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The Mengjiang 蒙疆 puppet regime was established in Inner Mongolia by Japanese colonizers, in collaboration with the Mongolian Prince Demchugdongrub, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Mengjiang regime tried to revive Mongolian culture in the name of resisting Chinese despotism. However, the Japanese supported the Mongols' desire for “self-determination” merely to use it as a vehicle for their colonial designs. Through a close reading of several texts that appeared in Sinophone magazines published in Japanese-occupied Inner Mongolia during the war, this article explicates the distinctions between Han writers' and Mongol intellectuals' nationalist writings, in order to theorize the dual oppression of the Mongol minority culture under Japanese colonialism and Chinese despotism. Despite the mission of this so-called Mongolian nation-state to write in a Mongolian style, the Han writers in Mengjiang expressed their ethnic identity through Sinophone literature; at the same time, Sinicized Mongol intellectuals failed to revive Mongolian culture through the same vehicle. In the end, both the former Han despots and the new Japanese colonizers tried to instrumentalize Mongol minority culture to establish their own cultural hegemony. Under this dual oppression of foreign colonialism and native despotism, the Sinophone nationalist writings of the Han majority and the Mongol minority problematize any simple binarism of colonizer and colonized.

The writing reforms of the Mongolian language in Inner Mongolia from 1954 to 1980 are a notable case of Maoist China’s language planning projects. In those years, the Chinese government attempted to implement two consecutive reforms featuring Cyrillization and Latinization of the Mongolian writing system, but neither reform yielded any substantial result and the traditional Mongolian script remains in use today. This article explores the domestic and international dynamics behind these two closely related reform attempts and examines their origins, rationales, processes of implementation, and reasons for failure. Although the rationales of both reforms lay in the communist doctrine favoring easier, more regular, and more universal writing systems that could improve literacy and facilitate communication, hidden behind both reforms were nationalist agendas. The Cyrillization reform sought linguistic unity with the Mongolian People’s Republic, while the Latinization reform sought unity of writing systems among languages in China. In both cases, the hidden nationalist agendas undermined the original goals of the reforms, and the reforms lost momentum once contending agendas prevailed.

This article reveals the murky political landscape of Alashaa Banner in Inner Mongolia during the Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945). By using various archival documents and secondary source materials, this research seeks to present a clearer picture of Inner Mongolian borderlands, involving the Chinese Nationalists, the Sinicized Muslims, and the Inner Mongols. Instead of restating the ‘ineffectiveness’ or ‘weakness’ of the Nationalist frontier administration in China's innermost borderlands during the pre-1949 decades, this article attempts to explore the extent of the war-threatened Nationalist Chinese effort to initiate their state-building tasks and promote their regime's power consolidation in modern China's northern periphery.

史料紹介, Document Review

On the night of 7 July 1937, there was an exchange of shots between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beiping (Peiping). At first, it seemed that nothing would come of it. Japanese troops had been in China, particularly in Manchuria, Beiping and Shanghai, more or less permanently since the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. In the 10 years prior to 1937 there had been numerous other incidents involving Japanese and Chinese troops—where shots had been fired, soldiers temporarily detained and even people killed—though in each instance the disputants had reached a negotiated settlement. In 1931–1932, the Guandong Army (Kwantung Army) succeeded in gaining control of Manchuria and, in May 1933, had even secured Chinese recognition of its control through the Tanggu (Tangku) Truce. On this occasion, however, there was to be no settlement. The shots exchanged in July 1937 were to be the start of the Sino-Japanese War, as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government was no longer willing to bow to Japanese demands by ceding them more territory

This chapter deals with the early development of Chinese nationalism around 1900 and its significant influence on the nationalist selfperceptions of the present-day People’s Republic of China (PRC), despite the Communists’ claim to have broken with the imperial and Republican past. Acceptance of the idea that today’s Chinese nationalism is based on this heritage is essential to understand modern developments in the PRC and the special problems it faces when dealing with its non-Chinese inhabitants in Tibet, Xinjiang and even Inner Mongolia.

The essay is an historical investigation of the Chinese National Government’s policy toward Inner Mongolian nationalism during the postwar years. The study reveals that the seemingly marginal ‘Mongolian question’ was actually at the core of the KMT—CCP struggle for northern and northeastern China. Through examining the government’s rigid and Chinese-centric policies and its misconceptions about the conditions of postwar Inner Mongolia, the study contends that the KMT government’s blunders in the Inner Mongolian ethno-politics were among the reasons for its loss to the Chinese Communists in the civil war. The study is based on a solid research of archival as well as published materials.

S UMMARIZING in the December number of PACIFIC AFFAIRS the recent study, by Mr. Ch'ien Shih-fu, of "The Basis and Solution of the Inner Mongolian Problem," Chen Han-seng points out that the original articles "mark an important renewal of serious research" on problems "which have been disastrously neglected since the great creative period in which Chinese nationalism was led by Sun Yat-sen." I agree; and it is because of the importance of his work that I want partly to criticize and partly to develop the views put forward by Mr. Ch'ien. He speaks a little too confidently, I think, of ameliorating the relations between Chinese and Mongols by promoting the spread of agriculture in Inner Mongolia and a better use of its mineral resources, with safeguards against exploitation by Chinese that will "give all advantages to the Mongol toilers." He is quite right, however, in criticizing the Chinese official policy for ignoring those parts of the Mongol problem which are most acutely important to the Mongols themselves, and for attempting to do no more than "keep its Mongol territory under the name of the Chinese Republic." The heart of the problem, he points out, is "the real liberation of the Mongol people." Or rather there are two problems. There is the Mongol problem of liberation, and there is the Chinese problem of whether to compete with Japan in the conquest and exploitation of the Mongols, or to work toward a relation mutually beneficial to Chinese and Mongolstoward Sun Yat-sen's ideal of a Chinese Republic containing such national minorities as the Mongols, but not oppressing or exploiting them. Both of these problems are complicated by the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, containing the eastern half of Inner Mongolia, and the threatened conquest of Chahar and Suiyfian, containing the rest of Inner Mongolia proper, and of Ninghsia, containing tribes of West-Mongol (016t) origin, whose situation is almost the same as that of the true Inner Mongolian tribes. For a really clear understanding of both problems it is necessary first to consider the relation within Mongol society of princes, lamas and commoners, and then to take up the wider questions of the relation of the Chinese people as a