Deviation Actions
They say, Manchuria is a country that should have been returned to China in 1945. There are good reasons for that. The majority of Manchuria was Chinese, did not want to participate in Manchukuo, and the Manchus are by then a declining minority in their own country. They also by then didn't even speak their own language. So it was logical that by the time the Cairo Conference set in, the Allies agreed to have China regain Manchuria.
And yet, this didn't happen. In 1946, as we know, the Democratic Republic of Manchuria was founded as "a temporary measure," to be proved permanent, Mongolia annexed Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Western Tibet became the Uyghur and Tibetan Soviet Socialist Republics, China being under the Chinese Communist leadership, the Chinese developing their own arsenal, the Manchus in response developed and purchased their own bombs, the DRM after the Cold War becoming a (nominally) democratic republic, and in the late 2000s, unilaterally reunified the Korean Peninsula under Southern control by a flimsy pretext, invaded and conquered and puppetized the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and expanded their influence by founding the Economic Assistance Organization, a collection of states both recognized and unrecognized, supported the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad in destroying the Syrian rebels, both moderate and hardline Islamist, and yet its government was overthrown by a popular uprising in 2014 over its role in bombing Japanese World War II memorials in Japan, including the burning of the Yasukuni Shrine, allegedly with South Korean, Chinese, and Japanese instigation.
Here are what happened.
Chapter 1: From Mongolian Patronage
...in 1942, Shao Shangzhi barely escaped an assassination attempt. He thought that the revolution he hoped for China will not be for some time. And so, he escaped to the USSR with his band in 1942. It was to be pointed that he was [i]expelled[/i] from the Chinese Communist Party in 1940 for being having disagreements with some Communist leaders in Yanan. He did not took the decision well, and this caused him to have second doubts with Mao.
Second to that is the attempted assassination of Sheng Shicai by Chiang Kai-shek in 1943 when it turned out that Chiang found out about his Soviet connection. He and his family then escaped to Mongolia, where he was secretly feted by the Mongolian leadership.
Speaking of Mongolia, another pivotal event was the annexation of the small Tuvan People's Republic in 1944 in Moscow. In Ulan Bataar in neighboring Mongolian People's Republic, Khoorloogin Choibalsan, its leader, secretly did not take the news well. In his eye, Salchak Toka, the Tuvan leader, was merely an opportunist. He did want Mongolia to be a part of the Soviet Union, although some in his own cabinet, allegedly, wanted to. He also wanted Inner Mongolia, or rather South Mongolia. He would demand nothing less. And so, when the war ended in 1945, he privately wrote in his memoirs that Stalin have agreed to have Inner Mongolia remain in China. This, Choibalsan wrote, "could not be tolerated by my conscience. An Inner Mongolia remaining under Chinese control, even under communist control, is not in my cards." And so, he secretly plotted the final borders of China. He would also use Manchuria as his own puppet state and sea border. Choibalsan thought of having access to the sea, but later he considered the idea as unrealistic at this point...
... in September 3, 1945, Choibalsan summoned Shao Shangzhi and Sheng Shicai in his office and told that he personally disagreed in the fate of Mongolia and Manchuria. He believed that Manchukuo, although a failed experiment by the Japanese state, should not be annexed back to China, and Manchuria, even though it was majority Chinese by today, has its own culture and has a potential to become its own country, resources and all. Sheng Shicai, born in Manchuria, thought of what would be the official language of Manchuria, with the emphasis on Manchu as a "language of inter-ethnic communication". Choibalsan said it would be Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese, and Russian, but Zhao disagreed on the first one. He said that Manchu is now a moribund language, but Choibalsan disagreed. He said that the capitalist countries of Ireland and the Jewish people in the Middle East have been fairly successful in reviving nearly-extinct languages, and the USSR is successful in reviving the dying minority languages. Manchuria would be no exception, and it will be seen as a sign of Communist superiority. However, there was a problem. Manchu, like Mongolian at this point, was written in the vertical script, and it was regarded as very difficult to type, despite the existence of Mongolian-script typewriters. By then, the Mongolian government is commissioning Soviet linguists to convert the script to Cyrillic, and soon, the Soviets, led by G. Serdyuchenko, have churned up a Cyrillic alphabet for Manchu. But it was only in 1953, when the Korean War ended, that they were able to implement it in full...
...in 1947, the Kuomintang, infuriated by Manchuria's declaration of independence a year ago, and after the failed assault in Huludao by the Manchurian Democratic Army, the new Manchu army, the Kuomintang knew that the Manchus are taking orders from both Moscow and Ulaanbataar. Mongolia, the weaker one, was the easier target. The success of the KMT troops in Peitashan in 1947 have alarmed the Mongolian leadership, and decided that to do it, it must strike back at the KMT...
Excerpts from Chapter 1, "Manchuria Rising"
By Kikuko Takeshima
Kakukawa Press, Tokyo, 2015