Territorial Natures

A critical account of the Japanese occupation in Inner Mongolia.
 
Early in the twentieth century, the steppe borderlands between China and Mongolia erupted in violence. As imperial Japan expanded into the area, this crisis between nomadic and settler communities posed fundamental problems in governance. In response, Japanese and Mongol leaders together proposed a radical solution: demarcating an autonomous region in Manchukuo for minority peoples, a new kind of political space that would later define the territorial structure of Communist China. 
 
In Territorial Natures, Sakura Christmas explores how the fraught partition of this autonomous region warped the ethnic and environmental boundaries of Manchukuo. She challenges its origin story as a socialist invention by the Chinese state, instead seeing it as also a fascist extension of the Japanese occupation. By reading Chinese and Mongolian sources against Japanese archives, Christmas reveals how this contested history seeded the volatile landscape of autonomous regions in the People’s Republic of China today.