Transformation of the legal status of the Mongol lands that became part of the Manchu provinces during the creation of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Girin

Abstract

The subject of the study is the process of changing the legal status of Mongolian lands, which before the beginning of the twentieth century were united into the polities of Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Barga (Hulun-Buir), which had the status of autonomous states within the Qing Empire. Having guarantees of immunity from the penetration of the Chinese population into their borders, these lands preserved the ancient tribal way of life, the division of the principality (khoshuns) led by the Dzasaks – the descendants of Genghis Khan or his brother Khasar. However, Chinese colonization, which began in the 1880s, the political weakness of the emperors and the objective need to expand the living space of the Han population of the huge empire, forced the central authorities in Beijing to violate ancient agreements, begin to alienate the lands of the khoshuns and create on them the Chinese system of administrative-territorial devices. The research methodology was based on an interdisciplinary approach based on tools from a number of humanities: ideographic, or descriptive-narrative method, the principle of historicism, retrospective method, periodization method, comparative legal method, reconstruction method, structural method and narrative approach, and also, taking into account the legal component of the phenomenon under study – the dogmatic method and the method of legal hermeneutics. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in modern domestic science, the process of transition from the clan organization of the Mongolian and Manchu lands to its modern state has been reconstructed, while considering it in the context of the continuity of key territorial structures, a significant part of which is currently functioning in the Chinese People's Republic Republic (provinces and districts).