinggan

Province. Still, Directive 39 neither represented a final nor absolute decision.

Rather, the early 1930s revealed how Japanese, Chinese, and Mongols contested, compromised, and ultimately settled the border in the aftermath of Directive 39. Ethnic rioting broke out in Kangping, Tuquan, Tailai, Jingxing, and Nenjiang counties, and the population transfer of Mongols and Tungus acted as a stopgap approach to a larger predicament: the original lines staked out by planners on the map did not match the demographic reality of the borderlands.

The conflicting visions between the Khinggan Bureau and the Civil Ministry came into sharp focus as the two offices fought over those boundaries. While Oronchun saw the mass relocation as a temporary fix to address the sudden dispossession of minority communities, he still hoped to

88 extend the border of Khinggan Province and reclaim the historically Mongolian territory east of the Naun. The Japanese authorities supported, then re-appropriated, this population transfer, but viewed it as a more final solution for keeping the Naun River as the eastern border of the

Mongolian territories. Partitioning Khinggan Province in the end did not derive its logic from past precedents in the Qing. Rather than using historical boundaries in the most contentious counties, the planners of Khinggan Province attempted to combine the convenience of natural geography—a putatively timeless condition—with the population balance at the moment, a more time-bound constraint. Despite the fact that a kind of revanchism stood as a key justification to the founding of Khinggan Province, its advocates could not reclaim all of the former banner lands, exposing the ideological limits of Mongol autonomy in Manchukuo.

89 CHAPTER TWO: RATIONALIZING NOMADS

Khinggan Province required not only drawing up new internal borders on maps, as seen in Chapter One, but also a long process thereafter of bringing those demarcations to life— literally by transmuting and transferring flora and fauna of an idealized pastoral landscape to the region. Japanese developers saw the steppe—“the mother of the provincial economy”—as engendering the migratory features of pastoral life. They blamed the previous regime for denuding the “lush primordial forest”—chopping down trees and stripping the steppe to the point that desert sand filled the air from erosion. “Stabilizing the livelihoods” of hunters and herders in order to revive “the dying race” began with greening the grasslands.133 Ethnicity and environment became conflated in such a way that state planners saw hunting and herding as vital markers of identity for Mongolian and Tungusic peoples, and for that reason, the nature from which they drew their sustenance likewise needed conservation. Rather than try to disentangle those notions of ethnicity and environment, this chapter deliberately treats these categories as mutually constitutive in order to understand why, in the early 1930s, Japanese bureaucrats and indigenous elites directed their energies towards “returning” nomads to a primeval landscape through policies of “grassland protection” (J. sōchi hogo).

A new kind of imperial logic galvanized these efforts. Like the claims of the Third Reich to the “eternal forests” of the Germanic soul, Japanese intellectuals not only looked to rustic farm communities of the archipelago for their nation’s essence, as discussed in the Introduction, but also pursued even earlier origins in the nature of the continent, the supposed wellspring of their

133 Fushimi Sadatoshi, Kōan hokushō bokuya gaisetsu (Kōan hokushō kaitaku chō, 1942), 1, 29.

90 Altaic ancestors.134 In particular, Prasenjit Duara has brought attention to the Orochon as the

subject of Japanese endeavors to preserve “our lost selves,” but this policy did not remain unique

to the Orochon alone, nor did it endure as a permanent feature of the occupation.135 While recognizing that by the 1930s, half of the Mongolian and Tungusic population subsisted as farmers in the borderlands (and some already for decades), this chapter focuses specifically on the remaining nomads farther in the forest and steppe.136 In so doing, the chapter looks at how

Japanese administrators first strove to “protect the dying race” of hunting and herding minorities

from increasing agriculture along the pale.

After 1936, however, exigencies of the empire took over with the Five Year Plan. This

economic program sought to eliminate the nomadic element of herding by moving populations

toward sedentary ranching because its architects did not see seasonal migration as a “rational”

use of resources, but rather, the root of overgrazing and land degredation. Japanese researchers

condemned transhumance for the “deterioration of the steppe” in some of the richest areas of the

province; “after nomadic use,” they reported, “the grasslands do not improve.”137 This

explanation represents one of the many competing discourses over the causes of range

134 Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 179–208; on romanticism and its influence on forestry policy in Nazi Germany, see Raymond Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington: Unidiana Unversity Press, 1992); Michael Imort, “Eternal Forest, Eternal Volk: Rhetoric and Reality in National Socialist Forest Policy” in How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 43–72; Frank Uekötter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

135 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asia Modern (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 187.

136 For village-level studies on the agricultural transformation of the Mongolian borderlands, see A-la-teng-ga-ri-ga [Altanγaraγ], Jinxiandai Nei Menggu youmu bianqian yanjiu: Yi Zha-lai-te qi wei li (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 2012), 87–172; Bo-er-zhi-jin Bu-ren-sai-yin [Borjigin Burensain], Jinxiandai Mengguren nonggeng cunluo shehui de xingcheng: Formation of the Mongolian Farming Village Society (Hohhot: Nei Menggu daxue chubanshe, 2007), 139–208.

137 Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kōan hoku shō ni okeru bokuya narabini hōboku kankō chōsa hōkoku (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, 1939), 195, 218.

91 degradation, but by excluding nomadism from the rational and scientific, such epistemic violence

assumed particular potency in the Five Year Plan.138 As geographer Emily Yeh argues based on

her fieldwork in Tibet, regardless of the actual extent of land degradation at a specific site and

why, “dramatic and sweeping claims” by the state about overgrazing across entire swaths of

steppe “do the political work of motivating various programs to rearrange the livelihoods of

herders.”139 Japanese sources contended that nomadic practice had already maximized the sparse vegetation of the Mongolian territories; therefore, what needed to change were the initial conditions of the land itself, meaning the importation of new plants and animals to reach the productive potential of the steppe.

To implement the industrialized herding of the Five Year Plan, economic planners restructured pastoral life through a settlement program that would consolidate thousands of

Mongols in fixed villages.140 Inspired by other imperial “frontiers,” Japanese agronomists also harvested alfalfa and crossbred merinos on the steppe in order to reconfigure human relationships to the land. Certainly, sheep had served as the very agents of colonization themselves in other contexts; in nineteenth-century Australia, historian Sarah Franklin writes that

“sheep were used not only to displace indigenous people, but to ensure the non-reproducibility of the subsistence ecology supporting the Aboriginal way of life, thus literally entrenching the

138 Dee Mack Williams discusses the ambiguities of defining land degradation and argues that enclosed grazing accelerates deterioration over migratory herding, contrary to current state programs in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region; see Dee Mack Williams, Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 42–44, 117–137.

139 Emily Yeh, “Green Governmentality and Pastoralism in Western China: ‘Converting Pastures to Grasslands’ in Nomadic Peoples, Vol. 9, No. 1 and 2 (January 2005), 15.

140 For contemporary similarities in the Tibetan borderlands of the People’s Republic of China, see Elisa Cencetti, “New Settlements on the Tibetan Plateau of Amdo-Qinghai” in On the Fringes of the Harmonious Society: Tibetans and Uyghurs in Socialist China (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2014), 159–182; Emily Yeh, “Tibetan Range Wars: Spatial Politics and Authority on the Grasslands of Amdo” in Development and Change, Vol. 34, No. 3 (June 2003), 499–523.

92 settler economy into what was to become their national soil.” Bluntly speaking, “sheep converted

pasturage to profit and then moved on.”141 Still, how does this environmental transformation unfold in the Mongolian territories when the sheep were already there? Experimental farm stations disseminated alien grasses and hybrid animals whose intensive care demanded sedentary patterns of livelihood, undercutting nomadic practice over time. As this chapter shows, tracing the mobility, and then immobility of nomads and their animals at the very edge of the empire reveals how shifting ethnic, economic, and environmental priorities lay at the heart of the

Japanese colonial experiment.

THE PASTORAL PRESERVE

In the months before the Manchurian invasion, top officers of the Kantō Army had already planned to limit the extent of land reclamation in the Mongolian territories. Influenced by the rise in Mongol nationalism from the 1920s, a discourse of “purity” tainted early Japanese policy—not just a fascistic sense of ethnic purity, but an ecological one: these Japanese envisioned a complete and sustainable system particular to the steppe, one that Chinese agriculture, and the flora and fauna brought along with it, had threatened, most especially the

“weak and hungry Han donkey [J. hiryoku daishoku Kan no roba],” in the words of Kikutake

Jitsuzō.142 One confidential document listed “not to permit the opening and releasing of land in the pure Mongol region [J. jun Mō chitai]” as the military’s very first priority. “In the

141 Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 122.

142 Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 96. For earlier ideas of ecological “purity” in the Mongolian territories, see Jonathan Schlesinger, “The Qing Invention of Nature: Environment and Identity in Northeast China and Mongolia, 1750–1850” (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2012).

93 autonomous province,” the unidentified commander wrote, “the livestock economy will become

the key focus; agriculture will not be allowed.”143

Kikutake explained this “purity” of the Mongolian territories in his position paper to

Katakura Tadashi in early 1932; “Mongolia is pastoral by principle,” he argued. Kikutake expressed doubts over the viability of organizing the autonomous region based on the original

Qing banner divisions, because the region no longer represented “a purely pastoral livelihood [J. junzentaru bokuchiku seikei].” He described the Han has having advanced into a region “with hardly any entrepreneurial value” where Mongols followed them into agriculture as hired hands,

“throwing out their own intrinsic ethnic ability [J. minzoku koyū seinō].” Mongols imitated Han for the moment, Kikutake wrote, because the agricultural lifestyle may have appeared lucrative, but “in fact, the Han rob their land, so I question whether Mongols can exercise their intrinsic ethnic ability by themselves through herding.” Throughout this commentary, Kikutake returned again to this term, “intrinsic ethnic ability,” revealing his underlying assumption of Mongols as nomadic by nature—nature in the double sense of nomadic practice as inborn for Mongols and as inextricable from the natural world of the steppe. Ethnicity as Japanese planners conceived of it, derived in part from the particular ecology of the steppe, which fostered the specific, nomadic

“abilities” of hunting and herding. Because of Han settler colonialism, though, protecting the bounds of “purity” in the borderlands depended on a paternalistic intervention by Japan to foster

Mongolian “intrinsic ethnic ability.”

What did this paternalistic intervention entail? Kikutake wanted to mark off the steppe beyond the Manchukuo county administration as “a purely Mongol autonomous zone [J.

143 Kantō gun shirei bu, “Manmō kensetsu ni tomonau Mōko mondai shori yōkō” (6 February 1931) in Katakura Tadashi monjo 11–A–15, Archives at the University of Tokyo Department of Advanced Social and International Studies.

94 junzentaru Mōko jichi kuiki].” Intending to leave this zone “entirely as grassland [J. sōchi],”

Kikutake had hoped to take advantage of the prevailing mood among Mongol landowners—

many of whom were refusing to sell tracts to the Han—and then “prohibit the expansion of

farmland without exception, and return the people of the banners to herding.” Nevertheless, to

convince Katakura and the rest of the Kantō leadership of this seemingly regressive scheme,

Kikutake had to portray the pastoral livelihood as economically significant to the empire. He

admitted that the Mongolian territories would never amount to much value for Japan in terms of

agricultural output, but then pointed to the archipelago’s over-dependence on foreign imports:

meat, wool, leather from Canada and Australia (the very industries relegated to outcaste groups

in Japan). His argument worked. Here Katakura took his pencil and underlined Kikutake’s

words: “we cannot not realize the rangelands [J. bokuchi] of the Mongolian territories as

[something] our country absolutely needs.” Kikutake drew a line to split up Manchukuo

ecologically; he wanted to reserve everything west of the railroad from Sipingjie, Taonan,

Tao’an, and Ang’angxi as pasture for Mongols. “This land is already more suited for grazing

than for farming,” he declared, “the ethnics [J. minzoku] will make herding [their] intrinsic

ability.”144 Kikutake’s ideas about “intrinsic ethnic ability” became enshrined in official rhetoric

in 1933. The Principles of Mongol Rule announced that it would “make Khinggan Province into

a herding zone [where] areas that could have been developed as agricultural land now [would] be

largely left alone ... Based on the intrinsic ethnic ability of the Mongols, the livestock industry

will be developed.” A series of laws announced over the next decade points to how this land

reclamation ban came into effect.

144 Unfortunately, after this sentence, Kikutake’s proposal cuts short, as the document lacks the two critical pages elaborating on this point. Kikutake Jitsuzō, “Kōan in (kyoku) kansei bikō” (11 March 1932) in Katakura Tadashi kankei monjo 291, Modern Japanese Political History Materials Room, National Diet Library.

95 The Manchukuo government sought to prohibit homesteading while setting up Khinggan

Province. This ban explains much of the ethnic violence that erupted along the pale in the early

1930s from Chapter One; Han farmers in the borderlands, especially, saw these laws as

threatening their economic future. In November 1932, Prime Minister Zheng Xiaoxu (1860–

1938), announced Directive 105, the “Banner Land Protection Act,” a reclamation ban that went

into effect through 1944 (when it became an imperial edict). Directive 105 aimed to “preserve

the banner lands [Ch. baoquan qidi]” in Khinggan Province, prohibiting any further “opening or

releasing” of the Mongolian territories.145 Tracts already rented or sold to outsiders in the

borderlands during the Qing and Republican years, however, continued on as homesteads, but

only after express permission from the provincial government. As for the rest of Khinggan

Province, only the “original” (Ch. yuanyou) Mongols of the banner could use the land for

herding or farming, though administrators would come to interpret the directive as a means of

protecting pasturage in successive laws. Directive 105 prevented both Han peasants and Mongol

migrants from the former Josutu and Ju Uda Leagues, who made up the majority of farmers in

Khinggan Province anyway, from pressing further into the steppe.146 What this highly restrictive law aimed to do, then, was to fix newcomer populations to a bounded piece of land without much of a possibility for expansion. Directive 105 took away the long-term incentive for Han farmers, especially, to remain in Khinggan Province and gave legal clout to Mongol herders.

Once the agricultural advance slowed to a creep, new environmental boundaries grew out of these policies. In the end, though, these did not map neatly onto Khinggan Province. The law

145 “Jiaoling di 105 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 62 (3 Novermber 1932), 2; “Chiling di 136 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 2961 (25 April 1944), 465.

146 In 1939, however, the state eliminated banner distinctions between Mongols, allowing for outsiders to begin farming once more in the “closed” territories, which may have accelerated reclamation again. Directive 105 continued to forbid Chinese from doing so. See Kōan kyoku, Kōan nan shō Jaraito ki jittai chōsa hōkoku (1939), 2.

96 divided the Mongolian territories into land “open” (Ch. kaifang Mengdi, J. kaihō Mōchi, Mo.

talbin γarγaγsan Moŋγol γaǰar) and “closed” (Ch. feikaifang Mengdi, J. hikaihō Mōchi, Mo.

talbin γarγahu ügei Moŋγol γaǰar) to reclamation in 1932. The open territories comprised of the

thirty-two county administrations and two municipal districts of the former Mongolian territories

that now lay outside of Khinggan Province, as Kikutake had wanted, including all of Jinzhou and

Rehe Province (except for parts of Naiman, Khesigten, and Ongniγud Banner, later incorporated

into South Khinggan anyway). Within Khinggan Province, Tongliao County in the south, Linxi

and Kailu County in the west, and the riverbanks in the east remained open, along with bits and

pieces of banners along the pale. The rest of Khinggan East, South, and West, and all of North

Khinggan stayed closed, or about ninety percent of the surface area of the province.147 As a result,

the Xing’an Military Colony—the state farm from the 1920s in what would become Khijaγar

Banner—fell into disuse under this new law, with the colony condemned as an “impermissible”

symbol of the “evil warlord government.”148

The local Mongol elite welcomed Directive 105, even though the law had eliminated a significant amount of immediate revenue from selling or renting closed territory to Han farmers.

Jagar (?–1944), the governor of West Khinggan, saw the banners as carrying on in “a primitive collective shape [J. genshūteki kyōyō no keishiki].” Calling Directive 105 “the greatest guarantee” against the “coercive” policies of the warlord period, he said that now, “everyone felt relieved.”149 Erkhimbatu (1882–1951), the head of New Barγu Left Flank Banner, pressed for

147 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōchi no hanashi (Kōan kyoku, 1939), 8–9.

148 “Xing’an zongshu zhiling di 71 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 59 (24 October 1932), 32–33.

149 Mōseibu, Dai ikkai Kōan kakushō shōchō kaigi giji roku (1936) [microfilm], 215; for the actual land law, see pages 155 to 159.

97 Figure 2.1 Map of Open and Closed Territories under Directive 105 (1932)

98 continuing the land reclamation ban, for “living [off the land] as a nomad [Mo. negüdelen

nutuγlan]” represented an “inherent characteristic [Mo. törölki-yin činar] of Mongols.”

Erkhimbatu drew up a five-point plan that named herding “the industry most suited to conditions

of the land [Mo. γaǰar siroi-yin baidal].” He urged against “shattering the land [Mo.

qaγalburilaγsan]” in unclaimed areas, and instead pressed for “bestowing special rights to

Mongols for protecting and raising the livestock which constitute their assets.”150 Soon thereafter, provincial authorities began a livestock loan program, lending out hundreds of sheep, cattle, and horses per banner, as well as sickles to cut grass for fodder.151

Nevertheless laws passed at the provincial and circuit level point to the challenges in enforcing Directive 105 throughout the occupation, even if this law hindered the advance of the plow. Anecdotal evidence collected by provincial surveys shows Han farmers arriving in many

Mongol settlements “without asking what is open and what is closed territory.” While these surveys blame “the decline of the Mongol village” on these migrants alone, settling the land required, at the very least, some sort of tacit agreement between migrants and the residents

150 Erkhimbatu’s outline became so important that his letter made its way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo. He assumed the governorship of North Khinggan in 1936, then the chair of the autonomous region in 1945, seeing it through the tumultuous transition from the Japanese occupation to the early People’s Republic. See Christopher Atwood, “State Service, Lineage, and Locality in Hulun Buir” in East Asian History, Vol. 30 (December 2005), 5–22. Erkhimbatu’s letter, filed backwards in the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives represents one of the very few Mongolian-language manuscripts from the Japanese occupation that I have found. The letter includes a Japanese translation by China hand Furukawazono Shigetoshi. This translation still suggests a fundamental incommensurability between languages of pastoral versus sedentary civilizations on the issue of land tenure. Whereas Erkhimbatu uses the term “shattering” or “breaking” the land (the root qaγal in qaγalburilaγsan in Mongolian), the Japanese translator relied on characters from Chinese meaning “opening and releasing” (J. kaikon). See Erkhimbatu, “Manǰu ulus-un ǰasaγ-un kereg-tur čiqula qolbuγdaltai tabun ǰüil-un sanalγ-a bičigsen anu” (April 1936) in Man-Mō seikyō kankei zassan: Uchi Mōko kankei, Vol. 3 A–6–1–2–1–14, 320–328, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives.

151 Mōseibu, Dai ikkai Kōan kakushō shōchō kaigi giji roku (1936) [microfilm], 133.

99 Figure 2.2 Number and Cost in yuan of Livestock Borrowed per Banner

Banner Sheep Cattle Horses Total Cost Number Cost Number Cost Number Cost East Khinggan 1000 8000 300 21000 300 18000 47000 Molidawa 0 0 300 21000 100 6000 27000 Arong 0 0 0 0 100 6000 6000 Butkha 1000 8000 0 0 100 6000 14000 South Khinggan 4000 32000 600 42000 400 24000 106000 Jalaid 2000 16000 0 0 0 0 16000 Khorchin Right 1000 8000 200 14000 200 12000 34000 Front Khorchin Left 1000 8000 200 14000 200 12000 34000 Middle Khorchin Left 0 0 200 14000 0 0 14000 Back Khuree 1000 8000 0 0 0 0 8000 West Khinggan 4000 32000 600 42000 300 18000 92000 Jarud 2000 16000 200 14000 100 6000 36000 Ar Khorchin 2000 16000 0 0 0 0 16000 Baγarin Left 0 0 0 0 100 6000 6000 Baγarin Right 0 0 200 14000 0 0 14000 Kheshigten 0 0 200 14000 100 6000 20000 North Khinggan 7000 56000 500 35000 0 0 91000 Old Barγu 2000 16000 100 7000 0 0 23000 Solun 2500 20000 200 14000 0 0 34000 New Barγu Left 2500 20000 200 14000 0 0 34000 Total 17000 128000 2000 140000 1000 60000 336000

of the banner.152 Mongol landowners and Han farmers still entered informal (if not illegal) rental agreements well after Directive 105, only declaring these contracts once the planting had already begun on family plots alloted by the banner (Ch. hudi, Mo. erüke-yin tariy-a).153 Chimedsempil

pursued this problem with a wary eye, demanding documentation of name and citizenship of the

renter and the location, area, and sketch of the plot, not to mention the original rental contract

itself.154 In South Khinggan, the governor Sumingga (1885–1947) went beyond recording just

the distribution of farms and assuming the rest of the banner as pasturage. Instead, Sumingga

152 Yamane Juntarō and Muraoka Shigeo, Shunō jūboku shakai ni okeru “Mōko buraku no nōgyōteki seikaku” (Shinkyō: Manshū minzoku gakkai, 1944), 15.

153 Mongol historian Altanγaraγ argues that small-scale farming by Han laborers on family plots acted as the main vector of agriculturalization in the 1930s; see A-la-teng-ga-ri-ga [Altanγaraγ], Jinxiandai Nei Menggu youmu bianqian yanjiu: Yi Zha-lai-te qi wei li (Shenyang: Liaoning minzu chubanshe, 2012), 118–147.

154 “Mengzheng xunling di 245 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 630 (25 April 1936), 493–494.

100 eliminated that ambiguity by demarcating pastures by law. As he lamented, “year after year, the

pastures have been opened and cultivated [Ch. kaiken] and the grazing areas have shrunk with

time; the livestock industry has become weak and degenerate, dwindling down one path.”155

Repeating that new farms remained strictly prohibited, Sumingga required all banner officials to

announce the distribution of pastures under their purview, a mandate handed all the way down to

the head of each district.

Even stricter plans for preservation also upended Orochon communities, but only those

who lived in Heilongjiang Province have left accessible, documentary evidence of their fate. The

Heihe Special Service issued “guiding principles” for the eighteen hundred Orochon in the

Hūmar and Birar Circuits to reverse the “turn to farms, abandon the hunt” campaign of the

Republican years. These principles, which Khinggan Province may have also adopted, aimed to

“continue primitive living” among the Orochon, and “not allow agriculture, isolate them as a

special ethnic group, strictly forbid opium, strictly forbid white flour, and construct a road to

self-sufficiency and reject a life of dependency.”156 The special service hoped to “rope off one main region for nomadic hunting” in order to contend with all of the Orochon across various banners and counties.157 Initially, petty bureaucrats stationed in the Heihe provincial office, like

Naitō Kazuo, took on these romantic ideals of returning the Orochon to a primeval forest. As

Naitō justified this approach:

155 “Xing’an nan sheng xunling di 120 hao” in Xing’an nan sheng gongbao, No. 1 (1 March 1938), 31, Inner Mongolia Regional Library.

156 Nagata Haruka, Manshū ni okeru Orochon zoku no kenkyū (Shenyang: Chianbu sanbōshi chōsaka, 1939), 42–43. One major difference between the Orochon in Heilongjiang versus Khinggan Province lay in the local administration. In Heilongjiang (split into Heihe, Sanjiang, and Longjiang in 1934), Japanese kept the Orochon officer positions, such as the troop captain (Ch. zuoling, Ma. janggin) and regiment colonel (Ch. xieling, Ma. gūsai da) as well as the military organization, from the circuit (Ch. lu) to the banner, largely intact from the Qing.

157 Shigeoka Zaisuke, “Orochon minzoku no genjō” in Dai ajia, Vol. 4, No. 3 (March 1936) in Manshū kaihatsuron: Takushoku daigaku shusshinsha ni yoru (Tokyo: Takushoku daigaku, 2003), 413.

101 From a historical standpoint, it is impossible to assign [the Orochon] farmland and implement agriculture. Their most handy use is to respect their dauntless, warlike spirit and make them guard forest districts and gold mines ... looking at their living conditions, [we] can see this trend towards a kind of primitive communism, so the interested parties should also consider the uniqueness [of the Orochon] and speedily take the measures of providing suitable guidance so as to not damage their ethnic unity.158

Though described by Duara as a “terribly wrenching process,” where the Orochon who had begun farming in the Republican years suddenly had to switch back to hunting, this restrictive policy quickly broke down underneath all of that imperial discourse.159 As a close examination of archival materials from the Hūmar Circuit shows, Orochon hunters did object to nomadic reversion and their administrators gave in with certain allowances. In 1934, for instance, the regiment colonel of the Hūmar Circuit wrote to the Heihe Special Services on the behalf of the fifteen hundred Orochon under his watch. He reported that a violent rise in banditry had kept hunters from tracking animals deep into the forest, while springtime flooding had exhausted community provisions. The Hūmar Orochon wanted to learn how to raise crops, requesting tools, seeds, and guidance to do so.160 The case vexed Shigeoka Zaisuke, one of the provincial officials

reviewing petitions. Shigeoka argued that welfare in the form of farm aid would threaten the

ethnic integrity of the Orochon. “To provide relief as they are dying out raises the fear that the

Orochon would lose an aspect of their existence,” he confessed, “though I believe that this is the

158 Naitō Kazuo, “Orochon zoku ni tsuite” in Takushoku bunka, Vol. 15, No. 3 (12 December 1935) in Manshū kaihatsuron: Takushoku daigaku shusshinsha ni yoru (Tokyo: Takushoku daigaku, 2003), 408.

159 Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asia Modern (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 182; Nakao Katsumi, “Japanese Colonial Policy and Anthropology in Manchuria” in Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia: Comparative and Historical Colonialism (Richmond: RoutledgeCurzon, 1999), 245–265; “Elunchun zu jianshi” bianxie zu, Elunchun zu jianshi (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe: Nei Menggu xinhua shudian faxing, 1983), 126–129.

160 “Guanyu weilie kunnan yaoqiu kaiken wenti” (23 May 1935) in Ku-ma-er lu E-lun-chun zu dang’an cailiao, Vol. 2 (Nei Menggu dongbei shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha zu, 1958), 154–155; “Guanyu xieling xiang Heihe shengzhang tiaochen E-min shenghuo qingkuang” (2 December 1934) in Ku-ma-er lu E-lun-chun zu dang’an cailiao, Vol. 3 (Nei Menggu dongbei shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha zu, 1958), 194–201.

102 path to follow as a moral nation [believing in] ethnic regeneration.” Shigeoka’s office vowed

“positive support” in an “experiment to encourage agriculture,” but refrained from taking a

coercive turn with the project. It promised loans for arable land, granted permission to chop

down trees for houses, and gave subsidies on tools and seed.161

As in Heilongjiang, Japanese agents in Khinggan Province took on a highly localized approach in introducing stock-farming and fixed settlement to “protect the small peoples from dying out” (J. horobi yuku jakushō minzoku hogo).162 One military adviser in Morin Dabaγa,

Gunji Hiko (1908–?), diverted public money to build permanent houses and plant vegetable

gardens with supplies subsidized by the banner government.163 A key environmental factor hastened this trajectory towards farming: a virulent outbreak of plague had killed off several of their reindeer herds a generation earlier.164 If anything, returning to nomadism persisted as a

viable policy for only a brief moment in the early 1930s before the reality of the borderlands set

in for the Khinggan administration.

CONCENTRATION-VILLAGES AND THE FIVE YEAR PLAN

The year 1936 marked a drastic turn in pastoral policy. Tensions between Imperial Japan

and the Soviet Union escalated as they battled each other through their respective Mongolian

proxies along the Khalkh River. A series of defeats on the Japanese side, however, convinced the

161 Shigeoka Zaisuke, “Orochon minzoku no genjō” in Dai ajia, Vol. 4, No. 3 (March 1936) in Manshū kaihatsuron: Takushoku daigaku shusshinsha ni yoru (Tokyo: Takushoku daigaku, 2003), 411–414.

162 “Yama ni sumu Orochon zoku” in Manshū gurafu, Vol. 6, No. 8, (August 1938), 176–179. According to oral history taken by PRC ethnologists, Japanese officers already began restricting hunting routes and “concentrating” campsites (Ch. jizhong) as early as 1934; see Bu-te-ha qi E-lun-chun minzu xiang qingkuang (Nei Menggu shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha zu, 1959), 2.

163 Gunji Hiko, Manshū ni okeru Orochon zoku no kenkyū (Tokyo: Mutsumi insatsu kabushiki kaisha, 1974), 4.

164 Ethel John Lindgren, “Northwest Manchuria and the Reindeer Tungus” in The Geographical Journal, Vol. 75, No. 6 (June 1930), 524–525.

103 Kantō Army that spies were in their midst. Officers focused their attention on Lingsheng, the

head of North Khinggan and several of his subordinates as potential informants. In part, their

suspicions did not seem unwarranted: Lingsheng himself had become increasingly frustrated

with ceding Mongol autonomy to Japanese control over the past four years. He had strayed from

the Japanese stance in border negotiations with the Mongolian People’s Republic first in July,

then in October 1935; moreover, he had spoken vociferously against Japanese plans to ramp up

economic development in Khinggan Province at a conference in March 1936.165 After this last meeting in Xinjing, Lingsheng took the train back home to Hailar, only to find Kempeitai officers waiting for him when he disembarked. The military police arrested Lingsheng and accused him of “selling off the country by leaking state secrets to the Soviet Union, news that rang in our ears like a clap of thunder in blue skies.” The Kempeitai tried and executed

Lingsheng by firing squad in the southern hills of the capital the following month, also purging several other Daγurs from the provincial office.166 Kikutake had protested Lingsheng’s

sentencing, but to no avail; he himself had resigned from lieutenant governorship at the end of

1933, already disillusioned by the future prospects of the Mongolian question in Manchukuo.167

165 See the transcripts in Mōseibu, Dai ikkai Kōan kakushō shōchō kaigi giji roku (1936) [microfilm].

166 The Kempeitai also executed Lingsheng’s younger brother, Fuling, the Chief of Staff of the North Khinggan Defense Force; his brother-in-law, Chunde, the head of the North Khinggan Military Police; and his secretary, Hua Lintai; as well as imprisoned or fired several more people. See Kokumin shiryō hensan sho, Ryōshō Soren tsubō jihan no gaiyō to gunbō kaigi no hanketsu (Typewritten manuscript, 1936), Tōyō Bunko Library; Koyama Sadatomo, “Ryōshō jiken to Mōko mondai” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 10, No. 19 (May 1936), 18–22; Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, Vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 149–152; Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005), 72–74; Zhen-zhu-er-zha-bu [Jinjuurjab], “Lingsheng ‘Tong Su shijian’ zhenxiang” in Nei Menggu wenshi ziliao: Wei Manzhouguo Xing’an ziliao, Vol. 34 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1989), 108–112.

167 Kikutake tried to assume Lingsheng’s position as the head of North Khinggan, moved back to Tokyo for two years, before becoming the editor-in-chief of Köke tuγ, Manchukuo’s only Mongol-language newspaper; he died in Xinjing in 1946 during repatriation. See Khurcha, “‘Manshūkoku’ Kōan sōsho Kikutake Jitsuzō jichō no jishoku ni tsuite: ‘Katakura Tadashi monjo’ no bunseki kara” in Nairiku Ajia shi kenkyū, Vol. 25 (March 2010), 143–165; Suzuki Nirei, Manshūkoku to Uchi Mongoru: Man-Mō seisaku kara Kōan-shō tōchi e (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 2012), 382–384; Yoshida Jun’ichi, “Kikutake Jitsuzō ni tsuite" in Kingendai tōhoku Ajia chiikishi kenkyūkai nyūzu retā, No. 14 (December 2002), 105–112.

104 The Lingsheng Affair emptied out the final seats of opposition in the Khinggan

government, opening up the steppe to heavily rationalized plans of industrial herding with the

Five Year Plan.168 Under the ultimate supervision of Ishihara Kanji (1889–1949) and Miyazaki

Masayoshi (1893–1954), the proposal for the Mongolian territories largely rested in the hands of

Mantetsu’s Economic Research Committee. Lead members included Marxian analysts educated

at Tokyo and Kyoto Imperial Universities, such as: Oshikawa Ichirō (1899 – 1970), Ōgami

Suehiro (1903–1944), and Taira Teizō (1894–1978). The Five Year Plan aimed to push the land

to its productive limits, but supposedly within the realm of ecological possibility; that is, rather

than pursue development completely at odds with local conditions, the plan sought to maximize

the natural resources already at hand in the Mongolian territories.

At the foundation of this plan lay a mandatory, resettlement scheme for many banners to

consolidate both permanent homes and seasonal gers into villages (Ch. guitun binghu, J. shūdan

buraku)—villages that would make rationalizing the steppe viable in the eyes of Japanese

economists. As one agricultural research unit observed, the Manchukuo government had given

Mongols until this point, “the full treatment of the protection policy” where they could “use the

grasslands essential to their nomadic livelihood free of charge.” This policy supposedly led to

overgrazing, which left the steppe—already at the stage of “animal saturation”—in a state of

“disrepair.” As a result, this study concluded that “the basis of the pastoral economy is collapsing,

spelling out self-destruction for Mongols who make their living as nomads.” Japanese planners

168 Patrick Caffrey notes a similar move from “sustained yield” to “intensive exploitation” in Manchukuo’s timber industry in the late 1930s. See Patrick Caffrey, “Transforming the Forests of a Counterfeit Nation: Japan’s ‘Manchu Nation’ in Northeast China” in Environmental History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (April 2013), 309–332. For more on the drafting of the Five Year Plan in Manchukuo, see Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 61–63, 96–101; Nakai Yoshifumi, “Politics of State Building and Economic Development in Manchuria, 1931–1936 (PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2000), 146–415.

105 instead argued that settling herders in villages would reduce range degradation and increase

livestock numbers.169

Though adapted to the particular environmental concerns of the Mongolian territories,

this resettlement scheme had origins in another ethnic borderland of the Northeast—between

Manchukuo and Korea. Village consolidation actually dated to the warlord years with the first

artificial hamlet built in Qian’an County in Jilin Province in 1926. After the Manchurian Incident,

however, Japanese authorities began experimenting with ethnic enclaves for Korean migrants in

order to “protect” them from violent race riots that had spread across the region.170 In fact, the

program also aimed to sever local assistance to the Communist resistance. Both Chong-Sik Lee

and Hyun Ok Park have used the term “collective villages” to stress the principles of self-

sufficiency, joint management, and family farming in these fortified communities. For Park,

especially, “agrarian cooperatives in Manchuria represented the desire of the colonial power ... to

promote both territorial sovereignty and capitalist agricultural reform.” Even so, these villages

kept up tenant farms; landowners traded in their old plots for something of the same value in the

new settlement and sharecroppers paid a freshly adjusted rent of thirty percent of the harvest.171

The label “collective village,” here, does not reflect the revolutionary nature of collectivization

as seen in the Soviet kolkhoz. Rather, it defies translations from contemporary accounts, which

rendered shūdan buraku instead as “concentration-villages” that were set up in a general

169 Nichi nō nōsei kenkyūkai, Shinkyō jimukyoku, Kōan hoku shō no nō boku sui sangyō gaikan (shisatsu hōkokusho) (Typewritten manuscript, 1940), Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University.

170 Chianbu keimushi, Manshūkoku keisatsushi (Keijō: Chōsen insatsu kabushiki kaisha, 1942), 380–388.

171 Chong-Sik Lee, Revolutionary Struggle in Manchuria: Chinese Communism and Soviet Interest, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 271–275; Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 146, 153, 157.

106 “Concentration-Settlement Zone.”172 Calling these settlements “concentration-villages,” then, situates this program within a broader, global context of rounding up and isolating minority populations in the interwar years.173

In 1934, village consolidation became encoded in law, which authorized a dramatic

expansion of the program beyond its experimental beginnings. Over the next five years, the

police partnered with the Civil Ministry to establish more than thirteen thousand concentration-

villages.174 At first issued to all provinces in Manchukuo except Khinggan, the new act targeted

the “desolate, remote, and under-developed districts” of the countryside in order “to save people

living in the hinterlands from the dangers of banditry, bathe them in all kinds of institutional

benefits ... rouse the withering morale of the public, urge a self-governing spirit in the village

under the order of communal life, and forge ahead the exaltation of state functions.”175 The law

made claims of “modernizing the agrarian village [J. nōson no kindaika]” through “relief aid as

organized by ethnicity”—namely, through transportation, communication, industry, education,

and healthcare.176 Concentration-villages represented the ideals of communitarian theorists who had sought the primordial unity of an idealized past as imbedded in the memories of folk life.

These ideals, as Harry Harootunian argues, intwined with the fear of alienation and

172 Minami Manshu tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, Sixth Report on Progress in Manchuria, Vol. 6 (Tokyo: The Herald Press, 1939), 132–133.

173 See for example, “the barbed wire zones of a labor camp, the bounded special settlements, the surveyed land of collective farms” of Ukranians forcibly relocated to Kazakhstan during the 1930s in Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 188.

174 Chianbu keimushi, Manshūkoku keisatsushi (Keijō: Chōsen insatsu kabushiki kaisha, 1942), 383; Sōsaishitsu kōhōka, Manshū ni okeru tokushu jichi seido (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha sōsaishitsu kōhōka, 1938).

175 “Minshengbu xunling di 969 hao” in Manzhouguo zhengfu gongbao, No. 237 (13 December 1934), 109–110.

176 Onda Sakubei, “Tō-Man chihō ni okeru nōson no genjō to ‘shūdan buraku’ kensetsu no jūyōsei” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 9, No. 3 (20 July 1935), 27–31; No. 6 (10 August 1935), 17–21; No. 8 (24 August 1935), 23–30; No. 9 (31 August 1935), 18–25; No. 10 (7 September 1935), 24–28; No. 11 (14 September 1935), 22–26; No. 12 (21 September 1935), 23–27.

107 commodification, prefigured the “gathering of fascism.”177 While this analysis may have held true for Japanese settlers as well as Chinese and Korean farmers in Manchukuo, it tends to break down for Mongols, some of whom had not experienced that primordial unity of village life before, and others only for some generations. As such, the concentration-village in the

Mongolian territories represents less a redemption of a village life lost than a perceived way forward for herders into rational management and capitalist development.

Concentration-villages for Mongols became a possibility in as early as 1934, when

Matsui Gennosuke (1889–1950), then the head of the Kantō Army’s Special Services in Chengde, urged for a development plan in the territories beyond “hastily building railroads again.” His

“eyewitness” report, circulated among various state ministries including the Khinggan Bureau, argued: “Will [the Mongols] not eventually die out like the ‘Ainu’ race of Hokkaido? To improve the lives of Mongols, first, arbitrary grazing as it occurs now needs to stop and [we] must hope for half-settled ranches or consolidated units.” Rather, Matsui proposed a division of labor within the household so that one person would watch the herds, while the others split up various duties such as collecting household fuel or tending to sick animals.178 In Khinggan

Province, the fields surrounding concentration-villages would produce fodder for a burgeoning bovine and ovine population on an industrialized scale for butchering, tanning, and shearing. The new provincial administration (now renamed the Bureau of Mongolian Affairs) called for the following in 1936:

177 Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 399–401; Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 148.

178 Matsui Gennosuke, “Watashi no mita Mōko” (2 April 1934) in Man-Mō seikyō kankei zassan: Uchi Mōko kankei, Vol. 2, A–6–1–2–1–14, 294–295, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives.

108 1. Plan to increase and improve cattle, horses, and their products, and develop livestock industries with a priority on sheep, and a complete commodification of future livestock and manufacturing. 2. Plan to encourage herders to farm and adopt a half-agricultural, half-pastoral [lifestyle] and settle people in order to break from self-sufficient consumption and advance towards commodification. 3. Plan to carry out the gradual settlement of nomadic peoples and rationalize pasture management in those lands [designated] for fixed settlement.

For the Mongols, the most basic reform means: forage collection and storage, rangeland protection and management, mechanized agriculture, and the development of livestock manufacturing.179

In effect, Khinggan Province would become “one giant grazing region” revived by

agricultural science. In the words of one proposal, all of these efforts would “enrich the

communal spirit as an exuberant revival of ethnic consciousness” among the Mongols and other

minorities in “settling nomads” (J. yūbokumin wo teichaku seshime).180 By replanting the steppe

with foreign grains and crossbreeding animals to create hybrid species, the Five Year Plan

sought to replicate a frontier ideal drawn from alien ecologies across the Pacific, from Australia

and the United States.

After 1936, the Bureau of Mongol Affairs co-opted nomadic social organization from the

Qing, so that security apparatuses, labor conscription, and population surveys could “permeate”

all of the banners.181 Usually discussed in terms of state penetration, this nested hierarchy of

179 Saitō Tokisuke, Horonbairu chikusan jijō (Hōten: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha tetsudō sōkyoku, 1937), 190–191; Tamura Ichirō, Manshū oyobi Hoku-Shi ni okeru men’yō jijō ni tsuite (Tokyo: Nichi-Man jitsugyō kyōkai, 1936), 8.

180 Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha sōsaishitsu kōhōka, Mōchi ni okeru nō-chikusan gokanen keikaku (Typewritten manuscript, 1937), Library of Congress; Mōseibu, Kōan kakushō sangyō gaikan (Typewritten manuscript, 1936), Library of Congress.

181 Kōan nan shō Koruchin sayoku chūki jittai chōsa hōkokusho (Kōan kyoku, 1939), 24; Jin Hai [Altandalai], Riben zai Nei Menggu zhimin tongzhi zhengce yanjiu (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2009), 87; on conscripted labor in the nutuγ, see Gao Chunde, “Riwei shiqi Xing’an dong sheng de heian zhidu” in Zha-lan-tun wenshi ziliao, Vol. 1 (Jalantun: Zhengxie Zha-lan-tun shi wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, 1989), 14–22; on taxes in the nutuγ, see Zhou Mingrui, “A-lu Ke-er-qin qi lunxian shiqi de xumuye gaikuang (1933–1945)” in A-lu Ke-er- qin qi wenshi, Vol. 5 (Aru Khorchin: Zhengxie A-lu Ke-er-qin qi weiyuanhui, wenshi ziliao weiyuan hui, 1996), 247–255.

109 administration—known as the nutuγ γačaγ-a (Ch. nu-tu-ke ga-cha) system—radically altered the

pastoral landscape as well: it laid the critical foundation to carry out the Five Year Plan at the

local level.182 Previously, a nutuγ (Ch. qu) had represented the grazing pastures or hunting areas of Mongol and Tungusic clans, whereas a γačaγ-a (Ch. cun, rarely zuo) had literally meant to drive stakes into the ground, as if to settle down. Rather than delineating entirely new districts below the banner, Japanese planners decided to integrate new, supposedly autonomous bureaucracies into the “naturally developed” boundaries of the nutuγ. This meant, for example, assigning police surveillance and corvée requirements by nutuγ and its administrative subdivisions, much like the baojia system designed for the rest of Manchukuo.183 Each banner

ranged from four to eleven nutuγ, while each nutuγ equaled two to nine γačaγ-a, and each γačaγ-

a comprising several more herding camps or farm hamlets, known as ayil (Ch. tun). Finally, an

ayil consisted of ten to two hundred households.184

This administrative structure “did not simply restore the nutuγ of ancient times,” as

Japanese planners insisted, but instead dealt with the rapidly changing demographics and

livelihoods of the early twentieth century. In accommodating both rangeland and farmland, both

original bannermen and Mongol newcomers, the nutuγ γačaγ-a system now “combined land lines

with blood lines to progress from jus sanguinis to jus solis for autonomous organization.”

Provincial authorities therefore emphasized territory over lineage in reconstituting ethnic

182 Mantetsu Hoku-Man chōsa iinkai, Kōan tō shō kaihatsu keikaku chitai chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1940), 128.

183 On the baojia system in Manchukuo, see Endō Masataka, “Manshūkoku tōji ni okeru hokō seido no ri’nen to jittai: ‘Minzoku kyōwa’ to hōji kokka to iu futatsu no kokuze wo megutte” in Ajia taikeiyō tōkyū, No. 20 (February 2013), 37–51.

184 Kōan nan shō gairan (Kōan nan shō kōsho, 1935), 31–37; contemporary ethnographies also confirm village consolidation as a practice throughout the southern banners of Khinggan Province. See Hao Yaming and Bao Zhiming, Tixing zhengce yu Menggu zu xiangcun shehui bianqian (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue chubanshe, 2010), 44–45, 48–49.

110 autonomy in the borderlands. Through this process of internal territorialization, then, they

believed that “the new shape of the nutuγ [would] revive Mongol society.”185 As the anthropologist David Aberle notes in his interviews with Daγur informants, the nutuγ γačaγ-a system eliminated the functions of “the clan meeting,” destroyed the general regulation of social life, and replaced it with the bureaucratic regulation of the individual.186

The environmental consequences of the nutuγ γačaγ-a system, though, reverberated at the local level of the ayil, in the herding camps and farm villages. In December 1936, the Bureau of

Mongol Affairs—under pressure from Manchukuo’s Business Department—announced that it would “fix settlements [J. buraku teichaku] for nomads in order to execute the industrial development [laid out] in the Five Year Plan and contribute to stabilizing the livelihoods of the banner people.” This program attempted to achieve the rationalized dreams laid out by the First

Five Year Plan for nomadic Kazakhs in the Soviet Union, short of complete collectivization.

Under this ambitious scheme, thousands of Kazakhs would settle in large, collectivized, livestock-breeding farms where they would grow fodder to bring to the animals rather than migrate with the herds themselves. Planners reasoned that sedentary ranching would free up land to cultivate cash crops to finance heavy industrialization. Kazakhs attached to a fixed address would become, in the words of Kate Brown, “school-attending … newspaper-reading citizens instead of wandering yurt-dwellers.”187 Yet Japanese seemed blissfully unaware that

185 Kōan sei shō Aru Horuchin ki jittai chōsa hōkoku (Kōan kyoku, 1941), 11; Yamane Juntarō, Manshūkoku Uchi Mōko chitai ni okeru minzoku bunpu ni tsuite (Typewritten manuscript, 1940), Tōyō Bunko Library. For an explanation of nationality law in the transition between the Qing Empire to Republican China, see Shao Dan, “Chinese by Definition: Nationality Law, Jus Sanguinis, and State Succession, 1909–1980” in Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 35, No. 1 (November 2009), 4–28.

186 David F. Aberle, Chahar and Dagor Mongol Bureaucratic Administration: 1912–1945 (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1962), 99.

187 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 177.

111 sedentarization and collectivization had also wrought catastrophic famine, which killed over a

million nomads by 1932.188

In Khinggan Province, these permanent communities of former nomads would comprise

the most basic building block for industrial development. Villages would “communally manage”

industrial production with funds and technicians assigned by the state.189 Owing to increased

farming in the southern half of Khinggan Province, administrators carried out a program of

concentration-villages among those Mongols starting in late 1936. Because the policy never

became encoded into law for Khinggan Province, however, it depended on each banner in order

to pursue village consolidation. In the end, much of South and West Khinggan resettled scattered

herder camps and farmhouses into walled units of administration, forbidding people to live

outside of their compounds.190 Given the uneven execution of village consolidation, not to mention its fragmentary evidence, just how many Mongols became subject to this mandatory process remain elusive, and ultimately unknowable and uncountable. Between 1935 and 1937, local police set up over two thousand concentration-villages in all districts of Khinggan Province except for the eastern quarter, and they projected another 450 settlements the following year.

While a significant share of these fortifications likely housed Korean migrants, the overall

188 For more on the famine, see Sarah Cameron, “The Hungry Steppe: Soviet Kazakhstan and the Kazakh Famine, 1921–1934” (PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 2010); Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 189–198; Matthew Payne, “Seeing Like a Soviet State: Settlement of Nomadic Kazakhs, 1928–1934” in Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography, eds. Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler, and Kirill Tomoff (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 59–86; Niccolò Pianciola, “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen, 1928–1934” in Cahiers du Monde Russe, Vol. 46, No. 1 and 2 (January and June 2004), 137–191.

189 Minami Manshū tetsudo kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Nō-chikusan bumon kankei shiryō in Manshū gokanen keikaku ritsuan shorui, Third Edition, Vol. 1 (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsabu, 1937), 62.

190 Kōan nan shō Koruchin sayoku chūki jittai chōsa hōkokusho (Kōan kyoku, 1939), 24, 189; Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Kōan sei shō Satsurotoku ki Ajikajishin ki chikusan chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō, 1939), 36–37.

112 number of concentration-villages in Khinggan Province constituted nearly a fifth of the total in

Manchukuo. This means that Khinggan Province, with its sparser population, experienced a

disproportionately higher degree of surveillance and containment compared to the rest of the

country.191 Based on census data, up to 330,000 Mongols could have qualified for living in concentration-villages if the banners had acted comprehensively.192

Village consolidation relied upon state coercion in rearranging the patterns of settlement

along the pale. Descriptions of other concentration-villages across Manchukuo suggest what this

process might have looked like in the Mongolian territories. After choosing a centralized

Figure 2.3 Concentration-Villages Built in Manchukuo by Year

Province Before 1935 1936 1937 1938* Total Jilin 760 892 663 78 2393 Longjiang 13 910 187 46 1156 Heihe 0 0 7 38 45 Sanjiang 0 60 115 215 390 Mudanjiang 0 0 404 1018 1422 Binjiang 246 971 2167 299 3683 Jiandao 70 29 39 24 162 Tonghua 0 0 103 76 179 Andong 49 134 44 15 242 Fengtian 39 364 211 199 813 Jinzhou 0 0 23 28 51 Rehe 0 0 0 38 38 West Khinggan 7 279 511 216 1013 South Khinggan 345 556 344 165 1410 East Khinggan 0 0 0 0 0 North Khinggan 0 0 104 76 180 Total 1529 4195 4922 2531 13177 * Projected figure.

191 Sōsaishitsu kōhōka, Manshū ni okeru tokushu jichi seido (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha sōsaishitsu kōhōka, 1938).

192 Matsumoto Toshio, Manshūkoku gensei (Shinkyō: Manshū kōhō kyōkai, 1937), 218–219; Mōseibu sōmushi chōsaka, Mōseibu kannai shuyō toshi oyobi sonchin kokō tōkei (1936). I estimated this figure by subtracting the number of Mongols living in towns and villages already established before 1936 (with a population of five hundred people or more) from the total number of Mongols living in South and West Khinggan Province. The statistic assumes that all banners except for Aru Khorchin carried out village consolidation.

113 location for settlement, local police conscripted residents to assemble a brick wall out of millet

and mud, often without the promised funding from the Civil Ministry. Walls stood about ten feet

tall and six feet thick, surmounted by wooden stakes and strung with barbed wire. A moat ten

feet across (and sometimes even more barbed wire) encircled the fortification. The walls

themselves featured corner blockhouses with galvanized iron roofs so that denizens could shoot

at trespassers. People could only enter at the gate with official registration passes. They had to

rebuild their homes within the compound, often identical structures lined in neat rows.

Meanwhile, police torched recently emptied homes and standing grain to prevent Communist

organizers from taking shelter in the outlying areas.193 Chinese memoirs recall how Japanese soldiers committed rape, arson, and indiscriminate slaughter against those who refused to cooperate with forced relocation or the labor conscription afterwards.194 Indeed, as Hyun Ok

Park writes of Korean concentration-villages in southeastern Manchukuo, “the architectural

apparatus of the agrarian cooperatives gave a visual form to the power relations between

colonized and colonizer. The spatial design of each cooperative entailed a self-enclosed village

that acted as a type of social quarantine.”195 With the highly planned order of the compound,

village consolidation composed the carceral landscapes across Manchukuo’s countryside.

193 T. A. Bisson, “Aikawa Asks for Fifty Millions” in Amerasia: A Review of America and the Far East, Vol. 2, No. 1 (March 1938), 9; T. A. Bisson, Japan in China (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1938), 392–397; Mori Chōjirō, “Shūdan buraku kōsaku to Takoi Motoyoshi” in Manshū kaikoshū kankōkai, Aa Manshū: Kunitsukuri sangyō kaihatsusha no shuki (Tokyo: Nōrin shuppan kabushiki kaisha, 1965), 136–139.

194 Che Jihong, “Xuelei banban de ‘jituan buluo’” in Rijun qinhua zuixing jishi, 1931–1945 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1995), 30–36; Ma Wengui “Taipingchuan ‘juantun’ ‘binghu’ jishi;” Heilongjiang sheng Huanan xian zhengxie wenshiban, “Zai ‘guitun binghu’ zhong de zui’e xingjing” in Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Jilin sheng weiyuanhui, Wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, Buneng wangji de lishi, Vol. 19 of Heilongjiang wenshi ziliao (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1985), 190–200; “Gedi qiangxing guitun binghu zhuangkuang” in Riben diguo zhuyi qinhua dang’an ziliao xuanbian: Dongbei “da taofa” (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), Vol. 4, 169–203.

195 Hyun Ok Park, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 174.

114 In the Mongolian territories, the only place with evidence documenting the mechanics of

dispossession was Sir-a khar-a aγula (Ch. Sha-li-hao-lai), a concentration-village set up in

Naiman Banner, West Khinggan. Sir-a khar-a aγula served as a case study for two Japanese

researchers employed by the bureau, Yamane Juntarō (1905–?) and Muraoka Shigeo (1909–

1980), hence the significant number of articles published about the settlement’s century-long

transition from nomadic herding to sedentary ranching.196 Citing security issues, banner officials ordered Mongols throughout Naiman to consolidate their settlements in February of 1937, as so- called bandits had recently killed several Japanese officers there. At the time, Sir-a khar-a aγula had consisted of a few mud-brick dwellings built close together, with another two dozen in the outlying pastures. The police arrived in Sir-a khar-a aγula in April and forced its residents build an earthen wall centered on the house of the wealthiest member of the community, who coincidentally, also served as the head of local security. Since many of the farmhouses stood outside this enclosure, the police gave families two months to rebuild them within the compound and move their belongings. Only a third of them managed to meet the June deadline. Finally, by autumn, thirty families—about two hundred people total—had set up households inside the new ail, which now measured about 800 feet across. The entire process, swiftly executed, took less than half a year. Photographs of other temporary settlements show woven reed fences delimiting the village and dozens of gers circling a single kerosene streetlight.197

196 See, for example, Takemura Shigeaki, “Naman ki ni okeru tochi ni kansuru kenri no sho yōsō” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 2, No. 2 (March 1940), 25–75; Muraoka Shigeo, “Kōan sei shō Naman ki Nishi Saryokukōrai ton ni okeru hōsei seido” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 5, No. 3 (September 1943), 1–25; Muraoka Shigeo, “Kōan sei shō Naman ki Nishi Saryokukōrai ton no hanbai kōnyū kankei” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 5, No. 4 (January 1944), 1–33; Muraoka Shigeo,“Kōan sei shō Naman ki Nishi Saryokukōrai ton no rōdō kankei” and “Kōan sei shō Naman ki Nishi Saryokukōrai ton no taishaku kankei” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 6, No. 1 (January 1944), 1–11 and 29–58; Yamane Juntarō, “Naman ki Nishi Saryokukōrai ton ni okeru nōbokumin no seikatsu gaiyō” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 1944), 49–60.

197 Walther Heissig, “Mongol Farming” in Contemporary Manchuria: A Quarterly Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1939), 87.

115 In the aftermath of village consolidation, Yamane and Muraoka observed a bewildering

phenomenon in Sir-a khar-a aγula, something not entirely ascribable to correlation alone: along

with village consolidation, the overall number of households increased, but the number of

animals herded and land tilled by Mongols decreased significantly. When these economists

investigated further in the early 1940s, they found that concentration-villages had inadvertently

attracted more Han tenants to the area, while Mongol residents left. Many of the remaining

Mongols had abandoned herding and even farming, renting out their lots to these newcomers.198

At other sites, reports surfaced of animals dying of exposure in the winter because compounds became much too crowded to fit everyone.199 Village consolidation led to more fixed

communities, many for the first time, forming the basis of permanent settlements in eastern Inner

Mongolia for decades to come. Monocultures of sorghum, soybean, millet, and buckwheat took the place of diverse steppe grasses—grasses already depleted by the animals grazing over the same areas, in close distance to the village. In his sketch of Sir-a khar-a aγula, Muraoka drew the village as a neat box with a kilometer of pasture buffering it on all sides. To the southwest on this map lay tilled land, to the southeast, alkaline soil; newly formed sand dunes (Mo. maŋq-a) encroached into these areas, indicating that agriculture had already begun to take its toll on the land.200 This kind of concentrated living, while legible to the state, hastened the expansion of the

198 Yamane Juntarō and Muraoka Shigeo, Shunō jūboku shakai ni okeru “Mōko buraku no nōgyōteki seikaku” (Shinkyō: Manshū minzoku gakkai, 1944), 5–8, 18–20.

199 Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Kōan sei shō Satsurotoku ki Ajikajishin ki chikusan chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō, 1939), 36–37.

200 Muraoka Shigeo, “Kōan sei shō Naman ki Nishi Saryokukōrai ton no shizen jōken oyobi kōshu gaiyō” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 1944), 18.

116 Figure 2.4 Map of Sir-a khar-a aγula, Naiman Banner (1940)

117 desert. According to more recent scientific literature, pockets of deterioration would have first

appeared, eventually enlargening and merging into each other.201

Nevertheless, village consolidation, while compulsory, was never quite complete, no matter how much of a hard line the new administration took after 1936. Even as Mantetsu surveyors evaluated the measure as a “good success,” a careful reading of their data suggests indifference, if not resistance, by herders as seen in two instances in Aru Khorchin and Jarud

Banners.202 If anything, evidence points to its iterative failure in accounting for pastoral populations. Five years after village consolidation went into effect, Japanese researchers complained that they could not take accurate records of nomads in Aru Khorchin because this banner never implemented the policy. Instead, as one sample “village” called Kharatoγchin shows, Mongol camps cycled through two seasonal locations separated by about twenty miles.

Unlike in Sir-a khar-a aγula, the number of herding families in Kharatoγchin, if the sources could pin it down to one location at all, increased nearly fivefold over the course of a year, most likely because pastoral Mongols were fleeing other concentration-villages from further south.203

Compared to Aru Khorchin, though, Jarud did carry out forced resettlement. In the five

such villages studied in the banner, nearly fifteen percent of the total households still rotated

201 Borjigin Burensain, “Teijū sonraku keisei to Uchi Mongoru ni okeru sabakuka: Horuchin chiiki wo shirei ni” in Sabaku kenkyū, Vol. 11, No. 1 (April 2001), 13–22; Walther Heissig, “Mongol Farming” in Contemporary Manchuria, Vol. 3, No. 4 (October 1939), 89; Ian Clunies Ross, A Survey of the Sheep and Wool Industry in Northeastern Asia, with Special Reference to Manchukuo, Korea, and Japan (Melbourne: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1936), 18; Dee Mack Williams, “Grassland Enclosures: Catalyst of Land Degradation in Inner Mongolia” in Human Organization, Vo. 55, No. 3 (October 1996), 307–313; Dee Mack Williams, Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 24; for a comparative take on state legibility and village consolidation in the ujamaa campaigns of Tanzania, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 223–261.

202 Minami Manshū kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Kōan sei shō Satsurotoku ki ajikajishin ki chikusan chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō, 1939), 36–37.

203 Kōan sei shō Aru Horuchin ki jittai chōsa hōkoku (Kōan kyoku, 1941), 36–37, 61, 82, 211.

118 their camps seasonally, refusing to observe this policy. Nomadic practice in Jarud Banner,

instead, continued on in many forms after 1936. Some herders either took out their flocks to

pastures in the morning and returned at night, or lived separately from their kin. Most families,

however, moved through the steppe, three to ten times a year, in gers three to fifteen miles away

from the compound. In the concentration-villages of Ongγon Oboγ-a and Γachaγ-a, about thirty

families only passed through the compound in the spring. Instead, they went to different seasonal

pastures some twenty to thirty miles apart, each with a hundred and fifty cows, thirty horses, and

up to four hundred sheep and goats in tow.204

As opposed to their southern and western neighbors, North and East Khinggan did not implement concentration-villages in any coherent manner. In fact many of the banners had yet to integrate local administrations with bounded territories completely. In the meantime, the provincial bureau sent out researchers to document and map the migrations of each herding camp, so that no ayil could escape the purview of the state.205 Officials considered requiring Mongols

Figure 2.5 Nomadic Households in Select Consolidated Villages of Jarud Banner

Village Name Nomadic Households Total Households Total Population Ongγon Oboγ-a 13 94 554 Γachaγ-a 25 113 621 Nodomu 17 56 289 North Huahushao 0 57 334 South Huahushao 3 75 350 Total 58 395 2148

204 Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Kōan sei shō Satsurotoku ki Ajikajishin ki chikusan chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō, 1939), 237, 247, 259, 278. Ongγon Oboγ-a literally means “sacred cairn or marker” whereas Γachaγ-a means “settlement” if the origin of these names indicates how temporarily and indiscriminately officials named concentration-villages.

205 Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kōan hoku shō ni okeru bokuya narabini hōboku kankō chōsa hōkoku (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, 1939), 65–92, 171–208, 288–295, 300.

119 Figure 2.6 Map of Seasonal Pastures in New Baraγ Left Flank Banner (1939)

120 Figure 2.7 Map of Nomadic Migrations in Old Baraγ Banner (1939)

121 and Tungus to “settle down” (J. teijū); fixing people to the land, of course, opened up ominous

opportunities for governmentality. Japanese advisers emphasized potential in state

entrenchment—the building of police stations, public schools, and hygiene bureaus—as a move

that “would revolutionize not only Mongol livelihoods, but at the same time, its industry.” Still,

they recognized that such a radical intervention in the steppe would have “an enormous effect on

public sentiment,” and decided to “encourage concentration-villages ger by ger” as a way

towards more permanent settlement.206

One exception prevailed along the Khalkh River. There, escalating tensions with the

Soviet Union called for rounding up ten thousand Barγu, Buriyad, and Daγur Mongols and half a million livestock into nearly seventy concentration-villages. While most herders would use their village as a base camp in their seasonal rotation, their inability to move as freely as before meant that each outpost required a reliable source of fresh water and extra acreage for accumulating fodder for the winter, neither of which came in great supply.207 To make matters worse, the

Japanese defeat at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 led to a renegotiation of borders ten miles east of the river, the previous boundary. Scholars have tended to portray this conflict as a clash between two great powers in the middle of nowhere, a framework that does not account for the rapidly changing ecologies of war—in particular, the battle’s consequences for local herders who had used these killing fields as rangeland.208 Nomads in both flanks of the New Barγu Banners had to

206 Senuma Saburō, Manshūkoku gensei (Shinkyō: Manshūkoku tsūshinsha, 1938), 223.

207 Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kōan hoku shō ni okeru bokuya narabini hōboku kankō chōsa hōkoku (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, 1939), 131–139, 228.

208 See for example, Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, 2 Vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). For a historiographical review of this vast literature, see Iwaki Shigeyuki, Nomonhan jiken no kyozō to jitsuzō: Nichi-Ro no bunken de yomi toku sono shinsō (Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2013), 43–81. For an approach that situates the Mongols at the center of this conflict, see Tanaka Katsuhiko, Nomonhan sensō: Mongoru to Manshūkoku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2009), as well as the memoir, Kitagawa Shirō, Nomonhan: Moto Manshūkoku gaikōkan no shōgen (Tokyo: Tokuma shoten, 1979).

122 renounce their winter pastures at Nomunkhaγan and Manantal-a to the Mongolia People’s

Republic. As a result, desperate Mongols crossed banner lines to graze their livestock illegally on

other pastures, culminating in fierce disputes over dwindling resources. In order to alleviate

grazing pressures, local officials coerced nomads to sell off fifty seven thousand animals (likely

under market value) to one of Manchukuo’s state enterprises, the Manchuria Livestock Company.

The provincial government then sent forty to fifty families and their remaining twenty thousand

livestock to live in neighboring banners.209 Whereas herds could turn a yearly profit in various animal products, a lump sum of cash seemed to provide little long-term security. By the early

1940s, some of the best grassland in the Mongolian territories available to livestock—in the very banners disrupted by the Battle of Khalkin Gol—constituted half the amount needed per animal.210 Relocating and concentrating settlements ultimately heightened environmental

tensions on the steppe.

HYBRID SHEEP IN THE ALFALFA EMPIRE

With the nutuγ γačaγ-a system in place, Japanese researchers began engineering the

environmental transformation of Khinggan Province. The origins of this “improved” steppe

ecology emerged out of the experimental farm stations of Mantetsu: Gongzhuling, the main

station, founded in 1913 in Jilin Province on former Mongolian territory, then later, Darkhan and

Wangyemiao in South Khinggan, Linxi in West Khinggan, and Jiramtai (Ch. Zha-luo-mu-de)

209 Koyanagi Yukio, “Hōbokuchi funsō jiken hassei ni kansuru ken” (6 February 1940) in Man, Mō ni okeru nōboku jigyō kankei zakken, E–4–3–0–1, 43–45, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives.

210 Fushimi Sadatoshi, Kōan hoku shō bokuya gaisetsu (Kōan hoku shō kaitaku chō, 1942), 27–28.

123 near Hailar, in North Khinggan.211 These farm stations helped fulfill the agricultural dreams of their managers, including Japanese re-settlers like Chiba Toyoji (1881–1944) who had left exclusion-era America to reinvent themselves as colonial masters of Manchuria. When these agronomists beheld the great plains of northeastern China in the 1920s, they had seen the potential to reproduce the pastoral landscapes they had to abandon in the American West. Chiba and others—several of them graduates of Hokkaido Imperial University—advocated for continental dry farming of the United States, which required heavy machinery, over island wet cultivation of Japan, which called for intensive human labor.212 Mantetsu’s experimental farm

stations tried out those foreign methods and unfamiliar species in bounded spaces to recreate

“frontier” nature in the miniature before introducing them to new surroundings.

At the edge of the Khorchin grasslands, Gongzhuling served as a testing ground to solve

what Mantetsu experts saw as a particular problem to both improving and multiplying herds in

Inner Mongolia: the meager food supply. Extreme temperatures, alkaline soil, and increasing

aridity all contributed to the issue of mass animal starvation on the steppe. To give a sense of the

potentially devastating costs of winter, in 1935 ninety percent of the sheep in one banner

reportedly froze to death.213 Throughout the 1920s, the livestock fodder expert at Gongzhuling,

Kosai Motokichi (1895–?), worked to find the optimal herbage for these harsh environmental

211 Kōshurei shōgakkō dōsōkai, Manshū Kōshurei: Sugishi 40-nen no kiroku: Kōshurei shōgakkō 80-shūnen kinenshi (Tokyo: Seisaku Asahi shinbun Tōkyō honsha shuppan sābisu, 1987), 1; Tamura Ichirō, Manshū oyobi Hoku-Shi ni okeru men’yō jijō ni tsuite (Tokyo: Nichi-Man jitsugyō kyōkai, 1936), 18.

212 Man-Mō Nihonjin shinshiroku (Dairen: Manshū nippōsha, 1929), 77, 137, 160, 239, 330; Kōshurei shōgakkō dōsōkai, Manshū Kōshurei: Sugishi 40-nen no kiroku: Kōshurei shōgakkō 80-shūnen kinenshi (Tokyo: Asahi shinbun Tōkyō honsha shuppan sābisu, 1987), 19–20; Azuma Eiichiro addresses the linkages between Japanese migration to the United States and Japanese colonialism in Manchuria, and how disciplinary divides between ethnic studies and area studies have largely obscured these transpacific connections. See Azuma Eiichiro, “‘Pioneers of Overseas Japanese Development’: Japanese American History and the Making of Expansionist Orthodoxy in Imperial Japan” in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 67, No. 4 (November 2008), 1187–1226. For Chiba Toyoji’s biography, see Itō Takuji, Tenkai no kisoku: Chiba Toyoji monogatari (Furukawa: Osaki taimusu sha, 1987).

213 Nakano Seiichi, Manshū no chikusan (Tokyo: Meibudō, 1941), 53.

124 conditions. Kosai drafted a one-hundred-year plan to provide the “grasslands with apt protection”

against future degredation, proposing sylvan windbreaks, rationalized cultivation, and seed

distribution.214 He identified various grasses native to the steppe and measured their efficiency in

yield for fodder; fescues, wheatgrass, tufted vetch, redtop, and foxtail millet ranked among the

best in their ability to thrive in sandy, alkaline soil.215 Still, these plants withered in comparison

to a particular favorite of Kosai’s—Medicago satvia, or alfalfa (J. rūsan).

In Kosai’s narrative, alfalfa originated in Persia and proliferated in frontier landscapes

alongside the expansion of empires across millennia, finally reaching Texas, New Mexico, and

California. The particular samples at Gongzhuling likewise spread with settler colonialism;

Japanese studied the plant with Americans at experimental farm stations in Hokkaido in the late

nineteenth century and bought seeds from Russians in the Guandong Leasehold in the early

twentieth, though alfalfa itself had grown in the drier provinces of China south of the wall in

Shaanxi and Gansu for centuries.216 Now Kosai aimed to transplant the crop from Gongzhuling to the banners of Khinggan Province. As a legume foreign to eastern Inner Mongolia (at least in modern times), domesticated alfalfa stood for a kind of ecological imperialism whose reach could extend far beyond that of its human colonizers.217

214 Kōsai Motokichi, Uchida Tōkichi, and Sunagawa Yasuo, Satsuramokutoku men’yō kairyōjō ni okeru nogusa no chōsa hōkokusho (Typewritten manuscript, 1937), Stanford University Library. Kosai, a graduate of an agricultural school in Kumamoto, stayed on at Gongzhuling after the surrender in 1945 with a group of Japanese technicians to help rebuild industries in China in the postwar; see Kōshurei shōgakkō dōsōkai, Manshū Kōshurei: Sugishi 40-nen no kiroku: Kōshurei shōgakkō 80-shūnen kinenshi (Tokyo: Seisaku Asahi shinbun Tōkyō honsha shuppan sābisu, 1987), 490.

215 Ian Clunies Ross, A Survey of the Sheep and Wool Industry in Northeastern Asia, with Special Reference to Manchukuo, Korea, and Japan (Melbourne: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1936), 16; Kosai Motokichi, Manshū ni okeru bokusō (Kōshurei: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha nōji shikenjō, 1928), 37– 40, 73–74.

216 Kosai Motokichi, Manshū ni okeru rūsan saibaihō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō nōji shikenjō, 1935), 3.

217 For the origins of this argument, see Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Contrary to Kosai’s perception that Mantetsu had brought alfalfa to the steppe, scientific evidence points to the plant growing in the wild since the Han dynasty, if

125 The alfalfa champion of Manchukuo, Kosai penned several pamphlets on its benefits and

hosted cultivation workshops throughout the countryside.218 Alfalfa could stave off wind and soil

erosion with its profuse canopy and deep roots, stretching some nine to sixteen feet into the earth.

Calling the crop “heaven’s blessing,” Kosai extolled its ability to ward off “the demon of drought”

though he failed to mention that alfalfa requires a substantial amount of water to grow in the first

place, a resource in short supply in the Mongolian territories.219 Nevertheless, as Kosai boasted,

alfalfa fixed nitrogen gas from the air so that the element became available for healthy plant

growth, acting as a kind of “green fertilizer [J. ryokuhi]” during a time when the archipelago

moved increasingly towards toxic chemical supplements.220 Nitrogen fixation further enriched the soil for future crops planted in these fields. Most importantly for economic development, however, was alfalfa’s robust yield, which far exceeded that of other legumes and grains. Kosai estimated that one acre of seedlings could produce two and a half tons of fodder (roughly five thousand kilograms per hectare) over the course of three harvests a season. Whereas an acre of wild grass could support half a sheep for a year, an acre of alfalfa would support nearly six of the

not earlier. Wild alfalfa seems to have evolved in sympathy with undomesticated horses. See Ernest Small, Alfalfa and Relatives: Evolution and Classification of Medicago (Ottawa: National Resource Council of Canada, 2011), 181–183.

218 Minami Manshū tetsudo kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Nō-chikusan bumon kankei shiryō in Manshū gokanen keikaku ritsuan shorui, Third Edition, Vol. 1 (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsabu, 1937), 394. Kosai Motokichi’s pamphlets include: Manshū ni okeru bokusō (Kōshurei: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha nōji shikenjō, 1928); Manshū ni okeru rūsan saibaihō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō nōji shikenjō, 1935), republished in 1942 as Rūsan no saibaihō; Satsuramokutoku men’yō kairyōjō ni okeru nogusa no chōsa hōkokusho (Typewritten manuscript, 1937), Stanford University Library; Manshū ni okeru ya-kansō chōseihō (Shinkyō: Manshū kokuritsu kōshuryō nōji shikenjō, 1940); Shiryō sakumotsu saibai gaisetsu, tsuketari bokuya hogo kanri narabini kairyōhō (Shinkyō: Manshū kokuritsu nōji shikenjō, 1944).

219 Kosai Motokichi, Manshū ni okeru rūsan saibaihō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō nōji shikenjō, 1935), 151; Kosai Motokichi, Manshū ni okeru bokusō (Kōshurei: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha nōji shikenjō, 1928), 46.

220 Kosai Motokichi, Manshū ni okeru rūsan saibaihō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō nōji shikenjō, 1935), 11–15. For the environmental repercussions of chemical fertilizers in twentieth-century Japan, see Timothy George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001); Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 137–175.

126 same animal. Alfalfa farms would process extra bales into lucerne meal for export in order to

feed military horses in Japan.221

By having the legume dried as hay for the cold season, state planners hoped that the

experiments at Gongzhuling would eliminate the perceived need for herders to migrate with their

animals to seasonal pastures, or even migrate at all. Japanese advisors began pressuring Mongols

in North Khinggan to collect and store grasses from the mid-1930s onwards, though these

herders often ended up hiring Russian and Chinese labor to cut pasture. In one banner the fodder

harvested amounted to 457,000 pounds of hay in 1938 alone.222 Kosai and his colleagues saw alfalfa as leading the Mongolian territories towards a sustainable, self-sufficient future.

Nevertheless the introduction of alfalfa meant that while the steppe would continue to look like the steppe, broadly speaking, the resulting scientific stock-farming would also transfigure an underlying ecology of transhumance into one of sedentary extraction.

Kosai’s alfalfa campaigns convinced Mantetsu economists to name the legume as one of the target crops to “revive the wastelands of Mongolia” for the Five Year Plan. With a modest budget of 2.8 million yuan, the plan would take a variegated steppe and convert it into rationalized fields of alfalfa, oats, and wheat.223 (Besides alfalfa, oats also did not grow in the region before the 1930s.) Japanese agronomists anticipated a slight increase in the surface area and yield of sorghum and millet in Khinggan Province (already plentiful), but predicted

221 Kosai Motokichi, Manshū ni okeru rūsan saibaihō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō nōji shikenjō, 1935), 152; Nakano Seiichi, Manshū no chikusan (Tokyo: Meibudō, 1941), 20.

222 Kosai Motokichi, Manshū ni okeru rūsan saibaihō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō nōji shikenjō, 1935), 152; Mōseibu, Dai ikkai Kōan kakushō shōchō kaigi giji roku (1936) [microfilm], 133, 135; Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kōan hoku shō ni okeru bokuya narabini hōboku kankō chōsa hōkoku (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, 1939), 40, 220– 222, 225. In the “purely pastoral regions,” herders rarely stockpiled dried hay for the winter months, except for some Buryiads in Solun Banner; see Saitō Tokisuke, Horonbairu chikusan jijō (Hōten: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha tetsudō sōkyoku, 1937), 82.

223 Manshū gokanen keikaku gaiyō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsabu, 1937), 52.

127 explosive growth for alfalfa, oats, and wheat. As for the latter two cereals, Japanese agronomists

imported “improved” species engineered at the farm stations in Hokkaido for hardiness in cold

weather.224 While alfalfa trailed behind all four crops in terms of its surface area with a projected

760,000 acres farmed in Khinggan Province by the end of the plan, it still would surpass each of

them in terms of output. Even in the impossible projections of the Five Year Plan, the alfalfa

yield per unit of area outstripped those of oats, soybeans, sorghum, and wheat four times over, an

extraordinary endeavor considering that the legume would have started from zero in 1936.225 By

Figure 2.8 Projected Yield for Target Crops in Khinggan Province for the Five Year Plan (in metric tons, with percentage of total projected yield for Manchukuo produced in Khinggan Province)

Year Wheat Oats Alfalfa Sorghum Millet tons % tons % tons % tons % tons % 1936 12800 1.51 0 0 0 0 30800 0.73 76680 2.43 Year 1 16800 1.51 2000 5.00 6000 55.1 31902 0.74 78408 2.45 Year 2 24800 1.92 7000 14.0 20000 58.8 33022 0.76 81252 2,49 Year 3 35700 2.35 13000 21.3 44000 64.7 35316 0.79 83700 2.51 Year 4 46600 2.64 20000 27.0 76000 69.1 37966 0.84 86868 2.48 Year 5 57400 2.84 29000 32.6 108000 71.1 40670 0.88 97090 2.71

Figure 2.9 Projected Surface Area for Target Crops in Khinggan Province for the Five Year Plan (in hectares with percentage of total projected surface area for Manchukuo used in Khinggan Province)

Year Wheat Oats Alfalfa Sorghum Millet Ha % Ha % Ha % Ha % Ha % 1936 16000 1.45 0 0 0 0 40000 1.28 108000 3.78 Year 1 21000 1.79 5000 14.7 3000 60.0 40900 1.31 108900 3.82 Year 2 28500 2.19 9000 20.0 7000 63.6 41800 1.35 109800 3.88 Year 3 41000 2.83 17000 29.8 15000 71.4 43600 1.41 111600 3.96 Year 4 53500 3.32 26000 36.6 23000 74.2 46300 1.50 114300 4.08 Year 5 66000 3.72 36000 41.9 31000 75.6 49000 1.60 117000 4.18

224 The provincial bureau of industry distributed wheat and oats primarily to the Three Rivers area of North Khinggan where Russian refugees were farming; see Saitō Tokisuke, Horonbairu chikusan jijō (Hōten: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha tetsudō sōkyoku, 1937), 32.

225 Ishizaka Tadayuki, Manshūkoku sangyō kaihatsu gokanen keikaku no shiryōteki chōsa kenkyū, nōgyō bumon (Tokyo: Tō-A kenkyūjo, 1941), 58–59, 64–72, 88–89.

128 1941, the Mongol Lands would contribute three-fourths of the total alfalfa cultivated in

Manchukuo. In replicating ranch-based pastoral landscapes from abroad, alfalfa imperialism

relied upon the extensive dispossession of land in Khinggan Province. The Five Year Plan

overrode the aims of Directive 105, which had prohibited further “opening and releasing” of the

Mongolian territories. In order to grow alfalfa, oats, and wheat, the plan called for expanding

extant farmland into recently rewilded areas (Ch. erhuangdi, Mo. buqar tariy-a)—about 180,000 acres—as well as seizing another 111,000 acres after “nomad resettlement [J. yūbokumin

teichaku].”226 Banner administrations also banned grazing in certain areas during the growing

season of grass intended for winter fodder.227 To start with, the provincial government, under orders from the Business Department, chose four ‘model’ villages of thirty households or more in select banners as part of a pilot program in scientific management. Each village would attend to 250 acres of cropland, sharing machinery and several thousand yuan of bureau funding within the banner, but for the villages in North Khinggan, the Business Department increased that surface area by ten times and issued diesel-fueled Caterpillar tractors from California to cover the vastness of these fields. Threshers, mowers, plows, harrows, clod crushers, and hay presses— these tools all would contribute to the Japanese dream of “rationalizing” the rangelands.228 Kosai and other representatives from Gongzhuling condensed all of this technical information to banner

226 Ishizaka Tadayuki, Manshūkoku sangyō kaihatsu gokanen keikaku no shiryōteki chōsa kenkyū, nōgyō bumon (Tokyo: Tō-A kenkyūjo, 1941), 55–59, 62–70, 86–89. Other editions of the Five Year Plan called these plots “newly cultivated land of the Mongols.” See Manshū gokanen keikaku gaiyō, First Edition, Vol. 1 (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsabu, 1937), 80.

227 Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kōan hoku shō ni okeru bokuya narabini hōboku kankō chōsa hōkoku (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, 1939), 220.

228 Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha sōsaishitsu kōhōka, Mōchi ni okeru nō-chikusan gokanen keikaku (Typewritten manuscript, 1937), Library of Congress. The following banners participated in this program: Ariγun, Bayan, Butkha, and Morin Dabaγa Banners in East Khinggan; Aru Khorchin, Khorchin Right Flank Front, Khorchin Right Flank Middle, Khorchin Left Flank Back, and Khorchin Left Flank Front Banners in South Khinggan; Baγarin Left Flank, Naiman, and Khesigten Banners in West Khinggan; Ergün-e Left Flank, Solon, Old Barγu, and New Barγu Left Flank Banners in North Khinggan. The last three banners had grain fields ten times the size of the others.

129 officials over the course of a three-day workshop, and the alfalfa jumped from a controlled

“labscape” of experimentation to an open landscape of unpredictable change, one that had the

possibility of failure built into it.229 These mechanized efforts stood in stark contrast to the style of farming still practiced by many Mongols in the northern half of Khinggan Province (Ch. mansanzi, Mo. namuγ tariy-a), where herders would scatter seeds on the steppe during the fifth month of the old calendar, go out to summer pastures, and return three months later for whatever harvest brought by chance.230

Instead, all of this alfalfa would feed the new, hybridized animals of the Five Year Plan.

In their encounter with steppe domesticates, Japanese sources describe “Mongolian livestock” as

“rather undersized” of a “degenerated condition” and, therefore, needing “improvement” through crossbreeding programs.231 As one gazetteer betrays Japanese anxieties on the slight stature of horses, sheep, and cattle: “if we silently observe and not interfere with the original livelihoods of

Mongols, we will not be able to save the herding industry in the years ahead.”232 Livestock therefore came to represent human hierarchies of the empire: for Mantetsu experts, the decline of

229 Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab–Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2–6; Tiago Saraiva uses the term “labscape” to describe how experimental farm stations circulated forms of standardized life, such as wheat, that could travel among different scales from the laboratory to the landscape in the expansion of fascist regimes. See Tiago Saraiva, “Fascist Labscapes: Geneticists, Wheat, and the Landscapes of Fascism in Italy and Portugal” in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Fall 2010), 457–498.

230 Kōan sei shō Aru Horuchin ki jittai chōsa hōkoku (Kōan kyoku, 1941), 203.

231 Matsuo Matsutarō, The Development of Science and Culture in Manchuria: Japan’s Contributions (Dalian: The Research Committee of Pacific Relation in South Manchuria Railway Company, n.d.), 4; South Manchuria Railway Company, Manchuria, Land of Opportunities (New York: Thomas F. Logan, Inc., 1922), 25–26.

232 Kōan nan shō gairan (Kōan nan shō kōsho, 1935), 86.

130 native fauna paralleled the trajectory of the “dying race,” justifying veterinary intervention as a

way to rationalize animals and consequently to rationalize the nomads themselves.233

As early as 1913, the technicians at Gongzhuling began importing “superior breeds” and crossing Arabian, Gidran, and Hackney horses with Mongolian “ponies,” Berkshires with local pigs, Holstein and Shorthorn bulls with indigenous cows, and most notably, Merinos and

Corriedales with fat-tailed sheep. Under the direction of the first livestock section chief Kōmura

Taiji (1889–?), hybrids grew taller and heavier with each iteration, amounting to more meat and milk.234 Gongzhuling then loaned out its “improved” offspring to local farmers and herders.235

Colonial historian Virginia DeJohn Anderson describes the “roaming of livestock ... so long as the ‘empty’ land seemed plentiful” in early America as the “advance guard of English settlement.”236 In the Mongolian territories, however, the introduction of new ungulates did not portend the coming of a “virgin soil epidemic” by invasive species against which native animals held no immunity; the steppe had already accommodated and adapted to livestock for centuries.237 Ecological imperialism did not march on with the hooves of foreign ungulates, but

233 See, for example, Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures of Victorian England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Aaron Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of a Modern Imperial World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 8.

234 For specific statistics, see Saitō Tokisuke, Horonbairu chikusan jijō (Hōten: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha tetsudō sōkyoku, 1937), 41–65. Kōmura Taiji took two trips to the United States, first to import foreign sheep, then to study abroad. His research culminated in a dissertation titled “On the Heredity of Wool Quality and Quantity in the Crossbreeding of Mongolian Fat-Tailed and Rambouillet Sheep.” After serving some years in the Agricultural Division of Mantetsu in the 1930s, he became the head of Harbin Agricultural College in 1940; see Kōmura Taiji, Minami Manshū no bokuyō (Kōshurei: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha nōji shikenjō, 1922); Manshū shinshi shinshōroku (Dairen: Nisshin kōshinjo, 1929), 137; Manshū shinshiroku (Tokyo: Man-Mō shiryō kyōkai, 1937), 888.

235 “Improved” cattle and pigs weighed up to ninety more pounds than their native counterparts at a year old; see Nakano Seiichi, Manshū no chikusan (Tokyo: Meibudō, 1941), 40–61; “The Live-Stock Industry of Manchukuo” in Contemporary Manchuria, Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 1938), 108–113.

236 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 243.

237 Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4–5.

131 rather, in their genes as Japanese circulated “improved” species beyond the confines of the

experimental farm station. As such, ecological imperialism became internalized as runaway

genes passed from generation to generation.

Out of all the steppe domesticates, the fat-tailed sheep underwent the most extensive

redesign at Gongzhuling.238 Fiber experts captured the textures of its wool by microscope,

lending an ocular objectivity to the notion that this hardy animal produced only a meager bit of

“very poor [wool], inferior in tension and elasticity, containing much coarse and dead hair.”239

Mongolian wool therefore seemed more suited to making felted carpets, not fine yarn. Since

planners sought to recast the steppe as economically productive to the empire, Kōmura targeted

fat-tailed sheep for breeding programs in order to increase both the quantity and quality of the

kemp. Doing so would sever Japan’s dependence on wool from Australia. Mantetsu shipped in

herds of up to five hundred ovines at a time from Australia, New Zealand, and the United States

(in particular, Wyoming and Utah), and eventually selected Merinos to create ‘super sheep’ able

to withstand exposure and yet grow a soft fleece. Compared to other possibilities like Shropshire

and Southdown sheep, the Merino represented the ideal woolen beast with its never-ending

238 For more on this program, see Enatsu Yoshiki, “Tōhoku Ajia shi no shiten kara mita yōmō wo meguru Nihon to Ōsutoraria tono kankei: Ōsutoraria ni okeru shiryō chōsa no hōkoku” in Newslettā Kingendai tōhoku Ajia chiikishi kenkyūkai, Vol. 22 (December 2010), 17–30; Robert Perrins, “Holding Water in Bamboo Buckets: Agricultural Science, Livestock Breeding, and Veterinary Medicine in Colonial Manchuria” in Healing the Herds: Disease, Livestock Economies, and the Globalization of Veterinary Medicine (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 195– 214; for the environmental effects of sheep-breeding in other frontier contexts, see Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 118–157; Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Tiago Saraiva, “The Production and Circulation of Standardized Karakul Sheep and Frontier Settlement in the Empires of Hitler, Mussolini, and Salazar” in New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 135–150; Rebecca Woods, “The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900” (PhD Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013).

239 Irie Ryūgo, “Koridēru shu ni yoru Mōko zairai shu mōshitsu kairyō shiken (dai ippō)” in Nōji shiken kenyū jihō, Vol. 20 (March 1937); Ōno Suematsu and Okada Shigeharu “Manshūsan Merinō shu yōmō ni kansuru chōsa” in Nōji shiken kenyū jihō, Vol. 27 (March 1939), 65–79; Irie Ryūgo and Ōshima Kenji, “Koridēru shu ni yoru Mōko zairai shu mōshitsu kairyō shiken (dai nihō)” in Nōji shiken kenyū jihō, Vol. 27 (March 1939), 81–98; “The Live- Stock Industry of Manchukuo” in Contemporary Manchuria, Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 1938), 100.

132 supply for yarn: the breed had a thick, crimped coat that—without its yearly shearing—would

continue to grow indefinitely in languid, layered wrinkles to the point that only the snout would

remain visible, leaving the animal immobile, blind, and overheated. Kōmura crossed

Rambouillet Merino rams with fat-tailed ewes, then crossed the female offspring with the

imported sheep for a third generation, and finally crossed that male offspring with native sheep

to produce the “Improved Mongolian Breed.” This fourth generation yielded three to six times

more wool than the original fat-tailed sheep—a total of 2.5 to 4.6 kilograms.240 In addition to

Merinos, Mantetsu began importing Corriedales for crossbreeding in 1933, and set up “wool improvement” stations at Darkhan, Jiramtai, Linxi, and Wangyemiao, each with several hundred livestock. These experimental ranches bred and distributed over three thousand “improved” sheep to Mongols between 1924 and 1936, and continued to donate hundreds more to herders throughout the occupation.241

By the start of the Five Year Plan, Gongzhuling had been genetically engineering livestock for over two decades. Japanese officials at the Bureau of Mongolian Affairs looked to the deceptive successes of the experimental farm stations, and projected that they could raise the

240 Hōjō Taiyō, “Mōko menyō kairyō shiken seiseki ni kansuru ken” (20 February 1919) in Bokuchiku kankei zakken, Vol. 5 B–3–5–2–68, 65–70, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives; Kōshurei nōji shikenjō chikusanka, Mōko yōmō kairyō shiken seiseki (Typewritten manuscript, 1932), Stanford University Library; Nakano Seiichi, Manshū no chikusan (Tokyo: Meibudō, 1941), 55–57; Russian immigrants along the Chinese Eastern Railway had been crossing local sheep with Karakul and Romney Marsh varieties throughout the 1920s as well, but had failed with Merinos due to the hybrid’s unpalatable meat, perforated membrane, and lack of winter food supply; see Saitō Tokisuke, Horonbairu chikusan jijō (Hōten: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha tetsudō sōkyoku, 1937), 193– 198.

241 Ian Clunies Ross, A Survey of the Sheep and Wool Industry in Northeastern Asia, with Special Reference to Manchukuo, Korea, and Japan (Melbourne: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1936), 21–22; Mantetsu Hoku-Man chōsa iinkai, Kōan tō shō kaihatsu keikaku chitai chōsa hōkoku (Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1940), 142–144; Mōseibu, Kōan kakushō sangyō gaikan (Typewritten manuscript, 1936), Library of Congress; Nakano Seiichi, Manshū no chikusan (Tokyo: Meibudō, 1941), 55; “The Live-Stock Industry of Manchukuo” in Contemporary Manchuria, Vol. 2, No. 1 (January 1938), 113; Saitō Tokisuke, Horonbairu chikusan jijō (Hōten: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha tetsudō sōkyoku, 1937), 207; Zhou Mingrui, “A-lu Ke-er-qin qi lunxian shiqi de xumuye gaikuang (1933–1945)” in A-lu Ke-er-qin qi wenshi, Vol. 5 (Aru Khorchin: Zhengxie A- lu Ke-er-qin qi weiyuanhui, wenshi ziliao weiyuan hui, 1996), 247–255.

133 number of sheep from roughly one million to ten million in eighteen years. The “Improved

Mongolian Breed” would comprise a significant part of this stock.242 Concentration-villages

eased the circulation of hybrid animals through livestock stations set up at key sites in every

district of the province. Kikutake Jitsuzō, for instance, envisioned a hierarchy of administrative

bodies from the province, to the circuit, to the banner in order to “guide the improvement of the

pastures and herds.”243 Drawing from resources at the national museum, library, and Continental

Scientific Institute, Khinggan Province would establish its own research branch, as well as a grassland survey office, adviser training center, and a string of emergency granaries in Kailu,

Linxi, and Tongliao counties. These organs would oversee livestock training centers, factories, and cooperatives set up in each circuit, whose authorities, in turn, would manage various banner agencies. Each banner, then, would host a livestock station, supporting two hundred to over a thousand sheep, as well as small factories (staffed only by Mongols) to wash wool and tan leather in order to make saddles, carpets, boots, and felt. Plague prevention bureaus at every level of the livestock administration monitored herds and delivered vaccines to preempt rinderpest, glanders, anthrax, and various poxes.244 State intervention penetrated down to the

level of the herding camp, where under the guise of self-sufficiency, herders would farm just

enough to feed their families and livestock.245

242 Mōseibu, Kōan kakushō sangyō gaikan (Typewritten manuscript, 1936), Library of Congress. It remains unclear what percentage of the ten million sheep projected for Khinggan Province would consist of the “Improved Mongolian Breed,” but according to one 45 Year Plan, South Khinggan expected to maintain a flock of four million hybrid species alone; see Kōan kyoku, Kōan nan shō Jaraito ki jittai chōsa hōkoku (1939), 96–97.

243 Kikutake Jitsuzō, “Mōko minzoku tōji yōkō (an)” (15 January 1933) in Katakura Tadashi monjo 31–29, Archives at the University of Tokyo Department of Advanced Social and International Studies.

244 Mōseibu, Dai ikkai Kōan kakushō shōchō kaigi giji roku (1936) [microfilm], 131; for linkages between the veterinary science and Japan’s bacteriological weapons program, see Ruth Rogaski, “Vampires in Plagueland: The Multiple Meanings of Weisheng in Manchuria” in Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 132–159.

245 Kikutake Inaho, Kei Mō dangi (1941), 92–96.

134 Nevertheless, like the alfalfa it consumed, the “Improved Mongolian Breed” threatened

to undermine nomadism as a form of livelihood. Fat-tailed sheep could largely survive the bitter

cold with minimal protection, but according to critics, these hybrid animals could not. The

“Improved Mongolian Breed” had to eat handfed alfalfa and sorghum and live in well-bedded,

sheltered conditions for at least half of the year. One Japanese breeder insisted that hybrids—a

herd of which did not even make it through a milder winter in Jinzhou—still had the stamina to

tolerate the cold and just had not received enough nutrition from winter-feeding.246 Yet the station director at Darkhan confided to Ian Clunies Ross, the head of Sydney’s Animal Health

Laboratory who toured these experimental ranches, that “such [crossbred] sheep could not survive under natural conditions during the winter, as they require hand-feeding both because they lack the resistance of the native sheep and, at the same time, show little aptitude for scratching through the snow to find feed as do the latter.”247

Reproducing the “Improved Mongolian Breed” on the steppe also seemed at odds with

“nomadic habits of the Mongols,” according to critics. Clunies Ross described livestock experts

as paddocking and restraining rams in order to manage the mating process and control the gene

pool, something “quite impossible ... within the existing system of communal grazing.” Without

this “extensive culling of off-types,” he warned, “the Mongol might easily be left with a hybrid

sheep lacking the hardiness ... of the native sheep, while producing a wool of little higher value

or volume to compensate for the disadvantages he has suffered in its production.”248

246 Tamura Ichirō, Manshū oyobi Hoku-Shi ni okeru men’yō jijō ni tsuite (Tokyo: Nichi-Man jitsugyō kyōkai, 1936), 24.

247 Ian Clunies Ross, A Survey of the Sheep and Wool Industry in Northeastern Asia, with Special Reference to Manchukuo, Korea, and Japan (Melbourne: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1936), 22.

248 Ian Clunies Ross, A Survey of the Sheep and Wool Industry in Northeastern Asia, with Special Reference to Manchukuo, Korea, and Japan (Melbourne: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1936), 19–20.

135 Gongzhuling and other farm stations had, in fact, engineered an economically intensive animal

entirely dependent on human intervention.

Whereas Clunies Ross argued that the pastoral economy would need to shift from

nomadic herding to sedentary ranching before the “Improved Mongolian Breed” could succeed,

Owen Lattimore contended that hybrids would act as the very agents to induce that

transformation. He expected that the distribution of hybrids would break down an “independent

livestock economy of the Mongols,” coercing them into imperial markets as “the coolie

employee of Japanese wool-growers, dairy interests, and cavalry-remount breeders.” The

consistency of hybrid wool could meet the demands of such a market, but it would not suffice for

the household economy of the very people that would ultimately raise them. Nomads used the

coarse kemp of the fat-tailed sheep for the felt walls of gers and ate its meat for its high fat

content. “This one animal,” Lattimore pointed out, “provides the Mongol with food, clothing,

and housing,” but once replaced with the “Improved Mongolian Breed,” the wool would become

too fine for tents and the meat too lean for winter diets. While hybrids themselves could not cope

with the harsh climate, their flesh and fleece would, furthermore, make human bodies more

vulnerable to the cold. It remains no wonder, then, that many herders reacted with apathy, if not

outright opposition, towards adopting crossbreeds. Complaints about the poor quality of the meat

and leather, not to mention the lack of resistence to disease, ran rampant among Mongols who

tended to these genetically modified sheep.249 As a result, livestock specialists could not increase

hybrid herds as quickly as they had hoped. Lattimore attributed this setback to “the conservative

249 Nichi nō nōsei kenkyūkai, Shinkyō jimukyoku, Kōan hoku shō no nō boku sui sangyō gaikan (shisatsu hōkokusho) (Typewritten manuscript, 1940), Northern Studies Collection, Hokkaido University.

136 stubbornness of the Mongols in wriggling away from the control of a money economy.”250 The lukewarm reception of the breeding program likely speaks more to how much of an environmental threat it posed to the livelihoods of herders, as they had perceived it. Seen in this way, then, Japanese technicians at Gongzhuling fostered ecologies of betrayal by introducing plant and animal species that would refigure environmental relations such that nomadic practice could not sustain itself.

* * *

This chapter has charted the environmental transformation of Khinggan Province in the aftermath of its demarcation. As Japanese state planners and Mongol provincial elites sharpened the ethnic divide in the borderlands, they sought to align local environments with these new demographic boundaries. In the geographic logic of the empire, nomadic livelihood initially defined Mongol ethnic identity. It was this idea that undergirded projects to engineer the ecology of Khinggan Province as a means of revitalizing herds and the hunt, and ultimately the “dying race” itself. Beginning with Directive 105—the ban on homesteading to delimit the steppe as zones of pasturage—conservative measures for Mongolian and Tungusic communities served to legitimize the occupation through a kind of “primitive authenticity.” But in casting nomadism as incompatible with the rational, scientific management of the land—indeed the very cause of range degredation—Japanese researchers opened the steppe to ambitious programs of state intervention in order to fulfill the productive capacity of the region as these economic experts had envisioned it. Recreating a “pure Mongol zone” only preserved the semblance of the steppe on the surface. Concentration-villages, alfalfa farms, and hybrid livestock under the Five Year

250 Owen Lattimore, “The Eclipse of Inner Mongolian Nationalism” (July 1936) in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 431–432; on the integration of Mongols in transcontinental trade and the global economy well before Lattimore, see the critique in Devon Dear, “Holy Rollers: Monasteries, Lamas, and the Unseen Transport of Chinese-Russian Trade, 1850–1911” in International Review of Social History, Vol. 59, Special Issue (December 2014), 69–88.

137 Plan all worked to reconfigure herding practices. In the end, and ironically so, the survival of

ethnic purity in Khinggan Province, moving forward, would hinge upon ecological hybridity.

By the early 1940s, when the Five Year Plan should have run its course, the development

office in North Khinggan assessed the extent of environmental impact in what had been the most

fertile grasslands in the region. Clunies Ross had already raised concerns about the surge in

sheep, improved or otherwise, at the start of the Five Year Plan. He figured that “existing

nomadic practices of the Mongol population have led to the maximum utilization of this country

for pastoral purposes.” Increasing the carrying capacity of livestock in areas of mixed farming

and herding, therefore, would lead to “definite erosion.”251 Typically it takes thirty-five to forty

years for animals to reduce the original standing crop of vegetation to unsustainable levels. This

cyclical process, known as an “ungulate irruption,” ends in a population crash, which then

relieves grazing pressures until the numbers rebound again.252 Statistical evidence remains too inconsistent across banners to point to any sudden decline in the livestock population but, broadly speaking, many areas in the early 1940s did reach a point of animal “saturation.”

Furthermore, the Mongolian territories hit nowhere near the production targets laid out for fodder in the original plan. Kosai’s alfalfa scheme, for one, totaled only ten percent of the projected three thousand hectares of fodder in the first year of the plan, though wheat and oat harvest fared closer to paper expectations.253 The development office cited half-finished

reclamation projects—likely intended for wheat, oats, and alfalfa fields for the Five Year Plan—

251 Ian Clunies Ross, A Survey of the Sheep and Wool Industry in Northeastern Asia, with Special Reference to Manchukuo, Korea, and Japan (Melbourne: Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1936), 25.

252 Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7.

253 Minami Manshū tetsudo kabushiki kaisha chōsa bu, Nō-chikusan bumon kankei shiryō in Manshū gokanen keikaku ritsuan shorui, Third Edition, Vol. 1 (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsabu, 1937), 477; Kōan nan shō Koruchin sayoku chūki jittai chōsa hōkokusho (Kōan kyoku, 1939), 82–85.

138 as the greatest challenge to “wasting away of pastures” by leaving the earth exposed to the

desiccating sun. As a result, plant growth had dropped on the steppe, collapsing into dead zones

of “climax vegetation,” which had hitherto been individual patches, but now had spread as far as

the eye could see. Wind erosion, excessive evaporation, alkaline soil, and the dwindling water

table all worked against the original objectives of the Five Year Plan.254

For all the talk of rationalization and science, the development office finally condemned applying methods indiscriminately from Japan or other foreign countries to the Mongolian territories without also understanding local conditions. Accepting temporary defeat, its report concluded: “the natural environment casts a long shadow over improvement technologies.”255

While previous scholarship tends to attribute the utter failure and eventual abandonment of the

Five Year Plan to the escalation of Japan’s war with China, a decision made far away from the

banners, the evidence here suggests that Japanese planners on the ground likewise conceded to a

landscape that they saw as increasingly beyond their grasp, regardless of a “technological

imaginary” that might have empowered them in the first years of the occupation.256 Still, even after the withdrawal of the plan, traces of its underlying draft remained: the environmental interventions of the early 1930s largely arrested the rapid march of Republican homesteaders, helping to define the limits of the autonomous region in the postwar years not only ethnically, but ecologically as well. Nevertheless, the stark delineation of this border leaves for us the

254 Fushimi Sadatoshi, Kōan hoku shō bokuya gaisetsu (Kōan hoku shō kaitaku chō, 1942), 27–28; Solon Banner stood right at carrying capacity, whereas Ergün-e Left Flank and New Barγu Right Flank could support another fifty percent more livestock.

255 Fushimi Sadatoshi, Kōan hoku shō bokuya gaisetsu (Kōan hoku shō kaitaku chō, 1942), 30–32.

256 Aaron Moore sees the “technological imaginary” as a visionary system of power and mobilization in the expansion of empire; see Aaron Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3.

139 question of what happened to the Mongolian territories excised from Khinggan Province, which the following chapter attends to next.

140 CHAPTER THREE: EXHAUSTING THE EARTH

In the former Mongolian territories east of the provincial border, Japanese imperialism

converted circulatory pastoral ecologies into extractive agrarian peripheries to devastating effect.

Two years after the Demarcation in the autumn of 1935, reports emerged of a mysterious illness

stalking the population of Keshan in what is now Heilongjiang Province. The county seat—itself

a middling and somewhat isolated town of 20,000 founded in 1915—lay at the end of a railroad

line only recently completed, sixty miles northeast of Qiqihar.257 The following summer in 1936, representatives from the Department of Hygiene in Manchukuo’s Ministry of Civil Affairs, authorities from the Manchukuo Army, doctors from the Continental Institute of Scientific

Research, and surveyors from Mantetsu descended upon Keshan, so named for an extinct volcano nearby. There, traveling along the dirt roads lined with sorghum-thatched, earthen farmhouses, the so-called experts learned of victims suffering from fever, headaches, dizziness, cold limbs, weakened pulse, chest pains, and nausea. From the onset of these symptoms, most people—after vomiting up yellow or green liquid—died within two days, half of whom were women between the ages of 16 and 35. Of the 130 known cases in Keshan and the surrounding six counties that year, 128 people had perished from this outbreak. Japanese observers at the time named it Keshan Disease (J. kokuzanbyō, Ch. keshanbing).258

While recognizing that the farmers in Keshan could indeed maintain a basic level of public health, the field scientists nevertheless saw the “academic necessity” in conducting

257 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 286, 288. For contemporary photographs of villages in Keshan County, see Kokuzan nōji shikenjō, Kokuzan chihō nōka keizai (Shinkyō: Sangyōbu daijin kanbō shiryōka, 1937).

258 Abe and his colleagues published figures that suggest a very high mortality rate for Keshan Disease, but it seems more likely that both the residents and the researchers could not diagnose patients until far too late in the progression of this sickness. Abe Toshio, “Kokuzanbyō byōgen chōsa hōkoku” in Tairiku kagakuin kenkyū hōkoku, Vol. 1, No. 10 (September 1937), 345–347.

141 Figure 3.1 Farming Village in Keshan County (1937)

“organized research” on endemic diseases of unknown origin in the more “remote areas” of the

continent.259 As the principal investigator of the study, Abe Toshio (1892–?), cautioned:

Manchurian peasants have well-established customs and a vague knowledge of preventative hygiene measures for their own bodies, and though unscientific to a certain extent, they do have the ability to differentiate diseases. We should not overlook the fact that locals do not remain completely ignorant.260

Abe and his team looked into the possibility of pneumonic plague, insect-infested wool,

contaminated foods, and poisonous plants, while also considering drinking water and the cold

259 Abe Toshio, “Kokuzanbyō byōgen chōsa hōkoku” in Tairiku kagakuin kenkyū hōkoku, Vol. 1, No. 10 (September 1937), 349.

260 Abe Toshio, “Kokuzanbyō byōgen chōsa hōkoku” in Tairiku kagakuin kenkyū hōkoku, Vol. 1, No. 10 (September 1937), 348. Abe had graduated from Tokyo Imperial University with a dissertation on typhus in 1927. He had taught as a professor at Nagasaki Medical University before assuming the head of the Continental Institute’s Hygienic Technology division. He maintained, at the very least, tenuous connections with the biochemical weapons program, Unit 100, where he supposedly organized some of its research activities. See “Jyūgonen sensō to Nihon no igaku iryō kenkyūkai ‘sensō to igaku’ daiyonji hōchū kiroku” in Jyūgonen sensō to Nihon no igaku iryō kenkyūkai kaishi, Vol. 7, No. 1 (February 2007), 41; Manshū shinshi roku (Tokyo: Man-Mō shiryō kyōkai, 1937), 106.

142 weather. They did not, however, take into account Erkeshan, the neighborhood volcano.261 After autopsying a victim’s heart and discovering it unnaturally engorged, the Japanese doctors diagnosed Keshan Disease as cardiomyopathy, a deterioration of the heart muscle. At the end of the inquiry, however, results were still inconclusive, and Abe posited three possible etiologies: a new form of infectious illness, carbon monoxide poisoning, or an “endemic disease” (J. fūdobyō,

Ch. difangbing) similar to goiter or Kashin-Beck Disease (J. Kashinbekku byō, Ch. dagujiebing), a degenerative bone disorder.262

The so-called discovery of Keshan Disease in 1935 signaled the horrifying repercussions

of settler colonialism and environmental engineering that culminated under Japanese imperialism.

As state planners designated specific modes of production to large swathes of Manchukuo— scientific ranching in its banners and industrial farming in its counties—their reductive programs refigured the land in such a way as to leave indelible imprints on the people that lived there.

Using the epicenter of disease as a case study, this chapter reveals those underlying connections between empire, environment, and the earth as they surfaced on colonized bodies and registered on the scientific record. The 1935 episode represented an unfortunate convergence of medical breakthroughs and environmental events in Keshan: the legitimating process of Japanese medicine through new theories of climate and hygiene rendered legible the slow accumulation of ecological decisions—decisions dating from the late nineteenth century that transformed pastoral migrations into agrarian settlement and reoriented regional economies towards international demands.

261 According to the Heilongjiang Draft Gazetteer, the provincial administration shortened a butchered version of the older Mongolian name qaghalgh-a tu or “gated” to come up with Erkeshan. See Wan Fulin and Zhang Boyin, Heilongjiang zhigao (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1992), 130.

262 Abe Toshio, “Kokuzanbyō byōgen chōsa hōkoku” in Tairiku kagakuin kenkyū hōkoku, Vol. 1, No. 10 (September 1937), 363.

143 This chapter begins by situating Keshan within a larger context of endemic disease research conducted by imperial doctors. Their studies on endemic disease built the routes of empirical exchange and authorized afflictions as unique to the borderlands. Japanese research nonetheless stopped short of determining the cause of Keshan Disease. To trace its origins, then, this chapter turns to a long-term study of the area by looking at the selenium-deficient soil, one that formed in the crucible of the earth millions of years ago. Selenium deficiency only became a problem when the patterns of land use in Keshan began to change in the late nineteenth century.

Keshan itself stood on former Mongolian territory located beyond Khinggan Province, in a banner once known as Yekhe Mingγan. This banner bore witness to the dramatic shift from pastoral nomadism to small-scale agriculture then to mechanized farming within a short span of fifty years. Largely driven by the integration of Manchuria’s soybean industry into the global market after the Russo-Japanese War, this transition created prime conditions for the development of selenium deficiency disorders among its inhabitants. After the Demarcation, the converting of “wasteland” into farmland through settler colonialism accelerated the depletion of already scarce reserves of the element. This ecological transformation, in bringing along an influx of migrants and changes in diet, rendered selenium deficiency—until then a geological characteristic of Keshan—into environmental and public health crisis.

CLIMATE AND THE INTERPRETERS OF MALADIES

The body, as Laura Nash has noted, offers a compelling site to explore local environments, and one that questions the modern dichotomy that separates people from nature.

When considering the body as porous, one cannot know definitively where nature ends and the

144 human begins.263 Selenium deficiency disorders demonstrate that permeable quality of bodies by making the consequences of intensive agriculture visible on those who literally lived off the land.

Yet without a putatively empirical language to describe and document Keshan Disease, the medical field would not have recognized these afflictions beyond the realm of unconfirmed rumor and superstition, as mere folktales of bachelor villages and poisoned fields. Keshan

Disease began to receive significant interest from the Japanese medical community as a part of a broader movement towards monitoring the health of its subjects and justifying imperial modernity through field research and hygiene campaigns. The physical impact of selenium deficiency disorders, as manifested on the bodies of patients, in turn, later contributed to conceptions of ethnic difference by Japanese scientists who attempted to explain these disorders.

Yet these experts ultimately could not unravel the etiology of Keshan Disease themselves; a longue durée perspective exposes the geographic composition of the area as lacking in selenium, a trace element primarily used to make particular enzymes that work as antioxidants, which prevent cell damage caused by free radicals.

Physicians at the time did not know its underlying causes, but Abe and some of his colleagues suggested that Keshan Disease belonged to a group of illnesses known as fūdobyō, a combination of the characters loosely meaning climate and sickness, and often translated as

“endemic disease.” A contemporary dictionary defined fūdobyō as “a disease occurring within a fixed region, attributed to factors of climate and natural features.”264 By the 1930s, fūdo—as

discussed in the philosophy of Watsuji Tetsurō—also could mean climate as “an expression of

subjective human existence” rather than an external, objective natural environment, from which

263 Laura Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 5, 8.

264 Daijiten (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1936), Vol. 22, 68.

145 an entire people’s attitudes, values, and culture would derive.265 The connotations of fūdobyō contrasted sharply with the Chinese term for endemic disease, difangbing, which suggests a strictly geographic meaning. Watsuji drew upon older meanings of fūdo, as discussed by such intellectuals as Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692) who asserted that differing geographic conditions between the Chinese and their ‘barbarian’ neighbors to the north generated contrasting constitutions, or qi, finally leading to disparate customs, behaviors, and natures.266 Watsuji later resurrected fūdo in response to what he perceived as Martin Heidegger overstating the importance of time in the structure of subjective existence vis-à-vis space. For Watsuji, fūdo served as the human expression of space. Thus fūdo, as a spatial and environmental concept, became increasingly important in defining difference not only within the Japanese empire but also against the West. By extension, fūdobyō fostered a form of civilizational difference between

Japanese and others when racial boundaries ceased to make any medical sense. That is, in the cases of Keshan Disease, scientists brought bodies into the empire and calibrated their health, but under the assumption that those bodies—Japanese or other—were fundamentally not all that different from each other. Hypothetically anyone could succumb to fūdobyō. The difference lay in the environments from which inhabitants drew their sustenance and how they chose to do so.

According to these studies then, Japanese migrants could therefore escape developing Keshan

Disease unlike the local population if they followed preventative measures of hygiene as prescribed by modern science.

265 Watsuji Tetsurō, Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bownas (Tokyo: Greenwood Press, 1988), v; Augustin Berque, “The Question of Space: From Heidegger to Watsuji” in Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Joy Hendry (London: Routledge, 1998), 57–67.

266 Chen Zhihong, “Climate’s Moral Economy: Geography, Race, and the Han in Early Republican China” in Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority, eds. Thomas Mullaney, James Patrick Leibold, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Armand Vanden Bussche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 74. Watsuji however makes no mention of the theories by other modern geographers like Friedrich Ratzel, Ellsworth Huntington, and Robert Ward.

146 Field research on Keshan Disease took place within an imperial campaign of

documenting endemic conditions in the borderlands.267 Typically, the first round of research

involved ascertaining the scope of the disorder. Teams of physicians from Manchukuo Medical

College—which included the occasional Chinese, Manchu, and Korean intern—along with

Mantetsu staff and military guards, traveled the countryside, conducting house-to-house

interviews, examining up to several hundred patients per site, and checking the composition of

water in dozens of wells.268 Recording the age, sex, and the number of years the patient lived in the area, however, did not suffice for these doctors, who then took to photographing, x-raying, and measuring subjects, as well as testing their blood and urine for any abnormal symptoms.

Doctors also visited several local elementary schools to survey children, who often exhibited signs of illness first. By the late 1930s, researchers, in particular, had moved onto human experimentation since they could not induce the symptoms of endemic disease in animals in the same way as they could for symptoms of epidemic disease. As one research scientist justified it,

“accurate knowledge on morphology is necessary, but since this disease is so distinct, how can we conduct animal testing?”269 Professors instead designed trials for disease prevention where

they dispensed, for example, cod liver oil, yeast pills, deadly nightshade to supposedly

consenting patients and observing their effects.270 The results of these studies, both in the field and in the laboratory, appeared in medical journals in Xinjing and in Tokyo, in Chinese and

Japanese, and established the borderlands at the forefront of endemic disease research.

267 Kihara Hitoshi, Uchi Mōko no seibutsugakuteki chōsa (Tokyo: Yōkendō, 1940), 92.

268 For instance, Xiang Naixi (1903–?), who identified as ethnically Manchu, trained under these Japanese doctors at Manchukuo Medical College.

269 Takamori Tokio, “Kashin Bekku shi byō no hontai ni tsuite” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 64, No. 3167 (1 January 1940), 18.

270 Multiple issues of Tokyo iji shinshi from 1935 to 1940 published medical research on Kashin-Beck Disease. Dongfang yixue zazhi and Manshū igaku zasshi also printed similar research articles from these laboratories.

147 Figure 3.2 Chest Cavity X-Rays of Keshan Disease Patients (1938)

Japanese scientists blamed civilizational practices drawn from local environments in deforming colonial bodies. For instance, when studying the endemic Kashin-Beck Disease (then, also not yet known as a selenium deficiency disorder), lead scientist Hieda Kentarō (1899-1971) stumbled through villages where the proportion suffering from Kashin-Beck Disease ranged from 60 to 72%. Borrowing the language of evolutionary theory, Hieda described afflicted locals living “primitive lifestyles” that had ultimately led them to have “the bone structure of a gorilla.”271 In the photographs that Hieda included in his report, he had arranged men with

271 Hieda Kentarō, Kitaman chihō ni okeru kōjyō senshu oyobi Kashin-Betsuku shi byō sonota kisei chūbyō ni kansuru jicchi chōsa gaiyō (Kantō kyoku imin eisei chōsa iinkai, 1937), 8. Hieda gained his research experience studying malaria at Fushun. At the end of the Second World War, he stayed on in China for another eight years as a

148 Figure 3.3 Hieda Kentarō’s Photograph of Kashin-Beck Patients (1935)

Kashin-Beck in a line by descending height and age, naked except for a loincloth. Patients stood next to a fully clothed, healthy subject—often one of the Japanese doctors—so that readers could compare the full extent of their deformities. Hands placed on their thighs, the men could not bend their elbows due to disease, and a close examination of the fingers reveals their disfigured joints. Hieda aimed to construct a metric to show how the disease progressed over time, and yet the photograph now evinces the extent of patient objectification in the name of colonial science.272

Naturally, these written accounts and photographic evidence expanded the boundaries of knowledge, but also provoked terror among administrators and settlers alike. One Japanese doctor urgently pressed for continued research on endemic disease because he saw it as “a

professor at Huabei University and supporter of the Communist Party. See Iijima Wataru, Mararia to Teikoku: Shokuminchi igaku to Higashi Ajia no kōiki chitsujo (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2005), 296.

272 Hieda Kentarō, Manshū ni okeru chihōbyō ni tsuite (Kantō kyoku imin eisei chōsa iinkai, 1935), 18.

149 significant obstacle to the Japanese (J. Nihon minzoku) development of Manchuria-Mongolia.”273

Especially troubling was the prevalence of Kashin-Beck Disease near Suileng, a county several miles east of Keshan and a government-designated site for Japanese homesteaders. There, about forty percent of the denizens had fallen ill, with about five percent of them exhibiting visible signs of goiter as well. The Manchukuo government organized an Immigrant Hygiene Research

Conference in early 1936 to discuss the unfolding crisis. As reported in the Manchuria Daily

News, military doctors and medical school professors in attendance found that:

The cultural climate and endemic diseases in Manchuria differed extremely from Japan. Shortcomings in adapting to the [continental] lifestyle would impede the health of migrants and their descendants, making it not difficult at all to anticipate the inevitable failure of the entire immigrant enterprise.

Personnel responsible for the migration of Japanese “pioneers” to Manchukuo worried that these newcomers would “become alarmed and flee back to the homeland” if they had arrived in Suileng without advance warning on the presence of endemic disease in the area. The conference emphasized the “extreme importance of research on indigenous hygiene,” advocating that should experts explain the condition in “sincere” terms, Japanese immigrants would not “run away out of anxiety” because their own hygienic practices somehow would prevent them from also becoming ill.274 Endemic disease endangered the very foundation of the Japanese imperial project in the borderlands by unsettling the potential settlers themselves.

Within the overarching debate on climate, hygiene, and civilizational difference, Abe and his colleagues probed the possibility of Keshan Disease as an endemic condition. Specialists

273 Miyabe Isao, “Manshū ni manenseru chihō byōsei kikeisei kotsukansetsu shikkan ni tsuite—daigokai hōkoku” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 60, No. 3005 (21 October 1936), 13; Miyabe Isao, “Manshū ni manenseru chihō byōsei kikeisei kotsukansetsu shikkan ni tsuite—dairokkai hōkoku” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 60, No. 3032 (15 May 1937), 24; Miyabe Isao, “Kokkashō ni okeru chihō byōsei kikeisei kotsukansetsu shikkan ni tsuite” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 60, No. 3098 (27 August 1938), 27–29.

274 “Imin eisei chōsa iin kaigi: Imin jigyō no kaitaku ha jyūyō naru kokusaku” in Manshū nichinichi shinbun (2 February to 4 March 1936), accessed through Kōbe University Library Newspaper Digital Archive.

150 from the Continental Institute of Scientific Research and Manchukuo Medical College set up a

temporary “North Manchuria Mystery Disease Research Center” in order to conduct human

autopsies, animal experiments, clinical tests, and field investigations.275 After reading results from electrocardiograms and x-rays, the physicians realized that the sudden onset of symptoms that had struck Keshan in 1935 represented only a fraction of all cases. Based on their findings, they divided patients into three groups: asymptomatic, consumptive, and urgent. Keshan Disease was actually a more gradual condition that had unknowingly affected hundreds of people in addition to those who abruptly died in 1935.

Keshan Disease, its symptoms now codified in medical terms, suddenly began to appear all over the borderlands. By 1938, cases had appeared across twenty counties in four different provinces.276 Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, several banners along the border of

Khinggan Province recorded hundreds of casualties. In Ariɣun Banner, for instance, “heaps of bodies” left from the outbreaks led to desolate descriptions of “bachelor villages” (Ch. guangguntun) and “streets of broken lineages” (Ch. duanjiajie).277 After the communist takeover,

Keshan Disease persisted as a pretext for government involvement in the daily life of its citizens;

the new state intervened by sending disease prevention teams in areas with little medical access

in order to establish hygiene centers. Daɣur and Orochon communities near Qiqihar, for instance,

275 Sun Jianping, Keshan xianzhi (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 1992), 710. For autopsy notes, see Abe Toshio, “Kokuzanbyō byōgen chōsa hōkoku” in Tairiku kagakuin kenkyū hōkoku, Vol. 1, No. 10 (September 1937), 383–386.

276 Abe Toshio, “Kokuzanbyō ni tsuite” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 62, No. 3091 (9 July, 1938), 1–7; Hara Tooru, Kokuzanbyō (shinkin shōgai wo shuchō to seru Manshū chihōbyō) ni kansuru rinryōteki oyobi jikkenteki kenkyū” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 63, No. 3116 (1 January 1939), 1–11. Seven provinces in China reported incidences of the disorder in 1939, and the cases began to “appear” in a wide area extending from the northeast to southwest of the country.

277 Wang Kejian records attacks of Keshan Disease in Ariɣun (1937, 1944), Butkha (1935, 1937, 1942), Kharachin (1941), and Morin Dabaɣa (1937, 1938, 1942) banners. See Wang Kejian, Nei Menggu zizhiqu keshanbing fangzhi yanjiu (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 2003), 5–6.

151 learned about the “preventative measures” of air circulation, bathroom insulation, and domestic

repairs from these initiatives.278 Keshan itself experienced even more devastating crises that claimed thousands of lives in the 1960s.279

Only in the late 1970s did medical experts and geochemists in the People’s Republic of

China realize that a deficiency of selenium lay at the cause of such catastrophe.280 According to the current literature, insufficient amounts of selenium rendered the villagers in Keshan— especially younger women and children—susceptible to certain contagions usually passed over by the immune system of any healthy body. For Keshan Disease, it may have been a fatal strain of the coxsackie virus. While present medical research still cannot account for the definitive causes of the disorder, an everyday intake of around 55 micrograms of selenium seems to prevent Keshan Disease for adults. The denizens of Keshan, however, absorbed only a fifth of that amount from food and drink.281 This trace element, or rather the absence thereof, hastened the emergence of environmental disease, thus underscoring the importance of the geological milieu in the health of its human occupants and, ultimately, in the nature of imperialism in

Keshan.

Much of the selenium cycling through human bodies and ecologies comes from rocks that make up the earth’s crust, with volcanic activity as the primary means of churning up molten material from the planet’s core to its surface. From there, selenium erodes into the soil and seeps

278 Zhu-rong-a, Ma-du-er-tu, Shao Dao, Zhao Yingdong, Wu Yongzhang, Qiqiha'er shijiao Dawo'erzu qingkuang (Nei Menggu shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha zu, 1958), 21–22, 69; Zhu-rong-a, Mo-jin-chen, Wu-da-mu, Zhang Weijun, Heilongjiang sheng Heihe zhuanqu Xunke xian Elunchun minzu xiang buchong diaocha cailiao (Nei Menggu shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha zu, 1961), 44.

279 Sun Jianping, Keshan xianzhi (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 1992), 710.

280 Melinda Beck, Orville Levander, and Jean Handy, “Selenium Deficiency and Viral Infection” in The Journal of Nutrition, Vol. 133, No. 5 (May 2003), 1463–1467.

281 “Dietary Supplement Fact Sheet: Selenium,” Office of Dietary Supplements, National Institutes of Health, accessed 13 July 2013 [http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Selenium-HealthProfessional/].

152 into the water following the slow, weathering of volcanic rock before making its way into human

and animal bodies through the consumption of plants grown in that soil. The remains of several

minor volcanoes dot the landscape of the Mongolian borderlands, including Erkeshan, which

spans Keshan and Kedong counties. These peaks range from two to six hundred meters in height

and date from the early Pleistocene, some 2.5 million years ago; with the exception of

Wudalianchi to the north of Keshan, they all have become extinct. According to one nineteenth-

century travelogue, Daɣurs had already identified these geologic formations as “sulphur-hills”

well before Japanese scientists surveyed them in the 1930s; one site in Mergen, about a hundred

miles north of Qiqihar, comprised over forty of these mounds.282 Typically, these eruptions

released great quantities of selenium in the prehistoric past, but here the mineral had quickly

evaporated into the air, leaving behind a landscape of basalt and, as a result, deprived the earth of

a critical amount for bodies to function.283 Indeed, the locations of these volcanoes directly map

onto the distribution of selenium deficiency disorders.284

The geological composition of Keshan and its surrounding counties suggests, then, the

presence of selenium deficiency disorders in the borderlands before their so-called discoveries in

1935. In fact, evidence of such illnesses comes from the last years of the Qing in the area around

282 Palladius, “An Expedition through Manchuria from Pekin to Blagovestchensk” in The Journal of the Royal Geographic Society, Vol. 42 (London: John Murray, 1872), 174; Ogura Tsutomu, Manshū kazan chōsa hōkoku, Vol. 1 (Lüshun: Ryojun kōka daigaku, 1936–1939), 81. Qing sources recorded the last eruption of Wudalianchi in 1720. See Xiqing, Heilongjiang waiji (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1967) and Wu Zhenchen, Ningguta jilüe (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1967).

283 Fiona Fordyce, “Selenium Deficiency and Toxicity in the Environment” in Essentials of Medical Geology: Impacts of the Natural Environment on Public Health (Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005), 378–379. Conversely, certain volcanic areas—geologically comprised of igneous rock—can lend to an abundance of selenium in the soil and in acid rain. Selenium poisoning leads to serious side effects such as hair loss, stomach problems, and fatigue. See G. H. Floor, S. Calabrese, G. Román-Ross, W. D’Alessandro, and A. Aiuppa in “Selenium Mobilization in Soils due to Volcanic Derived Acid Rain: An Example from Mt Etna Volcano, Sicily” in Chemical Geology, Vol. 289, No. 3 to 4 (October 2011), 235–244.

284 Kubo Haruo, “Man-Mō in okeru chihō byōsei kikei kotsukansetsu shikkan ni tsuite” in Tokyo iji shinshi, Vol. 64, No. 3195 (27 July 1940), 1–2; Ogura Tsutomu, Manshū kazan chōsa hōkoku (Lüshun: Ryojun kōka daigaku, 1936– 1939); Manshū eisei shiryō sōran (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chihōbu eiseika, 1937).

153 Keshan, a destination for Chinese migrants since the late nineteenth century. People named the

maladies based on their symptoms, such as “the swift and speedy sickness” (Ch. kuaidang bing),

“vomiting yellow water disease” (Ch. tu huangshui bing), and a case of the “heart-attacking

flutters” (Ch. gongxin fan). The earliest mention of Keshan and Kashin-Beck Disease dates to the

early 1890s, where recent homesteaders on the banks of the Lalinqing River, east of Keshan:

did not expect that after ten or so years of [reclamation] all of the women, infants, and the middle-aged died, with only the elderly surviving without serious injury. The youth who were fortunate to survive all grew thick, clumsy, and short with broad waists, big joints, and twisted legs. They were unable to work. When they had the chance, many deserted [the land], moving entire households and affixing their land licenses to the door while leaving all of their belongings inside.285

Ten years later in 1903, the lieutenant general at the Tungken garrison, which at that time

oversaw the area near Keshan, wrote to the military governor of Heilongjiang concerning the

abrupt departure of soldiers stationed at Keyin, nearby. The northern section, recently assigned

for homesteading, encompassed some 26,000 shang of territory. “Not one person dares to ...

[use] this land again,” the lieutenant general lamented, after the bannermen and their farmhands

“abandoned the wasteland because ... the earth and water were sick and poisoned.” The

Heilongjiang military governor decided to disallow further settlement in northern Keyin.286

These tragedies continued into the Republican era. In 1919, women had “vomited yellow water from their mouths and died” so the inhabitants had fled Keshan one after another, leaving their farms to seed.287 In one community alone, the death of some eight hundred people

285 Wan Fulin and Zhang Boying, Heilongjiang zhigao (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1992), Vol. 1, 442.

286 Keyin is present-day Hulan County. “Tongken fudutong Qing Qi wei jiang Keyin beiduan zhenghongqi qizhi huangdi nizuo tongshu guanbing liang jia zhan zhan zhi yongshi gei Heilongjiang jiangjun yamen ziwen” (GX28.06.15), Vol. 127, 128–129; “Heilongjiang jiangjun yamen wei tingfang Keyin beiduan zhenghongqi fangzhi huangdi shi gei Tongken fudutong yamen ziwen” (GX28.08.29), Vol. 127, 239–240 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

287 Sun Jianping, Keshan xianzhi (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 1992), 710.

154 prompted 116 out of 419 households to pack up their belongings and move. In a similar incident

from 1921, locals blamed the toxic well water that killed over a thousand inhabitants in Keshan.

Nearly three hundred families decamped, leaving three villages completely deserted without a

single person remaining.288 A later economic profile of Keshan County from 1933 recognized that “hands and feet become crooked or joints develop tumors. It is not uncommon to see freakish limbs transported on the road. Likewise ... women ... who [complain of] throat pain and end up dying violently are exceeding in number.”289 When the Japanese researchers had arrived

in 1936, then, selenium deficiency disorders had already established its presence. In fact, as seen

below, the structures of colonial science, in terms of its ability to make observations, conduct

experiments, and disseminate its results through an empirical language only formalized the

existence of disease.

Selenium deficiency disorders in the borderlands emerged as a problem deeply

implicated with Japanese efforts to stake claims for scientific legitimacy and highlight

civilizational difference between imperialists and indigenes. Even if the underlying cause of

Keshan Disease was a fundamental deficiency in selenium from foodstuffs grown in the basalt-

laden, volcanic soil, it did not date before the last years of the Qing dynasty. Therefore

geological determinism cannot account for the sudden rise of selenium deficiency disorders in

1935. This raises the question: what made selenium deficiency disorders a distinctly twentieth-

century phenomenon? In order to pursue this line of inquiry, the chapter now turns to the earlier

decades of Keshan County.

288 Sun Jianping, Keshan xianzhi (Beijing: Zhongguo jingji chubanshe, 1992), 9.

289 Manshū kokuritsu Kokuzan nōji shikenjō, Kokuzan chihō nōka keizai (Shinkyō: Sangyōbu daijin kanbō shiryōka, 1937), 121.

155 SETTLER COLONIALISM IN THE ORPHAN BANNER

The upsurge of Keshan Disease in the early twentieth century rested on the massive resettlement of Han farmers in the Mongolian territories and attendant ecological changes in patterns of land use. The official People’s Republic gazetteer fails to note the history of Keshan before it became a county in 1915 as if to reinforce a frontier narrative of transforming the wilderness into so-called civilization. In fact, Keshan comprised one of ten administrative units carved out of the banner Yekhe Mingγan (Ch. Yi-ke-ming-an) from the late Qing to the

Republican era.290 Yekhe Mingγan—or in Mongolian “The Great Thousand”—formed in 1757 when the Qianlong emperor had exiled a few thousand Oirats and their slaves from the northwest border of his domain to Hulunbuir after quashing their insurrection in Xinjiang. Of this group of migrants, fifty settled in the Naun River Valley, then sparsely populated by Tungusic tribes, where the emperor granted these nomads territory so that they could tend to their herds and hunt for game.291 At the time, the Qing state had defined the boundaries of the banner loosely; the

Oirat pastures centered around the wetlands of the Huyur River, bordered by the Nemor River to

the north, the Tungken River and Lesser Khinggan Mountains to the east, Dorbet Banner to the

290 These counties include Baiquan (1906), Nehe (1913), Keshan (1915), Yian (1929), Mingshui (1929), Kedong (1933), and parts of Hailun (1912), Lindian (1917), Fuyu (1929), and Dedu (1933).

291 There remains some confusion regarding the original number of Oirats settling in Yekhe Mingγan in 1757; Ao Leqi cites three hundred, whereas Yanagisawa Akira points to a number close to fifty, with additional households moving from Hulunbuir to Yekhe Mingγan shortly thereafter. See Ao Leqi “Yi-ke-ming-an E-lu-te lishi gaishu” in Heilongjiang minzu congkan, Vol. 27 (1991), 35–38; Yanagisawa Akira, Shinchō tōchiki no Kokuryūkō chiku ni okeru shōminzoku no keisei saihen katei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Waseda University, 2007), 28. More recently, Ochir Oyunjargal has uncovered memorials documenting that the Qianlong emperor initially had banished the Yekhe Mingγan Oirats to Chahar, but moved them to the Non River Valley because they could not keep the peace with another exile community there. See Ochir Oyunjargal, “Shinchō no Oirado tōbu tōjisaku,” (PhD dissertation, Tōhoku University, 2006), 58–60. One of the more interesting legacies of the Yekhe Mingγan Oirats settling in Heilongjiang is the isolated development of a Kyrgyz dialect in present-day Fuyu County, a result of the Oirats bringing their Kyrgyz subjects with them from Xinjiang. See Chen-hua Hu and Guy Imart, Fu-yü Gïrgïs: A Tentative Description of the Easternmost Turkic Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1987); Zhongguo kexueyuan, Heilongjiang sheng Fuyu xian Keerkezi zu qingkuang (Beijing: Zhongguo kexueyuan minzu yanjiusuo Heilongjiang shaoshu minzu shehui lishi diaocha zu, 1963).

156 south, and the Naun River to the west.292 Because of its deportee status, Yekhe Mingγan became subsumed under the direct administration of the Heilongjiang military governor as a special banner unassigned to any Mongol league.293 This ambiguous position as an orphan banner would later make it more difficult for Oirat descendants to defend their autonomy and justify land ownership against the imperial government. The elites of Yekhe Mingγan, like banner nobility throughout the Mongolian territories, demanded these rights of possession because they had entered into inescapable cycles of debt with moneylenders, and renting and selling off communal pastures would help settle their accounts. Consequently, by the Japanese occupation, these transactions would reduce Yekhe Mingγan to a fraction of its original size.

Mongol vernaculars conceived of their own landscape as virgin, unspoiled, idle, or unoccupied (Mo. atar gaǰar), but by the late nineteenth century, Chinese accounts overwhelmed these descriptions. By comparison they, referred to the northern reaches as “wasteland” (Ch. huangdi, J. arechi), a blanket term with meanings of wildness, abandonment, and devastation that actually denoted all types of uncultivated yet arable terrain, though they most likely served as fodder for cows, horses, and sheep. Indeed, a distant but volatile geological past imparted one important environmental legacy in the borderlands that would affect the expansion of agriculture into much of the region: the basic nature of the soil. High pH undermined plant growth on the steppe, especially in those places marked by white powder in chance patches across the earth where the ground was “impregnated with soda and other salts and ... [therefore] unfit for

292 Kikoku ryō shō Mōki gyōsei chōsasho (Minseibu chihō shi, 1934), 186.

293 Besides Yekhe Mingγan, the Qing administration placed Alashan Khosuud Banner and Ejene Banner under direct administration of the military governor in Ningxia and Shaanxi-Gansu, respectively. Song Sen, Qinding lifanbu zeli [Guangxu 34 Edition] (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan webxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 1992), 115.

157 cultivation” in the words of one British traveler.294 In basic soil, rainwater easily stagnates on the surface, as the ground—already high in sodium content—cannot absorb any more fluid. Sodas and salts thwart plants from taking in not only water, but also many critical nutrients, which stunts crops and turns their leaves dark green with tinges of purple and red. Consequently, Han farmers would face considerable hardship in setting up viable homesteads and eventually paying their financial dues to the state.295 The withering effects of alkalinity gave the region the

appearance of a formidable wasteland, stubbornly reluctant to take to agriculture.

In calling the banners a “wasteland,” Chinese texts attached culturally constructed

meanings of an unfamiliar and uncivilized wilderness to the land; this discourse implied a need

for its agricultural development.296 By the late nineteenth century, officials came to believe

hunters and herders under-utilized what territory the empire had granted them. These perceptions

helped justify requisitioning the land in the name of the state. What had changed in the

nineteenth century, then, was not the way indigenes had used banner property as much as the

way the state had interpreted that notion of usefulness. In the words of Donald Moore, these sorts

of “entangled landscapes” in the borderlands became bound up in power struggles between local,

regional, and imperial players. A landscape is not only a scene, but also a way of seeing; that is,

one that naturalizes social hierarchies and cultural constructions as accepted or inherent, to the

294 Alexander Hosie, Manchuria: Its People, Resources, and Recent History (Boston: J. B. Millet Company, 1910), 10. To read how some residents and migrants capitalized on soda in the borderlands, see H. E. R. James, The Long White Mountain, or a Journey in Manchuria (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1888)), 311; Wu Jisun, “Duban fu Taonan, Xincheng, Qiqiha’er yantu riji” (1908) in Menghuang anjuan (Jilin: Jilin wenshi chubanshe, 1990), 12.

295 “Heilongjiang changgongshu wei Zhaodong gongmin Ji Shunian yin jiandi leimin qing paiyuan chaming mianshui shi pi ji ling” (1918.07.18), Vol. 146, 62–64; “Guo-er-luo-si houqi zha-sa-ke Duo-er-ji-pa-le-mu wei Zhaozhou xian suo bao shajian dimu qingxing benqi juebu chengren shi gei Heilongjiang sheng changgongshu ziwen” (1925.11.21), Vol. 148, 237–240 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

296 Dee Mack Williams, “The Barbed Walls of China: A Contemporary Grasslands Drama” in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 55, No. 3 (August 1996), 672.

158 Figure 3.4 Original Boundaries of Yekhe Mingγan Banner (1907)

extent that it becomes part of the territorial identity, all but fading into the background.297 To call the banners as a “wasteland” during the last years of the Qing—a legacy carried into the

Republican era and the Japanese occupation—means becoming accustomed to the invisible technologies, quantification regimes, and social relations that allowed for this environmental

297 Donald Moore, Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 22–23.

159 transformation to take place. This section therefore examines those entwined processes in

conjuring a “wasteland” from the steppe, one in need of cultivation.

The local situation in Yekhe Mingγan reflected the broader shift in southern and eastern

Inner Mongolia from rangeland to farmland. It began in 1897 when the military governor of

Heilongjiang, Enje (d. 1899), and his deputy Saboo identified a tract measuring some one

hundred by two hundred li in the south of the Huyur River called Babai as a possible site for

reclamation. Citing the “poverty-stricken circumstances of banner men these recent years,” Enje

and Saboo wrote to the Guangxu emperor in hopes of moving 115 soldiers out to Babai as both a

defensive strategy against foreign incursion and social assistance for faltering subjects. They

pointed to an 1850 precedent where a previous governor had temporarily assigned a banner

garrison to set up a military farm in Babai.298 Since then, only thirty households had lived in the area with “land to spare on either side of the [Huyur] River.”299 This proposal represented one

attempt to open up Heilongjiang for partial colonization before the general call for migration in

1904.

Unlike neighboring land grants unequivocally owned by the state, Babai bordered Yekhe

Mingγan to the south and, as Enje and Saboo discovered, the divide between Babai and Yekhe

Mingγan was not as clear-cut as they had assumed. An officer dispatched by the military

governor counted several settlements in Babai, where the banner duke and jasak Bagmedorje (d.

1902) had been collecting rent without permission on what they saw as state property. Enje and

Saboo petitioned the emperor to forbid the “corrupt” Bagmedorje from inviting homesteaders

298 “Heilongjiang zhaoken zongju wei qing paiyuan chajiu Yi-ke-ming-an Menggong zhikong gaiju huimai huangdi ji Babai huangdi zhan bo li dui shi gei hushi deng yiwen” (GX25.01.11), Vol. 126, 206–208 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

299 “Enze Sabao zou wei hua kan Babai yu Yi-ke-ming-an gong jiezhi chou bo guanbing jin tie reng na e zu zhe” (GX 23.03.17) in Guangxu chao Heilongjiang jiangjun zougao (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 1993), Vol. 2, 543.

160 because it would “cause the utmost trouble.” They accused the duke of digging up the old

boundary marker between Babai and Yekhe Mingγan and “having the impertinence” to move it

within the official confines of his own banner in order to claim Babai as his domain.300 It seems from Bagmedorje’s perspective, however, he had upheld the original charter from the eighteenth century, and thus his pastures did include the 400,000 shang in question, though he had broken the law by renting out the land to banner outsiders, Mongol and Han.301 In 1899, the

Heilongjiang land reclamation bureau suspected its local office in Babai of “confusedly [taking]

bribes and selling off wasteland” under the “corrupt” influence of Bagmedorje.302 This incident tipped off Enje and Saboo. They reported that out of the 800,000 shang in the Babai tract,

Bagmedorje had “released” the eastern half of it, despite having claimed the land for his banner’s herds. Moreover, he had struck illegal deals with several entrepreneurs, including a Zhang

Yongxin who already had paid him 2500 taels for a section of what would become Keshan.

“This duke has not only not been able to point out substantial evidence [of possession],” detailed

Enje and Saboo, “but also has not dispatched anyone to carry his files to Beijing.” Owing to the original conditions that brought the Oirats to Heilongjiang—that is, banishment—Bagmedorje moreover could claim no right of ownership to Babai. It belonged to the dynasty. Enje and Saboo

300 “Enze Sabao zou wei hua kan Babai yu Yi-ke-ming-an gong jiezhi chou bo guanbing jin tie reng na e zu zhe” (GX 23.03.17) in Guangxu chao Heilongjiang jiangjun zougao (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 1993), Vol. 2, 543. Keyin now roughly corresponds to Suihua County, Tungken to Hailun County, and Zhuoshugang to Qinggang Couny. The Heilongjiang military governor released these tracts in the late nineteenth century for bannermen, though these soldiers often used convict or indentured Chinese labor to farm the land.

301 Yekhe Mingγan would not be the only banner to cast doubt over the state’s reclamation tactics in the territories. Dorbet Banner likewise challenged Heilongjiang’s claims over the demarcation of another land grant in 1905, seen as “confusing and unclear” by local bureau agents. Armed with maps and diagrams from the military governor’s office as evidence, surveyors met with the prince of Dorbet in order to simplify “the uneven and untidy border from the early years.” See “Zou pai zongban Tongken kenwu shiyi jian Babai xingju zongli Rui Lin wei fu ruhe jieding sheng-Tong-Meng sanchu jiexian shi gei Du-er-bo-te kenwu xingju yiwen” (GX31.11.12), Vol. 130, 25–28 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

302 “Heilongjiang zhaoken zongju wei qing paiyuan chajiu Yi-ke-ming-an Menggong zhikong gaiju huimai huangdi ji Babai huangdi zhan bo li dui shi gei hushi deng yiwen” (GX25.01.11), Vol. 126, 206–208 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

161 fumed that the duke “was too arrogant to obey common reason” and asked to “prevent him from

having an official audience at court and to strip him of his peacock feather plume.”303 Eventually the two sides came to some sort of agreement, drawing a straight line thirty li south of the banner headquarters. Bagmedorje could keep the northernmost section of Babai as pastureland, roughly a third of the tract’s original surface area.304 Enje, his political adversary died that very year, and

after a quick succession of military governors rotating through Heilongjiang, the state reversed

its seclusion policy (Ch. fengjing zhengce) in the Mongol territories.

The New Policies of 1901 marked a new era for the borderlands. Throughout China, the

Qing government enacted self-consciously modernizing reforms in education, military,

bureaucracy, and other state institutions, but the financial burdens of carrying out the New

Policies pushed many administrators to seek revenue from the Mongolian territories. The

economic focus of the New Policies in this region therefore centered on land and its relationship

to profit.305 This commodification of land also unfolded against a backdrop of increasing

territorial anxiety for the Qing. Reacting to encroachments by the Russians and Japanese along

its borders, the state issued proclamations to open up the northeastern provinces for official

settlement by Chinese farmers, including Heilongjiang in 1904, although an illicit real estate

market had begun decades earlier in the Mongolian territories like South Gorlos Banner, which

would become the city of Changchun, let alone parts of lower Manchuria. Under the New

303 The feather denotes rank and allegiance to the Qing. “Enze Sabao zou wei Yi-ke-ming-an gong buzun zoufeng” (GX25.07.17) in Guangxu chao Heilongjiang jiangjun zougao (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 1993), Vol. 2, 602–603.

304 Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 305.

305 Devon Dear, “Marginal Revolutions: Economies and Economic Knowledge between Qing China, Russia, and Mongolia, 1860–1911” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2014), 276–312; Lan Mei-hua, “China’s ‘New Administration’ in Mongolia” in Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan, eds. Stephen Kotkin and Bruce A. Elleman (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 39–58.

162 Policies, the banners now could “release” land through the local reclamation bureau, which

dispatched surveyors to assess potential property in cooperation with Mongol officials and a

translator (though in 1906, the province eliminated this sort of collaboration in favor of unilateral

action). By 1907 authorities had legalized private ownership and the free transaction of land. To

facilitate this process under the New Policies, the military government removed large tracts from

their protective status by “releasing” (Ch. chufang, kaifang) the land to the vagaries of the

economy. Newly established reclamation offices (Ch. kenwuju) at the local level then surveyed,

taxed, and sold those plots for revenue, and these proceeds, sent up to the provincial land bureau,

would then help to recompense financial obligations incurred by the administration.

In the eastern banners of Inner Mongolia, as the standard narrative follows, extravagant

spending had left much of the ruling class in debt, also compelling the nobility to rent out, then

sell, their hereditary lands—previously for communal use—to Chinese migrants in order to cover

their losses; others adopted agricultural practices to survive these rapidly changing times. The

aristocracy did maintain some privileges through the late Qing and into the Japanese occupation,

namely the right to collect rent off of former banner land (Ch. Mengzu, Mo. Moŋγol düriyesü),

and this not only included revenue on the land proper, but also on its spoils—metals, soda, and

salt. Still, potential sources of income for Mongols dwindled further whenever reclamation

bureaus expropriated banner land through border disputes. For the first time in many of these

banners, the Qing held Mongols accountable to artificial lines drawn on maps; reified in law and

market, these lines now held new meanings and consequences.306

306 Robert Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 160; James Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 78.

163 Privatization in Yekhe Mingγan began in earnest under Bagmedorje’s son, Baljinima (d.

1930). Neighboring Jalaid Banner just had received imperial blessing to open up its land, which

set a legal precedent for all of the Mongol territories in Heilongjiang in 1904. Homesteading

accelerated the following year with a keen endorsement from the recently appointed military

governor, Cheng Dequan (1860–1930).307 Officials plotted the land along the standardized grid of the well-field system (Ch. jingtian zhidu), the largest unit being one jing or well, divided into nine qu of four fang each, with one fang equal to 45 shang.308 Taking measurements meant

hazardous work due to heavy snow and icy trails; bandits, most likely Mongols displaced by this

territorial transformation, also attacked people on the job.309 The local reclamation bureau bore

the responsibility of collecting and disbursing the rent, once landlords began occupying newly

“released” property by building villages in the innermost four fang of each well while parceling

out the surrounding 32 squares to farmers. Heilongjiang at first set rent at 2.1 taels per shang per

year without any regard for its quality in Yekhe Mingγan.310 It charged fees for only 70% of the

total surface area, most likely to account for the varying condition of the terrain. The rent

307 For memorials on settler colonialism in Heilongjiang more generally, see Cheng Dequan, Cheng jiangjun (Xuelou) shou jiang zougao (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1968), 4 vols.

308 “Heilongjiang sheng fanghuang guize” (1914.03.21) in Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha rinji keizai chōsa iinkai, Kokuryukō shō shokumin ni kansuru shō tankō tochi hōrei (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō, 1930), 57.

309 The military governor in 1906, for instance, sent Orochon from the Birar circuit to quell bandits intimidating the surveyors in Babai. See “Zanshu Heilongjiang jiangjun Cheng Dequan wei Baju bangban Wang Xihou bugu juwu ying yanjia shenchi shi gei Babai kenwu xingju zongli Rui Lin zhawen” (GX32.07.05), Vol. 132, 34–40; “Heilongjiang shiye si wei chaosong Nehe xian chengqing huikan Yi-ke-ming-an Mengqi huangjie deng yuan chengqing chahe beian gei neiwu sigonghan” (1915.04.20), Vol. 143, 275–291 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

310 The Heilongjiang land reclamation bureau set rent at a flat rate of 2.1 taels per shang for Yekhe Mingγan and Gorlos Banners, as well as for Babai, Keyin, Tungken, and Zuoshugang, most likely to avoid having to assess the quality of the land, something quite difficult to determine without having farmers first trying to grow crops there. At 1.4 taels per shang, rent was cheaper along the Nemor River and the railroad in Dorbet and Jalaid Banners, Mergen, Dalai and Jingxin Counties. Parts of Butkha went for 0.7 taels per shang. Other areas in Jalaid Banner, however, did maintain a tiered rental scheme with 5.1 taels per shang for first class, 4.2 taels for second, and 1.4 taels for third. See “Kenwu yaogang” in Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 489.

164 collected from one tract in southeastern Yekhe Mingγan in 1906, for example, amounted to

231,971 taels and some change for 157,803 shang. The banner and the province divided these

profits in half; 45% disappeared into the personal coffers of Baljinima, 35% funded the local

reclamation office in Babai, 15% went to the overseeing land bureau, and 5% maintained the

banner administration itself.311

Only in the next decade did surveyors in the banners account for the differing quality of the land for the explicit purpose of sales and taxation. In 1914, they divided real estate into two groups: cultivated (Ch. shudi) and cultivable land (Ch. huangdi), with the latter consisting of three sub-categories. Broadly speaking, first class denoted the rich, black earth typical of northern Manchuria at three silver dollars per shang, second class meant hilly, sandy loess at two silver dollars per shang, and third class indicated alkaline soil mixed with soda and salts at one silver dollar per shang. Here the very methods of categorizing and appraising the Mongol Lands rendered the terrain as a frontier in need of development. These qualitative definitions—entirely dependent on ideas of agricultural productivity rather than pastoral use—do imply some leeway in determining its value. Rankings could rise or fall depending on wear over time; flooding and disease also factored into recalculating territorial worth.312 Peasants even petitioned the

311 “Heilongjiang quansheng kenwu zongju wei Yi-ke-ming-an gong ying pi huangdi yazu yingliang ying qing chi duzhi si hefa shi gei Heilongjiang sheng gongshu bingwen ji pi” (GX34.04.11), Vol. 134, 408–409 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

312 “Uchi Mōko Kairo ken fukin tochi haraisage jijyō” (1919.02.08), in Mōko nōmu jigyō kankei zakken, Vol. 1, 1– 7–7–7, Diplomatic Archives of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Note that the description of these categories come from a survey in Kailu County in southeastern Inner Mongolia. Aru Khorchin, Baɣarin Left and Right Flank, Jarud, Khorchin Left and Right Flank Middle Banners used similar categories of “black soil,” “sandy soil,” and “pure sand” in the late Qing. See Suitong diaocha dongbu Menggu qingxing cheng, Guangxu era, Manuscript No. 153495, Reading Room of Ordinary Old Books, National Library of China. None of the Qing-era procedures from Heilongjiang province record how agents classified the land besides noting the number of ranks. See for example, “Heilongjiang quan sheng qingzhang jian zhaoken zhangcheng,” “Heilongjiang sheng qingzhang guize,” and “Heilongjiang sheng fanghuang guize” in Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 394, 467–483. According to a more recent estimation, first class land produced about seven to eight dou of grain per shang, second class five to six dou, and third class three to four dou. One dou equals roughly 22.5 kilograms. Obviously this categorization only applied to cultivated

165 provincial government through the county magistrate to demote rankings.313 This ranking system tended to rank selenium-deficient soil as poorer in quality, and the cheaper prices would often attract unwitting buyers to this geologically unbalanced land.

Weak enforcement of these land categories often left the Mongolian territories vulnerable to widespread embezzlement. Recurring crimes compelled the state to add a third category to its cadastral surveys in 1914: undocumented acreage sold to settlers later discovered by officials

(Ch. fuduodi). Throughout the Mongol borderlands, the reclamation bureau sometimes left the business of dealing with homesteads in the hands of colonization companies, which would buy up acreage in bulk and parcel out plots to newcomers. In 1906, the land reclamation bureau hadsold some 226,800 shang, a quarter of the Babai tract, to a Wang Hongyou from

Shuangcheng and his relative Wang Fude. Unbeknown to the local bureau, the Wangs had tucked away another 50,000 shang in this bundle of land that they then sold off for an additional profit. This ruse went unnoticed until the Republican government again measured Babai years later for tax purposes and required that the residents pay for the property again, all of this culminating in an infamous case that found the Wangs guilty in 1917.314 This iterative act of

land, as surveyors could not necessarily predict agricultural productivity before reclamation. See Ge Ruoyu, “Xiantan Heilongjiang sheng Ke’erkezi zu jingji fazhan jincheng” in Heilongjiang minzu lishi yu wenhua (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu xueyuan chubanshe, 1993).

313 In 1917, for instance, a Tan Weizhi and thirty-odd farmers asked for a reassessment of their property in Nehe County in hopes of reducing the grade there from first to second class and therefore decreasing their tax burden, paid in grain. Tan and his neighbors had uncovered a substratum of “barren yellow sand” four meters below the seemingly rich topsoil, which they believed had led to the meager harvest in Nehe. Ultimately the province granted a temporary reprieve of three years, concerned that people would return their registers and abandon the land because they could not afford to pay taxes. See “Nehe xian min Tan Weizhi deng wei Nehe yuanding dize guogao qing jiandeng nuanzu yi xumin nanshi gei Heilongjiang shengzhang Bi Guifang chengwen” (1917.05.06), Vol. 145, 265– 271 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

314 Wan Fulin and Zhang Boying, Heilongjiang zhigao (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1992), Vol. 1, 444–449.

166 selling (Ch. zhuanmai) opened up opportunities for more profit and corruption. ‘Real’ estate

therefore became increasingly abstracted and alienated from its original owners.

The process of surveying, evaluating, and leasing territory enabled a real estate market

that commuted land into currency, one that reified the idea of the “wasteland” in need of

development. Of course, Baljinima, the new jasak of Yekhe Mingγan, completely unaware of the

impending ecological crisis, further opened up “the wasteland” in order to “recruit people to

cultivate the earth for profit.” In the correspondence of Cheng Dequan, Baljinima had gained

quite the reputation for “knowing profoundly the profit in reclaiming the wasteland.”315

Baljinima insisted that he would reserve the territory north of the Huyur River for the “the

livelihood of Mongols,” but out of the 460,000 shang in Yekhe Mingγan, he kept less than a

quarter of the acreage for pastoral use, supposedly setting aside a tract by the Tungken River as

“public land for herding.”316 With ninety thousand shang already in use, the threefold increase in arable land under Baljinima’s proposal meant that he stood to gain considerable income from the scheme, even if the provincial government took in half of the proceeds, as it had anticipated.317

In 1905, however, surveyors from the local reclamation bureau arrived in Yekhe Mingγan to measure a tract south of the Huyur, and found that just across the river to the north, in what would become Keshan, numerous Mongols from outside the banner were privately tilling the land; having escaped notice from the province, they were evading rent and taxes from the

315 Cheng Dequan, “Yi-ke-ming-an gong jieshu zhaoken pian” in Cheng Dequan shoujiang zougao, eds. Li Xingsheng and Ma Xiujuan (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1992), Vol. 1, 407.

316 Xu Shichang, “Ji Yi-ke-ming-an gong” in Dongsansheng zhenglüe (1911), Vol. 2, No. 1, 20; Bo Shaobu and He Xuejuan, Heilongjiang Menggu buluo shi (Harbin: Haerbin chubanshe, 2001), 441.

317 Xu Shichang, “Fu zhangfang Yi-ke-ming-an gong huangdi zhe” in Dongsansheng zhenglüe (1911), Vol. 2, No. 2, 36; Zhu Qiqian, Dongsansheng Mengwu gongdu huibian (1909), 16.

167 Heilongjiang administration.318 Baljinima as a result was taking in all of the rent, rather than just half of the revenue as decreed by law. Additional agents went to confirm the illegal situation on the Huyur several months later, but the duke blocked the surveyors from the northern riverbank, claiming it as a grazing area. Given a history of land controversies in Yekhe Mingγan, these officials suspected shady business. Baljinima had suddenly changed his mind in fear that they would discover him already leasing land without provincial permission, much like his father had done.319 Baljinima’s economic straits became obvious, when a week after the second inspection, he wrote to Cheng Dequan to ask permission about selling the northern bank of the Huyur in order to repay a debt of silver. Baljinima had borrowed 6000 taels from a Zhang Yonghe, but the amount owed had ballooned to 12400 taels with interest.320 In pocketing twice the revenue from

rent, the duke’s situation mirrored many of the other Mongol nobles west of Yekhe Mingγan

who saw reclamation as a way to finance their increasing debts.

When the Mongolian independence movement broke out in 1912, several princes seized

on the insurrection as an opportunity to relieve themselves from chronic insolvency, not to

mention regain their territory from the Chinese. Despite territorial losses from debt collectors

like Zhang Yonghe, Baljinima’s political leanings contrasted sharply with many of the other

318 “Zhanshu Heilongjiang jiangjun Cheng Dequan wei Yi-ke-ming-an gong bingqing chufang Hu-yu-er he nan huangdi chizhu xianxing huikan shi gei Tongken kenwu xingju zhawen” (GX31.07.04), Vol. 129, 155–160 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

319 This Mongol-run office (Ch. Menghuang shengju), founded in 1899, acted as a liaison between the banner administration and the provincial and local land bureaus. “Zou pai zongli Babai deng chu kenwu jianfang Menghuang shiyi Rui Lin wei pai yuan kanban Hu-yu-er hebei huangdi shi gei kanzhang Menghuang weiyuan Zhe- er-ji-shan deng zhawen” (GX32.04.01), Vol. 131, 130–135 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

320 “Yi-ke-ming-an gong Ba-le-ji-ni-ma wei ken jiang Ha-la-huo-tun huangdi bofang minren chengling dizhai shi gei zanshu Heilongjiang jiangjun Cheng Dequan bingwen” (GX32.04.25), Vol. 131, 111–112; “Zhanshu Heilongjiang jiangjun Cheng Dequan wei Yi-ke-ming-an gong dizhai zhi di zhao yin zhang bofang junhou zai yu jiesuan shi gei Babai kenwu xingju deng zhawen” (GX 32.04.09), Vol. 131, 191–193 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

168 nobles west of Yekhe Mingγan. He instead sided with Song Xiaolian (1863–1926), the

Heilongjiang governor in the new Chinese republic. Baljinima’s allegiance may have had many

explanations—including the fact that Yekhe Mingγan remained unaffiliated with any Mongol

league—but one reason stands out: the temptations of a unremitting revenue stream from land

sales and rent had left much of the banner in the hands of Han settlers by 1912. So certain he was

of his political convictions that Baljinima set out under Song’s orders to dissuade other banners

in Jirim League from revolting. He managed to coax Dorbet, Jalaid, and North Gorlos banners to

return to the Republican fold, thus weakening Inner Mongolia’s bid for autonomy. For this act of

collaboration, President Yuan Shikai promoted Baljinima from an imperial duke of the second

rank to the first rank in 1912 and then to the princely title of beise in 1914.321 Thus the land reclamation that had started with Bagmedorje led to a sinking spiral of renting and selling

Mongol territory in order to rescue banner finances, but these pastures had served as the very source of economic wealth for the area. Less land meant fewer herds, and therefore, a diminished income; as debts mounted, so too did the pressure to sell property and this cycle would begin anew. State-sponsored settler colonialism both fueled and followed this pattern, and the new demographics and diet it brought along likewise played part in the emergence of endemic disease in Keshan.

In the Republican era, the new national government appropriated banner rights from the

Mongol princes who had enjoyed significant autonomy under the Qing. It continued to encourage migration to Manchuria in order to align ethnic limits of the Chinese nation-state with

321 “Kokuryū Mōko ōkō raishō ni kanshi hōkoku no ken (Sō tofu no tai Mōko saku)” (1912.10.19) in Kakukuni naisei kankei zasshū Shina no bu Mōko, Vol. 2, 1–6–1–4–2–4, Diplomatic Archives of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Tian Zhihe and Feng Xuezhong, Minguo chunian Mengqi “duli” shijian yanjiu (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1991), 149; Bo Shaobu and He Xuejuan, Heilongjiang Menggu buluo shi (Harbin: Haerbin chubanshe, 2001), 430.

169 the geographical borders of the former empire. Some Mongols attempted to curb Chinese

settlement by farming the land themselves to counteract this policy. In order to do so, banner

elites had to transfer territorial rights from their domain to personal ownership. Privatization

through Mongol hands, though, encountered fresh challenges from the Republican regime: the

province decided to reject land deeds ratified 1915 and after, and eventually backdated this

prohibition to 1748 to prevent Mongols from commandeering western Manchuria.322 Since the

Oirats had moved to Heilongjiang in 1757, nine years after the new cut-off date, Baljinima’s

territorial losses in 1915—when citizens could start buying and selling land freely in the

banners—must have been especially acute. Baljinima could still lease 445,000 shang in the

eastern half of the banner under joint management by four different counties, but the provincial

government instituted rent control—half a yuan per shang—with the banner receiving 64% of

that amount. That proportion fell to 47% as the national treasury took in more of the rent

proceeds over the next twenty years.323 The income collected never reached its projected totals,

Figure 3.5 Projected and Actual Rent for Yekhe Mingγan on Former Territories in Yuan

County 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 Baiquan 11443.61 21914.12 20646.86 20459.47 20301.87 11007.26 (16967.23) (33054.01) (34135.43) (34135.40) (33910.20) (33910.20) Kedong 1533.97 1571.26 1572.79 1471.23 (1609.13) (1579.68) (1868.39) (1868.39) Keshan 12481 15626 12244 (17105) (17105) (17105) Yian 6974.40 9332.50 7715.04 8819.51 (8469.01) (10933.12) (10219.42) (15035.27)

*Projected amount for that year in parenthesis

322 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 103–105. The state selected 1748 as the cutoff point since in this year, the Qing entrusted Mongol princes to check against Chinese settlement in Manchuria.

323 Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 375.

170 and by the 1930s the actual amount consistently fell short a quarter to a third of the expected sum.

Through property expropriation, rent control, and revenue reallocations, the new republican state

asserted its dominance over the borderlands.

Crop failures, marauding bandits, and shrewd residents looking to bend the law in their favor further hastened the breakdown of banner finances. One letter from Baljinima illustrates

Yekhe Mingγan’s slow collapse into insolvency during the Republican era. The prince wrote to the provincial headquarters in 1923 asking to annul back taxes and delay rent collection for three months. Baljinima described the laws governing the public funds of the banner as “intricate and obscure” enough to confuse tenants to begin with, but now a paltry harvest and disruptive looting had forced many farming families into debt. The Finance Ministry fined them an extra 40% of their taxes, which the prince feared would “exhaust poorer households.” In addition, Baljinima uncovered a “scheme” hatched by several “crafty farmers” who had hoped to capitalize on the high grain prices that year. Having claimed that they could not pay their taxes, they accepted the

40% fine in order to sell their crops at inflated rates that far surpassed the penalty.324 While

settler colonialism, through quantifying, commodifying and privatizing land, acted as a quick fix

for banner finances in the short term, it undermined the integrity of Yekhe Mingγan over the

years.

Even the provincial government had difficulties keeping up with the swift pace of

paperwork for reclamation, a process of its own creation. The provincial administration had

created Baiquan County out of the Babai tract in 1906 and Nehe County out of the eastern bank

of the Nemor River in 1913. Two years later it split Nehe County to establish Keshan, though an

324 “Yi-ke-ming-an qi zha-sa-ke bei-zi gongshu wei ni qing biantong jing zhengzhi na zufu shi gei Heilongjiang shengzhang gongshu ziwen” (1923.12.11), Vol. 148, 95–98 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

171 unofficial outpost already had existed there for a number of years. While the Heilongjiang

surveyors’ office “very much approved of welcoming the many pioneers who come to open and

cultivate the land,” it briefly banned them from homesteading in parts of Yekhe Mingγan until

agents could finish measuring and evaluating the property there. The bureau had hoped to avoid

“causing further conflicts” with incoming settlers in “entanglements [Ch. jiuge] over the

wasteland” between the banner administration and subsequent Chinese owners.325 By the end of the land surveys, the banner consisted of a thin strip thirty li across on each side of the Huyur

River, including the low-lying embankments often prone to flooding. Thus Yekhe Mingγan’s borders were drawn and then redrawn to accommodate the demographic transformation, so much so that by the Republican land surveys in 1915, the surface area of the banner represented about one twentieth of the original size in the eighteenth century and half of the size since the end of the nineteenth.326

In the early years of the Republic, settler colonialism brought in new, permanent communities, but it also dislocated earlier populations. Mongols migrating out of the region meant new forms of sustenance beyond herding in Yekhe Mingγan. The banner, by this point, represented a mixed economy of agriculture and pastoral nomadism, with some of its inhabitants pursuing both. During the land surveys of 1915, reclamation officials sought to open a new area for settlement, but the banner objected to the loss of nearly 30,000 shang of land, citing its

325 “Heilongjiang sheng qingzhang jian zhaoken zongju wei jianye gongsi niling Baiquan xian jiahuang shi gei Heilongjiang sheng xingzheng gongshu chengwen” (1915.04.14), Vol. 143, 269–274; “Heilongjiang shiye si wei chaosong Nehe xian chengqing huikan Yi-ke-ming-an Mengqi huangjie deng yuan chengqing chahe beian gei neiwu sigonghan” (1915.04.20), Vol. 143, 275–291 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

326 Bo Shaobu and He Xuejuan, Heilongjiang Menggu buluo shi (Harbin: Haerbin chubanshe, 2001), 434–435; Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 300.

172 “livelihood [Ch. shengji]” under threat.327 Yekhe Mingγan negotiated with the province to issue

850 shang for every Mongolian man, resulting in the transfer of communal property to individual,

parceled plots to some 35 household heads. Within a decade, however, Chinese merchants had

cut deep inroads into the Naun River Valley. Mongols short on cash living along the Nemor and

Huyur sold their allotment to buy these wares, quickly immiserating them. Without land to tend

their animals, these herders lost their very source of income and two to three hundred of them

disappeared into the Khinggan Mountains. Still others took up coolie labor.328 In 1931, another two hundred households—up to two thousand Mongols—fled the banner owing to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.329 And briefly in 1929 the remaining Oirats in the banner had already expressed their frustrations with the shrinking pasturage by arming themselves with sticks and staves and rioting against the local government. Violence carried on for three days until the administration met their demands: each household would receive 15 shang to sustain its

“livelihood,” each individual would have limited corvée service, and each child would now attend primary school for free.330 Despite the welfare given to these herders, a considerable drop

from the 1915 allotment of 850 shang, most still went bankrupt.331 This type of public assistance

did little to counteract the increasing structural inequalities stacked against nomadic livelihoods.

327 Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 355–356.

328 Minami Manshū tetsudō keizai chōsa kai, Totsubojigawa Koyūjikawa ryūiki chihō keizai jijō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō, 1935), 24–25, 69. Some 40% of the agricultural workforce around Keshan consisted of coolies. Landlords contracted coolies either on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis, or given one to two shang to farm themselves on top of labor expected on the main lot.

329 Kikoku ryō shō Mōki gyōsei chōsasho (Minseibu chihō shi, 1934), 196; Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 355–356.

330 Bo Shaobu and He Xuejuan, Heilongjiang Menggu buluo shi (Harbin: Haerbin chubanshe, 2001), 444–445.

331 Ao Leqi “Yi-ke-ming-an E-lu-te lishi gaishu” in Heilongjiang minzu congkan, Vol. 27 (1991), 37.

173 By the 1930s ninety percent of the population in and around Keshan reportedly

comprised of settlers from Shandong, with a small minority of Mongols who had adopted

agriculture to the extent that Japanese researchers could no longer discern who was originally

‘Chinese’ and who was not.332 Population statistics from the 1930s record that 4000 Mongols were concentrated in the banner proper, but in the surrounding former territories, their presence became nonexistent: only nineteen Mongols out of 200,000 residents of Keshan County, five out of 280,000 in Baiquan County; eight out of 94,000 in Yian County; and ten out of 60,000 in

Kedong County.333

Of the various migrant groups to come to the northeastern provinces in the early twentieth century—military colonies and settler organizations among them—the refugee population proved the most susceptible to selenium deficiency disorders given their economic straits and transient nature. Starting in 1909, famine victims from Hubei moved to Keshan’s vicinity with government assistance, followed by those from Henan and Shandong in the next decades.334 Until 1927, only about 20% of all migrants stayed on as permanent residents in

332 Keizai chōsa kai, Manshū nōgyō shigen chōsa hōkoku, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1935), 120.

333 Kōan kyoku, Kakujirashi kōki, Tojihaku tokki, Ikokumeianki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho (Shinkyō: Kōan kyoku, 1939), 344, 379, 416, 452; Kikoku ryō shō Mōki gyōsei chōsasho (Minseibu chihō shi, 1934), 198.

334 “Heilongjiang dudu Song Xiaolian wei zhizhao Nehe ting bo Hubei zaimin huangdi deng shi gei minzheng siling” (1912.10.22), Vol. 140, 429–431; “Nehe xianzhi shi Zhong Qi wei Emin yiken getun jinni taotai banfa qing he shi shi gei Heilongjiang dudu jian minzhengzhang Bi Guifang chengwen” (1913.10.10), Vol. 142, 345–349; “Baiquan xianzhang Duan Yaoxian wei shengfu ansou nanmin qingxing ji jubao nanmin huaming qingce shi gei Heilongjiang zhengfu zhuxi Wan Fulin chengwen” (1929.04.02), Vol. 149, 407–413; “Heilongjiang sheng zhengfu minzheng ting tingzhang Liu Yanxuan wei jubao fenpei Nehe deng chu anzhi zaimin qingxing shi gei sheng zhengfu zhuxi Wan Fulin chengwen” (1929.07.13), Vol. 150, 21–25; “Heilongjiang sheng zhengfu minzhengting wei zhaobo shenghui gong’anju yunsong nanmin fu Baiquan Anda liangxian chuanzi shi gei sheng zhengfu zhuyi Wan Fulin chengwen” (1929.08.13), Vol. 150, 81–84; “Heilongjiang sheng zhengfu minzhengting wei zhuanbao Mingshui xian zhengfu choubei ansou nanmin qingxing beicha shi gei sheng zhengfu zhuxi Wan Fulin chengwen” (1930.03.31), Vol. 150, 453–455 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

174 Manchuria.335 For those sponsored by the state, the Heilongjiang colonization commission paid for half their expenses on the road, bought their ship and train tickets, issued them farm tools, and let these new residents work the land for five years before starting tax collection.336 Micah

Muscolino has brought similar attention to the prevalence of Keshan Disease among migrants in

Huanglongshan, Shaanxi, during the Second World War. In the 1940s, displaced people moved

to farm the heavily eroded loess in Shaanxi that lacked a vital amount of selenium. Eruptive

cycles of disease and disorder persisted in these populations precisely because no local memory

endured long enough to warn newcomers.337 As in Huanglongshan, selenium deficiency disorders in Keshan would vanish after its inhabitants fled, reappearing only when new drifters took up residency. Refugees, moreover, tended to work whatever land, typically of poorer quality, abandoned by others. Whenever disease broke out in Heilongjiang, the local reclamation bureau, rather than condemning the homesteads, would respond by demoting the tracts to third- class status, whose discounted price would lure migrants anew.338

Thus Baljinima leaving the Mongolian independence movement back in 1911 set into motion a sequence of events that neither he nor the other nobles could foresee twenty years later.

When the Japanese established Manchukuo, they excluded the “four outer banners” of Yekhe

Mingγan, Dorbet, Jalaid, and North Gorlos from the newly formed autonomous province of

Khinggan, as seen in Chapter One. Furthermore, when the state consolidated its revenue base under the Mongol Land Offer in 1938, as discussed in the next chapter, it redirected all of the

335 Franklin Ho, “Population Movement to the Northeastern Provinces in China” in Chinese Social and Political Science Review, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1931), 353.

336 Xu Shuming, “Qingmo Heilongjiang yimin yu nongye kaifa” in Qingshi yanjiu, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1991), 22.

337 Micah Muscolino, “Refugees, Land Reclamation, and Militarized Landscapes in China: Huanglongshan, Shaanxi, 1937–1945” in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 69, No. 2, (May 2010), 470–471.

338 Wan Fulin and Zhang Boying, Heilongjiang zhigao (Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1992), Vol. 1, 449.

175 rent from the Mongol territories outside of Khinggan to the national treasury. Without any sort of

financial freedom it enjoyed under the Qing and into the Republic, Yekhe Mingγan became a

banner in name only. In 1948, Heilongjiang Province dismantled Yekhe Mingγan completely,

merging it with Fuyu County. This act did more than efface the banner’s existence off the map; it

obscured the very social relations of Yekhe Mingγan that brought about this environmental

transformation from “wasteland” to farmland.

SOYBEAN IMPERIALISM AND SELENIUM DEFICIENCY

Japanese imperialism reconfigured local relationships to land and market, creating an

extractive periphery out of the region to meet the global appetite for food, fuel, and fertilizer.

Directive 105, which had protected banner lands within Khinggan Province from the kind of

intensive reclamation seen in Yekhe Mingγan, gave a mandate to Han settlers to continue

homesteading beyond its borders. Rather than nullify land sales by aristocrats like Bagemotdorje

and his son Baljinima in the former Mongolian territories, the occupation authorized them in

order to pursue its agrarian vision to make Manchukuo into the “granary of Asia.”339 To match these international demands, Keshan County turned towards “small-scale intensive cultivation”

from the 1920s onwards, a practice that put greater pressure per unit of soil to produce more

crops.340 With a limited supply of selenium, the mineral intake of those crops decreased over

time, especially when the agricultural yield per unit of soil increased. Such geochemical changes

manifested themselves in the declining quality in the nutrition of Keshan’s residents, ultimately

leading to selenium deficiency disorders.

339 Manchoukuo’s Natural Resources and Their Development: Questions and Answers, 1.

340 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 93.

176 The soybean, in particular, stood at the foundation of agricultural development in the

former Mongolian territories, as it did for much of Manchurian plain. This legume, Glycine max,

served multiple functions in the early twentieth century. Then, as today, the soybean nourished

humans and animals as food and fodder with its high protein content. Oil extracted from the seed

acted as an industrial lubricant, solvent, cleaner, and coating agent, whereas the residual cake

ended up as a valuable fertilizer for farmers. Like the alfalfa, the soybean also carries elevated

amounts of nitrogen needed for fertilizer since it hosts the symbiotic bacteria Rhizobia, which

fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere in the nodules of its root system. Thus the legume not only

enriches the surrounding soil as it grows, but once compressed as bean cake, also fertilizes fields

elsewhere around the world. Because Japan itself needed more nitrogen to push its agricultural

output to increasingly ambitious levels, it began to rely heavily on exogenous sources of this

chemical element. In describing this voracious dependency on nitrogen, Higuchi Toshirō calls

Japan a uniquely “organic empire” where soybeans reconstituted the archipelago’s metaphorical

metabolism in the early twentieth century. As Higuchi argues, “the agricultural core sucked up

the organic material while transferring the environmental costs of its production to the colonial

frontier.” Japan therefore avoided “biogeochemical crisis” by constantly expanding its overall

pool of nutrients with an influx of nitrogen from its colonies.341 Nitrogen and selenium cycles

collided, however, in Keshan.

Japanese reliance on soybeans grown in the former Mongolian territories began as early

as the late nineteenth century, but in a free market context. In the two decades from 1893 to 1903,

Japan’s importation of Manchurian soybean cake as a kind of fertilizer for its own produce leapt

341 Higuchi Toshirō, “Japan as an Organic Empire: Commercial Fertilizers, Nitrogen Supply, and Japan’s Core- Peripheral Relationship” in Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands, eds. Bruce Batten and Philip Brown (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015), 140.

177 from 25,000 tons to 200,000 tons. This surge translated into a jump in both rice and silk yields

on the archipelago.342 Soybean cake overtook herring fertilizer as the leading commercial source of nitrogen for the country after the Russo-Japanese War.343 By 1919, farmers in Manchuria

harvested 70% of China’s eleven million acres of soybean fields, about 1.34 million tons of the

crop and most of it leaving the country.344 Even though Japan had yet to occupy the region

formally, it had already become complicit in the accelerated process of land reclamation before

1931 by drawing critical elements, like selenium, away from unlikely places like Yekhe Mingγan.

By the end of the 1920s, while synthetic compounds surpassed soybean cake as the chief

commercial fertilizer within Japan, the foreign demand for Glycine max—distilled as vegetable

oil for industrial purposes—soared. During this commodity craze, Japan facilitated trade and

transport of raw soybeans overseas from Manchuria. Germany became the largest importer of the

crop, so much so that under the isolationist policy of autarchy, it sought to sever its dependency

on what pundits called “the Nazi bean” in 1933 and transfer cultivation from Manchuria to the

Balkans. After this point, Japan shifted soybean processing towards livestock fodder, some of it

likely to feed the burgeoning population of rationalized animals in Khinggan Province, but most

of it for export.345

342 Higuchi Toshirō, “Japan as an Organic Empire: Commercial Fertilizers, Nitrogen Supply, and Japan’s Core- Peripheral Relationship” in Environment and Society in the Japanese Islands, eds. Bruce Batten and Philip Brown (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015), 148.

343 On the history of herring as fertilizer and the endogamous rise of capitalism in nineteenth-century Hokkaido, see David Howell, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a Japanese Fishery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

344 Yasumori Matsunosuke, Manshū ni okeru yūbogyō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō shomubu chōsaka, 1923), 31–32; Yasutomi Ayumu, “Kokusai shōhin toshite no Manshū daizu” in “Manshū” no seiritsu: Shinrin no shōjin to kindai kūkan no keisei, eds. Yasutomi Ayumu and Fukao Yōko (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2009), 298.

345 Nagata Hisajirō, Doitsu to Manshū daizu (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chihōbu shōkōka, 1935), 1, 40; Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 157.

178 The global desire for soybeans as a cheap source of organic fertilizer, vegetable oil, and

animal feed drove Han farmers to clear the woodland and rangeland aggressively. Biologically

speaking, intensive cropping of the legume over many years causes a significant reduction in

yield. Homesteaders instead opted for extensive cultivation, which led to rapid and expansive

reclamation in order to produce even more soybeans to meet the market demand.346 As the first

step towards cultivation, migrants engaged in slash-and-burn methods by setting fire to the

steppe over several days and incinerating tall grasses and the brush. Next, they planted soybeans

deliberately to enhance the quality of the soil before sowing other kinds of crops. One county

gazetteer from the northern Manchuria noted that local farmers knew about the ability of

soybeans in transforming the “barren soil” without needing manure because the “bacteria on

their nodules could absorb free nitrogen elements in the air” and thus generate fertilizer.

Growing grains—such as millet or sorghum—before soybeans would cause “uneven damage” to

the land because they would “extract nutrients from the soil immediately.”347 Farmers then added soybeans to their crop rotation once every third or fourth year to replenish the exhausted earth with nitrogen.348 In converting boreal and pastoral landscapes into an agricultural frontier, this

346 Sanka Isao, Daizu no saibai (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kōgyōbu nōmuka, 1924), 293.

347 “Heilongjiang xingsheng zongdu Xu Shichang xunfu Cheng Dequan wei pizhun minzhengsi chengqingbo Zha- lai-te Ha-la huoshao huangdi banli tunken shizha” (GX34.04.09) in Heilongjiang shaoshu minzu, 1903–1931, eds. Heilongjiang sheng dang’anguan, Heilongjiang sheng minzu yanjiusuo (Harbin: Heilongjiang sheng dang’anguan, Heilongjiang sheng minzu yanjiusuo, 1985), 328–329; Sun Quanfang and Song Jingwen, Zhuhe xianzhi, 6 vols. (N.p., 1929), juan 11, 4.

348 Komine Kazuo, Manshū: Kigen, shokumin, haken (Tokyo: Ochanomizu shōbō, 1991), 189–190; Hisatake Kaneshizu, Manshū daizu narabini mamekasu (Kōshurei: Minami Manshū tetsudō nōji shikenjo, 1921), 15–23; Yasumori Matsunosuke, Manshū ni okeru yūbogyō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō shomubu chōsaka, 1923), 2, 17–21.

179 kind of reclamation stripped Manchuria of half its foliage and disrupted the migratory patterns of

wildlife in the early twentieth century.349

Yet the soybean did have its ecological limits further in the steppe. In alkaline soil throughout the rangeland, a high concentration of salt in solution caused the cells of soybean root to separate and prevented the necessary growth of the Rhizobia bacteria within the nodules for nitrogen fixation. Eventually these conditions led to stunted, yellow plants.350 In that sense,

Directive 105 may have inadvertently reflected the environmentally determined pale of viable

soybean growth in Manchukuo as it represented an artificially demarcated ban on land

reclamation.

Agriculture intensified under mechanization in the 1930s, worsening the selenium crisis

in the borderlands. Keshan served as the site for a Mantetsu experimental farm station beginning

in 1935, where scientists attempted to increase agricultural output with the introduction of heavy

machinery such as tractors and combines. With 85% of its surface area under mechanized

agriculture, the station tested and compared productivity and efficiency between five crops—

wheat, soybean, barley, millet, and wild sesame—investigating factors like the number of

devices needed, amount of gasoline consumed, hours of labor used per unit of land.351 While

wheat at the farm station yielded the largest harvest of the five, Mantetsu “brought a new zeal” to

technology-driven agriculture in order to promote the soybean as a “global product” by exporting

bean-cake and oil to Germany, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—a practice that kept

349 Fukao Yōko, “Baikofu ni sasagu,” 6–7; Nagai Risa, “Taiga no sōshitsu,” 22, both in “Manshū” no seiritsu: Shinrin no shōjin to kindai kūkan no keisei, eds. Yasutomi Ayumu and Fukao Yōko (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2009); Irie Hisao, Manshū kanjin shokumin chiiki (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1937), 29.

350 Kameoka Seiji, Manshū daizu no kenkyū (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha futō jimusho, 1920), 7.

351 Murakoshi bachō, “Kokuzan nōji shiken jyo ni okeru kikai nōgyō” in Man-Mō chishiki, Vol. 12, No. 10 (October 1936), 19–22; Tetsuro sōkyoku, Manshū no kikai nōgyō ni tsuite (N.p., 1936), 35–41.

180 selenium from returning to and replenishing the local soil. To radical agrarianists, this

mechanization of farming was not merely “a channel for Mantetsu’s policy of commodity

accumulation,” but a way for Japanese newcomers to break out of feudal structures transplanted

from the homeland to the continent; in essence, machines would “develop the economic instincts

of medieval migrant farmers.”352

By the 1930s Keshan devoted over ninety percent of its output to soybeans, millet, and wheat as a consequence of Japanese endeavors to transform the countryside.353 On the eve of the

Five Year Plan, Manchukuo was producing over four million tons of soybeans per year, its

largest crop by weight. Due to the policy of economic self-sufficiency, trade had become so

imbalanced in favor of this legume that Mantetsu researchers urged—through a study

specifically on Keshan—to diversify the food supply by harvesting more sorghum, millet, and

maize.354 Since soybeans had now saturated the market, the Five Year Plan instead focused on

increasing yields for grains. At a broader level, Longjiang Province, which oversaw the former

Tungusic and Mongolian territories including Yekhe Mingγan, yielded in 1936 the highest

portion of barley in all of Manchukuo at 28% (96,000 acres), the second highest portion of oats

at 24% (18,000 acres), and accounted for nearly half the amount in flax by surface area (10,000

acres). Longjiang Province also recorded the second highest portion of wheat at 25% that

amounted to a staggering swathe of 600,000 acres. Keshan under the Five Year Plan would

352 “Manshū nōgyō no kikaika nit suite” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 10, No. 17 (25 April 1936), 5–8; Uchikazaki Kenjirō, “Manshū nōgyō imin seisaku no shomondai” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 12, No. 11 (20 March 1937), 17–24.

353 In 1932, Keshan County encompassed 470,000 shang of land, with thirty percent under cultivation, another fifty percent considered arable, and the rest regarded as barren. Keizai chōsa kai, Manshū nōgyō shigen chōsa hōkoku, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1935), 126; to read more about soybean exports from Manchuria, see David Wolff, “Bean There: Toward a Soy-Based History of Northeast Asia” in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Winter 2000), 241–252.

354 Mantetsu, Shinkyō shisha chōsa shitsu, Daizu tōsei no Hoku-Man nōson ni oyoboseru eikyō: Kokuzan ken Teike yūbo ton jittai chōsa hōkoku, dai ni hen (N.p., 1940), 1, 40.

181 further do its part to raise this total by expanding the surface area of wheat by nearly 7500 acres,

the second highest increase in the targeted 46 counties of the client state.355 The Five Year Plan expected Longjiang Province to continue to shoulder a significant part of the agricultural output in grains and legumes for the Japanese empire, and Keshan, as one of its constituent counties, likewise bore this responsibility to match the unrealistic quotas set by state technocrats.

Yekhe Mingγan’s transition from a mixed economy towards near-exclusive agriculture from the 1920s onwards had direct implications for the diet of tenant farmers and ultimately for the prevalence of selenium deficiency in Keshan.356 Since these residents exported much of their

produce to urban centers in Manchukuo and beyond, selenium deficiency would have posed little

danger to outside consumers subsisting on a diverse diet drawn from multiple markets. For those

living in Keshan, however, the nutritional risk was substantial. Ironically, as a selenium-rich

food, soybeans drew in a significant amount of the element, but most of the harvest never made

it into the diets of the homesteaders themselves, instead bypassing them to enhance soil quality

elsewhere in the world. To compound this situation further, farming communities in northern

Manchuria tended to eat less varied meals than their pastoral predecessors. Homesteaders in

Keshan ate similar food regardless of social standing and much of it grown locally: gruel or

355 Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsabu, Nōchikusan bumon kankei shiryō in Manshū gokanen keikaku ritsuan shorui, dai sanhen, ikkan (N.p., 1937), 358, 443–445, 449, 452, 469–470.

356 Endemic disease specialist Yu Weihan argues that the three significant outbreaks of Keshan Disease in Manchuria coincide with particularly sudden changes in human diet and agricultural production brought about by the New Policies of 1901, the Japanese occupation, and the Great Leap Forward. Yu notes that minority populations during the first wave tended not to suffer from Keshan Disease owing to their pastoral practices. See Yu Weihan, “Yufang shenghuo xiguan bing—cong heli shanshi, jianchi yundong, xintai, pinghe zuo qi” in Zhu nin jiankang, Vol. 11, No. 9 (September 2004), 4–6. Wang Kejian notes the absence of Keshan Disease before 1929, but contends its emergence as entirely a product of Japanese economic policy in Inner Mongolia rather than a long-term trend towards agriculturalization from the late Qing. See Wang Kejian, Nei Menggu zizhiqu keshanbing fangzhi yanjiu (Hohhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 2003), 18.

182 pancakes made from millet as well as tofu, daikon, and cabbage.357 While a high meat intake can

stave off selenium deficiency, the diet of wealthier farmers in Keshan consisted of about 3.7%

meat and fish, a proportion that dropped to 1.7% for the middle and lower classes.358 Much of that protein supply derived from black hogs raised on their own property and slaughtered for the three holiday meals of the year.359 The increased alienation of human labor from the land

paradoxically brought nature and society closer together through the manifestation of selenium

deficiency disorders on the body.

Pastoral nomadism, in comparison, lent itself to diets that featured greater amounts of

selenium. Livestock could store up selenium over a period of years through bio-accumulation

before they were consumed. Cows and sheep, moreover, reacted to selenium deficiency—in the

form of white muscle disease—and for that reason, acted as a warning to their owners about the

field quality before irreversible human symptoms began to appear. At some point during the late

Qing, Oirats began to settle permanently, no longer moving back and forth between winter and

summer pastures, but herding remained their primary source of sustenance, supplemented by

fishing and hunting.360 A late nineteenth-century compendium mentions that Oirats in Yekhe

Mingγan specialized in the dairy products of butter, milk tofu, and dried milk skin, which to the

357 Keizai chōsa kai, Manshū nōgyō shigen chōsa hōkoku, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha, 1935), 224.

358 Manshū kokuritsu Kokuzan nōji shikenjō, Kokuzan chihō nōka keizai (Shinkyō: Sangyōbu daijin kanbō shiryōka, 1937), 109. Mantetsu researchers devised these categories of economic class, and the resulting data remain not without their limitations. See Philip Huang’s critique in The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 39–46.

359 Manshū kokuritsu Kokuzan nōji shikenjō, Kokuzan chihō nōka keizai (Shinkyō: Sangyōbu daijin kanbō shiryōka, 1937), 111.

360 Ao Leqi “Yi-ke-ming-an E-lu-te lishi gaishu” in Heilongjiang minzu congkan, Vol. 27 (1991), 36.

183 foreign palate, tasted like “Devonshire cream” before desiccation.361 One British visitor to the

region stereotyped that “Mongols are very bad farmers, their scanty cultivation being full of

weeds, so they depend on the Chinese, as far as they can, for luxuries and even the necessaries of

life.”362 Despite this reliance on outsiders for crops, as Owen Lattimore pointed out, “the diet of the Mongol, with its meat and milk, and grain got by trade, ... [as] more varied and more healthy than that of the Chinese.”363 In this shift from herding to farming, dietary patterns declined in the diversity of their provisions and origin. Settler colonialism had transfigured the relationship between humans and the earth in Keshan, and in so doing, rerouted the paths of economic exchange: food that had circulated at both the banner and regional level for Mongols now left unilaterally from the site of extraction to other parts of the empire and beyond. The diffusion of agricultural products from Keshan on the global market thus left a concentrated imprint on the local environment.

* * * The disappearance of Yekhe Mingγan as a banner and emergence of selenium deficiency disorders in its constituent counties not only serves as a reminder of the environmental aftereffects in settling the land beyond the perimeter of Khinggan Province. Surveying and selling the land confirmed the idea of a wilderness in the Mongolian territories, and one in need of development. In the area that would become Keshan, homesteaders displaced herders in turn, converting steppe into farms and depleting the earth of its selenium. Chopping the woodlands, draining the marshlands, and burning the rangelands all simplified the variegated terrain into

361 Xu Ke, Qing bai lei chao (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1928), 6374; H. E. M. James, The Long White Mountain, or a Journey in Manchuria (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1888), 300.

362 H. E. M. James, The Long White Mountain, or a Journey in Manchuria (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1888), 310.

363 Owen Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria (New York: The John Day Company, 1934), 92.

184 monocultures of grain and legume, so much so that the Mantetsu researcher Itō Takeo marveled

in 1917 as he traveled north by rail from Changchun: “I imagined northern Manchuria to be wild

lands, but the scenery that drew near from the windows of the train revealed field after field of

farms on the horizon. The area was sparsely populated, and there were very few forests. Where

did these farmers come from to work the land?”364 Itō remained oblivious to the crucial role that

the very railway he rode on (and his employer no less) played in reorienting local ecologies into

extractive peripheries. The soybean industry under Japanese imperialism especially created the

environmental conditions in which the little selenium drawn out of Keshan eluded its residents

for a destination beyond its horizons. This history also reveals the twisted interplay between the

physical environment and its perceived nature. The irony lay in the fact that what had made

Chinese living in the borderlands “civilized” during the late Qing and Republican regimes—that

is, the conversion of “wasteland” into farmland through the settler enterprise—had uncivilized

them in the eyes of the Japanese. The drawing of deficient metals into crops through the soil,

then consuming that harvest—ultimately resulted in the disfigured bodies that so fascinated

colonial scientists and officials.

364 Itō Takeo, Life along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itō Takeo, trans. Joshua Fogel (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1988), 32.

185 CHAPTER FOUR: DISASSEMBLING THE FEUDAL

Even as the ecological divide in the borderlands grew ever more striking between

rationalized herding and intensified agriculture, property ownership remained fundamentally

unchanged in its imbricated patterns of possession throughout the 1930s. The confusing

patchwork of relations among nomads and settlers, Mongols and Han, owners and tenants, lords

and commoners, and everyone in between would all change with the Mongol Land Offer (Ch.

Mengdi fengshang, J. Mōchi hōjō, Mo. Moŋɣol gaǰar-un erhükü), the main event of this chapter.

This new law took place within the larger context of the client state attempting to organize

cadastral registers and implement land reform throughout Manchukuo. This program rested upon

the Marxian interpretations of Mantetsu researchers who undertook scientific analysis in order to

identify the barriers to capitalist development and determine a program for a “revolution from

above.”

From 1935 to 1942, Mantetsu assembled social scientists and student interns to conduct

systematic surveys in nearly two hundred communities; they produced sheaves upon sheaves of

detailed statistics and ethnographic interviews about agrarian life.365 The question undergirding

their research echoed a similar debate from Japan in the 1920s: was the countryside essentially

365 These records differed from virtually all other local investigations by Chinese and American social scientists in the 1920s and 30s. The latter surveys emulated the methods of urban sociology and, as such, approached the peasant population by sampling a number of households across the nation as if to “pick names out of a telephone book,” in the words of Philip Huang. Despite the Guomindang culling a representative sample of 1.8 million households across twenty-two provinces in China, the data still portrayed overviews of counties. The Guomindang material cut across villages, rather than defining each of these communities as an analytical unit and examining the nature of socioeconomic structures within this circumscribed space. Therefore both Philip Huang and Prasenjit Duara have used the Mantetsu surveys as the basis for their social histories of agrarian life in North China, while acknowledging the limitations of data produced by a colonial administration. See Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 38; Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). For a history of how social surveys became the epistemological foundation of the Republican regime, see Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

186 feudal or capitalist in nature? The resulting Mantetsu surveys examined even the most minute

and mundane elements of agrarian life to answer this deceptively simple question. As Louise

Young argues, economists saw statistics as especially important because they “illuminated the

critical problem of revolutionary strategy: prescriptions for correct social action had to [rely] on

an accurate identification of the stage of capitalist development.”366 Many Mantetsu analysts

went on to work in the Mongolian territories, transferring their paradigms and methodologies to

the borderlands. Debates over feudalism versus capitalism initially animated surveys taken in

this region as well, but unlike in Manchuria and North China, the Marxian framework derived

from the agrarian problem did not translate so easily in answering the nomadic question.

The intellectual reinterpretation of nomadic pastoralism within feudalism, as this chapter

contends, steered the course of land reform in the Mongolian territories. The argument here

builds upon the meticulous research of Hirokawa Saho and Yoshida Jun’ichi by situating the

Mongol Land Offer within the overarching theoretical project of Japanese intellectuals who

endeavored to make sense of nomadic livelihoods within the teleological stages of historical

materialism.367 Through comprehensive studies, these Marxian economists redefined the parameters of feudalism to take into account nomadic livelihoods. The Land Offer specifically targeted the nobility as the supposed base of feudal power and the barrier to capitalist development. In an attempt to stave off further ethnic conflict over territory, the law required the

366 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 293. See also Joshua Fogel, Life along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itō Takeo (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1988), vii–xxvii; Kobayashi Hideo, Mantetsu chōsabu no kiseki: 1907–1945 (Tokyo: Fujiwara shoten, 2006). For Marxian debates in Japan between kōza and rōnō factions, see also Germaine Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

367 Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005); Yoshida Jun’ichi, “Kōan kyoku gaihen to Kōan shō shoki jittai chōsa” in Tōhoku Ajia ni okeru minzoku to seiji (Sendai: Tōhoku daigaku tōhoku Ajia kenkyū sentā, 2003), 27–46; Yoshida Jun’ichi, “Kōan yonshō jittai chōsa ni tsuite: Hikaihō Mōchi no chōsa wo chūshin ni” in Waseda daigaku daigakuin bungaku kenkyūka kiyō, Vol. 43 (1997), 57–71.

187 Mongol aristocracy to “return” their vast holdings located outside the recently demarcated

Khinggan Province to the Manchukuo state in 1938. Land reform therefore dispossessed Mongol

lords and princes of the domain that the Manchus had granted to them in the early seventeenth

century. It transferred their privileges—namely collecting rent from predominantly Han

tenants—to the state, and redistributed those funds directly from the national treasury to the

banner administrations as welfare. This act of expropriation effectively eliminated the last

remnants of indigenous territorial identity in the heartland of Manchuria for the sake of capitalist

development.

The chapter then turns to the next phase of reform, the Mongol Land Management Plan

of 1942 (Ch. Mengdi guanli yaogang, J. Mōchi kanri yōkō). Whereas the Land Offer focused on

the former territories outside of Khinggan Province, the Management Plan addressed the extant

banners inside the autonomous zone. To formulate the Management Plan, imperial surveyors

collaborated with indigenous guides to rework the Marxian assumptions that had been based on

agrarian villages for nomadic communities. Their field investigations led Japanese technocrats to

break up pastoral manors worked by tenant herders into private ranches run by family units. Both

the Land Offer and the Management Plan laid the ideological foundation of communist land

reform in postwar Inner Mongolia.

NOMADIC FEUDALISM IN MARXIAN THOUGHT

The ideological origins of the Mongol Land Offer, in part, lay in a progressive cohort of

Mantetsu researchers and affiliates that debated the nature of borderland feudalism in the 1930s.

The group included Tachibana Shiraki (1881–1945), Koizumi Yoshio (1910–?), and Ōgami

Suehiro (1903–1944), among others, who were later arrested and jailed for their political views

188 in 1942 during the Mantetsu Incident.368 These analysts believed in the “stagnation” (J. teitai) of

the region and framed it within the greater agrarian question looming over the Chinese

countryside. Following Marxian methodology, Japanese intellectuals wanted to locate the

territories in a stage along an evolution from feudalism to capitalism. If only they could specify

where indigenous communities stood on this trajectory, perhaps they could formulate a solution

to the so-called “collapse” of nomadic society and usher in the promise of economic

development as its imperial vanguard. Whereas in Manchuria proper, these same men had

disputed whether land relations fundamentally resembled feudalism with capitalist “sprouts” or

capitalism with feudal “remnants,” they agreed that the situation in eastern Inner Mongolia

typified the former model.369 Yet, nomadic notions of communal property complicated this

portrayal. Discourse revolved around what made the borderlands “unique” in the eyes of these

academics: the nomadic factor. Since Marx’s five stages of history did not take mobile societies

into account, this theoretical lapse left Japanese commentators with the task of reworking the

definition of feudalism to accommodate nomadism.

Attempts to codify knowledge of land regimes in the Mongolian territories began as early

as the inception of Mantetsu itself. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Japanese

analysts had already linked colonial knowledge on land research with the geopolitical legitimacy

of the empire through an extensive study on property relations in Taiwan, Korea, and the

368 Ōgami perished in prison from typhus and Tachibana died soon thereafter. For context on the Mantetsu Incident, see Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring, Expanded Edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

369 On Mantetsu theories of capitalist development in Manchuria, see Joshua Fogel, Introduction to Life along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itō Takeo, by Itō Takeo, (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1988), vii–xxvii; Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 272–303.

189 Guandong Leasehold.370 Assembled in a similar vein by founding members of the Mantetsu

Research Group, Reports on the Research of Old Customs of Manchuria also emphasized the

importance of land tenure in Japan’s newest imperial acquisition. The series divided up

northeastern China into three categories from the Qing: manor land of the Imperial Household

(Ch. neiwufu guanzhuang), commoner land (Ch. yiban mindi), and Mongol land (Ch. Mengdi),

the last on which Kamefuchi Tatsunaga (1880–1976), an early graduate of the Tō-A dōbun shoin, compiled in a volume in 1914.371 As he wrote in the introduction, Kamefuchi intended to “record

especially the regions entrusted to Mongol nomads, how legal customs developed from various

complications with Manchu and Han migrants opening up the land, and the enormous effect on

the political economy.” Kamefuchi primarily relied on Qing and Republican archives to sketch a

profile of each Mongol banner in Jirem League, then under Japanese jurisdiction, outlining its

history of cultivation, the quality and value of the land, its measurement and assessment process,

and rent and tax collection procedures.372 Kamefuchi’s research would endure as the basis for

Manchukuo’s programs for cadastral reorganization and subsequent land reform.

370 Enatsu Yoshiki, “Kantō totokufu oyobi Kantōchō tochi chōsa jigyō ni tsuite: Dentōteki tochi kanshū hō wo haiki suru kokoromi to sono shippai” in Hitotsubashi ronsō, Vol. 97, No. 3 (March 1987), 367–384; Enatsu Yoshiki, “Manshūkoku no chiseki seiri jigyō ni tsuite: ‘Mōchi’ to ‘kōzan’ no mondai kara miru” in Hitotsubashi daigaku kenkyū nenpō keizaigaku kenkyū, No. 37 (1996), 127–174; Jiang Bingkun, Taiwan chiso kaisei no kenkyū: Nihon ryōyū shoki tochi chōsa jigyō no honshitsu (Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai, 1974); Miyajima Hiroshi, Chōsen tochi chōsa jigyōshi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1991); Miyajima Hiroshi, “Higashi Ajia ni okeru kindaiteki tochi henkaku: Kyū Nihon teikoku shihai chiiki wo chūshin ni” in Higashi Ajia shihonshugi no keisei, ed. Nakamura Satoru (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1994), 161–188.

371 Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005), 43–44. On the history of the Tōa dōbun shoin, see Douglas Reynolds, “Chinese Area Studies in Prewar China: Japan’s Tōa Dōbun Shoin in Shanghai, 1900–1945” in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5 (November 1986), 945–970. On an explanation and critique of these land categories, see Christopher Isett, State, Peasant, and Merchant in Qing Manchuria, 1644–1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 57. Isett points out that Mantetsu researchers collapsed the categories of Manchu banner land (Ch. qidi) and the property of the imperial household (Ch. guandi) to create the “manor land” category.

372 Kamefuchi Tatsunaga, Manshū kyūkan chōsa hōkokusho zenpen no uchi: Mōchi (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsaka, 1913), 1.

190 Japanese theories on the relationship between feudalism and nomadism first appeared on

the pages of the critical journal Manshū hyōron. In an early article on the subject from 1932, the

editor of Manshū hyōron and researcher for Mantetsu, Tachibana Shiraki, laid out the terms of

the discussion. As a tenkōsha who had abandoned the Nationalist cause in favor of imperial

aggression in Manchuria, Tachibana advocated for a new agrarianism for peasants in China as a

progressive alternative to a capitalist, industrial economy—one that would “raise Asia” (J. Kō-A)

against the West.373 The pastoral preservation of the Mongolian territories under Directive 105, therefore, should have fit neatly into Tachibana’s agrarian ideology.374

Tachibana could not disentangle nomadism from feudalism at a time when Soviet scholars also struggled with the same endeavor. The Russian academic, Boris Vladimirtsov

(1884–1931), had recently coined the term “nomadic feudalism” (J. yūboku hōken sei) in his unfinished Social System of the Mongols to describe the blended features of status relations as they arose on the steppe from the eleventh to eighteenth century.375 For Tachibana, “ethnic

Mongol rule” also “had stagnated in an infantile stage of a feudal political system and a nomadic economic system” though he did not use the phrase “nomadic feudalism” per se. Tachibana regarded feudalism and nomadism as distinctly separate realms of politics and economics that intersected within Mongol society. He described the imperial administration in Khinggan

Province as a “benevolent autocracy...necessary” to carry out an “enlightened campaign” for

373 Lincoln Li, The China Factor in Modern Japanese Thought: The Case of Tachibana Shiraki, 1881–1945 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 45–75.

374 Tachibana Shiraki, “Minzoku undō no soshikika” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 3, No. 24 (10 December 1932), 2–6.

375 Tachibana already began formulating his ideas about nomadism and feudalism in 1932 before Vladimirtsov’s publication in 1934, and likely could not comprehend this text until its translation in 1937. See Boris Vladimirtsov, Mōko shakai seido shi, trans. Gaimushō chōsa bu (Tokyo: Gaimushō chōsa bu, 1936), and subsequent reprints in 1937 and 1941.

191 economic and political development.376 In particular, Tachibana targeted the presence of serfs (J. nōdo), consisting of twenty percent of the Mongol population as the basis for this feudal society that had “taken on a unique economic shape that [one] calls nomadic.” Tachibana raised the need to comprehend the “scientific and historical nature of serfdom” in order to enact an eventual ban.

Doing so, he predicted, would pry open the “feudal” stranglehold of the aristocracy on Mongol society.377 Much as Soviet planners later used Vladimirtsov’s notion of “nomadic feudalism” in justifying the Stalinist liquidation of the Kazakh nobility, so too did Manchukuo technocrats apply Japanese perspectives in dismantling elite land ownership in the borderlands.378

Inventing “nomadic feudalism” called for redefining foundational Marxian terms that had previously relied on agrarian circumstances. Japanese academics held that agrarian feudalism began in the kyōdōtai, the “communal body” of the village that came together to sustain the economic, social, and religious life of its members. In this materialist interpretation, the kyōdōtai served as the basic building block of feudal social structure and needed to disappear in order to complete the transition to capitalism.379 As such, determining the nomadic features of the kyōdōtai in the Mongolian territories arose as a key point of concern for these intellectuals. For example, Ōgami Suehiro, one of the more avowed leftists in Tachibana’s circle who advocated for a “revolution from above” in Manchukuo, critiqued Vladimirtsov and other academics who chose “arbitrarily” to examine feudalism in nomadic society only through its legal system, and

376 Tachibana Shiraki, “Minzoku undō no soshikika” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 3, No. 24 (10 December 1932), 2–6.

377 Tachibana Shiraki, “Mōko minzoku mondai to Mōko shakai” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 6, No. 22 (2 June 1934), 2–5; Hu-ri-cha [Khurcha], “‘Manshūkoku’ no tai Mongoru minzoku seisaku wo meguru ronsō: Mōsei bu no seisaku tenkai to Manshū hyōron ha no hihan wo chūshin ni” in Gengo chiiki bunka kenkyū, No. 17 (March 2011), 27–42.

378 David Sneath, The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 127.

379 Carol Gluck, “The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography” in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1 (November 1978), 36.

192 thus “could not even grasp the core” of the kyōdōtai.380 Ōgami instead urged “a careful scrutiny”

of the formation of banners, leagues, and alliances during the early seventeenth century that took

into account not only the Qing policy towards the Mongolian administration as they had done,

but also the rules that framed the economic livelihoods within Mongolian society. From this

economic perspective, Ōgami argued that “the banner, strictly speaking, is not a primordial

kyōdōtai, but ... a familial kyōdōtai imposed by patriarchal rule” from their Manchu overlords.

What defined this artificial kyōdōtai was the ownership of personal effects (such as slaves or

herds), rather than private property, in leading to the emergence of class differentiation within

“clans” (J. buzoku) themselves. With “the crumbling of the communal system and the

privatization of ownership,” then, Ōgami concluded that it had now became impossible for this

“tribal society” become a truly “classless” one: “While Mongolian tribal society, at the present,”

he wrote, “is in an extremely slow and incipient state, it still has class divisions.” Nevertheless,

Ōgami saw this familial kyōdōtai as separate from agrarian models in Japan and China. In

“nomadic feudalism,” Mongols had come to recognize personal effects within their kyōdōtai, but

had yet to differentiate the land itself as private property and therefore missed treating it as the

crucial means of production to exit out of feudalism. Ōgami consequently condemned the

territories as unable to achieve capitalist development on their own. Rather than “climb up the

380 Besides Vladimirtsov, Ōgami read Owen Lattimore, Valentin Riasanovsky (1884–1968), Yano Jin’ichi (1872– 1970). Japanese translations of Soviet scholarship on nomadism published as Valentin Riasanovsky, Mōko hō no kihon genri, trans. Aoki Tomitarō (Tokyo: Seikatsu sha, 1943); Valentin Riasanovsky, Mōko shūkan hō no kenkyū, trans. Tō-A keizai chōsa kyoku (Tokyo: Tō-A keizai chōsa kyoku, 1935); Boris Vladimirtsov, Mōko shakai seido shi, trans. Gaimushō chōsa bu (Tokyo: Nihon kokusai kyōkai, 1937), though many Mantetsu scholars knew Russian and likely read these works in the original. Ōgami also relied on Fukushima Miyoshi, Manshūkoku tochi seido no genjō to tochi seisaku (Shinkyō: Manshūkoku kokumuin chiseki seirikyoku, 1937); Tatsunaga Kamefuchi, Manshū kyūkan chōsa hōkokusho: Mōchi (Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha chōsaka, 1914); Yano Jin’ichi, Kindai Mōko shi kenkyū (Tokyo: Kōbun dō shobō, 1917); Yao Xiguang, Chou Meng chuyi (N.p., 1908).

193 slope of progress” by privatizing land, Mongolian social structure had slowly fractured into class

differentiation without development.381

The Japanese conception of “nomadic feudalism” also took ethnic mixing into account,

and in that sense differed dramatically from the Soviet case, which focused primarily on

indigenous society.382 Koizumi Yoshio, another radical member of the Mantetsu Research

Department, argued that the influx of Han settlers did the necessary work of destroying the

integrity of the Mongolian “ethnic kyōdōtai” to ready it for capitalism, a process he compared to

“air [disintegrating] a mummy.”383 While his colleague Ōgami pointed to internal causes to the

dissolution of the nomadic kyōdōtai, Koizumi attacked external factors: namely, the role of Han

migrants in unraveling the community fabric of the borderlands. Koizumi identified this

“moment of collapse” when Mongol lords appropriated “ethnic communal lands” that they had

“naturally” come to manage as private property, and then “opened up at their own discretion.”

Yet Koizumi doubted that this process alone would lead to a complete privatization of communal

land. Rather, he blamed “Chinese commercial capital”—while helping to usher in the next

historical stage onto the steppe—for also creating unequal exchange values between Mongols

and Han, which gradually broke down “natural” economic relations. Mongols meanwhile had

little capital accumulation because of their nomadic livelihoods because they moved from place

381 Ōgami Suehiro, “Futatabi Mōchi mondai ni tsuite (jō)” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 12, No. 4 (30 January 1937), 13– 19; Ōgami Suehiro, “Futatabi Mōchi mondai ni tsuite (ge)” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 12, No. 5 (6 February 1937), 11–22.

382 Japanese critiques of Vladimirtsov, for instance, drew attention to his failure to look at materials from Chinese sources, which in turn may have contributed to his blindness over ethnic divides within feudal structures themselves. See Egami Namio, “Urajīmirutsofu cho gaimusho chōsa bu yaku Mōko shakai seido shi” in Jinruigaku zasshi, Vol. 51, No. 12 (December 1936), 30–31.

383 For more about his life, see the memoir, Koizumi Yoshio, Orokana mono no ayumi (Yokohama, 1978). Koizumi here invoked Marx’s own infamous portrayal of “Old China” whose “isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England, dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air.” See Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and in Europe” in New York Daily Tribune (14 June 1853).

194 to place and they spent the entirety of their meager funds on daily goods and alcohol, often

“tricked” by merchants. Furthermore their “productive power” remained in a “sealed-off,”

isolated state. Koizumi hypothesized that “without capital accumulation, industry cannot develop

because the course of production perpetually emerges from the same base and repeats itself over

and over again, while Chinese commercial capital purveys a [constant] flow of goods.” This kind

of commercial capital spinning wildly out of control had left the borderlands in “broken tiles”

after the “crash” of natural economic relations. Consequently, Koizumi believed that “in terms of

the current global economic stages, the lack of an predestined industry and the impossibility of

its existence would send Mongol society down the path of stagnation rather than of normal

development [J. norumaru na hatten].” Koizumi advised that to escape from this crisis, Mongols

needed to generate a “productive power” beyond “sheep-chasing”—indigenous industrialization

that could overcome the “destructive function of Chinese commercial capital.”384 Here Koizumi disagreed with Tachibana about the future of the borderlands. Tachibana conceived of privatized pastoralism as a progressive alternative to industrial capitalism; by comparison, Koizumi argued for putting nomads in factories as the way forward. Koizumi plotted out economic divides along two axes in borderland feudalism: first, along class, between aristocrats, merchants, and commoners, and second, along ethnicity, between Mongols and Han. In his mind, Han migration seems to have prevented the typical materialist progression from feudalism to capitalism for the vast majority of Mongols. The intersection between class and ethnicity therefore suggested a multi-dimensional perspective to the trajectory from feudalism to capitalism, one that seemed more precarious and contingent in the borderlands.

384 Koizumi Yoshio, “Tōbu Uchi Mōko shakai no hōkai, teitai ni tsuite: Tai-Mō keizai seisaku no kisoteki shiryō no hitotsu to shite” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 6, No. 5 (3 February 1934), 12–15.

195 The Japanese take on “nomadic feudalism” suggested that ultimately the situation among

Mongols in Manchukuo diverged from those in the spheres of Soviet influence. As a result,

Mantetsu researchers did not necessarily want to conform to the nationality policy of their

northern neighbors. Perhaps the most conservative voice in this respect was the publisher of

Manshū hyōron and leader of the Manchurian Youth League, Koyama Sadatomo (1888–1964).

Koyama raised concerns over the large refugee population fleeing across the international border

into Manchukuo and Inner Mongolia throughout the 1930s, including an estimated fifty thousand

Buryiats.385 He construed this emergency as “Communist rule largely failing in Mongolia.”

Indeed, beginning in 1927, the new communist government of the Mongolian People’s Republic had forced collectivization onto its citizens, just as Stalin was doing to Buryiats, Kazakhs, and others in the Soviet Union.386 Collectivization in independent Mongolia—which pooled herds

and labor but did not requisition the land itself—represented a singular experiment in warp-speed

historical materialism: revolutionaries assumed that their country could leap directly from

feudalism to socialism because of the enduring communal land system in nomadic communities.

Until 1932 when the state relented with the New Turn Policy, it ordered independent herders to

give up their animals to local cooperatives (Mo. negdel). Rather than turn them over, defiant

nomads responded by slaughtering seven million heads of livestock, a third of the nation’s

total.387 Koyama attributed three factors to this catastrophe in independent Mongolia, denouncing

385 John Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 190–191.

386 Contemporary sources in Japanese seem not to have had too much information on collectivization of nomads in the Soviet Union. See, for example, Zenrin kyōkai chōsa bu, Buriyāto Mōko no zenbō (Tokyo: Nihon kōronsha, 1935), 88–90.

387 The New Turn Policy ended collectivization and encouraged simple forms of joint labor such as mowing hay or erecting pens as part of a more gradual process instead. Mongolia did not attempt collectivization again until the 1950s. See Bat-Erdene Batbayar, Twentieth Century Mongolia (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 1999), 307–310; Tsedendambyn Batbayar, “Stalin’s Strategy in Mongolia, 1932–1936” in Mongolian Studies, Volume 22 (1999), 1– 17; Charles Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia (New York: Praeger, 1968), 303–315; Elizabeth Endicott, A History of Land Use in Mongolia: The Thirteenth Century to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),

196 the Soviet leadership entirely: ignoring the intimate bonds that Mongols had to their animals,

implementing collectivization too rapidly, and imposing a command economy in a place “still far

away from capitalism.”388 Koyama’s critique suggests frst that Mantetsu researchers broadly agreed on the state of “stagnation” in Inner Mongolia—one that rested on a newly articulated theory of “nomadic feudalism” and took into account the intersection of class and ethnicity—but second that many of them remained wary of the Soviet course. Ultimately Japanese technocrats opted for a more moderate stance of land reform directed only at the aristocracy in order to guide the borderlands carefully them through all stages of materialist development.

THE MONGOL LAND OFFER

The Marxian interpretations of the indigenous territories—that the aristocracy perpetuated a feudal system of tenancy that prevented capitalist development—galvanized an extreme reform known as the Mongol Land Offer. This 1938 law represented no marginal piece of legislation. Indeed Katō Tetsuya (1895–?), the head of the Land Bureau which launched the initiative, declared at the time: “if we make just one mistake in sorting out the Mongol Lands, then we will never be able to see to the settlement of the land problem for all of Manchukuo.”389

As examined in Chapter Two, Directive 105 had divided the borderlands into two categories:

lands “open” and “closed” to cultivation by banner outsiders. After 1932, “open” land also

became known as the “former Mongolian territories,” the counties located outside of Khinggan

67–71. For a comparative example on Buryiats and Kazakhs, among other nationalities in the Soviet Union, see James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 283–346; Sarah Robinson, Peter Fink, and Bettina Hamann, “The Impacts of De-collectivization on Kazak Pastoralists: Case Studies from Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and the People’s Republic of China” in Journal of Central Asian Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2000), 2–33.

388 Koyama Sadatomo, “Ryō Shō jiken to Mōko mondai” in Manshū hyōron, Vol. 10, No. 19 (9 May 1936), 18–22.

389 Manshū teikoku seifu chiseki seirikyoku, Rinji tochi seido chōsakai dai ni kai iinkai giji sokkiroku (Manshū teikoku seifu chiseki seirikyoku, 1936), 118.

197 Province where aristocrats still collected rent off of their estates bestowed upon them by the

Manchus. Over a series of conferences, and then in draft meetings of the Five Year Plan,

Japanese technocrats formulated the Land Offer to target the vast holdings of the powerful elite

in Jirem League, namely the thirty-two counties and two cities they had cut away from eleven

banners in South Khinggan. To ascertain ownership, tenure, and revenues at the local level,

researchers with Mantetsu experience traveled to the banners in question to pore over land

contracts in a comprehensive survey of the area that would submit to these reforms. The results

of this investigation led to the requisitioning of 28,800 square miles of territory and over three

million yuan a year in rent and other income through the Land Offer. In 1939, the Land Bureau

then moved onto the eight banners of Josotu and Ju Uda Leagues now in Jinzhou and Rehe

Province, where it quantified, then appropriated 36,800 square miles and 1.5 million yuan for

similar reasons.390 The Land Offer eliminated overlapping property regimes and streamlined

them under one unified rubric in order to hasten capitalist development. By striking at the

financial base of the aristocracy through the Land Offer, Japanese occupiers effectively rendered

them obsolete.

Technocratic plans and indigenous claims over the territories clashed in the making of the

Mongol Land Offer. Deliberations on this law unfolded during a massive effort by the Land

Bureau, founded in 1932 within the Ministry of Civil Affairs, to organize the cadastral registers

(J. chiseki seiri) for all of Manchukuo, as the Chōsen Government-General had done for colonial

Korea in 1911. In mapping out property borders, ascertaining estate ownership, and auditing tax

records, the Land Bureau well understood the fundamental linkages between territory and

knowledge in sustaining imperial power. Moreover, as in Korea, the land registration program

390 Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 4–7, 15; Kōan kyoku, Kin-Netsu Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1939), 16, 116.

198 Figure 4.1 Map of the Open Territories under the Land Offer (1938)

199 sought to account for everyone, even those who had previously not documented their property in

order to avoid taxes, for the purposes of collecting much-needed revenue for the client state.391

The staff of the Land Bureau in Manchukuo even studied property rights in Central and Eastern

Europe, implicitly comparing the uncertain zone between Germany and the Soviet Union with

that of Manchuria and Mongolia. For the Land Bureau, the dual system of banner authority and

county government within the same space proved its most vexing issue in the national cadastral

project. In the “open” borderland counties, Han migrants often rented out their plots through a

string of middlemen, where 60% of their payments ultimately led back to a distant Mongol

prince who owned the tract. (The remaining revenue went to the county.) After the demarcation

of Khinggan Province, which physically cleaved most counties from the banners, that dual

system seemed to make little sense to many Japanese occupiers bent on rationalizing

bureaucracy.392 The earliest inception of the Land Offer already began to grapple with this

problem in late 1935. Members from the Ministry of General Affairs, Civil Affairs, Mongolian

Affairs, Finance, Justice, and Industry, along with officers of the Kantō Army, and later with

researchers from Mantetsu, negotiated its particulars during several sessions of the Provisional

Land System Research Association (J. Rinji tochi seido chōsa kai). The fact that all of these

agents engaged in the discussion over the borderlands demonstrates the far-reaching

consequences that colonial administrators expected the Land Offer to have across all sectors of

Manchukuo. Despite the diversity of participants, the meetings quickly broke down into a

391 On the organization of the cadastral registers in colonial Korea, see Edwin Gragert, Landownership Under Colonial Rule: Korea's Japanese Experience, 1900–1935 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

392 Tanabe Katsumasa, Sengo Ōshū ni okeru tochi seido kaikaku shiron (Tokyo: Kyōchōkai, 1935); Tochikyoku, Kintō Ōshū shokoku tochi seido kaikaku shokō kikan zuhyō (N.p., 1935); for more on the history of the Manchukuo Land Bureau, see Fukushima Miyoshi, Manshūkoku tochi seido no genjyō to tochi seisaku (Manshūkoku kokumuin chiseki seirikyoku, 1937); Manshūkoku chiseki seirikyoku, Tochikyoku shi (Chiseki seirikyoku, 1937).

200 contentious debate between the Land Bureau and the Ministry of Mongol Affairs over the

question of ethnic autonomy within the client state.

The Land Bureau, led by Katō Tetsuya, pressed for subsuming the Mongolian territories

under a national system of property law. A graduate of the law department in Tokyo Imperial

University, Katō had recently moved from his post as the head of the research section in the

Kantō Army Headquarters to direct land reform in Manchukuo.393 Katō wanted to abolish the

“rights of jurisdiction” (Ch. guanxia zhili quan) that the Mongol elite held over their banners—

what he called “preferential treatment”—since they stood in direct competition with the national

authorities. He insisted that “the dual administration in the open Mongol Lands poses a

hindrance to unifying the whole of Manchukuo” and that the government needed to “readily

cancel rent collection on the open lands which is, after all, a relic of the feudal system.”394 With the twinned goals of fostering both capitalism and liberalism for a modern-state, Katō urged a rapid timeline for land reform—not more than five years to formulate and implement the new law. Otherwise, he warned, migrants “flowing en masse will continue to develop the open lands, which means that the standards of living will rise and increase revenues from the Mongol rent ... to the point of strengthening the economic circumstances of the banners” vis-à-vis the rest of

Manchukuo.395 This chain reaction of dire events, Katō predicted, would tip the balance of power in favor of the Mongols and undermine the coherence of the client state.

393 Enatsu Yoshiki, “Manshūkoku no chiseki seiri jigyō ni tsuite: ‘Mōchi’ to ‘kōzan’ no mondai kara miru” in Hitotsubashi daigaku kenkyū nenpō keizaigaku kenkyū, Vol. 37 (1996), 131.

394 “Dai nana kai kanjikai giji gaiyō,” 14, 17; “Dai hachi kai kanjikai giji gaiyō,” 23, in Rinji tochi seido chōsakai, Kanjikai giji gaiyō (Mimeograph, 1935), Tokyo University Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia Library.

395 Manshū teikoku seifu chiseki seirikyoku, Rinji tochi seido chōsakai dai ni kai iinkai giji sokkiroku (Manshū teikoku seifu chiseki seirikyoku, 1936), 122.

201 To curtail the autonomy of Mongols radically in the open territories, Katō sought to

define land ownership by the “lower class” migrants who actually cultivated the land vis-à-vis

the “upper class” nobility who exacted rent from them. Land that seemed to have neither owner

nor occupant, furthermore, would automatically become state property, rather than reverting

back to the banner, and therefore to the Mongolian aristocracy as done in the past.396 This

decision defied the nomadic conceptualization of communal land: herders used banner pastures

in seasonal rotation, granted to them by their princes and lords. Through the eyes of the Japanese

technocrat, however, these tracts oftentimes seemed empty, unused, and unclaimed. But the

Ministry of Mongolian Affairs, as represented by Ōba Tatsunosuke (1904–1975), vehemently

opposed the Land Bureau’s proposal to repossess what the government saw as unoccupied areas

of the open territories. Ōba reminded the rest of the conference that “there is no land without an

owner in the Mongol banners. It is an iron-clad rule ... that unused land returns to the Mongol

banners.” Nevertheless everyone else in the proceedings disregarded Ōba’s warnings that land

reform would “agitate” the Mongols and voted him down unanimously.397 They motioned to

“liquidate the relics of the feudal system gradually”—that is, to end rental privileges and

jurisdictional rights of princes and lords in the open territories and to recognize the rights of

occupants and tenants instead.398 Kato’s colleague from the Kantō Army vigorously supported

this program: “the right of jurisdiction from the old customs of Mongolia opposes the spirit of

the Harmony of the Five Races... it also impedes Japan from implementing nation-wide

396 “Dai hachi kai kanjikai giji gaiyō,” 32, in Rinji tochi seido chōsakai, Kanjikai giji gaiyō (Mimeograph, 1935), Tokyo University Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia Library.

397 “Dai nana kai kanjikai giji gaiyō,” 15; “Dai hachi kai kanjikai giji gaiyō,” 23, in Rinji tochi seido chōsakai, Kanjikai giji gaiyō (Mimeograph, 1935), Tokyo University Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia Library.

398 “Dai kyū kai kanjikai giji gaiyō,” 11–12, in Rinji tochi seido chōsakai, Kanjikai giji gaiyō (Mimeograph, 1935), Tokyo University Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia Library.

202 policies ... Let us resolutely cast aside those bad customs ... for a unified administration.”399

These steps aimed towards eventually abandoning the categories of open and closed territories

from Directive 105 altogether in favor of rationalizing the country under a single classification

scheme.

Mantetsu economists then reified these conference decisions through the Five Year Plan

in 1936. Here, the overseeing committee derived its members from the Mantetsu research group,

such as the chairman Oshikawa Ichirō (1899–1970) and more radical Taira Teizō (1894–1978),

both out of Tokyo University, and none other than Ōgami Suehiro, who had theorized in Manshū

hyōron that Mongols themselves had yet to achieve the privatization of property and therefore

continue to languish under nomadic feudalism.400 In the Five Year Plan, land reform constituted a central element to agricultural development in Manchukuo, and thus called for merging land rights into one simplified framework of ownership. For the Mongolian territories, this meant that the aristocracy had to “return” (J. hōkan) their jurisdictional rights in the open lands to the state.

The architects of the plan deliberately chose the word “return” to obscure the act of imperial expropriation taking place under this centralizing impetus. The word “return” bolstered the legitimacy of the Manchukuo state, for the Qing had originally granted the Mongols the territories at its founding, and now the occupiers wanted to claim them as if the Japanese regime were the rightful heir to the Qing. The use of “return” also alluded to the events of the Meiji

Restoration, where its leaders had convinced key daimyō to voluntarily “return” their domains (J. hanseki hōkan) in 1869. In so doing, the daimyō ceded their hereditary authority to the Meiji

399 “Dai nana kai kanjikai giji gaiyō,” 17–18, in Rinji tochi seido chōsakai, Kanjikai giji gaiyō (Mimeograph, 1935), Tokyo University Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia Library.

400 Oshikawa himself studied land use in the former Mongol territories in Rehe Province. See Oshikawa Ichirō, Nekka shō Ryōgen ken Jyūgorihō ni okeru tochi kankō (Dairen: Minami Manshū tetsudō kabushiki kaisha keizai chōsa ka, 1935).

203 state and received reappointments as non-hereditary governors of new prefectures. The abolition

of the domains, in the minds of Marxian researchers like Ōgami, helped transition Japan from

feudalism to capitalism. They superimposed a similar trajectory in the Mongolian territories

where indigenous princes corresponded to the daimyō and the banners corresponded to the

domains.401 The Land Offer, too, would relegate the hereditary aristocratic jasaks to non- hereditary positions in the banner administration.402 After the “return,” the Five Year Plan would

abolish rent-collecting agencies and continue on with resettling Mongols dispossessed of their

open lands to Khinggan Province.

The Five Year Plan would legally recognize not only the property that Han migrants had

rented officially in the past, known as “red seal land” (Ch. hongqi di, Mo. ulaɣan gereči bičig de

tariy-a). It would also sanction what they had rented unofficially, either for permanent

cultivation (Ch. baizha di, Mo. čaɣan ɣuɣursutu tariy-a, “white stalk land”) or under short-term

mortgages (Ch. lanjia di, Mo. ün-e ilǰalaɣsan tariy-a, “rotten price land”). The new definition of

property validated the permanent presence of people actively working the land as evidence of

rightful ownership, even if they had questionable paperwork to substantiate their claims.403

Nevertheless, these earlier drafts of the Land Offer needed statistical evidence to legitimate their imposition, at least under the logic of the colonial episteme; Japanese occupiers had yet to develop a comprehensive sense of the territory potentially affected by the reforms.

From February to June 1938, rotating teams of technocrats from the Khinggan Bureau and

401 “Memorial on the Proposal to Return the Registers” in Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume II, 1600–2000, second edition, compiled by William Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 674–675.

402 Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005), 112–116.

403 Minami Manshū tetsudo kabushiki kaisha chōsabu, Manshū gokanen keikaku ritsuan shorui, dai ippen, dai ni kan: Manshū einen keikaku shiryō (N.p., 1937), 70–71.

204 usually one representative each from the Bureau for the Organization of Cadastral Registers and

the Bureau of Internal Affairs assessed land ownership in thirty-four counties in open territories.

Nearly all the researchers were Japanese (except for three people of unknown ethnicity with

Chinese names). Ranging from their late twenties to mid-thirties, the men from the Khinggan

Bureau—and they were always men—had received their education from the top producers of

colonial administrators: the Law Department of Tokyo Imperial University, the Chinese and

Mongolian divisions of Osaka Foreign Languages Institute, Tōa dōbun shoin, and Takushoku

University; many of them continued on at Datong Academy, the civil servants training institute

in Xinjing. Five of this cohort spent the following year conducting in-depth ethnographies in the

closed territories, as examined in the next section. The only liaison from the Bureau for the

Organization of Cadastral Registers with any traceable record, Yoshino Toshio (1904–?), had

worked as a tax official for the Government-General of Choson. Colonial transfers like Yoshino

conveyed the tactics of territorial dispossession of the land registration program from Korea to

Inner Mongolia.404

Their mission remained largely an archival project. The resulting five-volume Research

Reports on the Mongol Lands Open to Reclamation (J. Kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkokusho) covered those counties cut out of the six Khorchin banners, the two Gorlos banners, Dorbet, and Jalaid in

Jirem League, plus the orphan banner Yekhe Mingɣan. They built upon the previous work of

Mantetsu’s Kamefuchi Tatsunaga, published back in 1914, by probing into land relations during the Republican period as they became increasingly fraught and complex. Agents spent one week in each location, ensconced in files at the county headquarters and the local tax or land bureaus

404 This group portrait is based on the profiles of Aosaki Shōzō, Hashimoto Shigeo, Ogata Hideo, Taguchi Yoshio, Takemura Shigeaki, Takikawa Jun, Yamane Juntarō, and Yoshino Toshio, published in Manshū shinshiroku, fourth edition (Tokyo: Man-Mō shiryō kyōkai, 1943), 35–36, 72, 89, 201, 344, 619, 1345.

205 Figure 4.2 Research Reports on the Mongol Lands Open to Reclamation Teams in 1938

# Banner County Khinggan Bureau Cadastral Internal Affairs Dates Organization Bureau Bureau 1 Gorlos Dehui Takemura Shigeaki, None None 02.21–02.26 Front Hashimoto Shigeo, Aosaki Shōzō, Annen Ichirō 2 Jiutai Takemura Shigeaki, Nishimura Yoshio Yuasa Masao 04.27–04.30 3 Changling Zhang Nachuan, 05.02–05.10 Annen Ichirō 4 Nong’an Takikawa Jun, Yoshino Toshio None 04.27–05.03 5 Qian’an Iwano Kazuo, 05.04–05.10 Sainohara Isao 6 Changchun Takemura Shigeaki, None 06.01–06.07 Takikawa Jun, Iwano Kazuo, Sainohara Isao 7 Gorlos Zhendong Matsuyama Kazuo, Tai Takeo Yuasa Masao 05.25–05.30 Back Takemura Shigeaki, Zhang Nachuan 8 Zhenzhou Matsuyama Kazuo, 05.31–06.07 Zhang Nachuan 9 Dorbet Anda Ogata Hideo, Miyamoto Shin None 03.30–04.05 Kawabe [Unknown], Okamura Tadao, Iriye Yoshikazu 10 Taikang Hashimoto Shigeo, Kubodera Gen Mitsui Sukeo Unknown 11 Lindian Maki Atsuji None 05.24–05.29 12 Yekhe Keshan Yamane Juntarō, Miyamoto Shin Furutaka Toshiaki 04.12–04.21 Mingɣan Okamura Tadao, 13 Kedong Li Dejun, 04.21–04.26 Iriye Yoshikazu 14 Yi’an Yamane Juntarō, Adachi Keishirō Inoguchi Ekio 05.11–05.18 Okamura Tadao, Li Dejun 15 Baiquan Yamane Juntarō, Miyamoto Shin Furutaka Toshiaki 05.19–05.25 Okamura Tadao, Li Dejun, Iriye Yoshikazu 16 Khorchin Lishu Takemura Shigeaki, None None 03.14–03.19 Left Taguchi Yoshio, Flank Masano Tomoshige, Front, Yoshida Chōichi, Middle, Li Dejun 17 and Back Kangping Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown 18 Changtu 19 Faku 20 Huaide 21 Liaoyuan 22 Shuangshan 23 Tongliao

206 Figure 4.2 Research Reports on the Mongol Lands Open to Reclamation Teams in 1938 (Continued)

24 Khorchin Baicheng Aosaki Shōzō, Kubodera Gen Inoguchi Ekio 03.30–04.06 Right Matsuyama Kazuo, 25 Flank Taonan Zhang Yonglu, 04.06–04.11 Front Sada Ibira 26 Khorchin Tuquan Taguchi Yoshio, Ōhata Yoshiaki None 04.05–04.12 Right Miura Jūzaburō 27 Flank Zhanyu Taguchi Yoshio, Inoguchi Ekio 04.21–04.27 Middle Hashimoto Shigeo, Miura Jūzaburō 28 Kaitong Taguchi Yoshio, 04.27–05.03 Miura Jūzaburō 29 Khorchin Dalai Aosaki Shōzō, Kubodera Gen 04.27–05.03 Right Matsuyama Kazuo, Flank Zhang Yonglu, Back Sada Ibira 30 Tailai Aosaki Shōzō, Furutaka Toshiaki 05.11–05.18 Zhang Yonglu, Sada Ibira 31 An’guang Taguchi Yoshio, Ōhata Yoshiaki Yamazaki Chisato 05.18–05.23 Miura Jūzaburō 32 Zhendong Taguchi Yoshio, None 05.25–05.31 Iriye Yoshikazu 33 Jingxing Aosaki Shōzō, Kubodera Gen 05.23–06.01 Zhang Yonglu, Sada Ibira with a day trip to a nearby village to interview a couple of subjects—spokesmen from the business association or the agricultural cooperative, tenant farmers, landlords, or just the oldest person in town. Divided into sections by county but bound into volumes by banners, the

Research Reports began by narrating the history of land reclamation from the local level, including the procedures for measuring and releasing the land and methods of collecting taxes. In the next chapter, it focused on the land itself: the surface area of plots ranked by quality, demarcations of released and yet to be released land, the process of undertaking possession of property, the system of land licenses, and a breakdown of rent, tax, and other fees. The Research

Reports then moved to the perspective of the Mongol banner on receiving rent revenue and how it financed the administration. A county portrait detailing population by ethnicity, administrative districts, financial circumstances, and local industry followed. In an appendix, the Research

207 Reports reprinted Republican land contracts and laws that shaped the course of reclamation in

each county.405 Ultimately The Research Reports quantified the total area of Jirem League that

the Land Offer would “return” to the central government, likely around 28,800 square miles.406

The Research Reports exposed—for the first time—significant misinterpretations in both

Chinese and Japanese assessments of the Mongol banners. As Hirokawa Saho astutely points out, previous studies before 1938 had assumed that those who had usufruct rights in the open territories consequently owned the land. Furthermore these surveys from the Republican and earlier Manchukuo periods had confused the amount of rent as the actual value of the land.407

Therein lay the origins of the controversy between imperialists and indigenes: What constituted a legitimate claim to the land? Who would be able to stake such a claim? Mongol princes and lords had understood usufruct and rent as temporary but renewable arrangements, whereas Han migrants had come to see themselves as permanent residents in the open territories, which

Chinese and then Japanese investigations then authorized. Katō and the Land Bureau had based their early drafts of the Land Offer on the error that those who physically occupied the open

405 Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kakujirashi zenki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkoku sho, Vol. 1 of Kaihō Mōchi shiryō (Kōan kyoku, 1939); Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kakujirashi kōki Dōrupoto ki, Iku Min’an ki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkoku sho, Vol. 2 of Kaihō Mōchi shiryō (Kōan kyoku, 1939); Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Seika chūki, Seika zenki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkoku sho Vol. 4 of Kaihō Mōchi shiryō (Kōan kyoku, 1939); Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Seika kōki, Charaito ki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkoku sho Vol. 5 of Kaihō Mōchi shiryō (Kōan kyoku, 1939). The third volume on the eight counties formerly of the three Khorchin Left Flank Banners remains missing.

406 The open territories amounted to 12,503,681 shang, of which settlers had already rented and farmed 7,479,102 shang. The Research Reports, however, only gave these seemingly precise figures in shang, a slippery measurement that, in fact, evades standardization. One shang could equal six mu in Manchu regulations, ten mu in Republican decrees, or fifteen mu in other Northeastern practices (where one mu equaled a fixed 666 square meters). Converting shang therefore meant that the surface area varied wildly: 19,300 square miles, 28,800 square miles, 48,200 square miles. The fact that Japanese investigators themselves chose to adopt shang as the unit of measurement speaks to the limitations of the Research Reports as an archival project instead of a field survey. They decided to rely on the legitimacy created by documents rather than by survey instruments, demonstrating an unwillingness to penetrate into land conflicts on the ground. See Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 3–7; “Heilongjiang sheng fanghuang guize” in Kōan kyoku chōsa ka, Kakujirashi kōki Dōrupoto ki, Iku Min’an ki kaihō Mōchi chōsa hōkoku sho, Vol. 2 of Kaihō Mōchi shiryō (Kōan kyoku, 1939), 479; Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and Enlarged (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 243–244.

407 Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005), 97–107.

208 territories, either by paying rent or holding usufruct, owned the land. Now the results of the

Research Reports not only invalidated those provisions, but also implied that the Land Bureau

had grossly underestimated the extent of dispossession about to take place under this

monumental piece of legislation. These dueling conceptions of ownership therefore shaped the

ultimate terms of the Land Offer.

The Land Offer signaled an important shift from experimental autonomy to imposed

centralization in the imperial borderlands. When presenting the finalized law to Japanese

bureaucrats in the banners, Hoshino Naoki (1892–1978) of the General Affairs Agency, and by

this point the most formidable civilian official in the Manchukuo government, asserted that “the

basis of the country’s founding is not federalism, but a strictly unified statism.” Hoshino also

saw the Land Offer as a strike against the indigenous aristocracy and their preferential treatment.

He “refused to forgive the Mongols” for the Lingsheng Incident in 1936, when they tried to

“secede from and dismantle Manchukuo.”408 By subjecting the open territories to a national system of property management, the Land Offer “reformed the ambiguous system” of Mongol and Chinese jurisdiction competing in the same space. Namely, the landowning nobility had “to offer up” (Ch. fengshang, J. hōjō suru, Mo. erhükü) their domain to the client state in tribute; this term masked the expropriation at work and, at the same time, affirmed the supremacy of the central government over the indigenous aristocracy. Land titling under this policy instead granted formal property rights to private individuals and families for tracts they had previously occupied under informal agreements or under customary practice. Authorities left 2% of the area exempt from the law, reserving it as temple precincts, burial grounds, or unenclosed pasturage

408 “Kōan nan shō oyobi shōgai Mōki kakuki sanjikan kondankai” in Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 29.

209 for Mongols left in the open territories.409 Japanese technocrats defended territorial centralization

as a way to establish equity across the diverse populations of the client state just as they

increasingly amplified rhetoric on the “Harmony of the Five Races.” Encoded into the law itself,

the Land Offer aligned with “the goals of ... the sacred work in founding the new state of

Manchukuo as grounded in the great spirit of ethnic harmony.” The law would “make the

Mongol banners, princes, and lords offer up ... their feudal rights and interests, which they have

hitherto held in the open lands, in order to stabilize the welfare of all people and contribute to the

development of the destiny of the new imperial state.”410 Here, land titling, as a form of

“economic advancement” in the words of Hoshino, could increase the security of tenure, expand

land markets, and allow better access to credit. In converting Mongol rent into a national tax,

Japanese occupiers believed that the Land Offer would also transform dependent tenants into

self-reliant owners and therefore ensure equal access for all subjects of Manchukuo to the

supposed fruits of capitalism.411

In return, the Land Offer sponsored welfare for commoners and financed local administrations. The territorial requisition transferred 2.1 million yuan in Mongol rent and another 1.8 million yuan in revenue from fishing privileges, tax subsidies, and commercial duties to the Manchukuo treasury. Of this total, 1.5 million yuan would underwrite banner offices in

Khinggan Province and another 1.5 million yuan would support the Mongolian Public Welfare

409 “Kōan nan shō oyobi shōgai Mōki kaku kichō kondankai” and “Hōjō kaihōchi kuiki nai seikeichi ryūkaichi chōsa hyō” in Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 41, 163–167.

410 “Kaihō Mōchi shori yōkō” in Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 19.

411 “Kōan nan shō oyobi shōgai Mōki kaku kichō kondankai” and “Kōan nan shō oyobi shōgai Mōki kakuki sanjikan kondankai” in Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 41, 31.

210 Figure 4.3 Surface Area of Open Territories Affected by the Mongol Land Offer (in shang)

Banner County Land under Not Yet Total Affected by Land Reserved Mongol Rent Released Land the Land Offer for Mongols Khorchin Left Faku (1) 29816 0 29816 506 Front Kangping (1) 115600 56886 172486 12 Khorchin Left Shuangshan 72406 139162 211568 6512 Center Liaoyuan (1) 232451 26453 258904 17032 Huaide 395386 28296 423682 40 Lishu 424850 84632 509482 0 Faku (2) 29980 0 29980 138 Kangping (2) 31304 15486 46790 2102 Changtu 29266 737 30003 705 Khorchin Left Faku (3) 1319 0 1319 4860 Back Changtu 369883 182997 552880 8374 Kangping (3) 27409 18794 46203 3844 Liaoyuan (2) 15233 0 15233 0 Khorchin Right Baicheng 182897 195690 378587 820 Front Taonan 333707 237017 570724 2205 Kaitong 223607 186393 410000 28215 Tuquan (1) 191480 330209 530689 0 Khorchin Right Danyu 261809 189316 451125 53326 Middle Tuquan (2) 38318 0 38318 1498 Khorchin Right Anguang 216227 261918 478145 17163 Back Zhendong 166449 375808 542257 770 Jalaid Jingxing 220011 39913 259924 294 Tailai 274530 175372 449902 47156 Dalai 104899 318400 423299 70538 Gorlos Front Changchun 493984 56719 550703 0 Jiutai 88772 0 88772 0 Changling 313805 333793 647598 196 Gan’an 354483 118287 472770 90 Nong’an 498298 87717 586015 5000 Dehui 267675 26069 293744 0 Gorlos Back Zhaozhou 273174 419826 693000 7535 Zhaodong 499505 95473 594978 1272 Dorbet Taikang 32616 418286 450902 2352 Lindian 105944 0 105944 733 Anda 138312 308447 446759 0 Yekhe Mingɣan Yi’an 94815 41185 136000 0 Kedong 13800 5766 19566 0 Keshan 182478 185468 367946 12 Baiquan 132604 55064 187668 0 Total 7479102 5024579 12503681 283210

211 Association in fighting the triple threat of “poverty, disease, and ignorance.”412 The

redistribution of Mongol rent under the Land Offer differed dramatically from previous schemes

in the early twentieth century. Using Yekhe Mingɣan’s budget as an example, the proportion of

the pool that went to running the banner offices rose from under 3% to 38%. In the late Qing, the

banner jasak had taken 22% of the rent income, with the expectation that he would decide how to

disburse the proceeds (and how much) as social assistance.413 The Land Offer eliminated this

discretionary power and explicitly designated 38% to welfare programs run by provincial

bureaucrats. Under this new legislation, then, Mongol princes lost their entitlements in dictating

budgets to the client state, but at the benefit of increased funding overall.

The Land Offer met little outward resistance because it also funded buyouts for the

Mongol elite after confiscating their estates and stripping their titles. Japanese occupiers justified

Figure 4.4 Mongol Rent Collected from and Redistributed to Banners under the Land Offer (in yuan)

Banner Mongol Rent Collected Funding Disbursed from Open Territories under the Land Offer Khorchin Left Front 77387 27000 Khorchin Left Center 471474 382000 Khorchin Left Back 173475 144000 Khorchin Right Front 167703 90000 Khorchin Right Middle 47125 13000 Khorchin Right Back 68880 43000 Jalaid 94417 71000 Gorlos Front 762429 534000 Gorlos Back 170903 94000 Dorbet 46720 47000 Yekhe Mingɣan 96178 55000 Total 2176691 1500000

412 “Kaihō Mōchi hōjō gaisetsu” and “Kōan nan shō oyobi shōgai Mōki kaku kichō kondankai” in Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 14, 49.

413 “Heilongjiang quansheng kenwu zongju wei Yi-ke-ming-an gong ying pi huangdi yazu yingliang ying qing chi duzhi si hefa shi gei Heilongjiang sheng gongshu bingwen ji pi” (GX34.04.11), Vol. 134, 408–409 in Dongbei bianjiang dang’an xuanji: Qingdai, Minguo (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chuban she, 2007).

212 this payoff as a way for “notable people to maintain their livelihood and prestige for completing

this epoch-making sacred work.” Under the Land Offer, some thirty princes and lords received a

total of six million yuan in bonds issued from the Central Bank of Manchukuo, with an interest

rate of 240,000 yuan per year. The Japanese divided these bonds based on aristocratic and

administrative ranks, so that someone like Chimedsempil as a “second class imperial duke” who

had served as jasak of his banner and the head of Jirem League at large, collected the most in

interest at ten thousand yuan per year. Low-ranked princes earned about 2600 yuan per year in

this reform.414 This class of men therefore became the last generation of hereditary aristocrats to

rule the steppe in 1938.

THE MONGOL LAND MANAGEMENT PLAN

After the Land Offer severed feudal relations between Mongol aristocrats and Han tenants, Japanese administrators turned west to “ascertain the land system” within indigenous communities themselves.415 The resulting village surveys taken in Khinggan Province from 1939

to 1941 aimed to make a “clear explication of the process from nomadism to agrarianism with a

precise [J. teikaku] understanding of nomadic society as a goal.”416 Nevertheless those

researchers who carried out the studies faced one very thorny methodological problem in

determining the course of land reform: Marx’s five stages of history never addressed pastoral

414 “Kaihō Mōchi hōjō gaisetsu,” “Kyū Mōko ōkō yusei kōsai hō,” “Kyū Mōko ōkō yusei kōsai rishi,” “”Kaihō Mōchi hōjō seifu an kaku ōkō tomoni shiji su” in Kōan kyoku, Kaihō Mōchi hōjō kankei kiroku shūsei (Kōan kyoku, 1938), 16, 81–84, 87–89, 124.

415 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941), 59; Mantetsu Hokushi keizai chōsa sho, dai sanhan, “Kōan Mōchi no chōsa ni tsuite” in Manshūkoku chisei seiri jōkyō shisatsu hōkoku (Mimeograph, 1939), Central Minorities University Library, Beijing, People’s Republic of China, 42.

416 Kōan kyoku, Kōan saishō Aru Horuchin ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date), 1.

213 nomads. They did not exemplify primitive communism because they had both aristocrats and

slaves, and yet to the Japanese economists, they still maintained some semblance of communal

land ownership. Unlike in the areas under the Land Offer, the technocrats here plotted indigenes

along two overlapping trajectories, from feudalism to capitalism on the one hand, and from

nomadism to sedentarism on the other. The Khinggan surveys therefore gave these men the

opportunity to theorize where Mongolian society stood along these two spectrums and to

reformulate the criteria used for quantifying land tenure in agrarian villages for nomadic

communities. The data ultimately collected from these investigations identified the “feudal”

features within Khinggan Province and focused on them under a new directive passed in August

1942, the Mongol Land Management Plan.

The Khinggan Bureau modeled the field reports after the village studies conducted by the

research division of Mantetsu in North China and Manchuria proper. Evident in the official name

of the project, “Reports on the Research of Actual Conditions” (J. jittai chōsa hōkoku), the

Khinggan surveys differed from those on the open territories by emphasizing scientific

objectivity through fieldwork as the only form of legitimate knowledge in the borderlands. Most

of their results, authored by both Japanese and Mongols, have survived either in narrative or

chart form in individual volumes or as scholarly articles in the journal Mōko kenkyū.417

According to Takemura Shigeaki (1909–2000), one of the team leaders who had also helped run

417 See Kōan kyoku, Kōan saishō Aru Horuchin ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date); Kōan kyoku, Kōan nanshō Koruchin sayoku chū ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date); Kōan kyoku, Kōan nanshō Jaraito ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date); Kōan kyoku, Kōan seishō Naiman ki, Aru Koruchin ki jittai chōsa tōkei hen (no date); Kokumuin Kōan kyoku, Kōan nanshō Koruchin sayoku chū ki, Jaraito ki jittai chōsa tōkei hen (no date); Kokumuin Kōan kyoku, Kōan hokushō Shin Paruko uyoku ki, Soron ki, Chin Paruko ki jittai chōsa tōkei hen (no date). The report for Morin Dabaγa Banner supposedly exists but I have yet to find an actual copy of Kokumuin Kōan kyoku, Kōan tōshō Makuryokutatsuga ki jittai chōsa tōkei hen (no date). Yoshida Jun’ichi has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of articles published out of the survey in “Kōan yonshō jittai chōsa ni tsuite: Hikaihō Mōchi no chōsa wo chūshin ni” in Waseda daigaku daigakuin bungaku kenkyūka kiyō, Vol. 43 (1997), 57–71; see also his chapter, “Kōan kyoku gaihen to Kōan shō shoki jittai chōsa” in Tōhoku Ajia ni okeru minzoku to seiji (Sendai: Tōhoku daigaku tōhoku Ajia kenkyū sentā, 2003), 27–46.

214 the Land Offer studies in 1938, technocrats at the bureau “designed [the survey] intending to

depict [both] the general nature and the unique organization and character of the Mongol village.”

Takemura urged that the questionnaires should “look at the human livelihoods on the land more

than studying the land itself.” The Khinggan Bureau by this point recognized that ethnicity and

livelihood varied greatly across the province. As such, focusing on just one or two sites would

not “grasp the entirety” of the borderlands. Administrators originally selected eight different

villages in the province that typified the array of ethnicities: four Khalkh Mongol communities,

and one Buriyat, Daγur, New Baraγ, and Solon community each. These sites, moreover,

purposefully reflected different stages in the borderland transition between “pure nomadism” and

sedentary agriculture. Takemura argued that only this kind of fieldwork that drew upon

representative villages could “ascertain the land system” in Khinggan Province in the years after

the Demarcation, and therefore determine where the borderlands stood in the staged evolution of

capitalism.418

Japanese researchers needed to rely heavily on indigenous knowledge and local connections in the borderlands. The bureau organized two teams of a dozen members each, including four of its own representatives, an adviser from the Ministry of Industry, two consultants from the Ministry of Justice, three Mongol translators from the Khinggan Academy, and several banner administrators. Half of the group therefore consisted of native informants.

(The Japanese side also underwent a “hasty” two months of language study.) A closer examination of the leadership of Team One reveals a moment of collaboration among parties who appeared ideologically at odds with each other: Young Mongols, security agents, and

Marxian economists.

418 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941), 59.

215 Figure 4.5 Khinggan Survey Sites in Reports on the Research of Actual Conditions

Date Province Banner Village Ethnicity Livelihood Team 1939.03 West Naiman West Shira khara Khalkh Mixed One aγula 1939.04 South Khorchin Left Flank Lang-bu-wo-bu Khalkh Agrarian Two Middle 1939.05 West Aru Khorchin Kharatoγchin Khalkh Mixed One 1939.06 South Jalaid Mao-li-tu Khalkh Mixed Two 1939.07 North New Baraγ Right Flank Kerlen New Baraγ Nomadic One 1939.08 North Solon Bayan khosiγu Buriyad Nomadic Two 1939.11 East Morin Dabaγa Ha-li-qian Daγur Agrarian One Unknown East Ariγun Ussumen, Naji tun Solon Agrarian Two 1940 West Baγarin Left Flank Bayan qosiγu Khalkh Agrarian One 1940.07 North Old Baraγ Teniger Old Baraγ Nomadic Two 1941 South Khorchin Right Flank East Hondoron Khalkh Mixed Two Middle

The bureau appointed Khafungga (1908–1970) as the supervisor of Team One. In the

words of Takemura, “when doing all kinds of research, we come into a lot of contact with

villages, and for these issues, putting a cheerful Mongol in charge is the suitable thing to do.”419

A former student of Mersé from the Khorchin banners, Khafungga had fought in the Inner

Mongolia Autonomy Army at the time of the Manchurian Invasion and helped negotiate the boundaries of Khinggan Province in its aftermath. In the 1930s he served as the minister’s secretary for the province, transcribing notes during the Land Offer negotiations, all the while working for an underground cell of the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party. After the surveys in 1941, Khafungga would move to Tokyo for two years as the Manchukuo cultural attaché, but at the end of the war, he would announce his Communist loyalties all along, becoming one of the deputies of the new Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.420 Indeed the

opportunity for self-ethnography and the exposure to Marxian methods during the Khinggan

419 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941), 60.

420 Christopher Atwood, “The East Mongolian Revolution and Chinese Communism” in Mongolian Studies, Vol. 15 (1992), 7–83.

216 Figure 4.6 Map of Khinggan Survey Sites

217 surveys may have shaped Khafungga’s vision for social reform in the turbulent years of the

Communist revolution.

Second in command to Khafungga in the survey team, and likely the actual manager, was

Takemura Shigeaki who had earlier experience in the Land Offer study. In fact, four other

members of the Khinggan Bureau—Aosaki Shōzō, Hashimoto Shigeo, Sada Ibira, and Yamane

Juntarō—also worked on both surveys. Takemura began at the Manchukuo Ministry of Industry

immediately after graduating from the department of law at Tokyo Imperial University in 1932, and then continued on in local administration in Linxi County. This post in the county bureaucracy simultaneously exposed Takemura to fieldwork and the Mongolian territories, as he gathered information to write the official gazetteer on Linxi. Takemura built on his experiences in Linxi when he returned to the Ministry of Industry to conduct village surveys in the rural north.

By the time he took up his position at the Khinggan Bureau, Takemura was serving as a liaison for the Manchukuo military police to county councilors.421

The third critical member of the team, Muraoka Shigeo (1908–1980), accompanied the

investigation as an adviser from the Ministry of Industry. Muraoka, a Chinese major from the

Osaka School of Foreign Languages, started at the Mantetsu Economic Research Division, then

transferred to the Manchukuo Ministry of Industry Research Unit along with a number of other

employees of the railroad company. Like Takemura, Muraoka had carried out several village

surveys in the Manchurian countryside in order to delineate facets of rural life as feudal or

capitalist.422 At first glance, then, the Khinggan surveys seemed to bring together an unlikely assortment of characters in the borderlands, but in fact, their leftist ideologies aligned in their

421 Takemura Shigeaki and Taketomi Kazuhiko, Gekiryū: Manshū ni iki, jūdō ni ikite (Fukuoka: Nishi Nihon shinbunsha, 1999); Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005), 207.

422 Muraoka Shigeo, Aogaeru kikō (Sapporo: Bungei sākuru, 1980), 212–213.

218 Figure 4.7 Khinggan Survey Teams in Reports on the Research of Actual Conditions

Institutional Position Team One Team Two Mongol Primary Leader Khafungga Ondus Japanese Secondary Leader Takemura Shigeaki Hashimoto Shigeo Ministry of Industry Advisor Muraoka Shigeo Ono Tamotsu Khinggan Bureau Yamane Juntarō, Sada Ibira Aosaki Shōzō, Ide Shuntarō Ministry of Justice No data Hiroo Yoshio, Namuljab Mongol Translators from the Dorigoru, Poinurige, Porichofu Jiruhe, Buren nasun, Hirenbuhe Khinggan Academy (transliterated from Japanese) (transliterated from Japanese) ultimate vision for land reform; the question lay in how to apply those Marxist-Leninist prescriptions meant for the agrarian problem to the nomadic territories.

The bureau only published one daily logbook out of the initial eight studies, and the concise notes of this journal to Kharatoγchin in Aru Khorchin Banner suggest how a typical field trip might have unfolded and what the economy of research involved on the ground. On April 30,

1939, the team, led by Khafungga and Takemura, set out from the capital via rail for Tongliao, then by bus to Kailu, and finally by truck to the banner headquarters in Kundu. There, the team consulted with local officials in selecting a settlement that met the ethnicity and livelihood requirements of the survey; in this case, they were looking for a nomadic Khalkh community.

They chose Kharatoγchin, a twenty-household “village” about forty-five miles north of Kundu.

When the investigators finally arrived unannounced in Kharatoγchin on May 8, their strange appearance must have elicited curiosity and apprehension from its residents: a dozen Japanese and Mongol men dressed in brass-buttoned, military khaki uniforms with three large wagons and six oxcarts full of luggage and equipment, including their own private gers. The banner administrators gathered the herders and explained the intent of this unusual visit, while the interlopers distributed medicine and posters to soften the inconvenience of their stay.

Immediately the following morning, the surveyors began household interviews in Kharatoγchin, first by offering a pound of brown sugar and two packages of starchy noodles to their subjects.

Moving from ger to ger over the course of ten days, they inquired about family histories, labor

219 relations, income and expenditures, animal husbandry, farming methods, rents and taxes,

hygienic practice, literacy rates, and religious life. All of this data they enumerated, diagrammed,

graphed, and mapped into their notes—no detail left unexamined. On the last day, the team

members hosted a horse race in which they awarded the first place winner a sheepskin and three

yuan in gold, and more sacks of brown sugar as consolation prizes. They boiled mutton for the

entire community, and washed down the feast with ten pounds of hard liquor. Including side trips

to observe other areas of the banner for comparison, the survey of Kharatoγchin, as with the

other seven sites, took about a month from start to finish.

In that month, researchers faced a range of arduous difficulties in answering all of the

questions posed by the survey handbook: inclement weather, unpredictable travel, and

uncooperative locals. Even in early May, team members battled fierce winds, freezing

temperatures, and light snow to reach Kharatoγchin. They dealt with transport mishaps from the

first week: the truck became stuck in sand, forcing everyone to hop out of the carriage and push

it across the dunes. Then, while driving through a river, the truck flooded and finally sputtered to

a halt. In Kharatoγchin, the problems continued. One reading of the reports shows that the

denizens sometimes engaged in a kind of passive resistance to the relentless barrage of questions

and quantifications: respondents answered with a cursory “yes” or “no.” Blank spaces in the

report charts may also indicate an unwillingness to cooperate with the researchers and translators.

Among nomads in New Baraγ Banner, for instance, the surveyors had only finished meeting with

three-quarters of the families before half the camp opted to leave the area and herd their animals

elsewhere.423 Aside from these examples, the bureau chose not to include discussion of these

challenges in the remaining reports in an attempt to depoliticize all that its technocratic hand had

423 Kōan kyoku, Kōan saishō Aru Horuchin ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date), 313–317; Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941), 60.

220 touched. By presenting these surveys as objective realities of borderland “villages,” the bureau

sought to obscure both the natural and social conditions that informed research and the local

opposition to its seemingly totalizing gaze.

Initial instructions to the survey teams reveal that Japanese technocrats wanted to know

where the Mongolian territories stood in terms of the inexorable Marxian transition from

feudalism to capitalism. Nevertheless, compared to previous village studies in Manchuria, they

had to account for the “unique” features of the borderlands: banner aristocracy and nomadic

practice. In dealing with nomads as a subject of economic study for the first time, Japanese

investigators reworked their methods and categories from those suited to agrarian conditions into

those for nomadic ones. Nomadic society accounted for wealth differently, which then led to a

cascade other readjustments in the questionnaire. Rather than parcels of land circulating as the

primary commodity of the local market, it was the heads of animals; landlords now became

herdlords. While using the same four classes between agrarian and nomadic communities—

wealthy, middle, low, and destitute—the reports translated land ownership to herd ownership,

supposedly pegging the worth of one adult cow to 0.6 shang of property. (They assigned other

values to camels, horses, and sheep.) Mathematically converting the value of herds to farms and

vice versa in the survey results, however, shows that in fact the economists applied no universal

range for each class across all eight sites. Rather, they used relative measures depending on the

distribution of wealth in that specific community.424

424 See the conversion tables printed in Kōan kyoku, Kōan saishō Aru Horuchin ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date); Kōan kyoku, Kōan nanshō Koruchin sayoku chū ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date); Kōan kyoku, Kōan nanshō Jaraito ki jittai chōsa hōkoku sho (no date); Kōan kyoku, Kōan seishō Naiman ki, Aru Koruchin ki jittai chōsa tōkei hen (no date); Kokumuin Kōan kyoku, Kōan nanshō Koruchin sayoku chū ki, Jaraito ki jittai chōsa tōkei hen (no date); Kokumuin Kōan kyoku, Kōan hokushō Shin Paruko uyoku ki, Soron ki, Chin Paruko ki jittai chōsa tōkei hen (no date).

221 Figure 4.8 Definitions of Class Divisions in “Reports on the Research of Actual Conditions”

Site New Baraγ Old Baraγ Solon Aru Naiman Jalaid Khorchin Left Right Flank Khorchin Flank Middle Commodity Heads of Animals Shang in Land Upper Class 301+ 101–1000+ 101+ 81–250+ 372.5+ 100+ 100+ Middle 81–300 71–100 51–100 13–80 140–180 40–100 40–100 Class Lower Class 31–80 21–70 21–50 5–12 40–70 20– 40 20– 40 Destitute 0–30 0–20 0–20 0–4 No data 0–20 0–20

In determining the state of feudalism, the bureau focused on herd ownership: who

possessed the animals and how many versus who actually cared for them, the nature of those

relations, and their compensation (if at all). Specifically, the survey categorized the work force

by types of servitude, tenancy, and daily, monthly, and yearly wage labor.425 In this way, these

researchers seem to have taken Marx’s words literally: “feudal organization was ... an association

against a subjected producing class... Labor is here again the chief thing, power over

individuals.”426 Japanese leftists therefore reevaluated the defining features of feudalism for

nomads as less about the materiality of the commodities themselves—property versus animals—

and more about the nature of labor relations involved in the fashioning of those commodities.

With livestock as the predominant commodity, the banners therefore presented a different

sort of “land question” compared to Chinese villages, since its membership, by grace of the

aristocracy, traditionally held near-free access to natural resources: open range, fresh water, salt

lakes, and woodland. As such the bureau remained invested in learning more about the

“communal” (J. kyōdō) use of the land within the “nomadic zone”—rights which Directive 105

425 Kōan yonshō jittai chōsa kōmoku (Mimeograph, no date), Tokyo University Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia Library.

426 David Sneath, The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 129. As Sneath points out, Owen Lattimore made these claims in 1957 when he noted the peculiarly narrow Soviet definition of feudalism where its advocates “are so much obsessed with ... asserting a priori that land is the determining kind of feudal property, that they neglect the significance of mobile four-footed property.” See Owen Lattimore, “Feudalism in History” in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1962), 550.

222 now protected. All of this information fed into formulas to identify the precise phase of

development for achieving social revolution through imperial means. Japanese economists

wanted to know the routes, distances, speed, and frequency of transmigration, herders’ important

rest areas and water supply, as well as the quality, quantity, and value of the pastures, all

“clarified with maps.” The survey directions queried the relationship between the borders of the

banner and the borders of the pasture, namely, whether the accepted boundaries of the pastures

gave rise to the shape of the banner today, or vice versa. The bureau elaborated further: in what

patterns did herders use the rangeland? How did authorities recognize grazing rights? How did

individuals acknowledge those same rights among each other? What legal process did banners

use when conflicts arose? Elucidating how banners became territorialized, that is, “fixed” (J.

kotei) or “concentrated” (J. shūdan) in a demarcated space, would therefore aid the state in

delineating new borders, settling old scores, and legitimizing those decisions often at the cost of

dispossession.427

In response to the above instructions, reports from the surveys deemed that the

“conception of land” among nomads in fact remained “shallow.” Ide Shuntarō, one of the bureau

representatives from Team Two, for instance, commented from the field site at Teniger in Old

Baraγ Banner that “of course, individual rights had not developed, but communal ones had not

done so clearly either.” Instead, as the team members discovered after interviewing the people of

Teniger and the local authorities, nomads openly violated banner boundaries despite state

attempts to assign territory to them during the Demarcation of 1933. The Baraγ continued to

cross over into the adjacent banner for the summer, while their neighbors, the Solon and

Orochon, carried on herding in Teniger, seemingly without any disputes over grazing. Conflicts

427 Kōan yonshō jittai chōsa kōmoku (Mimeograph, no date), Tokyo University Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia Library, 1–2, 21, 28, 34.

223 only arose when people began commodifying nature—the moment of capitalist exchange to the

Japanese researchers. For Teniger, this meant when outsiders harvested willow stalks for

wickerwork or cut grass seedlings for fodder. Ide claimed that the nomads never wanted to do so

because they would have to pay usufruct fees to the banner first.428 The Khinggan surveys therefore insinuated that the nomads themselves seemed to lack the entrepreneurial motivation to kick-start capitalism and privatize land ownership, casting them as decidedly feudal.

The Japanese portrayal of nomads having a premature “conception of land” fostered the belief that they also lacked a coherent village structure. Mantetsu economists had seen “the village” (J. buraku, nōson) as a fundamental category of analysis within their epistemology of the agrarian crisis, but “the village” ceased to cohere for nomadic communities. They had identified “the village” as a particular problem in Marxian thought at a time when rural livelihoods seemed to be collapsing within the archipelago itself. By examining landholding arrangements and labor relations, these researchers debated as to where “the village” lay in the teleological trajectory of capitalist development that would ultimately end in pure communism.

Advocates of agrarian reform in Japan had tried to rid villages of what they saw as “feudal remnants” by supporting immiserated tenants against usurious landlords and by fostering the growth of a freeholder class throughout the 1920s and even the 1930s. Because of entrenched opposition from the landlords, however, meaningful change proved impossible in Japan, and so these leftists had turned to the colonies in hopes of extricating tenants from the stranglehold of landlords through a “revolution from above.”429 Thus “the village” represented a crucial category

428 Of course, any historian could point to the myriad grazing disputes in the archive today to disprove this theory. Ide Shuntarō, “Yūbokuchi ni okeru sho kankō: Chin Hajiko ki no jittai chōsa yori” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 2, No. 3 (September 1940), 34–50.

429 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 294.

224 to understanding the transition between feudalism to capitalism, one that disappeared with

mobile populations.

In studying “purely nomadic” communities and “mixed” settlements, Japanese

researchers claimed to have discovered the absence of “village organization” only when they

mapped out the familial and economic ties between nomads. At first Takemura characterized the

locations of the gers as “randomly dispersed.” After diagramming the site, however, he was able

to reveal that their positions were not random at all, nor were they unified. Kharatoγchin, for

example, consisted of four pods linked together with tenuous labor ties. The researchers of Team

One numbered the households, and drew different arrows to represent all kinds of bonds at work

in Kharatoγchin: family members, day and month laborers, yearly contractors, cooperative

neighbors, tenant workers (Ch. bangqing, Mo. pančiŋ), and so on.430 In delineating this map,

they decided that nomadic and semi-nomadic communities comprised of small concentrations (J.

shō shūdan), rather than one integrated entity. Only under full agriculturalization, Takemura

argued, could former nomads cultivate a sense of a coherent “village” community and thus could

begin to realize a capitalist consciousness.431

The Khinggan surveys culminated with the passage of a new law in August 1942—the

Mongol Land Management Plan. This act laid out “concrete” stipulations to Directive 105,

which had banned land reclamation under more generalized terms ten years earlier.432 According to Takemura, one of its key authors, the Management Plan pursued both a retrospective and prospective outlook on the land problem: the reform claimed to “respect the actual conditions of

430 For an explanation regarding this class of tenant labor see Almas and Kevin Stuart, “The Mongol Panching Labor-Hiring System” in Mongolian Studies, Vol. 11 (1998), 43–46.

431 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōko minzoku no nōboku seikatsu no jittai (Tō-A kenkyū sho, 1941), 71–72.

432 Zhang Jinghui, “Kokumuin kunrei dai 179 gō: Mōchi no kanri ni kansuru ken” in Mōko kenkyūkai, “Mōchi kanri yōkō kankei kiroku” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 4, No. 5 and 6 (December 1942), 9.

225 Figure 4.9 Takemura Shigeaki’s Diagram of Labor Relations in Kharatoγchin

226 use in the Mongol territories by the original residents of the banner” and yet also “develop the

productive power of herding and farming ... to stabilize the livelihoods of the people.”433

Japanese technocrats contended that this act would not represent a radical departure from the past, but a logical extension of laws safeguarding the territories from the seventeenth century onwards.

The occupiers nonetheless saw the Management Plan as a “necessity for progressive development” rather than just a “passive preservation” (J. shōkyokutekina hozen) of the steppe.434

Indeed, in situating the law in contemporary language, Takemura evoked the recent deportations of hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens in the borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union as

“lessons from the harsh realities of weak ethnicities”—the kind of marginalized populations that the plan supposedly would protect in Manchukuo.435

The Management Plan reaffirmed the definition of what would count as the Mongolian

territories, as based on current practice and not on historical property. Under Directive 105, the

law designated the Mongolian territories as either “open” or “closed” for reclamation and rent by

Han farmers, with the underlying assumption that regardless of the category, the land ostensibly

still belonged to the indigenous elite even if it were under the cultivation of Han tenants. With

the Management Plan, Takemura recast the territories as consisting only of areas that had placed

the “rich distinctiveness” of minority livelihoods “at the center” and resolved to “abandon

interests” in places where Mongols and Tungus had “lost their essence [J. jisshitsu].”436 The major classifications under the law therefore shifted from the binaries of “open” and “closed”

433 Takemura Shigeaki, “‘Mōchi kanri yōkō’ no jisshi ni tsuite” in Chisei, Vol. 8, No. 1 (February 1943), 18–31.

434 “Mōchi kanri yōkō kaisetsu” in Mōko kenkyūkai, “Mōchi kanri yōkō kankei kiroku” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 4, No. 5 and 6 (December 1942), 85.

435 Takemura Shigeaki, “Mōchi mondai oboe sho” in Mōko kenkyūkai, “Mōchi kanri yōkō kankei kiroku” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 4, No. 5 and 6 (December 1942), 5.

436 Takemura Shigeaki, “Mōchi mondai oboe sho” in Mōko kenkyūkai, “Mōchi kanri yōkō kankei kiroku” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 4, No. 5 and 6 (December 1942), 3.

227 land to gradients of urbanization—cities and townships, communal and private village property,

and finally the vast majority of “other” which included pasture, forests, mountains, and the like.

The law designated the final category of “other” as “a region that preserved the Mongol Lands in

its most pure form [J. mottomo junsui ni hoji sareteiru]” where “nomadic communities [J.

yūboku buraku] and half-settled villages would migrate and wander the region ... the original

residents of the banner can move freely to herd animals, cut trees, and hunt animals ... and

maintain an entirely communal use of the land.”437 This re-conceptualization—from “feudal” relations of property along ethnic and status lines to those along urban and rural divides—effaced the original owners of the land, and thus legitimized the extensive dispossession that had transpired under the Land Offer in 1938.

To dislodge the “feudal remnants” at the community level, the 1942 law called for setting up “Village Land Management Associations” (J. buraku tochi kanri kumiai) in fixed settlements,

which shifted the responsibilities of property administration from the jasak to local committees

of twenty or so Mongol elites. These committees created an “integrated land use plan” that

oversaw the use of communal and private property in order to “strengthen the union of the

villagers and ... advance their welfare.” Members met and agreed on designated areas for herding

animals, collecting fodder, cutting reeds, and other pastoral pursuits. They also had the power to

deem if owners were using their allotments “against the characteristics [J. seijō] of the land,” in

which case the banner could confiscate or buy these tracts back. These village associations

diffused the feudal power of the jasak at the banner level and could actually police the use of the

437 “Mōchi kanri yōkō kaisetsu” in Mōko kenkyūkai, “Mōchi kanri yōkō kankei kiroku” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 4, No. 5 and 6 (December 1942), 93, 99.

228 land and labor in their own communities, thereby working to hold cultivation in check on the

steppe.438

The Management Plan aimed to break up large, feudal estates of tenant workers into small, private units of herding families. By eliminating “open” and “closed” categories of the land, Japanese planners could then dismantle the status relations that had epitomized the

Mongolian territories. Because Takemura and other researchers identified the lack of settlements as one of the primary obstacles to Marxian development in the Khinggan surveys, early drafts of the law required continuing the formation of villages (J. buraku keisei) as the fundamental building block of the steppe economy.439 Yoshida Jun’ichi, however, argues that the eroding trust between the Japanese-led administration and Mongols compelled planners to do away with enforcing further village consolidation and instead target the labor relations made visible by

Takemura’s mapping.440

Namely, the Management Plan appealed to a “duty to self-manage” the land. The law banned landlords and tenants in favor of private and communal property without these extractive economic relations. It also forbade the transferring, pawning, and mortgaging of the land, yet allowed its use by the residents of the banner in perpetuity. Further cultivation, especially with

Han farmhands, required permission from the jasak. In order to reduce the size of aristocratic

438 Kōan kyoku, Mōchi hō ni kitei subeki jikō (an) (Mimeograph, 1941), Takushoku University Library Former Colonial Collection; Takemura Shigeaki, “‘Mōchi kanri yōkō’ no jisshi ni tsuite” in Chisei, Vol. 8, No. 1 (February 1943), 25; “Mōchi kanri yōkō kaisetsu” in Mōko kenkyūkai, “Mōchi kanri yōkō kankei kiroku” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 4, No. 5 and 6 (December 1942), 77–109.

439 Kōan kyoku, Mōchi hō ni kitei subeki jikō (an) (Mimeograph, 1941), Takushoku University Library Former Colonial Collection.

440 Yoshida Jun’ichi, “Kōan kyoku gaihen to Kōan shō shoki jittai chōsa” in Tōhoku Ajia ni okeru minzoku to seiji (Sendai: Tōhoku daigaku tōhoku Ajia kenkyū sentā, 2003), 27–46.

229 estates, the reforms limited individual holdings to two hundred shang or less in surface area.441

Only this last provision met considerable resistance from wealthy landholders, who believed that

ceding parts of their estates to poor Mongols who did not have the resources to manage them

would ultimately lead to disrepair and the need to hire tenants again. Still, in the year after the

Management Plan went into effect, Takemura and other surveyors reported little to no opposition

to the law. That they did not find any tenant workers at field sites in the Khorchin banners further

hints at the early success of this policy in the final years of the empire.442 All in all, the

motivations behind the Management Plan in Khinggan Province—that is, to dissever perceived

feudal ties—mirrored the Land Offer in the former territories.

* * *

Theoretically speaking, land reform in the Mongolian territories relied upon

reinterpretations of Marxian trajectories to accommodate nomadic subjects. In explaining what

they saw as “stagnation” in the region, progressive academics integrated nomadic livelihoods

into feudal structures, arguing that the basic building blocks of community life did not rest on the

notion of land as private property. Consequently, by this logic, nomads had missed out on the

ability to spark capitalism from within. The concept of nomadic feudalism in the borderlands,

moreover, diverged from Soviet models in that it dealt with ethnic contentions. Researchers saw

Han migrants as the necessary source of commercial capitalism on the steppe, but also as the

barrier that prevented Mongols from reaping the benefits of this economic system. The

subsequent field surveys quantitatively confirmed to Japanese occupiers that what had begun as

441 Mōchi seibi yōkō shian (Mimeograph, n.d.), Takushoku University Library Former Colonial Collection; Takemura Shigeaki, “‘Mōchi kanri yōkō’ no jisshi ni tsuite” in Chisei, Vol. 8, No. 1 (February 1943), 27, 30.

442 Ide Shuntarō, “Higashi Kachūki ni okeru Mōchi kanri yōkō no un’ei jōkyō” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 5, No. 2 (June 1943), 1–25; Ide Shuntarō, “Nishi Kazenki ni okeru Mōchi kanri jōkyō” in Mōko kenkyū, Vol. 5, No. 4 (December 1943), 34–67.

230 communal pastures of the banners in the early Qing had now become feudal estates, which the

Mongol aristocracy rented out to tenant farmers, sometimes as absentee landlords through multiple middlemen. As a result, technocrats targeted the nobility as the primary obstacle to capitalist development through the Mongol Land Offer. This 1938 law therefore aimed to reconstitute social relations in the Chinese counties that had once belonged in the Qing leagues of Jirem, Josotu, and Ju uda by dispossessing the hereditary elite of their land and reorganizing them into bureaucratic agents of the modern state. Once the Manchukuo government co-opted

Mongol princes and lords into the administration of Khinggan Province, it was able to funnel their incomes from rent collection into the national treasury and disburse these funds in the form of social welfare. Cutting off indigenous ties to property ownership permanently ended their rights to the counties beyond Khinggan Province, and determined the broad contours of the Inner

Mongolia Autonomous Region before the postwar.

In the aftermath of the Mongol Land Offer, “Reports on the Research of Actual

Conditions in Khinggan Province” sought to measure the intertwined trajectories of nomadism to sedentarism and of feudalism to capitalism within the banners. Though initially drawing upon methods from the Mantetsu village surveys, in the end, the borderlands represented an inherently destabilizing place of study when the basic parameters of analysis did not necessarily fit the nomadic case. With the collapse of the “the village” as a category of analysis, nomads emerged as the exception to the comprehensive survey programs on the continent. They complicated the capitalist teleology that these leftwing economists had carefully constructed before fieldwork.

After two years of gathering meticulous data, the Khinggan surveys concluded that the nomadic territories represented a decidedly “pre-capitalist entity.” In the words of Takemura, capturing this region at a critical moment before it entered capitalism represented the rare opportunity to

231 “redo the many gaps exposed by the land system in capitalist society.”443 By banning landlords and tenants and encouraging self-management of farms and herds, the resulting Mongol Land

Management Plan of 1942 represented the chance for reform at a stage seen as even earlier than they found along the agrarian pale.

By comparison, Mantetsu researchers largely failed to implement their agenda for land reform in the rest of Manchukuo. Kantō officers finalizing the Five Year Plan rejected these measures because they would have struck at the extensive holdings of Chinese collaborators integral to the survival of the client state, thus destabilizing the delicate balance of power between Japanese occupiers and local elites.444 What allowed land reform, then, to run such a

different and ultimately exacting course in the Mongolian territories? Japanese economists

viewed this “stagnated” region as lagging even further behind than the Manchurian countryside.

These seemingly feudal conditions first required eliminating the Mongol aristocracy and its

inhibitive system of tenant farmers and herders before advancing to the next stage of capitalist

development. In many areas along the pale, the Land Offer actually validated the decades-old

claims of Chinese collaborators who had rented large tracts from the banner nobility and leased

them out to an ever-cascading chain of migrant farmers in turn.445 The Land Offer likely

strengthened both the economic and political hand of Chinese intermediaries at the cost of

marginalizing Mongol nobility. Ultimately both the Land Offer and the Management Plan under

the Japanese occupation set in motion postwar land reform in Inner Mongolia.

443 Takemura Shigeaki, Mōchi no hanashi (Kōan kyoku, 1939), 26–27.

444 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 299.

445 Noticeably absent from the Research Reports, for example, were the records of Han collaborators who held high positions in the Manchukuo government and who also rented large tracts from the Mongol aristocracy in order to lease them out to tenants for huge profits. Through this documentary excision, the Research Reports therefore seem to have bolstered Han power bases that supported the Japanese regime at the expense of Mongolian entitlements to the territories. See Hirokawa Saho, Mōchi hōjō: “Manshūkoku” no tochi seisaku (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2005), 96.

232 CHAPTER FIVE: ADVANCING THE AERIAL

Fastened to broken branches, little notes of Cyrillic etched into birch bark stuck out of the

ground along the backcountry trails of the northern Khinggan Mountains. Since childhood, the

reindeer herder Sanka, as he went tracking, could have picked up any one of these notes left

behind by his fellow hunters and passed it onto the next Orochen he met. The letter would then

travel from person to person, from place to place, until reaching its intended hands. At any given

moment, as these missives crisscrossed the forest, Sanka and the rest of the Orochen community

around Mohe knew the whereabouts of each family as it moved campsites, gathering a kind of

knowledge through space. One travelogue described this manner of correspondence: “Even

scattered in a boundless sea of trees, they kept communicating with each other frequently ...

everyone knew very well who was where. They had even remembered the migration routes of

the families as if [the information] were knowledge at their fingertips.”446 In 1942, just as Sanka turned forty, this spatial representation of movement as he knew it would all change, from birch bark to aerial photograph, from the view on the ground to the eye in the sky.

That summer, Imanishi Kinji (1902–1992), an ecologist from Kyoto Imperial University, led an expedition of naturalists through Sanka’s forest. Instead of using old military maps or scientific sketches, his team relied on the most recent, and perhaps the earliest, aerial photographs of the region, taken at a scale of 10,000:1, from an altitude of two thousand meters by Manchukuo National Airways. So heavy were these images that during the trip, Imanishi had a packhorse for carrying just the rolled-up prints alone. His assistants derived cartographic data from these photographs to create a drainage map of the Albazikha river system and then

446 Imanishi Kinji, Dai Kōan rei tanken (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1952), 302; Ethel John Lindgren, “An Example of Culture Contact without Conflict: Reindeer Tungus and Cossacks of Northwestern Manchuria” in American Anthropologist, Vol. 40, No. 4, Part 1 (October/December 1938), 613–614.

233 interviewed Sanka, a household head of six with 22 reindeer, whom they encountered on the

road. On this map, they plotted his hunting trails and transient campsites from 1940 to 1942

against the larger cycle of the Mohe Orochen. The view from above made Sanka’s location

immediately apparent.447 In depicting his circuitous path, the migration map superimposed multiple points and arrows throughout the eighteen-month period to tell a story not only about space, but also about time. For Imanishi, the migration map visually confirmed his theories about a now stagnant nomadism: that Orochen and the taiga had become co-dependent in an ecological climax phase. This chapter shows how the two unlikely elements brought together in this migration map—aerial photography and evolutionary ecology—sought to clarify the origin and course of nomadism in China’s borderlands.

As seen in the migration map of the Mohe Orochen, the advent of the airplane transformed spatial perception in the borderlands. The view from above was no longer an imagined perspective but a documented experience, leading Japanese involved in this enterprise to believe that they had produced some of the most powerful social relations of sight and knowledge for the empire to date. Japanese developments in the aerial realm evinced how photographic technology became increasingly integrated with geographic understandings of the continent. This chapter situates Imanishi Kinji’s aerial perspective towards Inner Mongolia— what he called “a cartographic way of thinking”—within a larger context of expanding Japanese flight paths across North China. The territory these airplanes covered was vast, and so too must the chapter take a similarly sweeping approach towards this history. Equally problematic are the kinds of historical evidence left behind by this exclusive mode of vision: Chinese, Mongol, and

447 In giving a seemingly complete representation of territory, aerial photography encourages the navigatory practice of map-reading, rather than wayfaring, where “the journey [becomes] no more than an explication of the plot,” as Timothy Ingold writes. See his Lines: A Brief History (New York: Routledge, 2007), 15.

234 Figure 5.1 Imanishi Kinji’s Migration Map of the Mohe Orochen (1942)

235 Tungusic views about aeriality, for the most part, do not exist. The chapter looks at the

development of Manchukuo National Airlines and the concurrent transformation of the region

into ‘flyover country’ through various photographic and mapping projects. The land below

became a highly abstracted surface, which allowed for the delineation of space in new

calculative regimes. The MNA photography bureau, in particular, assumed responsibility for

turning out aerial assemblages and quantifying the terrain pictured in them. Recognized as instantaneous, revelatory, and precise, this new genre of photography promoted visibility as a form of legibility for the occupation. For Imanishi Kinji, who worked with the MNA photography bureau during his scientific expeditions to the frontier, these images helped inspire pioneering theories of cooperative evolution by blending speed into scale to show both the past and future of nomadic practice.

EMPIRE UP IN THE AIR

The seemingly open lay of the continent triggered a kind of anxiety for outsiders.

Imanishi once wrote of this difficulty to make sense of “that ridiculous vastness” for someone

“accustomed to depth perception” He first considered the use of aerial technology during his

fieldwork to Sili-yin Gool in 1939. “When thinking of Mongolia,” he confessed, “we

immediately imagine a limitless horizon spreading before us ... Because [we] cannot easily

measure it with the eye, we come to think that this [landscape] is something heretical, beyond

our possession.”448 The steppe appeared too boundless to take in physically with one look. The

view from above, then, offered a way out of this spatial unease. In visual terms, the aerial

perspective could eliminate that disorienting horizon, infinitely stretching into the unknown.

448 Imanishi Kinji, “Mōko no seibutsugakuteki chōsa” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993); originally published in Shokubutsu oyobi dōbutsu, Vol. 7, No. 9 (1939).

236 Instead it allowed for the land to fill up the entire field of vision with a fixed distance separating

the viewer from the earth.

These geographic anxieties lay at the heart of the Japanese drive to establish a network of

airports throughout the Mongolian territories. The airports would serve as the infrastructural

basis for the production of aerial images in order to capture a “fugitive landscape” which

continually slipped out of imperial control. The ‘eye in the sky’ first emerged as a technology of

rule after the Great War. As Priya Satia argues, Britain had designed a new system of policing,

known as “air control” and implemented it in Iraq. There, cultural ideas of restive nomads and

shifting sands served to justify bombing the region into submission.449 Like the Middle East, the

Inner Mongolia also became ‘flyover country,’ a term which at first might suggest the bypassing

of irrelevant people and places.450 It signifies here a region in which understandings of human

geography called for this new mode of vision from the cockpit of an airplane. ‘Flyover country,’

however, did not exist as a given; it unfolded as a contingent process of tenuous contracts

between overseas airlines and contested claims over domestic airspace which challenged notions

of territoriality in the borderlands.

By the mid-1930s, four major corporations staked out unofficial spheres of influence in

China: a Japanese carrier in the northeast, German in the north and northwest, American in the

central plain and southwest, and finally, a domestic one in the southeast.451 These spheres of

449 Priya Satia, “The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia” in The American Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 1 (February 2006), 16–51.

450 For the postwar era, scholars argue that air travel created a new kind of “imperial” difference by linked elite passengers together in a shared, but uneven, time and space through a system of lines and nodes. See Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, “Flying through Code/Space: The Real Virtuality of Air Travel” in Environment and Planning A, Vol. 36 (2004), 195–211; John Urry, “Aeromobilites and the Global” in Aeromobilities (New York: Routledge, 2009), 34.

451 For airline contracts between China, Germany, and the United States, and a history of airline industry in China proper see Narasaki Toshio, Tō-A kōtsūron (Tokyo: Chikura shobō, 1939), 269–326. Japan also ran a mail carrier

237 influence had come out of an interpretation of the Paris Convention in 1919, a landmark treaty

signed by all four parties, which guaranteed “every Power [having] complete and exclusive

sovereignty over the air space above its territory ... [but] each contracting State undertakes in

time of peace to accord freedom of innocent passage above its territory to the aircraft of the other

contracting States.”452 Foreign powers could circumvent many of the terms of the Paris

Convention by setting up joint ventures with the host country. The United States had partnered with China in 1930 to found the China National Aviation Corporation and Germany followed in

1931 with the formation of Air Eurasia. Germany’s plans seemed especially ambitious as

Lufthansa began testing a Berlin-Beijing route via Baghdad and Urumchi soon after signing its contracts. Regarding these rapid developments in the airline industry, one Japanese commentator praised the Nanjing government for “receiving the baptism of modern science over feudal militarism.”453 Indeed, aerial modernity had arrived in China.

From the Ussuri to Alashan, Manchukuo National Airways (J. Manshūkoku kōkū kabushiki kaisha) would become the predominant presence over Inner Asia during the wartime era. The MNA started operations in 1932 with 3.5 million Manchukuo yuan in capital, following a heated dispute between the Kantō Army and the Japan Air Transport Company over lending planes and personnel from the Dalian branch to aid in military operations.454 Unlike other

company, Huitong Airlines in China after studying the terms drawn up by the United States and Germany. This later would become a commercial airline in 1938.

452 Narasaki Toshio, Kūkō seisakuron (Tokyo: Chikura shobō, 1940), 197–212. This treaty came about after considerable debate over aerial sovereignty among jurists, divided into four main opinions: absolute freedom of air navigation; absolute state sovereignty over air navigation; vertical limits to state sovereignty, similar to maritime belts; and limitations on sovereignty by international law.

453 “Shina ni okeru kōkū jigyō no hatten to sono genkyō” in Mankō, No. 57 (October 1938), 31.

454 Mugita Hirao, “Manshū kōkū kabushiki kaisha zenshi” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan ininkai, 1972), 3–7. Original investments came from the Manchukuo Government (28%), Mantetsu (43%), and the Sumitomo conglomerate (29%).

238 commercial airlines, Japanese firms did not maintain a strict division of civil and military

functions. This ambiguous collaboration therefore gave the airline industry flexibility in the face

of the law, still in its incipient stages of formulation, where the cinematic technologies of

surveillance (guilty as they were) counted as “innocent passage above [foreign] territory.” The

expansion of commercial airlines in Manchukuo throughout the 1930s tended to have militarist

undertones, whether through the transfer of information, manpower, or equipment for the Kantō

Army. Thus the sky remained militarized well after Japan secured Manchukuo as a client state.

Borders in the sky did not so neatly conform to those on earth (if at all), and airplanes of

dubious origin moved with freedom throughout China. In 1935 MNA representative Nagabuchi

Saburō traveled to Bailingmiao to persuade Demchugdongrub (1902–1966) to let the company

increase operations over Inner Mongolia, not to mention, sell the leader of the autonomous

movement a plane or two. As recounted in the company magazine, Nagabuchi said to the prince:

“In the age when the Mongols conquered the entire world, those of the fastest speed were horses.

In Mongolia the horses were many. From now on, in this age of the airplane, the future lies in

transportation across the sky, so the country with the most airplanes will master the globe.” In

response, “Demchugdongrub who put on airs about being the next Chinggis Khan, was

exceptionally pleased.”455 Nagabuchi compared airplanes to nomads and the sky to the steppe not

only to appeal to the prince’s nationalist sensibilities, but also to justify Japanese violations

against both Mongolian and Chinese sovereignty. In the logic of open space, whether sky or

steppe, conventional boundaries of territoriality no longer held. Nagabuchi’s words twist the idea

of nomadology in an ironic subversion: whereas Deleuze and Guattari pit the sedentary, linear

455 Nagabuchi Saburō, “Toku-ō kaiken ki” in Mankō, No. 18 (July 1935), 5. Demchugdongrub later bought several airplanes from the MNA including two Fokker Super Universals for 200,000 yen in 1940. See Kuroda Shigenori, “Mōko seifu you hikōki chōben ni kansuru ken” (13 May 1941) in Riku Shi mitsu dainikki S16–45–68, 619–626, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

239 State Apparatus against the nomadic, unpredictable War Machine in the irreconcilable ways that

they occupy and move through space, the airplanes of the MNA in fact had appropriated the very

logic of nomadology, and aimed to dispossess the Mongols as they expanded over the

continent.456

Long-distance flight, however, meant that the Japanese had to build several airports

across the Gobi. Newly appointed in 1936 as the Chief of Staff of the Kantō Army, Itagaki

Seishirō (1885–1948), began planning for an airway linking Dehua, Bailingmiao, Baotou,

Shawangfu, Dingyuanying, and Ejen-e (Ch. Ejina), deep into Inner Mongolia. While Japan had

no authority in these towns besides a string of intelligence units, Itagaki proposed that the MNA

and secret service convince local princes to allow airports for reasons of reconnaissance. In

particular, the terminal point Ejen-e, in the northwest corner of the Gobi, would function as a

strategic entre into Qinghai, Tibet, and Xinjiang during a possible Japanese invasion in the

future.457 That spring, the MNA commenced constructing and supplying stations out west. To

set up a rudimentary airbase in Dingyuanying, for instance, the company dispatched Hiki Hisao

(1913–?) and three other employees with fake passports via caravan. The team saddled 150

camels, each with four eighteen-liter boxes of gasoline, and made the arduous forty-five day trip

across the Gobi so that this outpost in Alashan Banner would have enough fuel—9000 liters to

be exact—to supply airplanes along this route.458

Though primarily for the purposes of surveillance, the airports in Alashan and Ejen-e

Banners also would support a new transcontinental route from Tokyo to Berlin. By 1935, the

456 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 351–423.

457 Itagaki Seishirō, “Mōko kōkū keikaku ni kansuru ken” (23 July 1936) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S11–8–40, 768–771, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

458 Hiki Hisao, Ōzora no Shiruku Rōdo: Gobi sabaku ni kieta seishun (Tokyo: Fuyō shobō, 1971), 136–168.

240 reach of Lufthansa and its local carrier Air Eurasia had alarmed officers of the Kantō Army to

the point that they wanted to replace China with Manchukuo as Germany’s primary air partner

on the continent. Generals Doihara Kenji (1883–1948) and Itagaki Seishirō and met with

Nagabuchi Saburō in Harbin a few months after his trip to Bailingmiao and sent him to Germany

to discuss the possibility of an aerial alliance.459 Because Britain ran the routes through India and the Soviet Union controlled the way through Siberia, this left only the treacherous option, seven thousand meters over the Pamir Mountains from Xinjiang to Afghanistan.460

Nagabuchi’s meetings resulted in a contract between MNA and Lufthansa in December

1936. The agreement outlined an East–West route from Tokyo, Xinjing, Anxi, Kabul, Baghdad,

Rhodes, to Berlin. It further stipulated that MNA would check the air safety to the east and

Lufthansa to the west of the Turkestan–Xinjiang border. By the time of signing, Lufthansa already had sent pilots to investigate climate conditions in the Anjuman Pass in Afghanistan.461

With this contract in hand, MNA expanded rapidly from Manchuria into Inner Mongolia erecting at least 45 airports by 1937. Nowhere did these settlements mention any consent from the

Republican government over the use of airspace but MNA seemed aware that it was encroaching upon Chinese territory. In fact, Ejen-e later replaced Anxi on the transcontinental route because

459 Nagabuchi Saburō, “Sora no ‘Shiruku Rōdo”’ in Manshū kōkū shiwa (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan ininkai, 1972), 167–172.

460 Arita Shin and Hiki Hisao, “Gobi sabaku ni kieta hikōjyo” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan ininkai, 1972), 160.

461 “Ō-A renraku teiki kōkū kyōtei ni kansuru kyōtei” (18 December 1936) in Manshū kōkū shiwa (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan ininkai, 1972), 156. The Japanese consulate in Kabul already made initial inquiries in 1935 about the feasibility of flying through Soviet-held Turkestan via Tashkent. See Kitada Masamoto, “Nihon mata ha Manshūkoku yori Shinkyō keiyū, tōkoku ni itaru kōkūro sōsetsu ni kansuru tōkoku sōri daijin no danwa no ken” (3 July 1935) in Honpō, kaku kuni aida kōkū un’yu kankei zakken B–F–1–10–0–14, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives.

241 the airline believed that the banner lay even further beyond the direct control of Nanjing. Pilots

only managed to test the route twice in 1937 and 1940.462

Despite MNA’s seemingly secret overtures, the growing number of airports across Inner

Mongolia did not escape the notice of the Republican government. Fan Changjiang (1909–1970),

then a young journalist, chronicled the tense relations between Japan and China over aerial

territoriality. Fan had taken a long detour through Inner Mongolia in 1936 on his way to Xi’an

and Yan’an to cover the unfolding political crisis between the Nationalists and the Communists.

Passing through Ejen-e, Fan found that the “Mongols harbored no hostility towards the Japanese.

The people who fly in and out were worth as much a warm welcome as the people who came by

caravan.” As Fan observed:

Nanjing repeatedly sent a number of futile telegrams to investigators ordering Prince Tu [Tüvshinbayar] to kick out the Japanese and stop all airplane activity. The Mongols responded, “We do not have the means to expel them, so we would much prefer it if you could.” One time the agents ordered the banner office to examine the papers of the Japanese arriving by airplane, but the [staff] replied, “How can we inspect the passports of people descending from the heavens [Ch. tianshang lai de ren]?”463

Fan cast the coming of the Japanese as a sort of cosmic apotheosis to the simple-minded denizens of Ejen-e, like Cortés as Quetzalcoatl before the Aztecs, or so the apocryphal story goes.

Nonetheless he also suggests, perhaps inadvertently, how Mongols navigated the uncertain lines drawn over the skies to their advantage. The Republican passport system could not accommodate

462 First in 1937, Carl August von Gablenz (1893–1942), then vice present of Lufthansa, flew from Berlin towards Tokyo. He experienced engine trouble and had to make an emergency landing in Khotan, Xinjiang where he and his passengers ended up under house arrest for a month before repairing the motor and somehow flying back to Kabul. Three years later, following the Tripartite Pact of 1940, the Italian Air Force departed Rome, passed through Baotou, and touched down in Tokyo. See Carl August Gablenz, D-ANOY Bezwingt den Pamir: Ein Abenteuerlicher Deutscher Forschungsflug (Oldenburg: G. Stalling, 1937). Nagabuchi Saburō translated this travelogue into Japanese, see Carl August Gablenz, D-Anoy Pamīru o seifukusu: Doitsu no bōkentekina tansaku hikō (Tokyo, 1938).

463 Fan Changjiang, Sai shang xing (Shanghai: Dagong baoguan, 1937), 98. Fan later would become head of the Xinhua News Agency and then commit suicide during the Cultural Revolution.

242 new forms of travel or new conceptions of sovereignty as brought about by aerial modernity,

making it difficult assert boundaries against MNA and the Kantō Army. Though within the

boundaries of Ningxia Province, Ejen-e did not answer to the Nationalists who held nominal

control of the region two decades after the break up of the Qing imperium; the real power lay in

the hands of the Hui warlord in the area, Ma Hongkui (1892–1970). Thus the Mongols pretended

to defer to the Republican state knowing well that at the time it remained powerless to intervene

in the economic and military investments made by the Japanese.

With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, however, the future of these desert

airports became increasingly uncertain. In an attempt to gain ground against Ma Hongkui and his

Muslim army, the Nationalists set out to establish a military presence in Alashan and Ejen-e.464

That July, a hundred Hui soldiers under orders from Jiang Jieshi raided the special intelligence

unit in Ejen-e and arrested the ten Japanese stationed there, including two MNA employees,

hauled them to Lanzhou, and executed them.465 Meanwhile, a second caravan out of West Sönid

Banner carrying gasoline, ammunition, and supplies bound for Ejen-e inexplicably vanished into the Gobi, most likely captured by the Nationalists, with their three MNA handlers also sentenced to death in Lanzhou.466 To counteract the Republican advance in Ejen-e, Ma Hongkui then

464 Hsiao-ting Lin, Modern China’s Ethnic Frontiers: A Journey to the West (London: Routledge, 2011), 63–65. According to a series of diplomatic telegrams from Zhangjiakou, the Japanese presence already became a precarious situation in late 1936 before the formal declaration of war; see Ikeda Shokisei, “Zai Chōkakō Ikeda Shokisei Shinkyō shō jicchi chōsa kankei” (4 November 1936 to 29 January 1937) in Shinkyō seikyō narabi jijyō kankei zassan A–6–1–151, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives.

465 Ishimoto Torazō, “Gakuzainō tokumu kikan’in no jyōkyō ni kansuru ken tsūchō” (27 July 1938) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S13–12–72, 1314–1318, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives; Zang-deng-mi-de-ge and Gao Tong, “Riben tewu zai E-qi de jiandie huodong ji bei weibu jingguo” in Alashan meng wenshi, Vol. 4 (Hailar: Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi Alashan meng weiyuan hui, 1988), 86–90.

466 Arita Shin and Hiki Hisao, “Gobi sabaku ni kieta hikōjyo” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan ininkai, 1972), 165; Hiki Hisao, Ōzora no Shiruku Rōdo: Gobi sabaku ni kieta seishun (Tokyo: Fuyō shobō, 1971), 265–282; Ishimoto Torazō, “Gakuzainō tokumu kikan’in no jyōkyō ni kansuru ken tsūchō” (27 July 1938) in Riku Man mitsu dainikki S13–12–72, 1314–1318, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives. The spy Ōsako Takeo, who accompanied this second gasoline caravan, escaped his death sentence by convincing his captors that he was, in

243 attacked Alashan in 1938. Hiki Hisao and his colleagues evacuated to Manchukuo, while the local prince hired coolies to hide the hundreds of canisters of gasoline in a secret chamber of a lamasery.467 Airports abandoned, and the route across Inner Mongolia now closed, Japan proposed another course as late as March 1940 with Germany and the Soviet Union through

Siberia in preparation for a “postwar ... lifeline connecting the Orient.”468 The trajectory completely bypassed China, running from Tokyo to Xinjing, then Chita or Irkutsk, Moscow, and finally, Berlin.469 The plan was short-lived. Within a year, this commercial alliance collapsed when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

The airway across the continent never truly got off the ground, traversing only the imaginations of military planners and aviation experts. At first glance, the MNA alliance with

Lufthansa seems to have set up a geographic relationship of two metropoles on either end of the

Eurasian expanse; airplanes would have stopped along the way, but the primary purpose of this course would have connected two peripheral centers and in so doing, reified the emptiness in between and extended their domination over that space. The urgency for surveillance over the

Mongolian territories, not to mention the human and financial costs in setting up such a program, suggest otherwise. These unrealized schemes reveal that in the uneven and uncertain boundaries

fact, a Mongol by the name of Sanjachaab. He married a Mongol woman and reported back to his superiors that he had survived the ordeal, sending along two self-portraits bundled up in furs in Xining (now preserved as a weird artifact of the archives). Some time later, he accidentally blew his cover during a round of heavy drinking and promptly was executed.

467 Arita Shin and Hiki Hisao, “Gobi sabaku ni kieta hikōjyo” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan ininkai, 1972), 164.

468 Manshū kōkū kabushiki kaisha, “Tai Do-So kōkū renraku kōshō yōryō an” (6 July 1940) in Manshū kōkū keiei to gun to no kankei, Rikkū Manshū hōmen 128, 1670, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

469 Mutō Akira, “Ō-A kōkū renraku jitsugen no ken” (28 May 1940) in Manshū kōkū keiei to gun to no kankei, Rikkū Manshū hōmen 128, 1665–1667, Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.

244 of imperial Japan, these men saw airplanes as the new nomads in defying and redefining

territoriality in a region of strategic significance.

TECHNOLOGIES OF THE GAZE

If the view of the horizon from a train corresponds to the panorama, as Wolfgang

Schivelbusch writes, then the view from an airplane—in eliminating that horizon—might correspond to the map.470 When flying over the Mongolian territories, especially, pilots conflated

the aerial and cartographic perspective. As one wrote in 1937, “a line drawn on the map

represented the route, with some letters written to indicate [the presence] of villages.” Peering

out of the cockpit, though, he noted “a vast sea of millet grain [where] people never entered into

the field of vision. As one would expect, the Gobi Desert looked exactly like what I had learned

from a map.”471 To confuse these two perspectives, though, would prove costly, leading to

“outrageous [J. tondemonai] mistakes,” in the words of a technician at the MNA. Quite simply, the “mathematical properties” of projection between aerial photographs and maps differed, calling for a highly technical vigilance in transforming the former into the latter.472 Thus, the

aerial perspective made representations of the earth seem instantaneous and precise, but in fact it

470 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 61; A. J. Eardley, Aerial Photographs: Their Use and Interpretations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 1. For a history of aerial photography in the early twentieth century, see Peter Adey, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2010), 85-113; Denis Cosgrove and William Fox, Photography and Flight (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Geneaology of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 235-248; Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin, Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2013).

471 Kawaida Yoshimasa, “Kawaida nisshi shō” (26 June 1937) in Manshū kōkū shiwa (zokuhen) (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan iinkai, 1971), 240.

472 Kataoka Kenjirō, “Shashin sokuryō (otona no yomu kodomo no hon)” in Mankō, No. 121 (March 1944), 19.

245 belied a longer process of image-making, and for the borderlands, one that significantly involved

the photography bureau of Manchukuo National Airways.

The prevalence of aerial photography marked one phase within a longer history of

combat and cinema technologies becoming increasingly intertwined. In what Paul Virilio calls “a

logistics of military perception,” this mode of vision in the twentieth century led to “a

dematerialization of reality [in which] a supply of images would become equivalent of an

ammunitions supply.” Successive inventions from the watchtower, to the reconnaissance balloon,

the aerial camera, and most recently, satellites and drones, emphasized the representations of

events over the presentation of facts while eyes grew more mediated, and bodies more distanced

from the battlefield.473

Likewise for Japan, deriving cartographic information from aerial images first came

about on the continent through military interventions. In 1928, the imperial army briefly

occupied parts of Shandong and, under the command of Kimoto Ujifusa (1884–?), photographed

the Jiaoji Railway from the air. A year later, the air force documented timber resources along the

Yalu River, a practice then carried out on a more extensive level above the forests of southern

Sakhalin by the Shimoshizu Aviation School from 1930 onwards. These projects became the

foundation for the first manuals on aerial imaging in Japanese, most of them authored by Kimoto

who became director of the MNA photography bureau.474

473 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 1999), 1.

474 For examples, see Kimoto Ujifusa, Kūchū shashin sokuryō no yōryō to sono riyō ni tsuite (Tokyo: Suidō kenkyūkai, 1931); Kimoto Ujifusa, Aerial Photogrammetry in Japan and Manchukuo (Jena: Zeiss-aerotopograph, 1933); Kimoto Ujifusa, Kōkū shashin sokuryō (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū, 1941). Despite close connections to the military at its inception, the photography bureau would come to distance itself from the Kantō Army in the late 1930s. In one tense incident, the bureau had lent out film at one yen per page so that the intelligence unit could make military maps at 100,000:1. Top officers of Kantō Army then decided to classify and confiscate all of the film taken by the photography bureau as military property. Because the photography bureau had seen itself as separate from the Kantō Army and had intended to distribute images to governmental organs and civilian companies, it protested this new regulation, claiming that pilots and cameramen had risked their lives to obtain these shots. The bureau

246 When organized in 1933, the photography bureau numbered two dozen or so technicians,

two cameras, and two airplanes based in Fengtian. Kimoto himself visited the Zeiss factory in

Germany to purchase and transport the hefty and expensive stereoplanigraph needed to draw

topographic maps from stereoscopic aerial images.475 The photography bureau expanded rapidly.

Taking advantage of stable climate conditions in the region, the bureau photographed 38,000 square miles of forests, 8000 miles of railroads, 2500 square miles of salt fields, and 1300 square miles of urban areas in the next three years.476 In 1941, the military sent several members to

shoot strategic locations in French Indochina, Thailand, Singapore, and Sumatra, demonstrating

the roundabout circulation of technological ideas in the Japanese empire. At its height, the unit

maintained a fleet of ten planes and had a reputation of being one of the top producers of aerial

images in the world, after Germany and the United States.477 By the end of the war, the bureau had grown to two hundred workers, with branch offices in Beijing and Nanjing, captured 90% of

Manchukuo on film, and conducted aerial surveys from Korea to Mongolia.

Aerial photography enabled the Japanese imperial apparatus to become more efficient in staging environmental interventions on a mass scale: agricultural schemes, deforestation, railroad

threatened to cease lending the film entirely and the Kantō Army apparently conceded. See Shibata Hideo, “Omoide no Mankō shashin sho” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (zokuhen) (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan iinkai, 1971), 542.

475 To give a sense of the scarcity of this instrument, Zeiss manufactured only twenty C4 stereoplanigraphs, and the United States only had one. Besides this stereoplanigraph, the bureau started with a Fairchild automatic aerial camera, a Zeiss four lens automatic aerial camera (J. shikyōgyoku jidō kōkū shashinki), a rectifier (J. henhizumi shūseiki), and a stereotopograph (J. jittai kyokusen byōga ki). See Tsukamoto Michio, “Shashinsho sōgyōji no omoide” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan ininkai, 1972), 71.

476 In a calendar year, Manchuria had about seventy days for optimal conditions to conduct photographic surveys, whereas Japan and Taiwan had about forty days. See Kimoto Ujifusa, Kōkū shashin sokuryō (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū, 1941), 52, 125.

477 Kobayashi Shigeru, Gaihōzu: Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2011), 201–222; Sokuryō chizu hyakunenshi henshū iinkai, Sokuryō chizu hyakunenshi (Tokyo: Nihon sokuryō kyōkai, 1970), 206.

247 building, dam construction, flood control.478 The photography bureau distributed its images and

maps to a variety of organizations, not only to the military, but also, as time went on, to Mantetsu,

the Forestry and Industry Ministries, the Survey Corps, the Manchuria Colonization Company,

the Manchuria Coal Mining Corporation, and more. While most of these assignments engaged

the photography bureau on a short-term basis, the reorganization of land registers in Manchukuo

occupied the photography bureau for over a decade. Calling previous attempts “unscientific,

uneconomical, and arbitrarily implemented” the bureau took on “the chaos [J. ranmyaku] of the

land registers,” a result of “inadequate edicts, local customs, and administrative misgovernment.”

Advocates of the aerial view saw the technology as a way to render the land both “unified and

uniform.” Cast as a radical break from the past in terms of both surveying methods and state

consolidation, the reform allowed for government “departments to pause and give careful

thought to the future.” In simplifying and standardizing some nearly 200,000 square miles of

property to maximize farm produce and state taxes, the bureau emphasized the crucial role of

aerial photographs as the “basis of research on Manchukuo’s resources ... and development.” The

former Mongol Lands confiscated by the Manchukuo government in Jinzhou and Rehe

especially, as discussed in Chapter Four, most likely came under the purview of this particular

program. To reorganize the registers, rather than consult the personal records and local archives

for property deeds, the photography bureau captured the land on 30 by 30 cm film, producing

prints up to 90 by 180 cm, roughly the size of a tatami. Technicians then transferred the 15,000:1

photographs to blueprints at a scale of 100,000:1, noting both natural and manmade features. In

478 In 1939, for example, the photography bureau drafted maps to help determine some of the largest hydroelectric projects in Manchukuo, the Su’pung and Fengman Dams. For further practical applications of aerial photography, see Horie Kenji, Gaikan sekai kōkū chirigaku (Tokyo: Yūbun shoin, 1933), 85–105. Air travel even helped Tokyo University architecture professors envision the central Manchurian plain as a “blank slate” to project a honeycomb network of utopian villages to house hundreds of Japanese migrants. See David Tucker, “City Planning without Cities: Order and Chaos in Utopian Manchukuo” in Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 53–81.

248 short, aerial photography supposedly made the “condition and quality of the land instantaneously

obvious” to the state, by clarifying contested borders in spatial terms that sheaves of property

deeds accumulated over the decades could not.479

The photographic bureau’s techniques revolutionized cartographic methods of

triangulation already in use in Manchuria. The Japanese imperial land survey department already

began mapping out the region from the early 1900s, but inaugurated the official triangulation

survey of Manchukuo in 1933.480 The department later handed over the project responsibilities to

the Kantō Army’s survey corps. Broadly speaking, triangulation works off of basic principles of

trigonometry, where the observer determines the location of a point by measuring angles to it

from two known points, one at each end of a fixed based line. Trigonometry offered a much

easier solution than trying to measure the distances to the point directly. Surveyors in

Manchukuo first established three fundamental points from which they eventually based all other

measurements of distance and elevations: the origin point, located in Huanxiling, outside of the

capital; the leveling origin point, located in the main traffic circle in Xinjing; and finally, the

tidal observation point, located in Huludao port on the Bohai Sea. Unfortunately, during winters

the metal marker imbedded in the port would bob up and down depending on the waters freezing

or melting, causing a cascade of inaccuracies in measurement.481 From these three points,

surveyors then built calculation chains out of multiple, smaller triangles, where they calculated

479 Kimoto Ujifusa, Kōkū shashin sokuryō (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū, 1941), 312; Manshū kōkū, Kōkū shashin wo riyō suru chiseki sōkuryō ni tsuite (Manshū kōkū kabushiki kaisha, 1936), 1, 9; Nakayama Hiroichi, Kōkū shashin ni yoru shinrin chōsa (Tokyo: Kōrinkai, 1937), 5.

480 John Karl Treiber, Mapping Manchuria: The Japanese Production of Knowledge in Manchuria-Manchukuo to 1945 (PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i, 2004), 105–126.

481 Kobayashi Shigeru, Gaihōzu: Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2011), 226.

249 distances between each point in the triangle from measuring the angle from a previous triangle in

the chain.482

Triangulation from the ground posed several problems, despite its pretenses of

approaching “the cartographic ideal.” Since the eighteenth century, trigonometric rhetoric not

only had given colonizers a sense of mastery over distant places, but also expressed the paragon

of imperial rule in ordering the land in rational, standardized terms.483 By the advent of the

airplane, this rhetoric could no longer ignore the shortcomings of trigonometric practice: the

inefficiency, the inaccuracy, the violence. Teams of eight, ten, sometimes more, would spend

several days in the countryside determining points, angles, distances, and elevations where they

often encountered bandits who occasionally robbed, even killed, workers.484 These calculation

chains overlapped entirely with Manchukuo’s railroad network, not only for security reasons but

also for the simple fact that the rail passed through most of the country’s denser communities.

This meant, however, that teams often did not venture farther into the hinterland. The margin of

error in distances increased as surveyors moved farther away from the three foundational

points.485 MNA pilots complained that maps of the borderlands were particularly misleading.486

They discovered that towns inland had the wrong coordinates or did not even exist at all on

482 Sokuryō chizu hyakunenshi henshū iinkai, Sokuryō chizu hyakunenshi (Tokyo: Nihon sokuryō kyōkai, 1970), 469.

483 Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

484 Manshū kōkū, Kōkū shashin wo riyō suru chiseki sōkuryō ni tsuite (Manshū kōkū kabushiki kaisha, 1936), 2.

485 Nakayama Hiroichi, Kōkū shashin ni yoru shinrin chōsa (Tokyo: Kōrinkai, 1937), 5. If close to the three foundational points, however, aerial photographs could have a margin of error of less than three-tenths of one percent, when compared to triangulation surveys. See T. P. Ahrens, The Utilization of Aerial Photographs in Mapping and Studying Land Features (Washington, D.C.: Resettlement Administration, Land Utilization Division, Land-Use Planning Section, 1936), 2.

486 Mamiya Yoshitarō, “Manshū no kōkū ni tsuite” in Manshū kōkū kabushiki kaisha, Sora no taikenki (Mimeograph, 1939), National Diet Library, 86.

250 triangulated maps. In effect, the triangulation system could cause a potential chain reaction of

error upon error, but with the pretense of precision.

The transition from ground triangulation to aerial surveys was one from imagining the

bird’s eye view to experiencing it. In experiencing, rather than imagining such a perspective, the

observer could comprehend the land in immediate terms; triangulation by foot on the other hand

took months before a surveyor could draw up the terrain on paper. A 1934 estimate from

Belgium suggested that aerial surveys cut costs by 40% and the time by 75%. MNA claimed that

in the “wilderness [J. mikai]” of Manchukuo at least, both of these figures rose to 90%.487

Because the northern Khinggan Mountains lacked any record of terrestrial triangulation, this

region represented the ultimate opportunity for the MNA to show the critical advantages of

efficiency and precision afforded by aerial photography in charting the land.488 In 1940, the photography bureau began a methodical survey of Sanka’s forest, the first of its kind for this region as part of the Five Year Plan to assess the timber resources of the borderlands from the air.

The subsequent images would serve as the blueprint to Imanishi’s theories on nomadic evolution.

Given the freedom of movement in an aircraft, the MNA team flew the plane in a straight line, winding back and forth, north to south, passing ground stations along the way. While the pilot steered, the technician took photographs with a camera mounted downwards at

487 Another statistic boasted that an aerial survey to make a map at a scale of 5000:1 would cost a third of a ground survey. Shashin sho, “Kōkū shashin sōkuryō” in Mankō, No. 66 (July 1939), 2–3.

488 The other known MNA aerial survey of an area without a previously triangulated base map in the northeast took place in Khulan sirγ-a daγ-a (Ch. Hun-shan-da-ke) drylands in Sili-yin Gool. The Kantō Army commissioned pilot Miyazaki Shigeo (d. 1945) and photographer Inoue Yukio (d. 1954) to fly over southern Inner Mongolia in 1937. The MNA established ground stations in advance and determined their geographic coordinates independent from the triangulation network in Manchukuo. Khulan sirγ-a daγ-a held a disorienting sameness from the sky; Miyazaki and Inoue reported that frequently they could not figure out where they had left off the day before in the aerial survey because the dunes had shifted overnight, rendering the landscape unrecognizable. One memoir notes that the team covered 400,000 km2 in six months, but this seems like an overestimation, since it would have tripled their efficiency, compared to a normal surveying trip in Manchukuo. See Kojima Muneharu, Kōkū sokuryō shiwa: Sora to shashin to tatakai to (Osaka: Kabushiki kaisha Osaka purinto, 1991), 66.

251 meticulously timed intervals, perhaps every twenty seconds.489 He recorded the speed, altitude, and bearing of the plane at the click of the shutter. For a different sort of aerial survey, such as documenting a railway, water route, or mineral seam, the pair would have flown in a straight line along the assigned feature, but mapmaking required a calculated zigzag over a large area, usually about 700 km2 per day.490 The pilot might have struggled to keep the aircraft on a stable course, or misread data on faulty altimeters, though experts could later enlarge or reduce the resulting photographs to a common scale. Once the two had completed this phase, they might have crosschecked their photographs by traversing the area again, this time from east to west. From an altitude of two or three thousand meters, they could have made out the individual tents, flocks of sheep, and herds of reindeer. Lamaseries and settlements would have stood out in their rigid geometry, but by and large the landscape consisted of trees.

Although aerial photographs flawlessly capture objects directly under the focal point of the camera, they grow increasingly oblique toward their peripheries: raised elements bend outward from the center, whereas sunken features warp inward. To keep this radial distortion in check, the photography bureau arranged images in an overlapping pattern known as a mosaic.491

These unwieldy assemblages consisted of many individual stills, each rectified and harmonized with its neighbors. Mosaics were not so much taken as produced by technicians who edited images for tilt, blur, vibration, and scale. To note this process does not mean to dismiss the accuracy of the photographs entirely; rather, these imbrications suggest a contingent, almost deceptive kind of accuracy that led viewers to believe they saw an integrated, synchronic reality

489 Howard Oakley Sharp, Aerial Photogrammetry (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1943), 35.

490 Kimoto Ujifusa, Kōkū shashin sokuryō (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū, 1941), 284–286.

491 Typically, photographs overlapped about 60% along the long axis of the flight lines, and 30% along the sides. See T. P. Ahrens, The Utilization of Aerial Photographs in Mapping and Studying Land Features (Washington, D.C.: Resettlement Administration, Land Utilization Division, Land-Use Planning Section, 1936), 17.

252 rather than a diachronic series of pictures stitched together. The mosaic of the Khinggan

Mountains comprised of a collage of moments cobbled from a period of two years from 1940 to

1942. No number of fixes to compensate the imperfections of flight could conceal the turning

seasons in the Khinggan Mountains: snow falling and melting, leaves budding and withering,

rivers surging and retreating all betrayed the impermanence of the aerial photograph. As literary

scholar Paul Saint-Amour writes, the photomosaic “was anything but free from human error. It

was, rather, a delicate pas de deux of error and counter-error.”492

Mapping and measuring the terrain, plotting points to coordinates on a putatively universal grid, these pursuits meant another level of scientific entrenchment where the land could not escape the purview of geodetic calculation. Mosaics required new skills in “reading” photographs for this kind of information.493 Because these images flattened peaks and valleys,

technicians had to interpret their shadows on film or a stereoscopic camera had to recreate their

height or depth in “a hallucinogenic exaggeration.” According to Saint-Amour, the aerial mode

of vision “produced observers who were confronted constantly with the spatial and temporal

contingency of human vision who were therefore more willing to extend it by subjecting their

bodies ... to a massive optical prosthesis,” the stereoplanigraph. Through these “surrogate eyes of

a virtual colossus,” workers transferred significant geographic markers from mosaics onto

maps.494 The staff relied on three-dimensional trigonometry to determine the exact amount of displacement from radial distortion. The airplane became one of the three foundational points, but unlike the fixity of landmarks in triangulation surveys, it was in constant motion.

492 Paul Saint-Amour, “Applied Modernism: Military and Civilian Uses of the Aerial Photomosaic” in Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, No. 7 and 8 (2001), 245.

493 T. P. Ahrens, The Utilization of Aerial Photographs in Mapping and Studying Land Features (Washington, D.C.: Resettlement Administration, Land Utilization Division, Land-Use Planning Section, 1936), 5.

494 Paul Saint-Amour, “Modernist Reconnaissance” in Modernism/modernity, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 2003), 356–357.

253 Triangulation had covered the earth’s surface in a network of measured points, to which the

aerial method added another dimension, so that even the space between was not free from

quantification. Piecing mosaics, rectifying images, calculating distortion, tracing outlines: all of

these efforts resulted in an idealized outline that expunged any sense of instantaneity—the

wayward flocks or migrating campsites of the Mohe Orochen. Perhaps more so than in sedentary

areas where more permanent settlements stood, mapping created a timeless representation of the

borderlands emptied of life forms.

A CARTOGRAPHIC WAY OF THINKING

As a new form of spatial representation, aerial photography in turn gave fresh perspective to the ecologies of settlement across Inner Asia. Imanishi Kinji, in particular, recognized the potential of these images in tracing the movement of people, plants, and animals in time and space. An avid mountaineer, Imanishi had graduated in 1928 from the College of Agriculture in

Kyoto Imperial University and continued on in the zoological department for a doctorate in etymology. He insisted on the immense importance of fieldwork from an early stage in his career, and these convictions took him exploring all over the Japanese empire from the southern mountains of Sakhalin to Pohnpei Island in Micronesia. Imanishi led four scientific expeditions to the Mongolian territories in 1938, 1939, 1942, and 1944, the first three as zoology professor of

Kyoto Imperial University, and the last as head of the Northwest Research Institute. His extensive fieldwork on the Chakhar and Sili-yin Gool steppe and in the Khinggan Mountains served as the basis for his theories on evolutionary biology, which launched his postwar career as a renowned ecologist.495 Members of his expeditions—colleagues and students of Imanishi who

495 Several scholars have discussed Imanishi’s contributions within the field of primatology or evolutionary theory more generally; this postwar perspective has led theorists like Donna Haraway to conclude that Imanishi’s

254 comprised the ‘other’ Kyoto School—went on to become eminent scholars in their own right,

Kawakita Jirō (1920–2009), Kira Tatsuo (1919–2011), Morishita Masaaki (1913–1997), and

Umesao Tadao (1920–2010) among them.

Imanishi committed several months to fieldwork in Inner Mongolia as Japan’s war with

China escalated. Beginning in the summer of 1938, he embarked on a 5000-kilometer trek out of

Zhangjiakou with three other colleagues from Kyoto Imperial University. The next year,

Imanishi and fellow ecologist Morishita Masaaki headed for Chakhar and Sili-yin Gool, with these experiences summarized in the account Steppe Travels. After a brief stint in the South

Pacific, Imanishi returned to northeastern China in 1942, this time with twenty professors, students, soldiers and technicians. They spent three months charting out the topography of the

Khinggan Mountains—much of it previously unmeasured—for the Japanese military while observing native flora and fauna along the way. Between these trips, Imanishi and other scientists circulated their findings through lectures at the Kyoto Expeditionary Geography

Society as well as the Kyoto Academic Alpine Club; they also published journal articles and popular travelogues, though many of these works did not become available until after the war.496

“framework for watching monkeys and apes did not depend on the structure of colonial discourse—that complex search for the primitive, authentic, and lost self.” This chapter, however, shows an undeniable strand of continuity between Imanishi’s expeditions to Inner Mongolia and his observations later in Japan. See Pamela Asquith, “Some Aspects of Anthropomorphism in the Terminology and Philosophy underlying western and Japanese Studies of Social Behaviour of Non-Human Primates” (PhD dissertation, Oxford University, 1981); Clinton Godart, “Darwin in Japan: Evolutionary Theory and Japan’s Modernity, 1820–1970” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2009), 391–409; Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 244–252; Takasaki Hiroyuki, “Traditions of the Kyoto School of Field Primatology in Japan” in Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 151– 164.

496 Nakao Katsumi attributes the time lapse between Imanishi’s expeditions and his publications not to financial constraints in the postwar, but to tensions rising between the ecologist and GHQ. The United States Military requested Imanishi’s research on the Great Khinggan Mountains through GHQ channels for intelligence purposes on Inner Asia. Imanishi later wrote in his memoirs that “the survey was intended as a scholarly enterprise, so I wanted to make the results public. When it became classified military intelligence, all of that hard labor went to naught.” He published his first article on the Great Khinggan Mountains in English with the American Geographical Review with the help of an American in 1950, perhaps to avoid his research becoming classified. See Nakao Katsumi, “Shared

255 In 1944 Imanishi’s career took an unexpected turn. That year, the Good Neighbor

Association (J. Zenrin kyōkai), the dominant “humanitarian” organization in the region, set up

the Northwest Research Institute in Zhangjiakou and offered Imanishi its directorship. Even in

the last years of the war, the Japanese administration in Mengjiang continued to devise defensive

strategies against the Soviet Union in areas under its informal rule, including the establishment

of this ten-person center. Given military designs further west in Gansu and Xinjiang, the

Northwest Research Institute focused on Mongolian and Islamic studies, yet demonstrated a

seemingly contradictory partnership between left-wing intellectuals and army officers; the deputy director, for example, was Ishida Eiichirō (1903–1968), an ethnologist who had been jailed after the March 15th Incident for his communist beliefs. Imanishi saw himself differently from the other researchers on the continent, criticizing archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and linguists for their “conscious and unconscious workings of curiosity that go too far, [they] treat Mongols as antiques and view Mongolia as a museum, as if ... science, development, and construction are unnecessary.”497 At the same time, however, he warned against policymakers enforcing a teleological progress on the Mongolian economy modeled after Japan who expected that this formula would produce a similar, modernized society. These so-called experts, Imanishi believed, “just looked through the threshold onto the Mongol lands and pretended to understand the Mongols.”498 Thus this new position in Zhangjiakou gave Imanishi the opportunity to observe and explore Inner Mongolia from his own backyard. Watching animal herds throughout

Abodes, Disparate Visions: Japanese Anthropology during the Allied Occupation” in Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2 (October 2007), 175–196.

497 Imanishi Kinji, “Sōgen kō” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 110; originally written in 1941 and published in 1947.

498 Imanishi Kinji, “Sōgen kō” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 136.

256 the winter of 1944 yielded unprecedented data for Imanishi, as compiled in his essay On

Nomadism.499

Despite several months in the field, Imanishi balanced out his intimate observations with

the distance of aerial photography. Imanishi and his team could not afford to travel overland by

airplane owing to the exigencies of war, but they did work closely with Manchukuo National

Airways on his research. During the 1942 expedition to the Khinggan Mountains, the airline

photographic bureau sent one of its technicians, Yamamoto Yukio, to accompany the naturalists

from Kyoto. Yamamoto himself had only recently joined the MNA, at the encouragement of his

professor Odauchi Michitoshi (1875–1954), one of the earliest experts on human geography in

Japan and contributor to Manchukuo’s “National Land Planning” initiative. The young

technician had hoped to use aerial technology to uncover ancient ruins of the Goguryeo, Balhae,

or Jurchen but instead found himself traipsing through the woods with Imanishi and his men as

they set about documenting the nature around them.500 The expedition relied on the most recent aerial photographs at a scale of 10,000:1, only produced by the bureau that previous winter. As

499 On the activities of the Northwest Research Institute, see Nakao Katsumi, “Nairiku Ajia kenkyū to Kyōto gakuha: Seihoku kenkyūjyo no soshiki to katsudō” in Shokuminchi jinruigaku no tenbō (Tokyo: Fūkyōsha, 2000), 211–258; regarding Imanishi’s prewar fieldwork in the colonies, see Saitō Kiyoaki, “Imanishi Kinji to fīrudo kagaku” in ‘Teikoku’ Nihon no gakuchi: Jitsugaku toshite no kagaku gijyutsu, Vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2006), 303– 343; with respect to Imanishi’s domestic research, see Brett Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 198–205.

500 Kobayashi Shigeru first notes this connection between Imanishi Kinji and the photographic bureau but does not pursue its implications further. Kobayashi Shigeru, Gaihōzu: Teikoku Nihon no Ajia chizu (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2011), 215; Yamamoto Yukio, “Dai Kōan rei tanken sanka hōkoku” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (zokuhen) (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan iinkai, 1971), 554. National land planning (J. kokudo keikaku), as part of Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s New Order movement, aimed to incorporate the spatial dimension in restructuring Japan’s economy. Going beyond short-term five-year plans, the 1940 program endeavored to check the urban population, shift industrial zones, and protect rural areas. See Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 191–196; Aaron Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 135–149; Yang Daqing, “Japanese Colonial Infrastructure in Northeast Asia: Realities, Fantasies, Legacies” in Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 90–107.

257 part of the joint venture, the group helped Yamamoto draft maps from the photographs by

confirming via triangulation on foot the landmarks seen in the images.501

Imanishi had favored flying over the Mongolian territories to derive patterns of the land rather than conducting a lengthy triangulation survey of the first, then second, and finally third order. Nevertheless he lacked the experience of flight at this time. Still, even before using the

MNA images, Imanishi argued for a “cartographic way of thinking” (J. chizutekina kangaekata) in order to comprehend the vastness of the continental landscape.502 To Imanishi, aerial

photography laid bare the natural and unnatural boundaries between biomes, across which

humans gradually migrated in evolutionary time. The images likewise confirmed his more

holistic understanding of an ecological world that reintegrated humans with their environments

— a vision inspired by the interconnected universe of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and the Kyoto

School. In his 1941 opus, The World of Living Things, Imanishi interpreted Nishida through what

he called a “species society,” contending that organismic communities transcend their aggregate

numbers to come together in a “shared life.” This seminal text pressed for a cooperative world of

change over a competitive model of evolution.503

Imanishi’s “cartographic way of thinking” unfolded alongside other social scientific

theories on aerial photography. As the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) points

out, the view from above lies on a visual continuum, one that greatly expanded with the advent

of modern technology, from the laboratory microscope of the biologist to the stereographic

501 Imanishi Kinji, Dai kōan rei tanken (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1952), 41. The aerial photographs revealed the “completely bogus [J. detarame]” placement of geographic features on previous maps, scaled at 500,000:1, made by German and Russian geographers.

502 Imanishi Kinji, “Sōgen kō” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 102.

503 For more on the influence of the Kyoto School of philosophy in his work, see Pamela Asquith’s introduction to Imanishi Kinji, A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things (London: Routledge, 2002), xxxiv; Noe Keiichi, “Shutai to kankyō no seimeiron: Nishida Kitarō to Imanishi Kinji” in Nihon no tetsugaku, Vol. 3 (December 2002), 29–51.

258 camera of the aviator.504 Increasingly abstracting life at either extreme—be it at the micro or macro level—this relative sense of scale became of historiographical import to intellectuals like

Marc Bloch, a founding figure of the Annales school, who had discovered the longue durée from the vantage point of a plane during World War I. For Bloch, one could not simply disengage the view from above and the view from below; the maze of trenches across the earth’s surface—cut like fault lines into the land—also stressed the consequence of deep, geological time in the longue durée.505 Bloch’s contemporaries further applied these new methods of seeing to the colonies in order to reveal linkages between spatial form and social life. Marcel Griaule conducted aerial surveys of West African communities that were inaccessible by foot to study the checkerboard iconography of the Dogon—a pattern he saw replicated from their fields onto their pottery and textiles. Meanwhile Pierre Gourou mapped out the distribution of polders of

Indochinese peasants to explain the supposed harmony between nature and culture in the Tonkin delta. To Griaule and Gourou, aerial photography lent a mechanical objectivity to the discipline of human geography, where technology helped legitimize notions of colonial difference through the science of space.506 The wide scope of surveillance power, in short, allowed for theorists to

make sweeping conjectures about alien landscapes previously uncaptured by the naked eye.

Like Griaule and Gourou, Imanishi looked beyond the metropole for evidence of nature

and culture in symbiotic form, and yet, like Bloch, he saw the promise of aerial photography in

504 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Design, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1938), 38.

505 Paula Amad, “From God's-eye to Camera-eye: Aerial Photography's Post-humanist and Neohumanist Visions of the World” in History of Photography, Vol. 36, No. 1 (February 2012), 85.

506 Jeanne Haffner, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 19–54; David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 105–110; David Biggs, “Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945” in Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 109–132.

259 tracing deep historical time. Imanishi used his “cartographic way of thinking” to mark out the

longue durée of ecological change in order to stage a new kind of history for nomads, one that

began from the ground up. He started with plants. In Steppe Travels, Imanishi described how to

create a distribution map of different types of pasture on the Mongolian grassland from the aerial

perspective. He argued that by driving or flying over the land at great speed over long distances,

“the smaller differences between various pastures would disappear in a blur, but their

overarching similarities would leave a lasting impression” on the observer. Traveling across the

steppe at high velocity, Imanishi realized the “overwhelming surface area of naked oats [in the]

Han zone of settlement.” While Imanishi himself still conducted—and emphasized—small-scale

fieldwork in the Mongolian territories, he also pointed out that most botanists would focus on

individual plants in too narrow of an area to make more general conclusions.507

Here, Imanishi seems to have resisted the tenacious trend towards small-scale fieldwork in Japan. This tension between broad surveys and detailed studies in the social sciences, for instance, surfaced in the failure to introduce aerial methods to the Japanese archaeological discipline during the prewar period. With the rise of right-wing political culture in Japan from the 1930s, the archaeologists became more concerned with the finer points of typology and chronology at the risk of disassociating artifacts from their historical context and frames of reference. In so doing, researchers could avoid such sensitive topics as questioning the origin myth of the imperial line. Small-scale fieldwork likewise affirmed an artifact fetish for those

507 Imanishi Kinji, “Sōgen kō” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 100–101.

260 who focused on the object’s line, color, and form in defining the aesthetics of ‘Oriental art’ and,

ultimately, fashioning a Japanese imperial identity.508

In 1931, however, Morimoto Rokuji (1903–1936)—a student of Torii Ryūzō—tried to introduce the use of aerial photography by translating British archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford’s articles. Crawford had served as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, where he pioneered the use of aerial photography in locating traces of prehistoric ruins, later uncovering Woodhenge in 1925. Morimoto suggested that his colleagues also embrace this technology to identify kofun, or megalithic tombs, in Japan and Korea.509 The backlash against

Morimoto was considerable. Critics feared that in the age of mechanical reproduction, aerial photography would render their kind of expertise obsolete, not to mention replace painstaking work with more imprecise conclusions. Two years later, Morimoto published a retraction of sorts, citing the problems with aerial archaeology: for one, apparently Japan did not have any underground cities for excavation. Morimoto mused, “perhaps it is better to attain lightning-fast efficiency by flying on the silver wings of the imperial air force over archaeological fields in

Rehe.”510 Although Japanese archaeologists excavating abroad never fully realized Morimoto’s

aerial ambitions, the continent did represent a chance for scientists to test out new techniques of

seeing in other ways without facing obstacles from the academic establishment in Japan.511

508 See, for instance, Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 27–31; Fumiko Ikawa-Smith, “Co-Traditions in Japanese Archaeology” in World Archaeology Vol. 13, No. 3 (February 1982), 304.

509 Morimoto Rokuji, “Hikōki to Nihon kōkogaku” in Kōkogaku, Vol. 2, No. 2 (April 1931), 15–34.

510 Morimoto Rokuji, “Nihon kōkogaku ni okeru kōkūki riyō no mondai (jihyō ni kaete)” in Kōkogaku, Vol. 4, No. 4 (April 1933), 106; Morimoto tragically died of tuberculosis before archaeologists could use aerial surveys to uncover kofun and other burial structures in Japan during the postwar period.

511 Only one Japanese expedition seems to have taken Morimoto’s suggestion and used aerial technology for archaeological research—the First Scientific Expedition to Manchukuo, led by Waseda University professor Tokunaga Shigeyasu. The Asahi newspaper, one of the many sponsors of the expedition, lent its airplane for two flights in Rehe in 1933, but the scientists made no substantive discoveries besides a general survey of the terrain

261 As noted in the Morimoto controversy in the archaeology community, micro and

macroscopic sight—and the nature of research that resulted from each—seemed irreconcilable.

At the edge of empire, though, Imanishi found convergence between these bifurcated ways of

seeing by linking scale to speed. “Call it the principle of speed-scale [J. supīdo teishaku no

hōsoku],” he wrote. “If we increase the speed of travel, we do not have to realign [our sight] to

continue to perceive on a small scale [J. shō teishaku].” Essentially, Imanishi had described the

everyday manifestations of scale relativity, a visual paradox where objects viewed in a

magnifying glass appear to move quickly despite their slightest movement, but objects viewed

from an airplane window appear to slow to a standstill. Since this problem of perception,

according to Imanishi, lay in the physical limitations of the human eye, the mechanization of

sight through speed enabled the observer to perceive the land at a small scale without

diminishing its detail. Imanishi explained:

In order to apply the cartographic perspective, we must defer with the map’s scale, and therefore adjust our eyes, but the human eye cannot be used that skillfully, so we must resort to speed ... at which point, we could say that the eye no longer defers to the map’s scale, but rather, the map’s scale defers to the eye.512

To make a distribution map of Inner Mongolia’s pastures at a scale of 2,000,000:1, as

Imanishi had wanted, the observer’s eye would have to view the land at a corresponding speed of

2,000,000:1. “At the very least,” he calculated, “we must fly an airplane at a speed of two or

before excavating. The Asahi reporter assigned to the expedition, Fujiki Kuzō, however did note the extent of environmental destruction in the forests around Chengde from the sky. Imanishi met with Tokunaga and his team before his first trip to Inner Mongolia in 1938. See Tokunaga Shigeyasu, Daiichiji Man-Mō gakujutsu chōsa kenkyūdan hōkoku, Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Daiichiji Man-Mō gakujutsu chōsa kenkyūdan, 1933); Fujiki Kuzō, Nekka tankenki (Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha, 1934), 65–75; for more on the expedition itself, see Morris Low, Japan on Display: Photography and the Emperor (London: Routledge, 2006), 64–74. Egami Namio and Yokoo Yasuo did consult with Manchukuo National Airways for their research, though as to what information they exchanged remains unclear. They likewise planned to take a flight from Baotou to Ningxia, but had to cancel due to sudden flooding in the area. See Tō-A kōko gakkai Mōko chōsa han, Mōko kōgen ōdanki (Tokyo: Tokyo Asahi shinbunsha, 1937), iv, 78–84.

512 Imanishi Kinji, “Sōgen kō” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 105.

262 three hundred kilometers and look down at the Mongolian steppe from the sky. Only then could

we probably grasp the general idea of this ... distribution map with our sense of perception.”513

Aerial technology compensated for the biological shortcomings of the human eye through its

speed, and by picturing Inner Asia from the sky, Imanishi began to develop a comprehensive

theory to explain nomadic evolution.

Imanishi categorized the Mongolian territories into three ecological zones, overlapping to

some extent, but each with its own set of flora and fauna: hunter-gatherers in the Khinggan

Mountains to the northeast, nomadic pastoralists on the central steppe, and farmer-settlers along

the southern edge. Imagining Inner Mongolia at a scale of 2,000,000:1, Imanishi then divided the

pasture itself into three groups. First, the fringes of the steppe, he identified as receiving plenty

of rainfall, which nurtured the dense growth of lyme grass up to half a meter in height. Moving

deeper into the steppe, Imanishi found mixed herbage of lyme and feather grass, though

sagebrush dominated this second type of terrain. Finally, in the very center of the region, he

noted an arid realm of sparse, feather grass where he could see the bare earth between the low-

lying shrubs. According to Imanishi’s estimates, the density of the vegetation ranged from about

500 to 1500 kilograms of plant matter per hectare between these three types of grassland.514

It seemed to Imanishi that the better quality the pasture, the less often Mongols relocated their gers. In the first steppe zone of lyme grass, the herders moved twice per year for the summer and winter. Near the desert, where the feather grass grew scarce, people would rotate through seven sites in one year. Imanishi heard that in the northern parts of Ujumuchin banner, herders even cycled through a hundred spots. The Mongols whom he interviewed said that the

513 Imanishi Kinji, “Sōgen kō” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 105. In fact, viewing the earth at a scale of 2,000,000:1 was technologically impossible at this time.

514 Imanishi Kinji, “Yūbokuron sonohoka” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 233; originally written in 1945, published in 1948.

263 reason for moving lay in the poor condition of the grass, so they sought more fodder elsewhere.

Imanishi however remained unsatisfied with this answer; this phenomenon, he wrote, called for a

“factual investigation” (J. jittai chōsa). He observed in Chakhar that the animals grazed in a wide

area, about twelve kilometers across, but the distances between seasonal camps stayed small,

anywhere from thirty to a hundred meters. As such, Imanishi concluded that these Mongols were

moving their homes needlessly; that is, they were looking for better pasture when the livestock

actually was eating in overlapping areas year round.515 The animals, and consequently their

minders, were now “moving for the sake of moving ... in a kind of over-adaptation.”516

Evolutionarily speaking, then, the ecology of the steppe worked too well, to the point of undermining the prosperity of the Mongols who would waste time moving when they could have spent their efforts to other activities. The absence of free labor and the resulting inability to diversify or specialize roles beyond herding seemed to perpetuate this “fixed and stagnant feudal society” for Mongols.517

The itinerancy of the Mongols in Chakhar, Imanishi reasoned, did not emerge from the

poor quality of the grass there. In fact, at one point in the distant—and certainly idealized—past,

he thought that the steppe must have been quite fertile. Imanishi therefore concluded that

nomadism did not evolve on the steppe as a response to scarce resources nor did it ensue from a

social breakdown along the agricultural pale. Rather, nomadism in Inner Mongolia had carried

over from a forest lifestyle in prehistoric times. To Imanishi, both hunting and herding were two

types of nomadic life. The leap in evolution that came about only on the steppe, though, was the

515 Imanishi Kinji, “Yūbokuron sonohoka” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 235.

516 Imanishi Kinji, “Yūbokuron sonohoka” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 242.

517 Imanishi Kinji, “Sōgen kō” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 136; Imanishi Kinji, “Sakyū wo koe” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 301; originally written in 1944.

264 formation of the herd. Observing gazelles in Chakhar, Imanishi saw that herds—and the stability

they brought—served as a form of evolutionary protection against predators in open space;

simply put, there was strength in numbers. Humans, he argued, moved from a hunter-gatherer

existence in the forest to nomadic pastoralism on the steppe by following the animals—a

somewhat different sequence from the historical materialist approach. Imanishi pointed to a

particular technological moment in which hunting transitioned to herding: when nomads adopted

the practices of milking and castrating herd animals. As he proposed, “when hunters entered the steppe zone and laid their hands on hoofed animals, rather than stalking individual prey, they lost sight of the hunting lifestyle of the forest, [having] long harbored the chance to develop from hunting to herding.”518

Even so, Imanishi had to account for the hunters still living in the forests in the present

day—Sanka and other Orochen whom the 1942 expedition encountered in the Khinggan

Mountains while checking aerial photographs against the land. He later attributed their failure to

domesticate wild game not to “the native’s inability or inferiority,” but to the “shy and solitary”

nature of forest megafauna: the elk, the moose, the roe deer. Imanishi compared the ecology of

the Khinggan Mountains to the situation on Chakhar steppe:

Where the animals are gregarious, such as the wild sheep and wild horses of the steppe ... a hunter can follow the nomadic life of the herd. If a symbiotic relationship between humans and animals were established through some opportunity or crisis, domestication would begin.519

Given this supposed lack of opportunity or crisis in the deep past, the Orochen did not pursue a path towards domestication, leaving Imanishi to infer that “the concept of a universal

518 Imanishi Kinji, “Yūbokuron sonohoka” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 228–229.

519 Imanishi Kinji, “Ecological Observations on the Great Khingan Expedition” in Geographical Review, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 1950), 249.

265 succession from the hunting stage through the pastoral stage to the agricultural stage is

untenable.” As such he defended the Orochen hunters as not any less “inferior” than the Han

farmers. The Orochen, on the contrary, had co-evolved with their harsh environment, and for that

reason, had reached the extent of their developmental trajectory within that milieu. “The hunting

life of the Orochens,” argued Imanishi, “is ecologically a climax phase, adapted to the habitat, as

the taiga is considered a climax phase of vegetation ... Forest between steppe and tundra is forever the land of hunters.”520 Imanishi drew upon Frederic Clements’ organicist theory of plant succession to suggest that the Orochen, like the birch and larch trees around them, also belonged to the forest ecology.521 Because Imanishi believed that the Orochen had hit their evolutionary end, he underscored that the Japanese military draft placed an additional burden, which hindered their very means of survival. By exchanging a meager salary for relentless drills and covert assignments into the Khinggan Mountains, conscription “guaranteed a marginal lifestyle” since it meant less manpower devoted to the hunt. The expedition stumbled upon scenes of dire poverty among the Orochen living along the Gan River: members witnessed children afflicted with trachoma, blindly fumbling for their colored glasses, and interviewed families who were living off of millet owing to the dwindling intake of game animals.522

As seen in previous chapters, Japanese researchers and officials had used Social

Darwinist rhetoric to condemn hunters and herders as “a dying race.” Imanishi’s world, however,

was not a fatal competition to duke out the hierarchy of race; the losers did not represent a sort of

520 Imanishi Kinji, “Ecological Observations on the Great Khingan Expedition” in Geographical Review, Vol. 40, No. 2 (April 1950), 249.

521 See Frederic Clements, Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916); Ronald Tobey, Saving the Prairie: The Life Cycle of the Founding School of American Plant Ecology, 1895–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

522 Imanishi Kinji, Dai kōan rei tanken (Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha, 1952), 126–127.

266 vestigial oddity left over from the past. Still, rather than advocating that the Orochen should continue hunting as these Japanese policymakers had urged earlier, Imanishi imposed on the

Orochen an environmental determinism from which they could not escape. He argued that they could do little else but hunt in order to survive in this milieu. Imanishi saw the source of nomadic obsolescence lying in the all-too-perfect workings of a matured ecosystem. That environmental determinism becomes apparent in the migration map, which expedition members drew of the

Mohe Orochen. Here, nomads and the natural world were mutually constitutive parts of a whole;

Imanishi could not see how hunters would independently break out of their ecological system as it had evolved into “the climax phase.” Now in this final state, there would be small, everyday calibrations between the forest and hunters, but this was change without evolution.

At first glance, Imanishi’s “cartographic way of thinking” seemed to render the land into landscape and space into surface, where ecological boundaries and civilizational edges became obvious in the view from above. Aerial photographs, though, not only represented a slice of space, but also a slice of time; that is, they captured the instantaneity of the environment—what the lay of the land look like at that moment, nature’s dynamic state both because of, and independent from, human interaction. This understanding of land, as mutable and as agentic as the people that lived off it, contrasted starkly to the trajectory laid out by Marxian researchers.

As discussed in Chapter Three, hunters, herders, and farmers with directed guidance from

Japanese advisors could progress through set stages of history into modernity precisely because they could transform their relationship with the land, and even liberate themselves from it.

Primitive, feudal, or capitalist phase, no matter; land was a passive, static entity. By linking speed and scale, time and space, Imanishi staged nomadic history in a grand ecological design,

267 each organism an inextricable part of the “species society” in which the environment was as

integral to the human past as it would be to its future.

Aerial technology proved instrumental to Imanishi’s “cartographic way of thinking.” This perspective allowed for a critical distance through speed and scale to reveal ecological evolution, namely the gradual migration of life across the forest and steppe. By doing so, Imanishi aimed to de-center the human in nomadic practice: “what we call nomadism, however ancient its origins, is a pattern of living that has few human characteristics,” he wrote, referring to the roaming animals. Unlike the Orochen in the Khinggan Mountains, however, Imanishi saw hope for herders to break out of their “over-adaptation”—the now meaningless rotations between overgrazed pastures—and he wondered “what kind of new form should evolve if Mongolian stock-farming grows out of its current nomadic state.”523 As he wrote these words in early 1945,

Imanishi did not know that he would not witness that next evolutionary leap in Inner Asia. Later that year, some nine thousand meters over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the view from above offered one perspective on a new epoch in human history, but of a different, far more destructive kind.

Imanishi would not return to the Mongolian territories again.

* * *

By war’s end, aerial transport and photographic technology had combined to produce compelling spatial and temporal representations of the borderlands. For Imanishi Kinji, in particular, such representations consigned nomads to an evolutionary stasis. The thousands of aerial photographs produced by Manchukuo National Airways in the 1930s and 40s might initially point to a panoptic fixation of the Japanese empire, in the strict sense of the term. The halting advance of the MNA certainly demonstrated the possible extent of reconnaissance over

523 Imanishi Kinji, “Yūbokuron sonohoka” in Imanishi Kinji zenshū, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1993), 243.

268 the steppe. Nevertheless, surveillance from the sky, though wide-ranging, remained momentary

and inconsistent in the Mongolian territories. No evidence suggests a constant presence of planes

that conditioned people there to certain behaviours beyond surprise or curiosity, unlike the way

air raids might have trained city dwellers to follow emergency routines in Tokyo.524

Just as surveillance itself was fleeting, so too were the prints that followed. The MNA

photographers saw that their film captured the land at a specific instant, with ground conditions

subject to change by natural forces or human intent.525 Once technicians had extracted

geographic information from these images, they quickly put these cumbersome photographs

aside, working instead with a shrunken, patched-together copy, cleared of any imperfections. As

a result, these images became an intermediate step to the more idealized map or project blueprint.

While these photographs may represent a “voracious desire” by the imperial archive to collect

and categorize information of all kinds at all times, they also point to its “drive to save as little

information as possible” as one step in a longer planning process.526

Problems with scant data came out only after the collapse of that imperial archive. Those photographs not burned in the Soviet invasion of 1945 made their way to three known repositories: the Library of Congress, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Inner

Mongolia Regional Archives in Hohhot. Intended as intermediate steps, most of the prints stored in the United States, at least, do not include geographic coordinates, leaving it impossible to

524 Cary Karacas, “Protecting the City’s Sky: Civilians and Air Defense in Urban Japan during the Asia-Pacific War” (unpublished paper, March 2014).

525 Yamamoto Yukio, “Dai Kōan rei tanken sanka hōkoku” in Manshū kōkū shiwa (zokuhen) (Tokyo: Manshū kōkū shiwa hensan iinkai, 1971), 554.

526 Geoffrey Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 38.

269 identify their exact location.527 Without these coordinates, they could depict any number of places since the photographs themselves appear so abstracted. In spite of their verisimilitude of the earth’s surface, and perhaps because of it, to call the aerial perspective a panoptic control of the borderlands therefore ceases to make sense.

Still, the transience of these photographs does not diminish their significance. Even after these photographs themselves sit in archives as forgotten ‘moments’ and collect dust, their tangible legacies remain. In bringing the land increasingly under a kind of ocular occupation, the aerial perspective emphasized a precise, revelatory, and immediate kind of knowledge.

Monuments to colonial development built upon felled forests and barren earth stand as an enduring, though ambivalent testament to the technological imaginary, the realm of possibility for empire opened up by the view from above.

527 Nagasawa Ryōta, Imazato Satoshi, Watanabe Rie, and Okamoto Yukiko, “Kyū Nihon gun satsuei no Chūgoku ni okeru kūchū shashin no tokuchō to riyō kanōsei” in Kindai Nihon no chizu sakusei to Ajia Taiheiyō chiiki: “gaihōzu” he no apurōchi, ed. Kobayashi Shigeru (Osaka: Osaka daigaku shuppan kai, 2009), 75; Wang Longsheng, Zhang Huimei, Wu-ning-ba-tu, Nei Menggu zizhiqu lishi dang’an quanzong gailan (Huhehaote: Yuanfang chubanshe, 1999), 243. Fond 465, “Wei Man linyeju dang’an huiji,” contains aerial images of forests in the Khinggan Mountains but the archives have blocked access to this particular collection as with others from the Manchukuo period.

270 CONCLUSION: IMPERIALISM, COMMUNISM, AND THE TRANSWAR

When considering a history of the imperial borderlands, previous research often

overlooks the fact that regardless of whether or not Japanese saw their domain as a blank map

upon which to chart a colonial utopia, they still had to reckon with the hauntings of frontiers past.

The legacies of both the Qing and Republic lingered on in this space of overlapping indigenous

and settler communities, and Japanese administrators negotiated older meanings of imperialism

and nationhood within a new order of the occupation. As this dissertation has argued, Japanese

administrators at first saw the borderlands as an unfamiliar (but ultimately knowable) terrain to

survey and inscribe onto paper and, conversely, a space onto which they projected their own

cartographic and political designs. The demarcation of Khinggan Province unfolded through

these mutually constitutive, simultaneous processes, where Japanese, Chinese, Mongol, and

other ethnic minorities contested visions of modernity at the edges of the empire.

The preceding chapters have traced the imperial attempt to arrive at a cartographic convergence between ambitious expectations on paper and material realities on the ground.

Khinggan Province set more than just a political precedent of autonomous regions under communist rule, as others have argued. It also carried out an accelerated experiment in ethnic cleansing and environmental engineering because Japanese technocrats saw their subjects in entangled ethnic and environmental terms: environmental relations partly defined ethnic categories just as ethnic categories also helped condition the environment.528 Mongols and other minorities became conflated with nomadic herders and hunters; Han became conflated with sedentary farmers and traders. Japanese occupiers sought to align and realign ethnic and

528 For the expanded use of the term “ethnic cleansing,” see Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing” in Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 1998), 813–861.

271 environmental divides based on proposals and diagrams often in tension with actual demographic

profiles and the environmental capacities of the land.

The final delineation of the border represented a compromise among Japanese, Chinese, and Mongols, between making the map match the land through redistricting measures and making the land match the map through population transfers. The client state then fostered separate ecologies along this new ethnic perimeter. Inside Khinggan Province, Mongol herders cultivated an artificial grazing district using alfalfa seeds and hybrid sheep delivered by Japanese

agronomists, which would force supposedly primitive nomads to settle down as rationalized

ranchers. These imperialists thought that doing so would revitalize indigenous decline. Outside

Khinggan Province, the global market in soybeans, among other crops, pushed Han farmers to

clear the former Mongolian territories vigorously. A catastrophic spate of selenium deficiency

disorders erupted in this area as a result. The role of sheep, soybeans, and selenium evinces the

power of nonhuman agents in transforming the borderlands and colonized bodies in the imperial

project. In 1938, Japanese administrators struck at the last vestiges of Mongol rule in the

borderlands. Driven by Marxian analysis, Mantetsu researchers reframed nomadic pastoralism

within feudalism, which justified the state dispossessing the aristocracy of their extensive

holdings beyond the province and redistributing them to tenants. The data from Japanese surveys,

generated in collaboration with indigenous partners, motivated land reform in the territories.

Superseding this fieldwork by foot was the innovation of aerial photography for drafting maps.

This new technology captured the borderlands in a seemingly totalizing gaze, which inspired

theories about nomadism in a global discourse on evolutionary ecology.

To recapitulate the narrative thus far, Japanese occupiers viewed the Mongolian

territories as an exception to the rest of the client state in the early years after the invasion of

272 Manchuria. Following the Lingsheng Incident in 1936, they moved towards integrating the

region under a centralizing, national framework through the Five Year Plan and the Mongol

Land Offer. The imperial understanding and portrayal of the borderlands shifted from a primeval

landscape needing protection to a natural resource demanding exploitation under the autarkic

aims of the Japanese empire. Through it all, as this study has contended, maps and mapping

acted as the primary idioms through which technocrats sought to visualize the borderlands.

The shift in attention away from the core to the unexamined periphery reveals uneasy ties

between Japanese imperialism and Chinese communism across the transwar. Regarding the

dissolution of the Japanese empire, scholars have recently returned to the transwar question,

challenging the total rupture between “war” and “postwar.” Tessa Morris-Suzuki, for example,

has urged the field to begin pulling at the “mass of threads linking Japan’s imperial expansion in

Asia to the Korean War.”529 The rest of this conclusion explores some of the unexpected continuities in the two decades from the 1930s to the 1950s, beyond a narrative dominated by

Japanese actors and institutions as historians John Dower, Sheldon Garon. Andrew Gordon,

Laura Hein, Chalmers Johnson, Aaron Mootr, and Janis Mimura have defined them in the past.530 Rather, in considering this transwar period as a transnational phenomenon, what other disquieting narratives emerge from the imperial debris?

529 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Prisoner 600,001: Rethinking Japan, China, and the Korean War, 1950–1953” in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 74, No. 2 (May 2015), 411–432.

530 John Dower, “The Useful War” in Daedalus, Vol. 119, No. 3 (Summer 1990), 49–70; Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University, 1997); Andrew Gordon, “Consumption, Leisure, and the Middle Class in Transwar Japan” in Social Science Japan Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (May 2007), 1–21; Laura Hein, Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Aaron Moore, Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931 – 1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 195–200. A new generation of scholarship that has pushed the territorial bounds of the transwar beyond the archipelago has begun with Jessamyn Abel, The International Minimum: Japan’s Global Engagement in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015).

273 Many of the features that characterized Inner Mongolia under Mao as identified by

anthropologist David Sneath—ethnic autonomy, regional demarcation, land reform, and

rationalized herding—actually predated the Communist Revolution.531 Both imperialist and

indigenous blueprints to establish a zone of ethnic autonomy culminated with the creation of

Khinggan Province. Two opposing interpretations exist on the Japanese occupation as a turning

point in ethnic relations, one that would outlast the empire by decades. Contemporary observers

Robert Miller and Antoine Mostaert, evaluating for Human Relations Area Files in 1956,

characterized Mongols and Han as “two groups always function[ing] under two virtually

independent authorities with opposing aims.” The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, however,

incorporated both Mongols and Han into the governmental structure of the entire area as a

“logical continuation of the Japanese Mongol policy.”532 More recently, though, Christopher

Atwood has critiqued the Japanese occupation for “revers[ing] the symbiosis between Mongols and Chinese” in the early twentieth century. Khinggan Province “disrupted” that symbiosis, where “the overlapping jurisdictions of Mongolian banners and Chinese counties were replaced by a boundary that said, ‘here is Mongolian land, there is Chinese.’”533 This dissertation has

shown that the Japanese occupation certainly partitioned the Mongolian territories into separate

banners and counties, but over the 1930s, it continued to build these constituents into a coherent

whole, a trajectory that the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region perpetuated in the early years of

the postwar.

531 David Sneath, Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

532 Robert Miller and Antoine Mostaert, “Structure of Government” in A Regional Handbook on the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, ed. Helmut Wilhelm (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1956), 388.

533 Christopher Atwood, “The East Mongolian Revolution and Chinese Communism” in Mongolian Studies, Vol. 15 (1992), 15.

274 After the rapid decolonization of the continent, the former component parts of Khinggan

Province helped consolidate the core of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the first of

such areas in the People’s Republic of China. As Miller evaluated the situation: “when the

Japanese were finally driven from the area, some of the mechanism and some of the

psychological preparation for further extension of the concept of a unified Inner Mongolia

remained.”534 To condense the very fraught and complicated years of the Chinese Civil War,

three vortices of power emerged following Japan’s defeat and withdrawal: first, the Inner

Mongolia Autonomous Association in Zhangjiakou run by Ulanhu (1906–1988), the Communist

commander who had battled against Japanese forces; second, the Hulunbuir Interim Mongolian

Government in Hailar, set up by Erkhimbatu, the ex-head of North Khinggan; and third, the

Eastern Mongolian Autonomous Government in Wangyemiao, founded by Buyanmandukhu

(1894–1980), the former governor of Khinggan Province. In 1946, after much debate, both

Erkhimbatu and Buyanmandukhu allowed Ulanhu’s organization to subsume their governments.

Ulanhu became the head of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Government in 1947, with

Khafungga as his deputy chief. Under Ulanhu, a transwar generation of men, many of whom had

received higher education in the Soviet Union, Mongolia, or Japan, and then collaborated with

the Manchukuo state, survived the upheaval to staff the upper echelons of the new

administration.535

The internal border of Khinggan Province would also come to mark the eastern boundary of the new autonomous region. Mongolian and Tungusic peoples would never again be able to

534 Robert Miller, “General Character of the Society” in A Regional Handbook on the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, ed. Helmut Wilhelm (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1956), 24.

535 Christopher Atwood, “The East Mongolian Revolution and Chinese Communism” in Mongolian Studies, Vol. 15 (1992), 7–83; Futaki Hiroshi, “Buyanmandafu to Uchi Mongoru jichi undō” in Tōkyō gaikokugo daigaku ronshū, No. 64 (2002), 67–88; Liu Xiaoyuan, Reins of Liberation: An Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 115–280.

275 recover the hereditary territories that they had lost in the Demarcation of 1932. At its founding in

1947, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region consisted of Khinggan Province, as well as

Chakhar and Sili-yin Gool Leagues in Mengjiang. Smaller minorities, such as the Daɣur, Evenk

(the erstwhile Solon), and Orochen gained autonomous banners within the region, whereas others

did not, partly due to categorization efforts by Japanese ethnographers. An atlas published by the

Communists in 1951 replicates nearly the same eastern boundary in place since 1944 under the

client state: the line began up north with the Naun River, then heeded the Chaγan kerem wall, before snaking through the Khorchin banners. The only major differences lay in the absorption of Tongliao as an ethnic enclave, severance of the four satellite banners (Dorbet, Gorlos Front and Rear, and Yekhe Mingγan), and a return to the Sir-a Mören River as the southern perimeter.536 In 1955, when the Communists disbanded the Republican provinces of Rehe and

Jinzhou, they expanded the border past the Sir-a Mören River to bring Aukhan, Kharachin Front

and Middle, and Ongniγud banners into the fold. Regardless, by the mid-1950s, Chinese cadres

began to believe that they had given their Mongol counterparts too much influence and resorted

to territorial expansion to curb minority power. By incorporating Suiyuan Province and its large

population of Han residents into the autonomous region in 1954, the Communists reoriented

Inner Mongolia away from western Manchuria towards North China.537 During the Cultural

Revolution, the Chinese backlash against ethnic autonomy truncated the autonomous region, with Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning annexing the area from former

536 Guanghua yu dixue she, Zhonghua renmin gongheguo xinditu (Shanghai: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1951), 30–31.

537 Robert Miller and Antoine Mostaert, “Structure of Government,” 385, and Lo Jungpang, “Political Dynamics,” 410, in A Regional Handbook on the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, ed. Helmut Wilhelm (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1956).

276 Figure 6.1 Map of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (1951)

277 Khinggan Province for a decade.538 Until 1969, then, the eastern limits of Inner Mongolia

maintained a remarkable territorial continuity, where the Communists disavowed the Japanese

regime to demonstrate its own authority, but in fact adopted many of its geographical schemes.

Moving from redistricting to redistributing the Mongolian territories, early land reform

under the Communists realized what the Japanese occupation had set out to achieve under some

of its more radical members. In 1947, Mao Zedong announced the Basic Agrarian Law in which

“feudal and semi-feudal exploitation is abolished. The agrarian system of ‘land to the tillers’ is to

be realized ... Land ownership rights of all landlords are abolished.”539 Many of the Mongol

cadres, perhaps because of the Japanese occupation, believed that the region did not need further

reform and opposed this program from the very start. Ulanhu, however, understood this law as a

way to “abolish feudal rights and privileges” in areas of cultivation via confiscating the property

of landlords and ending the entitlements of princes and lamas. The resulting Inner Mongolia

Land Reform Law of 1948 declared that the entire region belonged under the “public ownership

of Mongols” which justified breaking up “feudal” estates and banning rent collection.540 In that

sense, it expanded the terms of the Mongol Land Offer from 1938 to encompass the entire region,

but for the first time, terminated taxes completely. Yet, like the Mongol Land Offer, the Land

Reform Law a decade later also grappled with explaining rights of sovereignty and communal

538 Uradyn Bulag, Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 125–131, 225–229; Ditu chubanshe, ed., Zhonghua renmin gongheguo fensheng dituji (Beijing: Ditu chubanshe, 1974), 5–6; Paul Hyer and William Heaton, “The Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia” in China Quarterly, No. 36 (December, 1968), 114–128; David Sneath, Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 102–125; W. Woody, The Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia: Extracts for an Unpublished History, trans. Michael Schoenhals (Stockholm: Stockholm University Center for Pacific Asia Studies, 1993).

539 “The Basic Agrarian Law” in The People’s Republic of China: A Documentary History of Revolutionary Change, ed. Mark Seldon and Patti Eggleston (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 215.

540 “Nei Menggu tudi zhidu gaige fa (1948)” in Zhonggong Xing’an mengwei dangshi bangongshi, ed. Xing’an dangshi wenji, Vol. 2 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu zizhiqu xinwen chubanju, 1993), 21–27.

278 use in the banners within a Marxian framework: Ulanhu at first insisted on charging Han

residents rent because reallocating the land to all proletariats regardless of ethnicity conflicted

with his notion of the Mongols’ “right of sovereignty” in the autonomous region. Under slogans

such as “Livestock to the Herders” and “Exterminate Feudalism” that recall the underlying

conviction by Japanese progressives, party members redistributed animals in pasture zones and

reallocated tracts in farming villages. The ensuing violence killed over two thousand people in

the area previously under the Japanese control. Bulag argues that land reform actually held a

“decolonizing connotation” hence its brutality; while it leveled property holdings, it more

importantly reordered configurations of class and ethnicity that the Land Offer was not able to

achieve under the Manchukuo occupation. The communist leadership used land reform as a

means to eliminate the social base of Japanese collaborators and Guomindang allies by dividing

up their property among those that had been disadvantaged under imperial rule and the

subsequent civil war. Land reform consolidated the revolutionary regime amid challenges to its

fledgling legitimacy.541 Disassembling feudal power under imperial command, then, set up paradoxical but intermediary conditions to communist revolution in the borderlands.

Unlike farmers who experienced the brunt of land reform, herders faced fewer revolutionary repercussions. As in the Mongol Land Management Plan of 1942, Communist cadres treated livestock rather than the earth as the primary form of property for nomads, and thus ordered the redistribution of their animals. Nevertheless this mandate did not go smoothly—

541 Uradyn Bulag, Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 115–118; Lo Jungpang, “Political Dynamics” in A Regional Handbook on the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, ed. Helmut Wilhelm (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1956), 400, 406; David Sneath, Changing Inner Mongolia: Pastoral Mongolian Society and the Chinese State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 62–101. For an in-depth study of land reform in Khinggan League, see Chao-ge-man-dou-la [Chogmandola], “Jindai Xing’an meng diqu tudi wenti yanjiu” (PhD dissertation, Inner Mongolia University, 2012), 162–207. For a collection of oral histories on land reform in this area, see Zhonggong Xing’an mengwei dangshi bangongshi, ed. Xing’an dangshi wenji, Vol. 2 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu zizhiqu xinwen chubanju, 1993).

279 Mongols slaughtered their herds before giving them up. In February 1948, when communist

soldiers arrived on the Ulaɣanmodun grasslands in Khorchin Right Flank Front Banner, for

example, two hundred inhabitants openly rebelled and fled to the Mongolia People’s Republic.542

The resistance on the steppe led to the “Three Nos and Two Benefits” campaign (Ch. Sanbu liangli); no property distribution, no class labeling, and no class struggle meant that regional authorities shielded herd-lords from the consequences of the Communist agenda. Ulanhu and other elite cadres, as a result, left the social structure in the nomadic areas largely intact since the

Japanese occupation, for the revolutionary programs of agrarian China, they alleged, could not translate to pastoral Mongolia without settling nomads first.543

In the interim, Communists hoped to convert nomads into ranchers and farmers through

agricultural technology. Their political philosophy viewed pastoral livelihoods as an

evolutionary end that obstructed national progress, scientific rationalism, and economic

development.544 Reminiscent of the Japanese Five Year Plan, the Renmin zhibao newspaper

urged in November 1955: “we must ... systematically and gradually assist and guide herders to

grow fodder crops and ... to settle down and build permanent homes. Later ... pastoral

development will gradually combine itself with agriculture.”545 Surveyors once again arrived in

the banners to locate and quantify grazing districts, the types of grass that grew there and the

number of animals they could support. State farms and state ranches resumed the work of

542 Sun Jiazhen, “Wu-lan-mao-du muqu minzhu gaige qingkuang” in Zhonggong Xing’an mengwei dangshi bangongshi, ed. Xing’an dangshi wenji, Vol. 2 (Hohhot: Nei Menggu zizhiqu xinwen chubanju, 1993), 154–157.

543 Uradyn Bulag, Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 120.

544 Dee Mack Williams, Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands in Inner Mongolia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 10.

545 Lo Jungpang, “Political Dynamics” in A Regional Handbook on the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, ed. Helmut Wilhelm (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1956), 425.

280 Manchukuo’s experimental stations to multiply and “improve” the herds.546 For instance, technicians imported Tsigaiskaya sheep from the Soviet Union to produce twenty thousand crossbreeds via artificial insemination in 1955. Their efforts resulted in double the amount in fine wool as the local variety, which likely undermined nomadic livelihoods.547 Indeed the genetic inheritance of imperialism exists to this day: at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was breeding ten million hybrid sheep every year.548

Ironically, it was largely the pressures of privatization under de-collectivization in the 1990s that finally affixed many of the last nomadic communities to the land.

The arc of a transwar narrative suggests that the two seemingly opposing ideologies of imperialism and communism found much common ground in the borderlands. That is not to portray the Mongolian territories as a persistently elusive and illegible space for both regimes.

Rather, these ideologies of the twentieth century shared an ultimately misguided desire and grand vision to transform the world anew. The techniques of sorting, surveying, and planning under

Japanese imperialism, which the Communist state similarly adopted, rendered a territory as undeveloped and its subjects as unenlightened. In these acts of ascription, modernity had cast the borderlands and its people as backward because it created the very ethnic and environmental categories of backwardness that its champions had set out to look for in the first place.

Modernity’s utmost confidence in technology to revolutionize the steppe resulted in programs so

546 Ramon Myers, “Agricultural Policy and Animal Husbandry” in A Regional Handbook on the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, ed. Helmut Wilhelm (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1956), 512–513.

547 “Reports from China” in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 19, No. 21 (24 November 1955), 661. For more on the intertwined genetics of sheep across northern China, see Jacob A. Hoefer and Patricia Jones Tsuchitani, eds. Animal Agriculture in China: A Report of the Visit of the CSCPRC Animal Sciences Delegation (Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, 1980), 130–135.

548 Ministry of Agriculture of the People’s Republic of China, “Report on Domestic Animal Genetic Resources in China: Country Report for the Preparation of the First Report on the State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources” (Beijing, 2003), 116.

281 disastrous and extreme as to reinforce the meanings of these categories further. In drafting and using maps and other diagrammatic means to bring order to what was to them an unknown realm, outsiders on the steppe inadvertently set in motion a disordered unraveling, leaving a fraught legacy of ethnic tension and environmental uncertainty with which we still reckon with today.

282 BIBLIOGRAPHY