Institutions of public power among the Manchu-Mongolian peoples of East Asia in the first half of the twentieth century (part 2: Postimperial political order)

Abstract

The author attempts to characterize the public-power institutions of the Manchu-Mongol peoples after the collapse of the Qing Empire, reflected in little-known academic Russian-speaking emigrant sources of the first half of the twentieth century. The revolutionary events in China in 1911–1912 and the abdication of the infant emperor from the throne gave rise to the problem of the legitimacy of the new central government. Not solved from the point of view of law, it led the country to the actual disintegration of the country and the formation of new nation-states. China itself in 1912 It became a republic, and a struggle for the formation of two regional orders unfolded on its borders: between Russia, imperial, and then Soviet, and Japan. The regional order in the zone of Russian interests was based on the statehood of Khalkha-Mongolia, the northernmost part of the Mongolian world, which at the end of 1911 chose the path of the theocratic monarchy, to which Barga tried to join in 1912–1915. The regional order in the zone of Japanese interests has always been associated with Manchuria, which declared independence as Manchukuo with the invasion of the Japanese on the continent. Inner Mongolia also falls into its orbit, forcibly divided into 3 special regions in 1914, and later, with the help of the Japanese, declared sovereignty as the state of Mengjiang. The institutions of public power built up in these policies are characterized by an attempt to restore ancient state traditions, but the key tools in the formation of order and in the change of statuses are the statehood accumulated by these peoples and demonstrating the “ability” to have state sovereignty and international recognition, as well as autonomy, which in some cases was the starting point when falling away from the former empire, and in others — the final one while remaining part of republican China.