Editing Manchukuo (section)

== Demographics ==
[[File:Map of Manchukuo divisions en.svg|thumb|[[List of administrative divisions of Manchukuo|Administrative divisions of Manchukuo]] in 1938]]
In 1908, the number of residents was 15,834,000, which rose to 30,000,000 in 1931 and 43,000,000 for the Manchukuo state. The population balance remained 123 men to 100 women and the total number in 1941 was 50,000,000.

In early 1934, the total population of Manchukuo was estimated as 30,880,000, with 6.1 persons the average family, and 122 men for each 100 women. These numbers included 29,510,000 Chinese (96%, which should have included the [[Manchu people]]), 590,760 Japanese (2%), 680,000 [[Koreans in China|Koreans]] (2%), and 98,431 (<1%) of other nationality: [[White émigré|White Russians]], [[Mongols in China|Mongols]], etc.{{citation needed|date=May 2013}} Around 80% of the population was rural. During the existence of Manchukuo, the ethnic balance did not change significantly, except that Japan increased the [[Koreans in China|Korean population in China]]. From Japanese sources come these numbers: in 1940 the total population in Manchukuo of [[Longjiang Province|Longjiang]], [[Rehe Province|Rehe]], [[Jilin]], [[Liaoning|Fengtian]], and [[Xing'an Province|Xing'an]] provinces at 43,233,954; or an Interior Ministry figure of 31,008,600. Another figure of the period estimated the total population as 36,933,000 residents. The majority of [[Han Chinese]] in Manchukuo believed that Manchuria was rightfully part of China, and they both passively and violently resisted Japan's propaganda that Manchukuo was a "multinational state".<ref>{{cite book|title=Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750|url=https://archive.org/details/restlessempirech0000west|url-access=registration|first=Odd Arne|last=Westad|publisher=Basic Books|year=2012|page=[https://archive.org/details/restlessempirech0000west/page/252 252]|isbn=978-0465056675}}</ref>

After the [[Russian Civil War]] (1917–1922), thousands of Russians fled to Manchuria to join the Russian community already there. The Russians living in Manchuria were stateless and as whites had an ambiguous status in Manchukuo, which was meant to be a Pan-Asian state, whose official "five races" were the Chinese, Mongols, Manchus, Koreans, and Japanese.{{sfn|Bong|2014|p=137–138}} At various times, the Japanese suggested that the Russians might be a "sixth race" of Manchukuo, but this was never officially declared.{{sfn|Bong|2014|p=138}} In 1936, the ''Manchukuo Almanac'' reported that were 33,592 Russians living in the city of Harbin—the "Moscow of the Orient"—and of whom only 5,580 had been granted Manchukuo citizenship.{{sfn|Bong|2014|p=146}} Japanese imperialism was to a certain extent based on racism with the Japanese as the "great Yamato race", but there was always a certain dichotomy in Japanese thinking between an ideology based on racial differences based on bloodlines versus the idea of Pan-Asianism with Japan as the natural leader of all the Asian peoples.{{sfn|Bong|2014|p=140}} In 1940, ethnic Russians were included among the other nationalities of Manchukuo as candidates for conscription into the Manchukuo military.{{sfn|Smirnov|2015|p=561}}
Until World War II, the Japanese tended to leave alone those travelling to Manchukuo with a passport as they did not like to deal with protests from embassies in Tokyo about the mistreatment of their citizens.{{sfn|Behr|1987|p=202}} The Kwantung Army operated a secret biological-chemical warfare unit based in Pinfang, Unit 731, that performed gruesome experiments on people involving much visceration of the subjects to see the effects of chemicals and germs on the human body. In the late 1930s, the doctors of Unit 731 demanded more European subjects to experiment upon in order to test the efficiency the strains of anthrax and plague that they were developing, leading to a great many of the Russians living in Manchukuo becoming the unwilling human guinea pigs of Unit 731.<ref name="Bisher2005">{{cite book | last=Bisher |first=Jamie | title=White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian | location=London | publisher=Psychology Press | year=2005 | page=305 | isbn=0415571340}}</ref> The [[Russian Fascist Party]], which worked with the Japanese, was used to kidnap various "unreliable" Russians living in Manchukuo for Unit 731 to experiment upon.<ref name="Bisher2005"/>

The children of the Russian exiles often married Han Chinese, and the resulting children were always known in Manchukuo as "mixed water" people, and were shunned by both the Russian and Chinese communities.{{sfn|Bong|2014|pp=138, 146}} Chinese accounts, both at the time and later, tended to portray the Russians living in Manchuria as all prostitutes and thieves, and almost always ignored the contributions made by middle-class Russians to community life.{{sfn|Bong|2014|p=144}} Mindful of the way that Americans and most Europeans enjoyed extraterritorial rights in China at the time, accounts in Chinese literature about the Russians living in Manchukuo and their "mixed water" children often display a certain ''schadenfreude'' recounting how the Russians in Manchukuo usually lived in poverty on the margins of Manchukuo society with the local Chinese more economically successful.{{sfn|Bong|2014|pp=148–149}} The South Korean historian Bong Inyoung noted when it came to writing about the "mixed water" people, Chinese writers tended to treat them as not entirely Chinese, but on the other hand were willing to accept these people as Chinese provided that would totally embrace Chinese culture by renouncing their Russian heritage, thus making Chineseness as much a matter of culture as of race.{{sfn|Bong|2014|pp=153–154}}

Around the same time the Soviet Union was advocating the Siberian [[Jewish Autonomous Oblast]] across the Manchukuo-Soviet border, some Japanese officials investigated a plan (known as the [[Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire|Fugu Plan]]) to attract Jewish refugees to Manchukuo as part of their colonisation effort, which was never adopted as official policy.{{citation needed|date=February 2018}} The Jewish community in Manchukuo was not subjected to the official persecution that Jews experienced under Japan's ally Nazi Germany, and Japanese authorities were involved in closing down local anti-Semitic publications such as the Russian Fascist Party's newspaper [[Nash Put' (newspaper)|''Nash Put'']].<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Kearney|first1=Gerald David|title=Jews Under Japanese Domination, 1939–1945|journal=Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies|date=1993|volume=11|issue=3|pages=54–69|doi=10.1353/sho.1993.0047|s2cid=159653300}}</ref> However, Jews in Manchukuo were victims of harassment by antisemitic elements among the White Russian population, one notable incident being the murder of [[Simon Kaspé]]. In 1937 the Far Eastern Jewish Council was created, chaired by the Harbin Jewish community leader [[Abraham Kaufman|Dr. Abraham Kaufman]].<ref name="Springer">{{cite book|editor1=Ember, M. |editor2=Ember, C.R. |editor3=Skoggard, I. |title=Encyclopedia of Diasporas: Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World |url=https://archive.org/details/encyclopediadias00embe |url-access=limited |date=2005 |publisher=Springer |page=[https://archive.org/details/encyclopediadias00embe/page/n185 159]|isbn=9780306483219 }}</ref> Between 1937 and 1939 the city of Harbin in Manchukuo was the location of the Conference of Jewish Communities in the Far East.<ref name="Springer"/> Following the Russian Red Army's invasion of Manchuria in 1945, Dr. Kaufman and several other Jewish community leaders were arrested by the Soviets and charged with anti-Soviet activities, resulting in Kaufman's imprisonment for ten years in a Soviet labor camp.<ref name="Springer"/>
[[File:Manchukuo propaganda poster showing European and East Asian ethnicities.jpg|thumb|A Manchukuo propaganda poster promoting <nowiki>''racial harmony''</nowiki> displaying European and East Asian ethnic groups]]
The Japanese Ueda Kyōsuke labeled all 30 million people in Manchuria as "Manchus", including Han Chinese, despite the fact that most of them were not ethnic Manchu, and the Japanese written, "Great Manchukuo" built upon Ueda's argument to claim that all 30 million "Manchus" in Manchukuo had the right to independence to justify splitting Manchukuo from China.{{sfn|Tamanoi|2000|p=253}} In 1942 the Japanese wrote "Ten Year History of the Construction of Manchukuo" which attempted to emphasize the right of ethnic Japanese to the land of Manchukuo while attempting to delegitimize the Manchu's claim to Manchukuo as their native land, noting that most Manchus moved out during the Qing period and only returned later.{{sfn|Tamanoi|2000|p=255}}

=== Population of main cities ===
*[[Yingkou|Niuzhuang]] (119,000 or 180,871 in 1940)
*[[Shenyang|Mukden]] (339,000 or 1,135,801 in 1940)
*[[Changchun|Xinjing]] (126,000 or 544,202 in 1940)
*[[Harbin]] (405,000 or 661,948 in 1940)
*[[Dandong|Andong]] (92,000 or 315,242 in 1940)
*[[Jilin City|Kirin]] (119,000 or 173,624 in 1940)
*[[Qiqihar|Tsitsihar]] (75,000 in 1940)
<small>Source: {{cite journal|doi=10.2307/2049515|jstor=2049515|title=The 1940 Census of Manchuria|journal=The Far Eastern Quarterly|volume=4|issue=3|pages=243–262|year=1945|last1=Beal|first1=Edwin G|s2cid=166016710 }}</small>

=== Japanese population ===
{{main|Japanese settlers in Manchuria}}
[[File:Wanrong in 1934 during an official visit by the Japanese.jpg|left|thumb|The Empress of Manchukuo taking part in a procession during a visit by Japanese officials, 1934]]
In 1931–1932, there were 100,000 Japanese farmers; other sources mention 590,760 Japanese inhabitants. Other figures for Manchukuo speak of a Japanese population 240,000 strong, later growing to 837,000. In Xinjing, they made up 25% of the population. Accordingly, to the census of 1936, of the Japanese population of Manchukuo, 22% were civil servants and their families; 18% were working for the South Manchurian Railroad company; 25% had come to Manchukuo to establish a business, and 21% had come to work in industry.{{sfn|Young|1998|p=258}} The Japanese working in the fields of transportation, the government, and in business tended to be middle class, white-collar people such as executives, engineers, and managers, and those Japanese who working in Manchukuo as [[Blue-collar worker|blue-collar]] employees tended to be skilled workers.{{sfn|Young|1998|p=258}} In 1934, it was reported that a Japanese carpenter working in Manchukuo with its growing economy could earn twice as much as he could in Japan.{{sfn|Young|1998|p=259}} With its gleaming modernist office buildings, state of the art transport networks like the famous Asia Express railroad line, and modern infrastructure that was going up all over Manchukuo, Japan's newest colony become a popular tourist destination for middle-class Japanese, who wanted to see the "Brave New Empire" that was going up in the mainland of Asia.{{sfn|Young|1998|p=259}} The Japanese government had official plans projecting the emigration of 5&nbsp;million Japanese to Manchukuo between 1936 and 1956. Between 1938 and 1942 a batch of young farmers of 200,000 arrived in Manchukuo; joining this group after 1936 were 20,000 complete families. Of the Japanese settlers in Manchukuo, almost half came from the rural areas of Kyushu.{{sfn|Young|1998|p=258}} When Japan lost sea and air control of the Yellow Sea in 1943–44, this migration stopped. {{citation needed|date=February 2018}}[[File:Propaganda Poster of Manchuku.jpg|thumb|Propaganda poster for European audiences, featuring a pair of Japanese settlers]]About 2% of the Japanese population worked in agriculture.<ref name="Spector2007">{{cite book |last1=Spector |first1=Ronald H. |title=In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia |publisher=Random House |date=2007 |location=New York |isbn=9780375509155 |edition=1st |pages=28–29}}</ref> Many had been young, land-poor farmers in Japan that were recruited by the Patriotic Youth Brigade to colonize new settlements in Manchukuo. The [[Manchukuo government|Manchukuo Government]] had seized great portions of these land through "price manipulation, coerced sales and forced evictions". Some Japanese settlers gained so much land that they could not farm it themselves and had to hire Chinese or Korean laborers for help, or even lease some of it back to its former Chinese owners, leading to uneasy, sometimes hostile relations between the groups.<ref name="Spector2007" />

When the [[Red Army]] [[Soviet invasion of Manchuria|invaded]] Manchukuo, they captured 850,000 Japanese settlers. With the exception of some civil servants and soldiers, these were [[Japanese repatriation from Huludao|repatriated to Japan in 1946–7]]. Many [[Japanese orphans in China]] were left behind in the confusion by the Japanese government and were adopted by Chinese families. Many, however, integrated well into Chinese society. In the 1980s Japan began to organize a repatriation program for them but not all chose to go back to Japan.{{citation needed|date=February 2018}}

The majority of Japanese left behind in China were women, and these Japanese women mostly married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" (zanryu fujin).<ref>{{cite journal | url=http://japanfocus.org/-Rowena-Ward/2374/article.html | title=Left Behind: Japan's Wartime Defeat and the Stranded Women of Manchukuo | first=Rowena | last=Ward | date=1 March 2007 | journal=The Asia Pacific Journal | volume=5 | issue=3 | issn=1557-4660 | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160112110754/http://japanfocus.org/-Rowena-Ward/2374/article.html | archive-date=12 January 2016 | df=dmy-all }}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Mackerras|first=Colin|title=Ethnicity in Asia|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fDCsD-1zitUC&pg=PA59|year=2003|publisher=Psychology Press|isbn=9780415258166|page=59}}</ref> Because they had children fathered by Chinese men, the Japanese women were not allowed to bring their Chinese families back with them to Japan, so most of them stayed. Japanese law allowed children fathered only by Japanese to become Japanese citizens.{{citation needed|date=February 2018}}