Manchukuo

Manchukuo was the state Japan created in Manchuria in 1932 and governed until 1945. Its founding was staged. Officers of the Kwantung Army blew up a section of their own railway near Mukden in September 1931, blamed Chinese soldiers, and used the incident to occupy the whole region. Tokyo was presented with the conquest as a fact. Puyi, the last Qing emperor, deposed as a child in 1912, was installed first as chief executive and then in 1934 as emperor of a country he did not rule. Every ministry had a Japanese vice-minister who held the actual authority. The League of Nations sent the Lytton Commission, which reported that the state was not a genuine independence movement; Japan left the League rather than accept the finding. Only a handful of states ever recognised it. Manchuria was industrialised hard - steel, coal, chemicals, the South Manchuria Railway - and the investment outlasted the regime, becoming the industrial base of the People's Republic. It was also the site of Unit 731, where human beings were used for biological weapons experiments. Millions of Japanese and Korean settlers were moved in. The Soviet Union invaded on 9 August 1945, destroyed the Kwantung Army in under two weeks, and the state dissolved. Puyi was captured, testified at Tokyo, spent a decade in Chinese prison and died a gardener in Beijing. Manchukuo is the standard example of a puppet state, and the term is applied to it more often than to any other. Its capital was Changchun, renamed Hsinking, meaning new capital. The state issued its own currency, postage and passports, and ran an airline. Around a million Japanese settlers were living there by 1945, and most of those who survived were repatriated over the following two years.

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