It was ostensibly founded as a republic, its territory consisting of the lands seized in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; it was later declared to be a constitutional monarchy in 1934, though very little changed in the actual functioning of government.

The southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, now the city of Dalian, continued to be ruled directly by Japan as the Kwantung Leased Territory until the end of the war.

The state was ultimately toppled at the end of World War II with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945; its government was formally dissolved following the surrender of Japan in September.

The Qing equated the territory of their state, which among other regions included present-day Manchuria, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet, with the idea of 'China' itself, rejecting notions that only Han areas were core parts of China.

These policies continued until after the end of the Second Opium War in the late 19th century, when the government started to encourage massive waves of Han migration to the northeast, collectively known as the Chuang Guandong, in order to prevent the Russian Empire from seizing more of the area.

[27] In Japan, Manchuria was widely seen as analogous to the Wild West: a dangerous frontier region full of bandits, revolutionaries, and warlords, but also a land of boundless wealth and promise, where it was possible for ordinary people to become very well-off.

[41] At the time, censorship in Japan was nowhere near as stringent as it would later become, and the American historian Louise Young noted: "Had they wished, it would have been possible in 1931 and 1932 for journalists and editors to express anti-war sentiments".

[48] Historians generally consider Manchukuo a puppet state of Imperial Japan[49] due to the Japanese military's continued occupation of the country and its direct control over the government.

Starting with the Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which made the very act of thinking about 'altering the kokutai' a crime, the government had embarked on a sustained campaign to stomp out all left-wing thought in Japan.

[69] Kishi succeeded in marshaling private capital in a very strongly state-directed economy to achieve his goal of vastly increased industrial production while at the same time displaying utter indifference to the exploited Chinese workers toiling in Manchukuo's factories; the American historian Mark Driscoll described Kishi's system as a "necropolitical" system where the Chinese workers were literally treated as dehumanized cogs within a vast industrial machine.

[70] The system that Kishi pioneered in Manchuria of a state-guided economy where corporations made their investments on government orders later served as the model for Japan's post-1945 development, albeit not with same level of brutal exploitation as in Manchukuo.

[67]: 30 When Manchukuo was founded as a Japanese puppet state, it inherited the railroad network of Manchuria that was built originally during an economic and military struggle between Russia and Japan over Chinese territory and became a focal point before and after the Russo-Japanese War.

Mantetsu personnel were involved in the economic exploitation of occupied China during World War II,[74] and colonial planning at the behest of the Imperial Japanese Army.

From Japanese sources come these numbers: in 1940 the total population in Manchukuo of Longjiang, Rehe, Jilin, Fengtian, and Xing'an provinces at 43,233,954; or an Interior Ministry figure of 31,008,600.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

In Japan itself, corporal punishment had been abolished as part of the successful effort to end the extraterritorial rights enjoyed by citizens of the European powers but retained for the Japanese colonies of Korea and Taiwan.

[119] By 1937 the Japanese judges and lawyers in Manchukuo were either disillusioned Pan-Asian idealists or more commonly cynical opportunists and mediocre hacks who lacked the talent to get ahead in Japan.

[122] As in Japan, the idea governing the legal philosophy in Manchukuo was the Emperor was a living god who was responsible to no-one and who delegated some of his powers down to mere human beings who had the duty of obeying the will of the god-emperors.

[131] The majority of the soldiers were Manchurian-born Han Chinese, with smaller groups of Koreans, Mongols, and White Russian emigres, who were all trained and led by Japanese instructors and advisors.

[120] After fighting against insurgents during the early to mid-1930s, the Manchukuo Imperial Army played mainly a supporting role during the actions in Inner Mongolia against Chinese forces, with news reports stating that some Manchukuoan units performed fairly well.

[139] According to a joint study by historians Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyochi Himeta, Toru Kubo, and Mark Peattie, more than ten million Chinese civilians were used by the Kwantung Army for slave labor in Manchukuo under the supervision of the Kōa-in.

Some badly ill workers were directly pushed into mass graves in order to avoid the medical expenditure[141] and the world's most serious mine disaster, at Benxihu Colliery, happened in Manchukuo.

[142][143][144] The Japanese banned Oroqen from communicating with other ethnicities, and forced them to hunt animals for them in exchange for rations and clothing which were sometimes insufficient for survival, which led to deaths from starvation and exposure.

According to the article, a document found by Yoshida shows that the Kōa-in was directly implicated in providing funds to drug dealers in China for the benefit of the puppet governments of Manchukuo, Nanjing and Mongolia.

[148] This document corroborates evidence analyzed earlier by the Tokyo tribunal which stated that: Japan's real purpose in engaging in drug traffic was far more sinister than even the debauchery of Chinese people.

[152] In spite of the League's approach, the new state was diplomatically recognized by El Salvador (3 March 1934) and the Dominican Republic (1934), Costa Rica (23 September 1934), Italy (29 November 1937), Spain (2 December 1937), Germany (12 May 1938) and Hungary (9 January 1939).

[167] The Photographic Division, part of the public relations section of the South Manchurian Railway was created in 1928 to produce short documentary films about Manchuria to Japanese audiences.

General Amakasu shot various "documentaries" showing carefully choreographed scenes worthy of Hollywood of Emperor Puyi in his capital of Xinjing (modern Changchun) being cheered by thousands of subjects and reviewing his troops marching in parades that were intended to help legitimize Manchukuo's independence.

In Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition (1959), Kaji, the main protagonist, is a labor supervisor assigned to a workforce consisting of Chinese prisoners in a large mining operation in Japanese-colonized Manchuria.