China’s Provinces Past

It’s a hopeless task, truly getting one’s brain around an entity as vast and old as China. Therefore, unless blessed with Asperger’s or idiot-savantism, one inevitably uses shortcuts. Sorting out all those Han states of Wu and Qu, Zhou and Zhao, frazzles the average brain enough. Once it gets around to the hinterlands, those shortcuts leave out a lamentably broad swath of scenery.

Case in point: China’s Northeast, the head and neck of the Great Rooster. Today it’s divvied into Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, and Inner Mongolia. “Windswept grassland and freezing forests, check,” the mind generalizes. “Untilled wilderness from whence the savage northern hordes thundered down to plague the Celestial Empire. Today a land of redundant SEOs and the odd dodgy ski resort.”

Tsk, tsk. Even the Republic of China and the Japanese Empire, looked on here today with as much favor as Olympic torch-dousers, knew enough about the Northeast to carve it up into nine provinces. They’ve since been re-assigned, of course, but to know them is to know a bit more about the hearty Dongbei cultural stew that’s been simmering up there for so long, under-sampled though it may be.

Liaoning: Andong, Liaobei, Rehe

The ancient Qin and Han Dynasties established but a tenuous hold on what is today Liaoning Province. Later proto-Korean kingdom Goguryeo would hold sway, to be swept aside by nomadic tribes like the Xianbei and Khitan.

After ousting the Mongols, the Ming Dynasty set up the Liaodong Wall throughout the 15^th century to hold back the restive Jurchen people. Although built with the same intent as the Great Wall, it was made primarily of earthen dikes, with shallow moats on each side. The Manchu found it child’s play to breach this not-so Great Wall, conquering Liaoning decades before they did the rest of China. Liaoning was littered with Han ghost-towns during this time, until later in the Manchu’s Qing Dynasty, when Shandong farmers were remanded to the area to resettle and get planting. The Manchu rulers forbade the rest of the Northeast to Han, however, finding the erection of a willow palisade outside the remains of the Liaodaong Wall sufficient to keep the re-settlers out.

The stage was set for this ancient region, heretofore known as Fengtian, to be sliced up in 1905, when the world’s largest pre-WWI land conflict, the Battle of Mukden, gave the Japanese a toehold on China. But during the intervening Warlord Era, the region was under the sway of the Fengtian Clique, led most famously by Zhang “The Mukden Tiger” Zuolin. An ardent anti-communist, Zhang ruled Manchuria but later became a Japan proxy by wrecking its economy with typical warlord corruption.

The Republic of China set up Rehe as a special autonomous Mongol region in 1914. The Japanese created Andong in 1934, as a subdivision of Manchukuo, while maintaining Rehe as a buffer zone between their puppet state and China proper. Liaobei, meanwhile, came into its short existence only in 1945, under the auspices of the Chinese Nationalist Government. So weak was their influence in the region, however, that Liaobei only really existed on paper.

Heilongjiang: Hejiang, Nenjiang, Songjiang

The part of Heilongjiang that comprises China’s chicken beak, poking into Russia and propped by North Korea, comprises the area’s most historically rich and diverse region. This is the site of the medieval Balhae kingdom, the Korean state reformed in the ashes of the aforementioned Goguryeo, which had been vanquished by the Tang to the West and Silla Kindgom to the South.

King Mu of Balhae spent especially encroached on by the Tang, and had the pluck to lead a naval battle against them late in the 8^th century. Tang cultural influence no doubt benefited Balhae, though, as seen in their elegant written language, arts, and establishment of a national academy based on their Chinese neighbor’s.

The Balhae used a traditional blend of cultural volition and military might to expand its territory and reign over several indigenous peoples, such as the Nanai, who made not just their livelihood but their clothes from fish; the Udege, hunters and ginseng-gatherers who smack mightily of aboriginal Americans; the various Mohe, who begat the Jurchen, who begat the Manchu. But not before the fall of Balhae to the Khitan in the 10^th century, hastened greatly by the explosion of a volcano that subsequently became one of the world’s most beautiful lakes.

This was the region later known as Hejiang Province, formally recognized in 1945 and incorporated into Heilongjiang in the 1950s, as were Nenjiang and Songjiang. Hejiang and Nenjiang were occupied by the Russians and handed over to the PLA, Songjiang was created by the Chinese Nationalists. Nenjiang was notable as the area around Heilongjiang’s original capital, Qiqihar, an ancient trade juncture bordered by red crane wetlands, later the site of some of occupying Japan’s greatest atrocities.

Inner Mongolia: Chahar, Suiyuan, Xing’an

Much retold is the story of Puyi , the last emperor, and his stint as nominal king of Manchukuo. Less known is Japan’s other puppet state, Mengjiang, and its Mongolian leader Prince Demchugdongrub. Hist story sheds light on the eternally delicate relationship between Han and Hun, as well as on the story of these three short-lived provinces.

Prince De at left

A Chahar Mongol born in the province of the same name, under the Plain White Banner, Prince Demchugdongrub, known more efficiently as Prince De, was of noble stock, and married a daughter of Qing aristocracy. Yuan Shikai promoted him to head of his banner in 1912, presumably to keep him close to China. But sniffing the country’s weakness in 1933, the princes of both Chahar and Suiyuan provinces visited Prince De, to plan a move for Mongolian self-rule in the area.

Japan’s blitzkrieg take-over of North China, including Chahar, convinced Prince De and his confederates to ride the Rising Sun to a compromised independence. The Mongol Military Government was formed in 1936, with Prince De at the titular top, promising mutual assistance to fellow punk state Manchukuo.

Prince De expanded into Suiyuan, the blood of Genghis simmering in his veins, and helped by material support from Japan. That success led to the establishment of the Mengjiang Autonomous Government in 1939, De serving as chairman. After the Japanese defeat, he took shelter in Beijing with the Kuomintang, then fled to Mongolia before the advancing communists, only to be deported back to their waiting hands. He died in 1966, a caretaker at an Inner Mongolia history museum.

In 1952, Chahar was subsumed into Inner Mongolia, Hebei, and Beijing Municipality. Xing’an and Suiyuan followed in 1952.

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