EnclavedMicrostate在2022-06-13~2022-06-19的言论

2022-06-19 作者: EnclavedMicrostate 原文 #Reddit 的其它文章

530: Primetime Parasocial Party - Weekly Discussion Thread, June 13th, 2022, submitted on 2022-06-14 00:11:11+08:00.

—– 530.1 —–2022-06-15 12:06:00+08:00:

A sort of issue would be that there are different Chineses (to use the phrase clumsily), and at present there’s a roughly 2:1 ratio (from what metrics I recall) of predominantly Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese viewers to Cantonese-speaking HK viewers, setting aside the possibility of VPN-using viewers doing things like superchatting via HKD and NTD. So unlike back when there was a bilibili presence and the vast majority of what I’ll term ‘Sinospheric’ viewers were Mandarin-speakers, we’ve moved to an environment where ostensibly one third of ‘Chinese’ viewers speak a different language from the other two thirds.

I’d imagine a loosening up of language use by certain members is more likely than the reintroduction of an international Chinese-language branch. There’s a couple of HoloEN members with varying levels of proficiency in certain Sinitic languages for instance: I don’t believe she has demonstrated it on stream as her Hololive VTuber persona, but >!Kiara does or did at one stage have some degree of Mandarin proficiency!<; the specific incident giving it away was scrubbed but >!Bae speaks Cantonese with Mama Rat!<.

—– 530.2 —–2022-06-17 01:10:39+08:00:

TBH there’s plenty of options though; you can have knives with an unpolished finish, or ostentatiously pattern-welded ones, or one with a black coating…

—– 530.3 —–2022-06-18 11:40:47+08:00:

Or more members are rebranding possibly: Froot has alluded to a ‘rebrand’ though what that may entail is as yet unclear.

—– 530.4 —–2022-06-20 15:35:54+08:00:

It probably depends on context. In Hololive’s case for instance, it’s pretty much just version numbers for their main model, 1.0 being the debut model and 2.0 being a touch-up of that. 3.0 looks to be some kind of clever thingy with more accessories that was teased at the HoloExpo back in March.

531: These salt-soaked caverns are teeming with pelagic nightmares - they must be flushed out!, submitted on 2022-06-14 09:04:08+08:00.

—– 531.1 —–2022-06-14 11:50:52+08:00:

I need this template so much

532: Which movie about World War II do you consider the most realistic?, submitted on 2022-06-14 19:01:18+08:00.

—– 532.1 —–2022-06-14 19:29:54+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the “most”, the “worst”, “unknown”, or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

533: Why didn’t the USSR annex or put a socialist government in Finland after WW2?, submitted on 2022-06-14 20:26:23+08:00.

—– 533.1 —–2022-06-14 21:15:57+08:00:

Hey there,

Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we’re letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as ‘Why didn’t X do Y’ relatively often don’t get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, ‘why didn’t X do Y’ questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It’s worth remembering that people in the past couldn’t see into the future, and they generally didn’t have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn’t necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn’t happen didn’t happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!

534: What were the diffrences between the Schlieffen Plan and the Blitzkrieg. Which strategy was more effective and why?, submitted on 2022-06-14 20:56:47+08:00.

—– 534.1 —–2022-06-14 21:21:10+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you’ve researched so far, what resources you’ve consulted, and what you’ve learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we’d approve. Additionally, if you’re not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, “Finding and Understanding Sources”, which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

535: What are some of the most influential and secretive US government programs that were uncovered, such as MKULTRA?, submitted on 2022-06-15 17:18:24+08:00.

—– 535.1 —–2022-06-15 18:14:36+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the “most”, the “worst”, “unknown”, or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

—– 536.1 —–2022-06-15 22:54:54+08:00:

Is there a specific context in which that appeared? As in they openly stated they wouldn’t bring up 4Ground again?

—– 536.2 —–2022-06-15 22:55:18+08:00:

No problem! For my part I’ve only ever backed one Kickstarter campaign (also for a tabletop wargame project), but while that overran it did deliver.

—– 536.3 —–2022-06-15 23:40:24+08:00:

Not all, but a good few (smile)

—– 536.4 —–2022-06-16 00:18:36+08:00:

Glad you enjoyed (smile)

—– 536.5 —–2022-06-16 00:19:02+08:00:

Ahh, well. Glad you enjoyed!

—– 536.6 —–2022-06-16 02:16:54+08:00:

Ah, is that last one AK?

—– 536.7 —–2022-06-16 02:17:26+08:00:

It’s complicated and one has to try to trust that your co-players aren’t awful. Which, er… can be over-optimistic as I myself know.

—– 536.8 —–2022-06-17 12:52:43+08:00:

I stumbled across TMP in I think 2016 or so and I’ve hung around there since; I suspect that makes me rather unusual though all told.

537: Sino-Soviet strategic cooperation documents “Protocol No. 1”, What are the “Errikon” and “Motad” Missiles referenced?, submitted on 2022-06-16 12:07:25+08:00.

—– 537.1 —–2022-06-16 13:12:12+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

538: Was the Dzungar genocide exaggerated?, submitted on 2022-06-17 00:37:15+08:00.

—– 538.1 —–2022-06-17 02:19:11+08:00:

(Some quick notes on terminology: Firstly, Zungar, Zunghar, Dzungar, Dzungar and Junghar are all acceptable variant spellings; I have opted for Zunghar out of familiarity. Secondly, the term ‘bondservant’, which crops up in a quote later, refers to a particular category of enslaved person known in Manchu as booi.)

The post you’ve come across is problematic for a number of reasons, and while I do have specific criticisms I want to first lay out a general statement about the Zunghar Genocide to begin with so as not to broadcast those problematic elements before frontending what I would consider to be the most historiographically correct narative.

I’ve written about the Zunghar Genocide before in this answer, which as you will note is more about the context than the act. The reason for that is relatively simple: almost the entire historiography of the Zunghar Genocide in English consists of a few pages in Peter Perdue’s 2005 monograph China Marches West. This makes discussing the event in depth difficult, especially as many of the details of the genocide given in Perdue’s work, particularly on its demographic impact, derive primarily from Wei Yuan’s Shengwuji, a privately-written military history of the Qing composed over 80 years later by a Cantonese scholar, Wei Yuan.

Even if we accept the not-unlikely scenario that Wei Yuan’s figures were very rough estimates, we still have to acknowledge the sheer scale of the mortality suffered by the Zunghars in 1757-8. Per Perdue’s summary of Wei Yuan, the Zunghar population was numbered by the Qing at around 600,000, of whom 30% were killed directly by the Qing army and 40% died of smallpox (against which Qing troops were mostly inoculated). Of the survivors, two-thirds fled to the Kazakh hordes or became Russian clients, while the remainder were enslaved by the Qing. Even if a 70% death rate were considered exaggerated, whatever actual, somewhat smaller figure it might be would still be horrifically vast.

The thing to bear in mind is that genocide is defined by intent, not by extent. There is no point on the number line dividing genocide from some lesser form of systematic mass killing, because the distinguishing feature of genocide is not quantitative but qualitative: it is the targeted killing of members of one or more groups of people who are defined as having a certain identity, on the basis of said identity. This is why there is the related category of cultural genocide, in which a state or polity attempts to erase a particular identity without aiming to actually kill those who are deemed to fall under that identity. To state it in brief, genocide is an attempt to destroy an identity, typically through the intentional killing, by direct or indirect action, of those the perpetrator categorises under that identity.

And with that in mind, the Zunghar Genocide absolutely, unequivocally counts as an undertaking with genocidal intent. If we quote Perdue verbatim here:

…Qianlong rejected all leniency. He now ordered the massacre of all Zungharian captives: “Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur.” In another edict he declared: “If a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surrender. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. Tell Tsengünjav to massacre these crafty Zunghars. Do not believe what they say.”

He clearly had to overcome resistance from local military commanders, since he repeated his order several times, using the term jiao (extermination) over and over again. General Jaohûi was praised and awarded high rank for reporting massacres, as was Tangkelu, who captured the Khoit Chebudeng Dorji and “exterminated his followers.” Tangkelu was allowed to incorporate his enemy’s families and cattle into his own tribe. Other commanders, like Hadaha and Agui, however, were punished for merely occupying Zunghar pastures while allowing the people to escape. The remnants of Amursana’s shattered bands were to be tracked down even into Russian territory and eliminated.

The emperor deliberately targeted young and able men in order to destroy the Zunghars as a people. When Chebudengzhabu captured a group of Khoits, whom he was going to award to the loyal Khalkhas, the emperor instructed him to “take the young and strong and massacre them,” and award only the women as booty. Even some Zunghar youths who surrendered after the defeat of their elders could not be spared, since “their ancestors had been chieftains.” They had to be executed or made bondservants of the conquering soldiers. In 1756 the court had recommended the use of food relief to win over the Zunghar people by giving them grain, tea, and animals if they surrendered. Now the emperor implicitly recommended the use of starvation tactics, commenting that it would be “easy to exterminate rebels because they had run out of provisions.” Old men, children, and women were to be spared and sent as bondservants to other Mongol tribes and Manchu bannermen, but they would lose their tribal identity; they could not preserve their tribal (otoq) names or their titles, such as zaisang (minister or clan leader). Reliable Mongols designated to supervise these remnants took instead the Chinese official titles zongguan and fuzongguan.

The intent and execution of the acts here are clear: the Qianlong Emperor was ordering the complete and total extermination of the Zunghars as a people. That is not to say that he was seeking the death of every individual Zunghar. Rather, the aim was to destroy Zunghar family and tribal units in order to erase the idea of the Zunghars existing as a coherent group of people. Yes, many Zunghar individuals survived. Indeed, a handful who defected to the Qing before the genocide, such as Ayusi, actually attained high status within the Qing state, but they did so through swearing new loyalties and participating in the slaughter of their former fellow-tribespeople. And there were those enslaved and those who fled among the Russians and Kazakhs. But most of those who did so took on new tribal identities. Aside from a few pockets of self-identifying Olots (one of the Zunghar sub-tribes), the Zunghars as a people were utterly wiped out.

I will address specific issues with the post in a reply to this answer later.

—– 538.2 —–2022-06-17 03:51:51+08:00:

The post makes a number of claims which are questionable at best. Addressing them in order:

[Referring to the historians who recorded the events of the genocide] Their purpose was to praise the military exploits of Manchu emperor and Kiss the ass of Manchu emperor.

That there was some degree of triumphalism involved in the narratives of the campaigns against the Zunghars written by Han Chinese historians does not imply that those narratives are inherently unreliable on the details of the genocide. Even assuming that these are narratives that are fundamentally attempting to flatter the Qing rulers (I’ll get to it in a minute), so what? It isn’t a motive to actively lie about the extent of the destruction inflicted. I’d also note that the consistent use of ‘Manchu’ in the post may suggest in some regard that the poster belongs to a particular school of thought denouncing Manchu rule as illegitimate by virtue of its barbarism and to specifically other the Qing’s rulers, and while yes, the Qing absolutely maintained forms of Manchu-Han segregation, presenting pro-Qing triumphalist historiography as sycophantic flattery by Han Chinese historians is a badly under-nuanced framing.

Much of the remainder of the post attempts to give practical reasons for why the massacres either happened on a smaller scale than alleged, or did not constitute a genocide. As noted, this is wrong on a fundamental theoretical level because, to repeat, genocide is about intent and not about extent, but there are also simple factual and interpretive issues as well.

1. Even if Manchu emperor had this idea, it could not be done with ancient technology.

Emperor Kangxi’s crusade against Dzungar tribe was to occupy Xinjiang, and not for the purpose of killing people to vent their anger.

As you will have noted from my answer above, it was the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1796/9) who ordered the genocide against the Zunghars, not his grandfather the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661-1722). Moreover, in neither case was the occupation of Xinjiang a desired end goal. The Kangxi Emperor simply wished to eliminate Galdan, who was an active threat on the Qing’s western border in Mongolia; the Qianlong Emperor, as we have seen, was deliberately seeking to exterminate the Zunghars as an end in itself. Indeed, the conquest of Xinjiang (if by that we mean the Tarim Basin in the southern half of what is now called Xinjiang) was an afterthought to the campaign against the Zunghar chief Amursana, undertaken to prevent the formation of an independent coalition of the region’s city-states under the leadership of local rulers who had, like Amursana, reneged on their alliance with the Qing.

If all were killed, who would supply the army with food, so subjectively there would be no genocide.

The Qing had made extensive logistical preparations for their campaigns in Zungharia: the economy of Gansu was artificially stimulated to lower food prices; depots were established to store the large amounts of foodstuffs needed for offensives into the steppe, most importantly at the Qing-allied city of Hami at the edge of the Tarim Basin; provision was made for all the necessary pack animals (horses, donkeys, and camels) to carry those foodstuffs; and arrangements were made with other tribes, such as the Kazakhs, to provide additional livestock to the army on the march. The Qing were, frankly, very prepared for a war in which their enemies would not be trying to feed them.

Dzungar is a nomadic nation, which can run away on horseback at any time, which is difficult to catch. Manchu Emperor can’t do it if he wants to commit genocide!

The problem of course is that if you pursue a nomadic army with a largely mounted army of your own, you can probably maintain a pursuit, especially against groups of enemy combatants protecting slower-moving civilians. The user seems to be alleging that the Qing were pursuing with infantry, but they had plenty of cavalry including of course allies from other Mongolian tribes, as noted above. The notion that the Qing were physically incapable of pursuing the Zunghars is absurd. And to stress again, what matters is not whether they succeeded, what matters is the fact they tried.

Otherwise, why did the counterinsurgency war last for 70 years? It has been from the period of Emperor Kangxi to the period of Emperor Qianlong.

The phrasing ‘the counterinsurgency war’ deserves several substantial quibbles. I actually don’t have the biggest quibble per se on the the ‘counterinsurgency’ front, even if I am quite sure the user is misusing it in some way; I do think you can argue that modern counterinsurgency doctrines have remarkable and non-coincidental similarities to how historical sedentary states approached warfare against steppe nomads. But calling the Qing-Zunghar conflicts a singular war is just not correct. While there were not always formal declarations of war and peace, fighting was generally sporadic, with major periods of intensity in 1687-97, 1718-1732, and 1752-58, but marked by substantial lulls in between, consisting of lengthy peaces punctuated by low-intensity raiding. Each of the major periods of conflict culminated in a substantial increase in Qing territory in one fell swoop, rather than a slow, incremental process of individual tribes either voluntarily or forcibly falling under Qing dominion in a continuous, decades-long process.

If Chinese ancient dynasties were able to genocide nomads, Europe wouldn’t be conquered by “God’s whip” Attila and Genghis Khan.

The conflation of all pre-20th century Chinese states as essentially equivalent ‘ancient dynasties’ is singularly unhelpful. Compared to the Ming, the Qing established a considerably greater degree of interventionist power within its borders allowing it to efficiently acquire and harness its resource base – a resource base that had expanded massively thanks to the Columbian Exchange and consequent growth in population enabled by new energy-efficient crops. Moreover, the Qing were much more effective at mobilising non-Sinitic modes of political legitimacy to secure and maintain support from various Inner Asian polities, and were not so blinded by xenophobia as to be unwilling to make compromises. The Qing conquest of Inner Asia was the product of a state which had immense capacity for action combined with a unique – or at least distinctive – political makeup that made them extremely effective at making use of their harnessed capacity.

2. The Qing army and the Dzungar Mongol Army did not have a generational difference in weapons.

I had a very difficult time following the course of this part of the argument, but this is also untrue. The Qing were able to employ considerably more and better gunpowder weapons, both artillery and small arms, than the Zunghars. The Zunghars did have firearms, both of local and foreign manufacture (the latter mainly either bought or stolen from the Russians), but not at a comparable scale, and they were particularly lacking in artillery which the Qing on the other hand used in prodigious amounts.

3. The Qing army wiped out mainly the tribes and thieves who had rebelled after the fake surrender.

That the Qing emphasised going after those who had overtly declared themselves against the Qing does not absolve them of pursuing a general policy of genocide against the Zunghars writ large. Again, what matters is intent and not extent. I would also note that the ‘mainly’ there is doing a lot of work, and the wrong work at that, because how is this supposed to absolve the Qing of wiping out tribes that didn’t rebel!?

Otherwise, how could the descendants of the Dzungar tribe like Yi Linzhen still be alive?

To put it glibly, this is like asking how there are still Jews today if the Holocaust was a genocide.

In short, the linked post is essentially a roundabout form of genocide apologia with an argument as follows:

  • The Qing weren’t trying to kill off all the Zunghars, but

  • Even if they were, they couldn’t actually kill any Zunghars, but

  • Even if they did, they were (mostly) killed for understandable reasons, and also

  • There are still Zunghar descendants alive today so clearly it wasn’t a successful genocide.

So for one it relies on a non-academic definition of genocide, and for another it does effectively concede that there were mass killings that occurred, and also that doing so would have been desirable, at least to historical Chinese states, if we go by its claim that

If Chinese ancient dynasties were able to genocide nomads, Europe wouldn’t be conquered by “God’s whip” Attila and Genghis Khan.

The only way to interpret the above quote is that ancient Chinese states would have wanted to commit genocide against steppe nomads, and that it would have been good if they had done so.

So yes, the Zunghar Genocide was a genocide, no it has not been exaggerated, and don’t get your history off Quora. Especially now that it’s not even plagiarised from AskHistorians anymore.

539: Need help translating this. I got this from a friend of mine. The inside looks like wax or clay., submitted on 2022-06-17 01:45:54+08:00.

—– 539.1 —–2022-06-18 01:01:53+08:00:

I concur with /u/Red_D_Rabbit that this is a box of seal paste (印泥 yin ni), and doing a bit of extra Googling specifically of a type called Zhangzhou Babao (漳州八寶) specifically associated with Zhangzhou in Fujian. In terms of the sticker, I believe that the outer four characters are supposed to be read top-bottom-right-left to form 魁紅硃砂, which would translate roughly to ‘best red cinnabar’, but I’ll admit that it’s unclear if that is the order in which they ought to go. However, I’m having some difficulty with the brand because I’m not confident identifying the leftmost character. I’m also having very little luck finding any brand of seal paste with the characters ‘芳齊’, so it may be an old, defunct brand.

540: Why did Japan create the Reorganized National Government under Wang Jingwei instead of granting the territory to their already existing puppet of Manchukuo?, submitted on 2022-06-17 05:37:23+08:00.

—– 540.1 —–2022-06-17 21:14:08+08:00:

To lay something out beforehand, this specific matter comes well after my actual specialism (only by about 30 years to be fair, but still), and I am very willing to be corrected in part or in whole by anyone whose toes I may end up treading on should I get things wrong.

On paper, Puyi not being given control over Japanese-occupied China is something that might be a little odd given the fact that it was his brief tenure as Qing Emperor that had gained him his figurehead post in Manchukuo. But this becomes considerably more explicable when we really dig into both the philosophical basis of Manchukuo and the practical mechanisms behind the Chinese collaboration governments. For some background I recommend reading this answer by /u/hellcatfighter on the early years of Manchukuo and this answer by myself on the formation of the collaboration governments, but this answer should be able to stand on its own.

Manchukuo

As has been repeated to death, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and subsequent establishment of Manchukuo was not a result of central government directive, but rather the result of junior officers of the Kwantung Army attempting to gain what they saw as a more favourable position for Japan after their hoped-for client warlord Zhang Xueliang turned out to be sympathetic to the KMT. However, I would argue that we can discern some consistent patterns in Japanese activities in this particular period.

Critically, we need to understand that the Japanese did not present Manchukuo as an entity holding only part of its entitled territory. Rather, the official line, at least in the first couple of years after the 1931 invasion, was that Japan had restored the historical independence of the Manchu people and established a nation-state for them, liberating them from Han Chinese rule. Qing-era cultural products such as the Qianlong Emperor’s Ode to Mukden were mobilised to demonstrate the existence of a distinct Manchu nation with a clear spatial presence, to which the Republic of China was unjustly laying claim. Thanks to the rejection of Manchukuo’s legitimacy by the international community, this line was eventually dropped in favour of a more pro-Japanese policy, with Manchukuo eventually having to adopt its own composite national model on comparable lines to the ROC, with Manchus, Japanese, Koreans, Han, and Mongols constituting a multiethnic ‘Manchurian’ nation.

But even with that change, Manchukuo remained conceptualised as a limited regional state with authority over a constructed ‘Manchurian’ nation within that state’s borders, not as the prelude to the establishment of a wider Japanese puppet government over China. Indeed, Japan, insofar as we can speak of a single unified concept of it, was very much not intending to invade China: the provocations that led to war in 1937 were, like those of 1931, not sanctioned by the civilian government in Tokyo, and were instead the result of the army acting on its own initiative. When war began, Manchukuo’s role was limited by virtue of its being considered independent from China, as opposed to a Japanese-ruled portion thereof. But it is worth adding that the officer corps never presented a singular united front. The Kōdōha (‘Imperial Way Faction’) for instance was extremely invested in the prospect of going to war with the USSR, but were opposed by a loose coalition known as the Tōseiha (‘Control Faction’) that was somewhat (though not substantially) less alarmist, and which successfully saw the Kōdōha destroyed in 1936. Manchukuo thus ended up as somewhat of a relic of an earlier, more aggressively northward anti-Soviet strategy backed by officers who did not really intend for the prospect of a war southwards towards China.

I think it also worth contextualising Manchukuo alongside two other Japanese attempts at puppet states: Mengjiang (aka Mengkukuo) and the Abdülkerim regime in Xinjiang. In Inner Mongolia, groups of adventurers, some acting without official sanction, attacked areas of ROC rule and installed Prince Demchugdongrub, who had been attempting to organise an independent state in Inner Mongolia since the early 1930s, as the regional head of state. Subsequently, in 1933, the exiled Ottoman prince Abdülkerim, who had been attempting to establish an independent regime in Xinjiang as the prelude to an eventual Turanist conquest of Central Asia and Turkey, was invited to Tokyo by members of the Imperial Diet closely linked with the Kwantung Army. These had hoped to be able to use Abdülkerim as a puppet leader who would, even if constrained to Xinjiang, serve to present a buffer against Soviet ambitions. While concrete support did not materialise thanks to opposition from the Foreign Ministry, some arms and intelligence leaks did find their way to Abdülkerim’s separatists; too little, too late, however, as the USSR crushed Abdülkerim’s forces and effectively installed their own puppet, the Han Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai.

The strategic motive behind the separatist states was the perceived need to establish a ‘citadel against Communism’ and constrain Soviet ambitions by installing Japanese-backed regimes in North Asia. The establishment of the Mongolian People’s Republic had effectively eliminated a major buffer zone between the USSR and China, and so the creation of Japanese puppets along the ROC’s northern border was seen by the militarist factions in Japan as a means of containment. But we could also argue that there was a somewhat hypocritical, if perhaps no less sincere for it, ideological dimension, in that these regimes were specifically being established in historically non-Han regions within the nominal territorial bounds of the ROC. As such, the Japanese-backed regimes could be understood as being presented as the decolonisation of the former Qing empire, albeit ones that in the long term would simply serve as conduits for Japan to establish its own imperial dominion in place of China’s.

When we look at it from this perspective, Manchukuo’s limited territorial scope starts to make a lot more sense. For one it was part of a strategy of anti-Soviet containment that hadn’t been abandoned as such, but whose fiercest proponents had been expunged; for another it had been consistently conceptualised not as a part of China under Japanese indirect rule, but rather as a state independent of China, where the severing of ties went both ways.

—– 540.2 —–2022-06-17 21:21:05+08:00:

The Collaboration Governments

Looking at it from a practical point of view, we need to appreciate that the collaboration governments emerged out of comparable conditions to those that started the war in 1937. For the most part, regional military forces established their own puppet governments on the assumed basis that this served the broader interests of Japan but in a way that was amenable to their own specific objectives and intentions.

On 14 December 1937, the North China Area Army, headquartered in Beiping, established its own puppet government, the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, headed by Wang Kemin, who had served several ministerial stints with some of the warlord governments in Beijing before the KMT Northern Expedition. The PGROC emerged out of similar considerations to Manchukuo and Mengjiang, serving as a Japanese-backed state concentrated near the border with the Soviet-backed Mongolian People’s Republic, emerging out of the assumption that the war in China would be brief and end in Chiang Kai-Shek’s concession to Japanese demands. However, unlike Manchukuo it had been done under instructions of the civilian government to establish friendly governments in China. Prince Konoe, then Prime Minister, would subsequently issue the aite ni sezu declaration on 16 January 1938, declaring that Japan no longer recognised Chiang Kai-Shek’s government as legitimate and that it would ‘look forward to the establishment and growth of a new Chinese regime’ amenable to Japan’s interests.

At the same time as Wang Kemin was being installed in northern China, a second collaboration government, the Reformed Government of the Republic of China, headed by Liang Hongzhi and staffed mostly by disillusioned members of the KMT’s conservative wing, would be formed by the Central China Area Army, headquartered at Shanghai. The CCAA’s Special Service Department had been organising this government without any consultation with the already-established PGROC or the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and while there was some official objection, ultimately nobody successfully prevented the CCAA from creating this government as a separate regime from Wang Kemin’s, leading to there being two separate Japanese puppet governments in China, backed by two separate armies.

Bear in mind that at this time, the Kwantung Army continued to exist as its own, third entity, watching the border with the USSR (and thus ending up involved in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in 1939, where after some initial successes they were eventually defeated by a force under the command of a certain Georgy Zhukov, future Marshal of the Soviet Union). Manchukuo thus ended up functionally as the puppet state providing the economic base for the Kwantung Army, while Wang Kemin’s Provisional Government served as such to the NCAA and Liang Hongzhi’s Reformed Government to the CCAA. In late 1939, the NCAA and CCAA were merged into a singular China Expeditionary Army, though the two puppets remained separate.

The original hope had been that Wang, being a major political rival to Chiang Kai-Shek, would be able to draw much more widespread support than Liang Hongzhi and Wang Kemin had done, and that he would unite the two existing puppet regimes just as the two armies had been united, but as the arrangements for Wang’s installation were being made, his role became increasingly minimised. Prince Konoe, who had given Wang Jingwei the offer of heading a unified collaborator government, resigned on 5 January 1939, leaving Wang without his major backer in Tokyo and thus subject to the whims of the regional commanders of the Japanese armies. The deal Wang Jingwei accepted in December demanded almost total Japanese control of the Chinese economy and government in the region under his control, as well as effectively conceding that Wang Kemin’s existing regime in Beiping would continue to exist as an entity autonomous of the Reorganised Government at Nanjing.

In effect, the appointment of Wang Jingwei simply entailed replacing the existing government of Liang Hongzhi with an even weaker one even more directly subordinated to Japanese interests, but without compromising the existing arrangements built up by the former North China Area Army in its own sphere of activity. The expansion of Manchukuo would have run counter to this for a number of obvious practical reasons, the most important of which was that Manchukuo was the Kwantung Army’s puppet. Expanding it would have fatally undercut the NCAA and CCAA (in 1938) or the China Expeditionary Army (in 1940), something that the latter would obviously not agree to if it could avoid it, which (by virtue of having lots of guns and lots of troops to shoot those guns) it very much could.

So even from a pragmatic standpoint, the expansion of Manchukuo made little sense. In 1937, Japan had yet to declare the overthrow of Chiang Kai-Shek as an official war goal and was building collaboration governments mainly out of the necessity of having some administrative machinery over occupied territory. In 1938, although it had now ceased to recognise Chiang’s government, it had already established two collaboration governments in China presided over by the armies actually in the region. In 1939, it was seeking to provide a concrete, viable rival to Chiang, whom Puyi most certainly was not. And in 1940, it just wanted to get Liang Hongzhi’s regime out of the way and a firmer hand in China, and expanding Manchukuo was not a practicable way of achieving that.

Conclusions

We need to regard the fragmentary nature of the Japanese puppet regimes in ROC-claimed territory as being partly intentional and partly unintentional, often at the same time. Manchukuo in particular was conceived of and presented as a breakaway region and not as a Japanese foothold into China as understood as a singular entity, and so it did not make sense to suddenly give it control of parts of China, which by the official line was now an entirely separate country. If China held no claim over Manchukuo, the reverse was also true. Manchukuo was also specifically tied with the Japanese Kwantung Army, whose political interests were decidedly distinct from the Japanese armies operating in China proper; giving the latter’s economic base over to the former made neither strategic nor political sense.

Sources and Further Reading:

Aside from the sources in the two linked answers, see also Selçuk Esenbel, ‘Japan’s Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 1900-1945’, in The American Historical Review 109:4 (2004).

541: What are the major differences between French Revolution of 1789 and 1848?, submitted on 2022-06-17 22:47:11+08:00.

—– 541.1 —–2022-06-18 00:41:15+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

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542: Historian or not, what are some funny comparisons between modern and historical events that make them seem a lot less serious?, submitted on 2022-06-18 00:22:11+08:00.

—– 542.1 —–2022-06-18 00:30:28+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates our ‘20-Year Rule’. To discourage off-topic discussions of current events, questions, answers, and all other comments must be confined to events that happened 20 years ago or more. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult this Rules Roundtable.

543: Aqua’s Updated Family Tree, submitted on 2022-06-18 00:59:57+08:00.

—– 543.1 —–2022-06-18 14:57:23+08:00:

But wait, if Noel is also Lamy’s mother…

What is this family tree?

544: Did Kiara stop doing holotalk?, submitted on 2022-06-18 03:35:35+08:00.

—– 544.1 —–2022-06-18 11:33:40+08:00:

Seems like what you got was a rrat about Ayame looking at Hololive as an occasional meal ticket so I guess I’ll offer a more reasonable explanation. Ayame has been dealing with a lot of personal and family issues for a good while now, but she’s been a consistent guest in 3D Lives and has remained active on Twitter, so it’s not like she’s popping into Hololive every once in a while. It’s only quite recently that she’s been back to streaming significantly. Depending on when Kiara mentioned not thinking Ayame would be likely, it’s very likely it was at a time when she was streaming very rarely and going through a lot of issues (and there are still issues she’s going through now), and it just might not be great doing an hour-long interview segment, even one that’s relatively chill like Holotalk, when you’re in that kind of situation and genuinely vulnerable. I can’t speak for Kiara’s specific thought process, but I’d imagine it’s not too far off.

545: Can anyone translate this ingot text?, submitted on 2022-06-19 01:48:13+08:00.

—– 545.1 —–2022-06-19 14:08:41+08:00:

Unfortunately you’ve taken the photos upside down, but I’ve flipped it. It seems like this is in fact a Japanese piece, although it’s understandably not easy to tell as a layperson as all the characters are kanji (Chinese characters as used in Japanese). The piece itself however is of Japanese origin, as these relatively thin ingots were developed in Japan in the Edo period. The reverse inscription has 定 jō (which serves as a proof mark), 常是 jōze (the title of a mint official) and 銀座 ginza (mint). The obverse is worn to where only 銀 gin (silver) is legible, but doing some quick research the full inscription is probably 一分銀 ichi bu gin, with the bu being a weight/currency unit corresponding to about 7.5g of silver.

—– 545.2 —–2022-06-19 16:34:05+08:00:

Yep.

546: How much did the average upper class Japanese person know about the rest of the world during the period when the country was isolated?, submitted on 2022-06-19 11:38:06+08:00.

—– 546.1 —–2022-06-19 14:53:59+08:00:

More may of course be said, but the alleged ‘isolation’ of Edo-era Japan has been greatly exaggerated. See the answers to:

And also thanks again to ParallelPain for compiling these links previously so I could copy-paste the whole thing again here.

547: Which politician(s) were not the first pick?, submitted on 2022-06-19 12:35:34+08:00.

—– 547.1 —–2022-06-19 15:01:25+08:00:

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548: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of June 20, 2022, submitted on 2022-06-19 23:00:16+08:00.

—– 548.1 —–2022-06-21 03:29:07+08:00:

I gave up on Extra Credits not long after Extra History became a thing. It’s just… so bad.

—– 548.2 —–2022-06-21 03:37:21+08:00:

I never played the game myself, though I did watch bits and pieces of Ludohistory’s Twitch streams of it and even appeared as a guest on the last one to have a bit of a chat about its China zone. Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTakIeSy4Yk&list=PLvFfHAMv6EH97hZ_B4JUHBuBK4yRAWx5l

It’s interesting being someone who mostly operates in historian spaces where most of the critique was really about the terrible optics of a colonialism MMO and the game’s constant falling back on colonialist tropes and motifs, and then coming over to more mainstream spaces to find that it’s also just a shit game.

—– 548.3 —–2022-06-25 02:23:39+08:00:

He doesn’t, although in the most recent episode there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it visual reference in that the book that Dr. Mbenga reads to his daughter was written by Benny Russell.

—– 548.4 —–2022-06-25 02:24:53+08:00:

Is this the infamous Ricky D. Phillips, Falklands War conspiracy theorist and alleged Hannibal march route discoverer? As a direct participant in part of the drama (I was and still technically am a mod of r/badhistory, where a part of it played out), I would be very interested in a more detached take. For what it’s worth, he is very willing to be abusive, it’s just he seems to have done so in spaces that are/were, shall we say, relatively well-moderated.

—– 548.5 —–2022-06-25 02:53:49+08:00:

I’m very torn on Strange New Worlds, but not because I think it’s badly executed. Frankly, assuming that episodes 9 and 10 maintain the level of quality of 1-8, its first season will have been the most consistently high-quality season Trek has ever produced. The cast is brilliant, I like the dialogue, I like the production design, and I think it mostly handles its diversity in a way that kind of is in your face without feeling in your face, if that’s a good way of putting it.

But.

When it comes to the episode concepts, I keep having the feeling of, ‘haven’t we seen this many times before’? Pretty much every episode draws on some standard Trek episode formulae:

  • Episode 1: Undercover mission on a pre-warp planet Gone Wrong – see TOS The Return of the Archons, TNG First Contact, ENT The Communicator

  • Episode 2: Communicating with a sentient being via a method other than conventional language – TOS The Devil In the Dark, TNG Darmok

  • Episode 3: Space Disease causes people to act weird – TOS The Naked Time, TNG The Naked Now, DS9 Fascination, ENT Singularity

  • Episode 4: Submarine hunt + ship in crisis – TOS Balance of Terror, Wrath of Khan, DS9 Civil Defense

  • Episode 5: The not-too-funny but still bemusing comedy hijinks episode + body swap – TOS The Trouble With Tribbles, DS9 Little Green Men, VOY Body and Soul

  • Episode 6: The literary adaptation (in this case of Ursula Le Guin’s Those Who Walk Away From Omelas) – TOS The Enemy Within (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), TOS Obsession (Moby Dick), Wrath of Khan (also Moby Dick), DS9 Fascination (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

  • Episode 7: Space pirates – TNG Gambit, VOY Basics, ENT Shockwave

  • Episode 8: Non-space-disease thing causes characters to act out of character or at least messes with the costuming – TNG Qpid, TNG Masks, DS9 Our Man Bashir

The thing is, they’re all done well. And there are definitely sparks of originality in every one. Just to name a few, episode 3 has an interesting if cut-short rumination on Trek’s scepticism of transhumanism through a character who hasn’t internalised an anti-transhuman perspective the way Bashir had on DS9; episode 6 goes for a classic SF/fantasy work that Trek hasn’t previously engaged with directly; and I really like how episode 7 tries to tease at some more complex views of identity by having a gender-nonbinary character try to connect with Spock’s own struggle with a different sort of non-binary identity. I get that on some level every story has been told, I just have this feeling that Strange New Worlds isn’t doing much, er, new, even if it’s fantastically good at doing it.

—– 548.6 —–2022-06-25 17:13:02+08:00:

That’s fair, but I suppose if you ever want a co-writer who did a little reading on the Falklands in the past, I am willing to render my services.

—– 548.7 —–2022-06-25 20:13:42+08:00:

Or use a site like camas.unddit.com.

—– 548.8 —–2022-06-25 20:23:09+08:00:

I was wondering how long it would take for it to reach HobbyDrama. All told, I feel like there isn’t much to discuss or at least not really anywhere it can still go. Both parties are essentially agreeing to disagree, and unless Mikeneko develops a more extreme case of lastworditis, this is probably where it all ends.

—– 548.9 —–2022-06-25 22:53:21+08:00:

Well, that’s if we presume that Mikeneko’s intention was to silence the antis. I personally don’t think she’s trying to do that, or to stir up new drama. To be honest, what seems to be the case is that she felt like Cover’s statement didn’t adequately represent her own view of what went down, she prepared a statement with her lawyers and cleared it with Cover to just get her side of the story out there, and she is prepared for people to either accept it or not. Maybe she could just move on without saying anything, but she does deserve to be able to deliver her perspective on what happened, whether or not the people reading it agree with that perspective.

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