Lats talk about this place

It's meant to be 'fives races under Japan in harmony' I think the original ROC flag meant something like the five races

It looked aesthetic and better than the chinablob we got today, that's objective and there's no debate. It still was a meme country, though.

Yeah I know, but why place it on the corner?

Flags in the corner means that a country is controlled by that flag in the corner, that's why it's superimposed.

Were the japs planning to reestablish the Republic of China with that flag?

Why didn't Japan go for a Yuan restoration? Having an imperial client state in China would have lined up with their interests.

Same concept, different ethnicities.

My guess is to make it seem like a genuine ""country"" whereas in reality it was just a Japanese colony/protectorate and make it seem genuinely Chinese

>Were the japs planning to reestablish the Republic of China with that flag?
no, not really. the flag and state of manchukuo were hastily thrown together to appease the higher ups in tokyo who were deeply displeased with mid-rank officers sperging out and conquering manchuria. after the conquest, tokyo indicated to them in no uncertain terms that they would not annex the territory. so a compromise of sorts was found...sort of.

Fucking japs goddamnit. They were planning to balkanize all China.

My great grandfather worked with some railway company and my mother says my grandmother met Pu Yi.
Don't know much about it other than the Japanese really tried to Japan-ify it.

I know in the original RoC flag yellow meant the Manchus, and they expanded that to most of the flag because it was Manchuria. Then they changed some ethnicities on the flag (since there were few Tibetans there, the Japanese took their place/color iirc)

somewhat, yes. they wanted to carve out north china as part of a japanese empire. i can't recall whether all of it would be made part of the empire or just a puppet, but i know that was the eventual goal for manchukuo. they shipped literally millions of japanese people into manchukuo to settle it, even as late as 1945.

the thing with japanese imperialism is that it suffered from a real bad case of mission creep, and it didn't have much of a coherent ideology behind it for the very longest time. put these two together, along with tons of hilarious japanese revisionism, and it can be difficult to pin down their motivations and goals. i mean, they went from wanting a neutral korea as buffer against russia in pre-1904 to conquering the entire east asian coast and fighting as far away as burma.

China was already divided and split between warlords, the Japanese capitalised on their ambitions because of the turmoil and proped up friendly warlords like in Shadong and set up puppets/protectorates like Manchukuo and Menjiang

>my great grandfather worked with some railway company

That'd probably be Mantetsu. It has been compared to the East India Company.

Playing as Manchuria in Kaiserreich is fantastic.

>they shipped literally millions of japanese people into manchukuo to settle it

Holy shit I didn't know about this. They were going full Generalplan Ost.
Yeah I knnow, I wonder why not a single warlord helped Japan.
>not the Legation Cities

For some reason I can't from the RoC anymore as them.

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>cutting edge technology from the 40s
>We didn't even have it in China back then

Fucking lying piece of chink.

It was built by the Japanese to be fair.

>I wonder why not a single warlord helped Japan.
Does pic related not count?

>Yeah I know, I wonder why not a single warlord helped Japan.
Zhang Zuolin was being bankrolled by the Japanese the entire time he was in power. so I guess you could say he was helping Japan.

One would think that "Chronic bandit trouble" would be an obvious understatement if reducing their number to a "mere" 40,000 qualifies as a great achievement to the Japanese authorities.

books.google.com/books?id=Qu5KojZANpQC&pg=PA1&dq&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
>By 1930 the country's total bandit population was being conservatively estimated at some twenty million.

Was he the crazy one who wrote poems to Khorne and said he would either come back to some town victorious or in a coffin so when he lost he was carried back into town completely alive and well in a coffin?

Man, china back then must have been a crazy place to live.

bump for answer for this

I feel like Republican China and the Russian Civil War would make fantastic settings for a number of videogame genres. They'd make good locales for Mount and Blade mods at the very least.

What the fuck is wrong with China.

I really want a Red Dead game (or at least something akin to that series) set in Shandong during the mid-1920s. Sort of like how you could traverse between Mexico and the US in RDR, you'd be able to move between British Weihai and Japanese Lüshun by taking a ferry across the Bohai Sea. You could have so many awesome characters too. German and Spanish arm dealers trying to sell box cannons, American Boxer Rebellion veterans, White Russian generals, Kempeitai, and more. I would play the shit out of this game.

dude had a somewhat tense relationship with the japanese. they bankrolled him to keep their investments and interests secure from bandits and the life(mostly the south manchurian railway company), but they absolutely loathed him trying to invade south of the great wall. the japanese did not like him putting himself, and by extension their interests, at risk by losing, nor did they want him to actually succeed and unite china. they just wanted him to sit around, which didn't interested him much. this was part of the reason why the army had him killed, hoping to control manchuria now via his son, zhang xueliang. unforuntately for them, his son was a big believer in chinese nationalism, which in turn led to them getting even more directly involved.

there are many reasons why they didn't, but the most important ones are
A.) re-establishing the empire was an absolute fantasy after 1911 and was not within japan's means before 1911.
B.) doing so would put the interests of all the european powers plus america in serious jeopardy, and turn them against japan.
C.) one of the big lessons japan took away from WWI was the need for strategic autarky, a need for their own secure resource base. a manchuria settled with japanese people did this much more effectively than a puppet empire ever would, and if the puppet empire ever got on firm footing, japan was fucked and would lose control quick.

The Warlord Period is popularly summarized in China as "'More officers than soldiers, more soldiers than guns, and more bandits than people."

Wild wild East, yo.

Can you recommend any books?

Not him, but I'd recommend pic related. It does a great job of depicting how the Warlord Era was able to go on for as long as it did thanks to huge influxes of foreign loans and weaponry.

Fuck yeah, this.

Holy shit, crowdfunding when

Probably a combination af being long time rivals with the chinese, so fuck them, and fears that an eventually industrial china would become to powerful to control.

desuarchive.org/his/thread/283168/

one of the few good threads on Veeky Forums, read this OP

I always thought it was neat how fast Japan switched from Harmony Under the Five Races to Homogeneous nation so quickly following the end of the war.

Prior to their surrender Japan was really acknowledging a theory of mixed racial roots from the east very the Korean peninsula and from the south-east.

As Japan began to lose the war and their holdings they promoted more and more a homogeneous theory that said that Japan was mixed but every mixed together thousands of years ago so the people on Japan were still Japanese. Following their surrender that narrative fir perfectly with Japan as a place of equality and no discrimination since Japan had lost its empire and was "only Japanese" now.

I've spent a fair amount of time in Shenyang (aka Fengtian or Mukden), and have talked to old a few old sods about the Japanese occupation.

They all disliked the Japanese, as they were invaders, but said that day to day they had no real problems with them i.e. Japanese people/soldiers were generally cordial. I suppose that makes sense if the Japanese wanted to exploit the NE as an industrial centre. But all held a particular grudge against the Russians for their behaviour during the liberation. It seems the Russians stole anything that wasn't nailed down.

>China is poorer than Russia at the time.
>Literally steal from these people.
Holy shit, Slavs.

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Before we get all pro Japanese though, I should say that the people I spoke to were all city dwelling educated middle class types. So during the occupation they and their families had decent jobs and money in their pockets. I imagine that you would get a different story about the Japanese if you talked to a peasant family of farmers or labourers.

The collaborators are usually middle class since they can manage shit. The low class sometimes don't collaborate since they got nothing to lose.

>Dr Yat-Sen, I'm KMT

True, but they basically keep society running, so their bound to become a part of the occupying system. But being well read and organised also means they're likely to be the source of greatest resistance to an occupying regime as well. One of my acquaintance's grandfather was a county level police/militia leader, and he used his position to help out communist agents avoid detection etc.

>tell me about the warlords! Why do they control parts of China?

A LOTTA LOYALTY FOR A HIRED BANDIT

Japan did nothing wrong. League of Nations was a bunch of fags.

Funny how he hated the Japanese, considering he saw through their shit that they were not going to restore him to the Throne as Emperor of China.

I kinda feel bad for him, always being manipulated, because some stupid bitch made you her heir after killing your father.

I still think it's pretty crazy how he managed to avoid getting executed like so many other collaborationists just because Mao thought it would look good to have the former emperor integrate into communist society.

>Mao thought it would look good to have the former emperor integrate into communist society.
It's a Chinese tradition to make transitions between dynasties look better.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_of_the_former_Chinese_imperial_clan

Couldn't upload this here because of file size limit (it's 10mb) but wanted to keep the thread alive.

my.mixtape.moe/tnyfly.jpg

It didn't last long. He was tortured in the last days of his life and suffered a slow and painful death.

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I recommend this book

It even details the arrival of the soviets

Anyone interested in readings on anti-Japanese Bandits and other outlaws in Manchuria should check this thread out.

forum.axishistory.com//viewtopic.php?t=110707

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I wonder if there was anyone in the Japanese empire at the time who sought to conquer and assimilate all of China into Japan rather than hold it as a client state or economic colony.

Would it have been feasible? China was 400 million to Japan's 70 million at the time. That's a near 10 to 2 ratio in difference in population.
What was Japan's end game in China anyway? To make it like how India is to Britain? Or to displace or genocide the entire population and repopulate it with ethnic Japanese?

>To make it like how India is to Britain?
As a matter of fact, pic related makes the case for Manchuria being just that.

But conquering the entirety of China was completely unfeasible, and they knew this. Imperial Japan wanted keep China under their thumb as much as they possibly could without outright conquering them. Failure to do so is what prompted them to do a full-scale invasion in 1937.

Isn't this the same time as the Warlord period, where all sorts of crazy characters ranging from mercs to White Russians were running around?

Different guy, but I'm only about 1/5 of the way though this but holy fuckballs, this is wacked.

Technically the Warlord era ended with the Northern Expedition's conclusion in 1927, but you still had stuff like the Central Plains War along with Xinjiang separatism, Manchukuo, and so on. The Nanjing Decade was more stable than what preceded it, but that isn't saying much.

Wasn't there still Guangxi clique and Xianjing in the 30's?

Not to mention killing dirty japs and getting to fuck chinese whores while smoking opium

Hey that's a picture of my grandma's uncle's family! What the heck?!?

I participated in that

>been this long
JUST

In summary: Japan's empire ran on pimps, opium, and comfort women.

Reading all that made me want to watch In the Realm of the Senses again.

Here's some random sports trivia that relates to Manchukuo. This is Tom Meschery. His parents were Russians who fled from the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution in 1917. They ultimately settled in Manchuria. Tom was born Tomislav Nikolayevich in 1938, during the early stages of the second Sino-Japanese war. His family would eventually be sent to a Japanese prison camp in Tokyo, but they all managed to survive.

After the war ended, his family relocated again to California. Because of his tall stature, Tom began playing Basketball. Turns out, he was a natural at it. during this time, his family changed their names due to the Red Scare, fearing people would think they were communists even though they originally supported the Tsar. Tom ended up getting accepted to St. Mary's, where he would start alongside the original Basketball GOAT, Wilt Chamberlain. He would get picked 7th overall in the 1961 NBA draft and go on to play 11 seasons in the fledgling early years of the NBA. first for the Philadelphia Warriors, then for the Expansion Seattle SuperSonics (RIP in Peace). He would make one All Star team in 1963. He was defined by his rough style of play, in the Sonics inaugural year, he led the team in Personal fouls.

When his basketball career finally ended, he went back to school and became a renowned poet and writer. He would also teach English for 30 years. He's pretty much one of the most notable people, and the most notable foreigner, born in Manchukuo during it's brief history.

>Born: China

Lmao superb post

He was Born in Harbin, which was part of Manchukuo at the time.

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So what was Russia's claim to manchuria?

The charles drage books from the 50's are alright

Does Russia ever need a claim?

Chinese Eastern Railway and the Russian minority in places like Harbin.

Bump