This Week in China’s History: March 1, 1934
This week in 1934, on a frigid and clear morning, the last emperor became the first emperor. Puyi, who had abdicated the Qing throne in 1912, was installed as the Kangde Emperor of the Great Manchurian Empire — Manchukuo — occupying what had been (and would again be) the northeastern provinces of China.
The New York Times’s front-page headline declared “Pu Yi Ascends Throne Of Manchukuo Empire In Centuries-Old Ritual,” reflecting, I expect, the hopes of the Japanese who had orchestrated the event. Manchukuo had been established exactly two years earlier, several months after Japanese troops had invaded China’s easternmost provinces, continuing an expansion onto the continent that had begun in Korea. The invasion of Manchuria started in September 1931, and lasted until Harbin fell in February 1932. A few days later, “Manchukuo” was formally established.
Manchukuo had been carved, through force of arms, from the territory of the Republic of China, and even before the new country was formally established, Chinese diplomats protested the incursion. In treaties, Japan affirmed “a free and independent Manchoukuo in accordance with the free will of its inhabitants,” but there was little to suggest that the new state was to any significant degree independent of Japanese interests (though those interests were themselves divided over the creation of the new state). Chinese protests to the League of Nations led to the creation of a commission to investigate the causes of the 1931 invasion and evaluate the legitimacy of the new state.
Puyi had been living in the international concession in Tianjin when the Japanese plucked him to play his part in the drama of Manchukuo. In March 1932 he was installed as Chief Executive of the new state, while international drama about Manchukuo’s legitimacy played out.
To buttress its claims that the creation of Manchukuo was locally inspired, Japanese leaders drafted Puyi, the last Qing emperor, to sit as a figurehead leader for the new state. The ploy had little impact on the League’s Lytton Commission, which found that the new state was not the product of an indigenous or spontaneous independent movement seeking to be free of China, but was rather dependent on Japanese military support. Before a vote condemning Japanese aggression and demanding Japan’s withdrawal from northeast China, Japan withdrew from the league.
With the chance of international approval seemingly gone, Japan leaned into its new creation. To emphasize, perhaps, that Manchukuo was not a puppet-state, it would become an empire — “the world’s newest,” to quote many news reports of the day. And who better to play the role of emperor than Puyi, who was already installed as head of state, and whose lineage could buttress the claim that the new state represented local desires. And besides, when evaluating applicants for the position of “emperor,” it is rare when one of them can claim previous experience! (This was, in fact, not just Puyi’s second stint as emperor, it was his third: after being deposed in 1912, Puyi had been briefly restored to the throne for two weeks in 1917, by a loyalist warlord.)
So, on a frigid late-winter morning, Puyi made the transition from Chief Executive to Emperor, wearing silk ceremonial robes — in the pattern of the Qing dynasty — that provided little protection against the biting winds. Like so much else that was Manchukuo, the ceremony was an attempt to embrace contradictions. Puyi was to be the head of “a new empire…in the ancient domain of the Manchus,” according to the opening line of the Associated Press report. His new capital at Changchun was renamed Xinjing: literally, the “new capital.”
“It was a memorable scene,” the report went on in a creation of tradition that would have made Eric Hobsbawm proud. “Against the barren, unending Manchurian plains, over which Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Pu Yi’s predecessors had come and conquered, the frail frame of the Emperor-elect, standing on the primitive earthen tabernacle and silhouetted against the sky, seemed like a mere phantom figure on the desert.”
After completing the rituals representing “centuries-old traditions,” Puyi entered a bulletproof American limousine for the five-mile ride through the city’s outskirts, his route lined by “Japanese and Manchukuoan soldiers” — some 70,000 in all, according to press reports — whose job was part display, part protection. They went to the palace, where a brief civil ceremony confirmed his installation as emperor.
The world’s “newest empire” occupied a strange and short-lived space in 20th-century history. Manchukuo was in part a tool of Japanese foreign policy, but it was also a pawn in an internal game of chess within the Japanese government, as different elements of the military argued over how best to achieve their ends on the Asian continent. In China, the country is barely acknowledged, its name being nearly always prefixed with the character wěi 伪 — false — to emphasize its spurious origins. But, as historian Prasenjit Duara pointed out, the very fact that Manchukuo was so obviously and so deliberately constructed, it can serve as a test case for theories of nationalism and imperialism.
Manchukuo’s decade and a half of existence was of course defined by war, but it also served as a large-scale social experiment as modernists and modernizers used the new state to develop aesthetic and artistic trends, in multiple languages (especially Japanese and Chinese). Recent works by Annika Culver and Norman Smith and by Jonathan Henshaw and others show sides to Manchukuo that are often obscured by (and does nothing to diminish, certainly) the problematic aspects of the would-be state.
Above all else, though, I find myself looking at photographs of Puyi standing on the freezing Manchurian plain, clad in robes meant to evoke another era, being named emperor yet again, and yet again his new office came with little real power. Not for the last time, “the last emperor” was an irresistible symbol for competing agendas that were rarely his own, exploited for his bloodline with little agency he could bring.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
