Manchukuo
Based on Wikipedia: Manchukuo
In 1932, a six-year-old boy who had been forced to abdicate as the last Emperor of China was invited to become the head of a brand new country. There was just one catch: the country was fake.
Manchukuo—the "State of Manchuria"—existed for thirteen years on maps and in diplomatic cables. It had a flag, a national anthem, and an emperor. But everyone understood the truth. The Japanese military ran everything. The emperor was a puppet. And the Chinese people whose land this was never consented to any of it.
This is the story of one of history's most elaborate political fictions.
The Boy Emperor
Puyi had one of the strangest childhoods in human history. Born in 1906 into the Qing dynasty—the Manchu rulers who had governed China since the 1600s—he was selected as heir and brought to the Forbidden City at age two. By age three, he was Emperor of China.
He didn't remain so for long.
The 1911 Xinhai Revolution swept away millennia of dynastic rule. Puyi was forced to abdicate at age six, though he was allowed to continue living in the Forbidden City with his imperial trappings, a kind of living museum piece. For years, he existed in a strange limbo: no longer emperor of anything, but still surrounded by eunuchs and courtiers who treated him as one.
The Japanese had other plans for this displaced monarch.
Japan's Obsession with Manchuria
To understand why Japan would create an entire fake country, you need to understand how deeply Manchuria had embedded itself in the Japanese national psyche.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 was a pivotal moment. Japan mobilized one million soldiers—one for every eight Japanese families—to fight Russia for control of this region. They won, shocking the Western world with the first modern military defeat of a European power by an Asian nation. But the victory came at a staggering cost: roughly 500,000 Japanese casualties.
The sacrifices transformed how Japan viewed this land. Japanese publications began describing Manchuria as "sacred" and "holy," a place where their soldiers had died as martyrs. A generation grew up hearing that their fathers and uncles had given their lives on Manchurian soil.
Then came what many Japanese perceived as a diplomatic betrayal. The Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by American President Theodore Roosevelt, ended the war but didn't give Japan everything its public expected. Between September 5th and 7th, 1905, anti-American riots erupted in Tokyo. The common sentiment was that Japan had won the war but lost the peace.
In the Japanese imagination, Manchuria became unfinished business.
The Railroad Empire
Japan's foothold in Manchuria wasn't primarily military—it was corporate.
The South Manchurian Railway Company, established in 1906, became Asia's largest corporation with a market capitalization of 200 million yen. But calling it a "railway company" understates what it actually was. The company owned ports, mines, hotels, telephone lines, and countless other businesses. It effectively controlled the Manchurian economy.
With the corporation came Japanese settlers. The Japanese population in Manchuria exploded from about 16,600 in 1906 to nearly 234,000 by 1930. Most were white-collar employees of the railway company, middle-class people who saw themselves as a colonial elite.
Back in Japan, Manchuria took on an almost mythical quality. It was portrayed as the Japanese equivalent of the American Wild West: dangerous and lawless, filled with bandits and warlords, but also a land of boundless opportunity where ordinary people could become wealthy.
The Convenient Incident
By the late 1920s, the Japanese Kwantung Army—the military force stationed in Manchuria to protect Japanese interests—was growing restless. They wanted full control of the region, not just a sphere of influence.
In 1928, they assassinated Zhang Zuolin, the Chinese warlord who had been running Manchuria with Japanese backing. He had become too independent for their liking. The generals expected his death to plunge the region into chaos, giving them an excuse to seize power.
It didn't work. Zhang's son, Zhang Xueliang—known as the "Young Marshal"—succeeded his father smoothly. And unlike his father, the Young Marshal was a Chinese nationalist who deeply resented the Japanese presence in his homeland. The Kwantung Army had murdered his father, after all.
So the army tried again.
On September 18, 1931, a small explosion damaged a section of the South Manchurian Railway near the city of Mukden. The damage was so minor that a train passed over the spot just minutes later. But the Kwantung Army blamed Chinese saboteurs and used the incident as justification for a full military invasion.
This was the Mukden Incident. And it was entirely staged.
The Japanese military had planted the explosives themselves.
Building a Fake Country
Within months of the invasion, Japanese forces controlled all of Manchuria. Now they needed to create the appearance of legitimacy.
The solution was elegant in its cynicism: they would establish a new nation, ostensibly independent, with Chinese leaders at its head. The fiction would provide diplomatic cover while Japan exercised total control behind the scenes.
In February 1932, Japanese army officers convened what they called the "Founding Conference" with four Chinese officials who had been persuaded—or coerced—into collaborating. Within days, they announced that "the Northeast provinces are completely independent."
The new state needed a leader who would lend it credibility. Who better than Puyi, the former Emperor of China himself?
Puyi was invited to serve as "Chief Executive" of the new state. He accepted, perhaps seeing an opportunity to reclaim some shadow of his lost glory. He was accompanied by Zheng Xiaoxu, a Qing loyalist who still dreamed of restoring the old dynasty.
In 1934, the fiction was elevated further. Manchukuo was renamed the "Empire of Manchuria," and Puyi was crowned as the Kangde Emperor. He had finally become an emperor again.
It meant nothing.
The Reality Behind the Throne
Japanese officials made every significant decision. They controlled Puyi's court, his schedule, his personal safety. The emperor couldn't leave his palace without Japanese approval. He couldn't issue any decree that Japanese advisors hadn't already approved.
The puppet state's economy was developed rapidly—but for Japanese benefit and using horrific methods. Under vice-minister Nobusuke Kishi, heavy industry expanded dramatically through the use of forced labor from local Chinese populations. Kishi would later become Prime Minister of Japan, his role in overseeing wartime atrocities conveniently overlooked during the Cold War.
Japanese settlers flooded into the new "country." By 1945, more than one million Japanese civilians lived in Manchukuo, many of them farmers from overcrowded areas of Japan who had been encouraged to relocate with promises of abundant land.
The Korean population also grew, as Korea was itself a Japanese colony and Koreans were moved around the empire according to Japanese needs.
A Name That Tells the Truth
Language reveals what official pronouncements try to hide.
In Chinese, the name Manchukuo was frequently prefixed with the character 偽—meaning "fake" or "so-called." Chinese speakers refused to grant the state the dignity of its claimed name. It was always "fake Manchukuo," "so-called Manchukuo," a constant verbal reminder that this entity was illegitimate.
Even the term "Manchuria" itself carries political freight. The name was largely promoted by the Japanese to suggest that this region was somehow separate from China—that it belonged to the Manchu people and was distinct from Chinese civilization.
This was historical revisionism. The Qing dynasty had explicitly stated in treaties and edicts that the Manchu homeland belonged to China. The Qing understood China as fundamentally multi-ethnic, with Manchu, Han, Mongol, and other peoples all being equally Chinese. The very concept of China as exclusively Han was a misrepresentation of what the empire had always claimed to be.
Modern historians tend to avoid "Manchuria" altogether, preferring to speak of "Northeast China"—the term Chinese speakers had always used, referring to the region's three eastern provinces of Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning.
The Black Dragon Society
Japan's ambitions in Manchuria weren't new, and they weren't solely military. Long before the Kwantung Army staged its incident, Japanese ultra-nationalist societies had been laying the groundwork.
The Black Dragon Society, led by Tōyama Mitsuru, had a remarkably cynical strategy. They initially supported Chinese revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen in their efforts to overthrow the Qing dynasty. Why would Japanese nationalists help Chinese revolutionaries? Because they calculated that once the Manchu rulers were gone, the new Han Chinese government wouldn't care about the Manchu homeland. Japan could simply take it.
The Society hosted the founding meeting of Sun Yat-sen's Tongmenghui resistance movement in Tokyo. They cultivated an intimate relationship with Sun himself, who sometimes promoted pan-Asian solidarity and even occasionally passed himself off as Japanese.
After the 1911 Revolution succeeded, the Black Dragons infiltrated China, expanding their opium trade and spreading anti-communist ideology. They became direct agitators for Japanese takeover of Manchuria.
The connection between organized crime, drug trafficking, and imperial expansion was never hidden. It was the business model.
International Recognition—Or Lack Thereof
Manchukuo presented the international community with a dilemma. The fiction of an independent state was transparent, but calling it out meant confronting an increasingly aggressive Japan.
Most of the world refused to recognize Manchukuo as legitimate. The League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, investigated the Mukden Incident and concluded that Japan was the aggressor. Japan responded by withdrawing from the League entirely.
The nations that did recognize Manchukuo tell their own story: primarily Axis powers and their allies. Nazi Germany recognized it. Fascist Italy recognized it. The puppet states that Germany would later create in Europe extended diplomatic courtesies to Japan's puppet state in Asia.
It was a mutual admiration society of aggressors.
Launchpad for War
Manchukuo wasn't just about controlling Manchuria. It was a staging ground.
In 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident near Beijing sparked full-scale war between Japan and China. Japanese forces poured into China from their secure base in Manchukuo. The Second Sino-Japanese War had begun—a conflict that would merge into the Pacific theater of World War II and leave millions dead.
For six years, Manchukuo served as the rear base for Japanese operations in China. Its factories produced weapons. Its farms fed soldiers. Its railways moved troops.
And then, suddenly, it was over.
The End
In August 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. The Japanese Kwantung Army, once the most powerful military force in Asia, collapsed within days. Soviet forces swept through the region with overwhelming force.
Puyi attempted to flee. He was captured by Soviet troops at an airfield, still trying to escape. The last Emperor of China became a prisoner of the Soviet Union, eventually handed over to the new People's Republic of China where he would undergo years of "re-education."
Manchukuo's government was formally dissolved following Japan's surrender in September 1945. The territory was transferred to Chinese administration the following year.
Thirteen years of existence, and nothing remained but ruins, war crimes tribunals, and bitter memories.
The Million Who Stayed
One of the forgotten tragedies of Manchukuo's collapse involved the Japanese settlers who had made their homes there.
More than one million Japanese civilians were living in Manchukuo when the Soviets invaded. The Japanese military abandoned them, prioritizing the evacuation of soldiers and officials. Ordinary families—the farmers and shopkeepers who had believed the propaganda about a Japanese destiny in Manchuria—were left to fend for themselves.
Tens of thousands died from violence, starvation, and disease during the chaotic months that followed. Others were stranded for years, unable to return to a Japan that was itself devastated and struggling to feed its own population. Some children were left behind, adopted by Chinese families, and wouldn't reconnect with their Japanese relatives for decades—if ever.
They were victims of the same imperial project that had victimized the Chinese people of Manchuria. The machinery of empire, once set in motion, grinds everyone it touches.
What Manchukuo Teaches
Puppet states are not inventions of the twentieth century. Empires have always installed compliant rulers in conquered territories. But Manchukuo represented something distinctly modern: the elaborate machinery of a fake nation-state, complete with constitution, currency, and diplomatic corps, all in service of a fiction that everyone understood to be false.
The lesson isn't subtle. A flag doesn't make a nation. A coronation doesn't make a legitimate ruler. International recognition can be manufactured through alliances of convenience among aggressors.
What matters is consent. The Chinese people of Manchuria never consented to be separated from their country. The elaborate theater of Manchukuo—the emperor, the government, the pretense of independence—couldn't change that fundamental illegitimacy.
When the Chinese still spoke of "fake Manchukuo" even while living under its authority, they were making a statement that all the Japanese army's power couldn't refute. Names matter. Truth, eventually, wins.
The territory that was once Manchukuo is today the industrial heartland of northeastern China. Millions of people live there, in cities that still bear architectural traces of Japanese colonial ambition. The past is never entirely past.
But Manchukuo itself? It exists now only in history books, a cautionary tale about the limits of power and the persistence of truth. You can conquer a land. You can install a puppet. You can even resurrect a dethroned emperor and give him a throne.
But you cannot make a lie true.