Manchurian Telecommunications Company - Japan 1933

Beautiful RARE certificate from the Manchurian Telecommunications Company issued in 1933. This historic document has a vignette of a field of radio towers and is over 74 years old. Paperclip mark on upper left.


Certificate Vignette

Manchuria is a historical name given to a vast geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria either falls entirely within China, or is divided between China and Russia. The former definition of the region is commonly known as Northeast China and historically referred as Guandong, which literally means "the east of Shanhai Pass".

Manchuria is the traditional homeland of the Xianbei, Khitan, and Jurchen people, who built several dynasties within both Manchuria and northern China. The region is also the home of the Manchu, after which the region is named. In the 17th century, the Manchus ruled China until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. The area of Manchuria inside China is at least 1.55 million square kilometres.

Between World War I and World War II, Manchuria became a political and military battleground. Japanese influence extended into Outer Manchuria in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, but Outer Manchuria had reverted to Soviet control by 1925. Japan took advantage of the disorder following the Russian Revolution to occupy Outer Manchuria, but Soviet successes and American economic pressure forced Japanese withdrawal.

Manchuria was (and is) an important region for its rich mineral and coal reserves, and its soil is perfect for soy and barley production. For pre-World War II Japan, Manchuria was an essential source of raw materials. Without occupying Manchuria, the Japanese probably could not have carried out its plan for conquest over South-East Asia or taken the risk to attack Pearl Harbor.

Around the time of World War I, Chang Tso-Lin established himself as a hugely powerful warlord with influence over most of Manchuria. He was determined to keep his Manchu army under his control and to keep Manchuria free of foreign influence. The Japanese tried to kill him in 1916 by throwing a bomb under his carriage, but failed. The Japanese finally succeeded on June 2 1928, when a bomb exploded under his seven-carriage train a few miles from Mukden station.

Following the Mukden Incident in 1931 and the subsequent Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Inner Manchuria was proclaimed as an independent state, Manchukuo. The last Manchu emperor, Pu Yi, was then placed on the throne to lead a Japanese puppet government in the Wei Huang Gong, better known as "Puppet Emperor's Palace". Inner Manchuria was thus formally detached from China by Japan to create a buffer zone to defend Japan from Russia's Southing Strategy and, with Japanese investment and rich natural resources, became an industrial powerhouse. But, under the control of the Japanese, Manchuria was one of the most brutally run regions in the world, with a systematic campaign of terror and intimidation against the local Russian and Chinese populations, arrests, organized riots, and other acts of subversion. The Japanese also began a campaign of emigration to Manchukuo; the Japanese population there rose from 240,000 in 1931 to 837,000 in 1939. Hundreds of Manchu farmers were evicted and their farms given to Japanese immigrant families.[4] Manchukuo was used as a base to invade the rest of China, an expensive action (in terms of the damage to men, mat¨¦riel and political integrity) that was as costly to Japan as the invasion of Russia was to Germany, and for the same reasons.

After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in 1945, the Soviet Union invaded from Russian Manchuria as part of its declaration of war against Japan. From 1945 to 1948, Inner Manchuria was a base area for the Chinese People's Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. With the encouragement of the Soviet Union, Manchuria was used as a staging ground during the Chinese Civil War for the Communist Party of China, who were victorious in 1949.

During the Korean War of the 1950s, 300,000 soldiers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army crossed the Chinese-Korean border from Manchuria to recapture North Korea from UN forces led by the United States.

In the 1960s, Manchuria became the site of the most serious tension between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The treaties of 1858 and 1860, which ceded territory north of the Amur, were ambiguous as to which course of the river was the boundary. This ambiguity led to dispute over the political status of several islands. This led to armed conflict in 1969, called the Sino-Soviet border conflict.

With the end of the Cold War, this boundary issue was discussed through negotiations. In 2004, Russia agreed to transfer Yinlong Island and one half of Heixiazi Island to China, ending a long-standing border dispute. Both islands are found at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, and were until then administered by Russia and claimed by China. The event was meant to foster feelings of reconciliation and cooperation between the two countries by their leaders, but it has also sparked different degrees of discontents on both sides. Russians, especially Cossack farmers of Khabarovsk, who would lose their plowlands on the islands, were unhappy about the apparent loss of territory. Meanwhile, some Chinese both at home and abroad have criticized the treaty as an official acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Russian rule over Outer Manchuria, which was ceded by the Qing Dynasty to Imperial Russia under a series of Unequal Treaties, which included the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Convention of Peking in 1860, in order to exchange exclusive usage of Russia's rich oil resources. As a result of these criticisms, news and information regarding the border treaty were censored in mainland China by the PRC government. The transfer has been ratified by both the Chinese National People's Congress and the Russian State Duma, but has yet to be carried out to date.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com.