Ethnopolitics in modern China: the Nationalists, Muslims, and Mongols in wartime Alashaa Banner (1937–1945)

Abstract

This article reveals the murky political landscape of Alashaa Banner in Inner Mongolia during the Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945). By using various archival documents and secondary source materials, this research seeks to present a clearer picture of Inner Mongolian borderlands, involving the Chinese Nationalists, the Sinicized Muslims, and the Inner Mongols. Instead of restating the ‘ineffectiveness’ or ‘weakness’ of the Nationalist frontier administration in China's innermost borderlands during the pre-1949 decades, this article attempts to explore the extent of the war-threatened Nationalist Chinese effort to initiate their state-building tasks and promote their regime's power consolidation in modern China's northern periphery.