In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  Tianjin in 1928 was thick with factions, secret societies, and intrigue. Puyi heard whispers of restoration and assassination attempts. Rumors said a warlord would put him on a Manchurian throne and secede from the Chinese republic; others warned the Japanese wanted him, the most powerful Manchu, dead. When a Japanese-planted bomb killed the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin that year, Puyi feared he was the next target.

  If he was unsure of his friends, he was certain of his enemy. In 1928, Nationalist Chinese troops systematically plundered the Eastern Qing Tombs for three days, excavating the treasures buried with the Manchu emperor Qianlong—in power at the dynasty’s eighteenth-century peak—and Cixi, the empress dowager who had put Puyi on the throne. The soldiers were said to have hacked their remains to pieces and looted their crypts. Puyi heard that China’s first lady, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, used the pearls from Cixi’s crown to decorate the toes of her shoes. “My heart smoldered with a hatred I had never previously known,” he wrote, “and I made a vow before my weeping clansmen, with my face raised to heaven: ‘If I do not avenge this wrong I am not a member of the Aisin-Goro clan of the Great Qing Dynasty.’”

  Were this a film, one can imagine a montage of a gritting Puyi lifting rice sacks, running beside a steam train, and stabbing pictures of Nationalist generals pinned to cabbages. But no. Puyi remained in the Japanese concession, attending dances that he never joined, preferring, he wrote, to watch from the side of the room.

  Manchuria’s man of action was Zhang Xueliang, the “Young Marshal,” whose warlord father had been assassinated by a Japanese bomb. At the time, Zhang had lived a life as louche as Puyi’s. In a private letter, an Australian journalist wrote that Zhang and fellow officers had “nightly orgies with bunches of concubines, singing girls, mahjong and other things not directly connected with affairs of the state. The latter are relegated to the obscure background. Nero fiddling was not a circumstance to these beauties jazzing. They think more of their concubines than their country.” In the light of day, Zhang “tries to bang a golf ball about under bogey. Perhaps the latter redeems him a little. It has done some good for it has brought about the repair of the road to the course. For that we are grateful. He has also fixed up stone seats at the tees, and so we are thinking of making him Patron of the Club in order to get more out of him. He has a lot of ill-gotten gains.”

  His father’s murder, however, spurred a transformation that echoed Prince Hal becoming Henry V. The young Zhang hired the Australian journalist as his chief adviser, who helped him kick his opium addiction. In April 1931, he ceded administrative control of the Northeast to the Chinese republican government. It announced plans to terminate Japan’s lease of the South Manchuria Railway.

  But it was more than just a train. The South Manchuria Railway was Japan’s largest corporation, whose yearly earnings represented nearly a quarter of all Japanese tax revenue. Called Mantetsu in Japanese, it was a state within a state, with administrative and police control of the tracks’ “attached lands,” leased—according to an agreement resulting from the American-brokered Treaty of Portsmouth—to the Japanese government until 2002. Its roster of companies in Manchuria included coal mines, steel mills, hospitals, hotels, hot springs, public utilities, slaughterhouses, orchards, water supplies, flour mills, fire stations, sugar refineries, libraries, and schools—from kindergarten to universities. In 1931 the railway’s workers (and their dependents) made up one-third of the 230,000 Japanese living in Manchuria.

  Under the slogan “Military Preparedness in Civilian Garb,” the railway also ran a research department staffed by two thousand employees that produced six thousand reports on Manchuria’s land, resources, and culture, recording statistics and stories on everything from jute sack shortages to the stateless Russian Jews trapped in Harbin. Researchers collected the minutiae of Manchurian life to better inform its future colonial administrators and settlers.

  In the summer of 1931, a Japanese officer in civilian clothes was killed in Manchuria by Chinese soldiers who correctly suspected he was a spy. In a dispute over irrigation rights in a village north of Changchun, Chinese farmers attacked Japanese-backed Korean settlers. No one was killed, but anti-Chinese riots broke out in Japanese-ruled Pyongyang, resulting in 146 Chinese deaths and hundreds of injuries. A boycott of Japanese products in Manchuria followed, increasing tensions.

  China called its theater of the Second World War the War Against Japanese Aggression. It began on September 18, 1931, six years before Japan invaded greater China, eight years before Germany invaded Poland, and a decade before Pearl Harbor. Today the anniversary is marked in the Northeast with air raid sirens that howl at 9:18 a.m. on September 18, the date Japanese soldiers detonated a bomb on train tracks outside present-day Shenyang. The small explosion harmed no one. It didn’t even disrupt rail traffic. But it was evidence, the Japanese army said, that their railroad zone was under attack. Soldiers overran a Chinese garrison near the tracks, then occupied the entire city.

  Zhang Xueliang was in Beijing at the time, and most of his forces were also south of the Great Wall, skirmishing with Communist rebels. Zhang knew that opposing the Japanese was tactical suicide. “There was no way we could win,” he said later. “We could only have a shambolic go of it. Non-resistance was the only feasible policy.” Over the next five months, Japan took control of every major city along the railway, and all of Manchuria.

  In November 1931, one of the officers behind the September 18 bombing called on the last emperor, Puyi, in his Tianjin villa to offer the position of sovereign of a state named Manchukuo.

  “But there was one big problem that worried me,” Puyi wrote, “and I asked what form the new state would take.”

  “As I have already mentioned, it will be independent and autonomous, and it will be headed by you.”

  “That is not what I asked. I wish to know whether it will be a republic or a monarchy? Will it, or will it not, be a monarchy?”

  “This problem will be solved after you come.”

  After Puyi demurred, the Japanese officer promised: “Of course it will be a monarchy; there’s no question of that.”

  Ignoring the warnings of his advisers, Puyi put on a Japanese soldier’s uniform and snuck out of Tianjin by ship. Unbeknownst to him, a large drum of gasoline was on board, to be exploded if the boat was captured, leaving no witnesses. Also unknown: Japan’s army had replacement candidates lined up to head Manchukuo if Puyi had declined their offer. These included a Manchu prince and a direct descendant of Confucius. Puyi was their first choice, however, as Manchukuo’s western flank would consist of Mongolian grasslands now controlled by princes who had ties to the former Qing court.

  Puyi had never lived in his ancestral homeland. After three months of isolation in a Port Arthur hotel, he was met by a Japanese officer who delivered the news that Manchukuo would be a parliamentary state. Puyi would become chief executive, not emperor.

  “Without waiting for the interpreter to finish translating,” Puyi wrote, “he produced from his briefcase the ‘Declaration of Independence of the Manchu and Mongol People’ and the proposed five-colored Manchukuo flag and put them on the table in front of me. Pushing them aside with a trembling hand, and with my lungs ready to burst with rage, I asked: ‘What sort of state is this? Certainly it isn’t the Great Qing Empire!’”

  The officer told him to accept the offer, or else. “These words, when relayed to me, left me stunned. My legs turned to jelly and I collapsed speechless onto a sofa.”

  On March 8, Puyi arrived in Changchun by rail, stepping onto a platform scored by the brassy, thumping din of an army band. “Even before the train had stopped,” Puyi recalled in his memoir, “I could hear the sounds of military music and the cheers of people on the platform. In the procession there were people wearing the Chinese-style long gowns and military jackets as well as those in Western attire, while others wore Japanese-style dress, all with small flags in their hands.” Among the throng, he spied yellow flags bearin
g the imperial insignia of a spindly dragon. They were held by former bannermen, the Manchu class of military administrators. An attendant told him, “For twenty years they have anxiously awaited a chance to see your majesty.”

  Puyi wrote, “Hearing these words, I could not repress the warm tears that welled up in my eyes, and my feeling of hopelessness grew ever stronger.”

  Japan announced the founding of Manchukuo on March 1. The news was bumped off the world’s front page by that day’s disappearance of a twenty-month-old toddler named Charles Lindbergh Jr.

  Puyi was inaugurated in a “ceremony befitting the graduation from a professional school,” an attending Japanese diplomat noted with displeasure, adding that “the look of ill fortune that was clearly revealed in Puyi’s face.” But one of the masterminds of the September 18 bombing that triggered Japan’s invasion of Manchuria sized up Puyi and thought: Perfect window dressing.

  In his office, Manchukuo’s chief executive sat behind an empty desk. “I soon discovered that my authority was only shadow without substance,” Puyi wrote. “I didn’t even have the power to decide whether or not I could pass out of the door to go for a walk.”

  Were he to stroll outside today, Puyi would recognize a surprising amount of Changchun.

  The wide, Japanese pine–lined axial boulevards still lead to roundabouts such as the former Unity Plaza—renamed People’s Square—ringed by steel-frame bulwarks of buildings that were meant to signify Japan’s permanent presence. All remain in use. The former Central Bank of Manchukuo is now the People’s Bank of China, the Manchukuo Telephone and Telegraph Company is a branch of China Netcom, and the Police Headquarters has become the Public Security Bureau.

  Changchun is a city of eight million, renowned in post-Liberation China as the home of First Automobile Works, producer of the Socialist era’s ubiquitous powder-blue Liberation truck and black, boxy Red Flag sedans. The city is no Detroit, however (or Flint, one of its sister cities): the car factory now makes sleek Audis, and 160,000 students attend the town’s twenty-seven universities. Yet the city center is still littered with reminders of the occupation. While Japanese war memorials and cemeteries have been razed, the government has protected over one hundred colonial sites, making the town itself a sort of patriotic education base.

  A walk south on People’s Avenue from the train station leads past a waving statue of Chairman Mao inside the gates of the former Jade Child (now Victory) Park, then past the spiky pagoda rooftops of the castle-like structure that had been the Japanese army headquarters. The provincial Communist Party bureau now calls it home. Just south of the former Unity Plaza, a Shinto temple to the god of war stands shuttered in Peony Park. Speed skaters on Rollerblades whoosh in loops around its wide, flat apron of asphalt. On its back wall, painted Cultural Revolution slogans fade in the sun. Otherwise, the building’s swooping tiled roof and white walls look recently built.

  Japan chose Changchun as Manchukuo’s capital for its central location and its rail connection to Korean ports and ships to Japan. Tokyo means “Eastern Capital”; Changchun was christened Shinkyo, New Capital—Xinjing in Chinese. It would be unlike other planned capitals, mired for years on drawing boards and budget sheets, as the United States and Australia’s had been. Around the time of Xinjing’s inception, an English reporter wrote of Canberra, “Londoners may be all too aware of the disadvantages of living in a city without a plan, but these cannot be compared with the rival disadvantages of living in a plan without a city.”

  Three decades before Brasília, Xinjing was plan and city at once. Unlike Harbin, to which the Russians had added a few churches, private mansions, and a commercial district that mirrored Moscow’s, here the Japanese colonial blueprint called for modernist urban planning that looked nothing like Tokyo’s tangle of narrow lanes.

  Planners drew clean lines, circular plazas, and numerous parks. They added ornate, colonnaded buildings with steam heat and flush toilets—a rarity in Japan, and the rest of China—meant to overshadow older Russian and Chinese structures and attract new settlers.

  I walked past the curving lines of the former art deco movie theater, now home to the Great Jilin Medicine Store. KFC was packed, as usual, and I carried my cup of steaming Nescafé past Walmart and the Shangri-La Hotel down Comrade Street to Liberation Road, ending at the expanse of Culture Square, the world’s second largest, after Tiananmen. A grand palace for Puyi was to overlook the fifty-acre plaza, but only its foundation was finished when Japan surrendered in 1945. China built the Geological Palace Museum atop the site. Inside, schoolchildren stared up at the skeleton of a dinosaur from the genus Mandschurosaurus.

  Culture Square bookended Xinmin (New Citizen) Avenue, which is to fascist architecture what Havana is to classic American cars. The road slopes gently like the Champs-Élysées, terminating after a mile at South Lake Park. Under Manchukuo, the boulevard was named Datong (Grand Unity) and lined with eight ministries set back from wide sidewalks shaded by the spindly branches of Japanese pines. The buildings look unlike any other in China—or the world—and their style, with crenellated towers, porticoes, and curving roofs, was called Rising Asia. Now the structures stand as markers of a fall.

  Walking south, the avenue’s first building is the former Manchukuo State Council, a wedding cake made of granite and marble crowned with a pagoda-style roof of cinnamon-colored ceramic tiles. Its front door is shaded by a colonnaded ramp that once received the imperial cortege. A vertical signboard next to a mature pine says that Puyi planted the tree.

  Like the other Manchukuo ministry buildings, the State Council has been repurposed, here as university classroom space. The front doors were open, without a ticket window or security guards forbidding entry. Inside, I passed Puyi’s personal copper-plated elevator—CLOSED FOR REPAIRS—and walked under the chandelier to climb the marble stairs. Carved orchids adorn the balustrade; they were Puyi’s favorite flower and became the Manchukuoan imperial seal. The stairs lead to an unlit second floor. Reflexively, I stomped my foot, which usually turns on the lights in a Chinese building. The room stayed dark. The only sound was my echoing footsteps wandering the remains of Japan’s imperial ambition.

  That night, I slept at the former Yamato Hotel, built as part of a chain along the South Manchuria Railway. A 1934 guidebook described the hotel as “quiet and cozy, surrounded by a spacious summer garden.” The garden is now a parking lot, and the hotel is dwarfed by a bus station whose rooftop neon sign flashes AMWAY.

  The bedding had been updated and a television added, but otherwise the room—with floor-to-ceiling windows and a cavernous claw-foot tub—was a time capsule of the 1930s. The desk phone rang, and I expected to tell the caller I did not want a massage. But it was Housekeeping. I was the building’s only guest, the maid said, so she wouldn’t be making her regular rounds. She would leave two thermoses of hot water by the door. The front desk had said that Chinese preferred to stay in the hotel’s characterless new wing, which cost twice as much. Being an appreciator of history (or, as the clerk called me, kou men’r, a cheapskate) had resulted in having the old hotel to myself. Even the masseuses ignored it. The room was quiet and cozy, with original steam radiators running along a wall. At night they hissed low, as if urging me to keep the room a secret.

  In the spring of 1932, a group of foreigners disembarked at the train station across the street. They had been dispatched in response to China’s plea for diplomacy to push Japan from the Northeast.

  “I have just heard that the League of Nations has decided to send a mission to investigate the Manchurian Incident,” Will Rogers wrote. “It reminds me of a familiar scene in early days in Oklahoma when the sheriff arrived to inspect the stable after the horses had been stolen.”

  The Lytton Commission, named for its head, the Earl of Lytton, consisted of four other men—from the United States, France, Germany, and Italy—who toured the Northeast by Japan’s hand. They stepped off the train onto a platform plastered in English posters that said MAN
CHUKUO, THE DEUTANTE, WELCOMES THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS and CO-OPERATE TO MAKE MANCHUKUO THE GENEVA OF THE EAST.A Japanese military officer mentioned to a reporter, “The weather has been much better since we Japanese came.” The propaganda posters, another correspondent noted, were torn to tatters each night and replaced before daybreak.

  The commission interviewed Puyi for a mere fifteen minutes. “They asked me only two questions: how did I come to the Northeast and how had Manchukuo been established?” Puyi considered pleading to be rescued, “but as soon as this idea swept into my mind, I recalled that, seated next to me, was the Chief of Staff of the army. I looked at [his] bluish white face and felt compelled to repeat exactly what he had ‘reminded’ me to tell the Commission: ‘The masses of the people of Manchuria begged me to come. My stay here is absolutely voluntary and free.’ The members of the Commission all smiled and nodded at my reply. They did not ask for more. Later, we had our pictures taken, drank Champagne and toasted one another’s health.”

  Japanese officers accompanied the commission at every step—even, Puyi later testified, detaining any Chinese officials who spoke Russian, French, or English so they could not meet the investigators.

  The Japanese argued to the commission that Manchukuo was in a region that had never belonged to China proper. It showed a map from 1720 that labeled all locales north of the Great Wall in Manchu script and cities south of it in Chinese characters. The president of the South Manchuria Railway presented decorative copies of a Qing emperor’s 1743 poem that lauded the Northeast’s unique geography and history.