China's last emperor became the powerless figurehead of Japan's Manchurian puppet state
Puyi lost the Chinese throne at six when the 1911 revolution ended dynastic rule. Two decades later Japan, having seized Manchuria, installed him at the head of a new state called Manchukuo. He held no real power, few countries recognised the regime, and it collapsed within weeks of Japan's surrender in 1945.
Manchuria, today's north-east China, was the ancestral homeland of the Manchus, whose Qing dynasty ruled China from the 17th century, though by the 20th century Han Chinese far outnumbered them there. As the Qing weakened, Russia annexed land along the Amur River through treaties in 1858 and 1860 and by the 1890s dominated the rest, symbolised by its railway from Harbin to Vladivostok. Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War reversed that. Japan had sent a million soldiers and suffered around 500,000 casualties, and from 1905 its press began calling Manchuria sacred ground bought with Japanese lives.
Some Japanese nationalists had long eyed the region. The Black Dragon Society backed Sun Yat-sen's campaign against the Qing, hoping that the dynasty's fall would open the Manchu homeland to Japanese control. After the Mukden incident of 1931, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria, and the next year set up a government with Puyi as nominal head, proclaiming him emperor in 1934. Japanese officials made the real decisions.
Japan settled more than a million of its people there by 1945, many of them young farmers short of land, and the Korean population grew too. Under vice-minister Nobusuke Kishi, heavy industry expanded rapidly using forced labour drawn from local people. The territory served as the springboard for Japan's wider war on China from the 1937 Marco Polo Bridge incident. Mongolian-majority western districts ran under a slightly different system, and the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, now Dalian, stayed under direct Japanese rule.
Recognition came mainly from Axis-aligned states, and Chinese writers still often prefix its name with the character for puppet. The Soviet invasion of August 1945 toppled it, its government was dissolved after Japan surrendered in September, and China took over administration the following year.
Source: Manchukuo
