I guess it's about time.
I've been thinking about this for years.
Manchuria, officially the Republic of Manchuria is a country in East Asia. The Yalu River and the Tumen River form the border between the Republic of Korea and Manchuria, the Amur and the Ussuri with Russia, and is bordered by Mongolia to the west and China to the southeast. This is the traditional homeland of the Manchu people.
A former territory of China, it became the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. The Soviets are supposed to return Manchuria to China in 1946; however, the Communist forces and the Soviet occupation forces are too entrenched to give it back, and Manchuria declared independence as the People's Republic of Manchuria. During the Korean War, the Manchurian republic aided North Korean and Chinese forces. In the 1960s, it became a bone of contention between the Soviet Union and China during the Sino-Soviet split. A policy of desinicization and Manchurianization occured, in which the number of people identifying themselves as Manchu grew to about a third of the population in 1990. A "careful" democratization took place in 1990 in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, eventually turning Manchuria into a non-communist state.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a border dispute between Manchuria and the former Democratic People's Republic of Korea erupted, resulting in the Manchurian-Korean War or the Second Korean War in 1997-8. Despite numerical superiority of the North Korean forces, the Manchurians controversially used tactical nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union, expilicitly prohibited by Russia from joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to defeat North Korean forces and topple the regime, as it claimed the North Koreans used chemical and biological weapons and an attempted use of a nuclear weapon against Manchurian cities, a claim contested by many in the international community.
The North Korean regime collapsed and surrendered to South Koreans, in which a unification process was initiated and completed in 2000. Since then, the Manchurian economy recovered from the devastation of the war and the nuclear radiation. The quick recovery with Korean, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese assistance has dubbed the Manchurian economy as a "tiger economy."
The capital city of Manchuria is Changchun, with the largest city the port of Dalny or Dalian. The population was about 134,230,235 (2011) and seemed to be stabilized and is set to decline. Manchuria is a republic dominated by two parties, the Social Nationalist and the Communist Party. Manchuria is one of the world's most militarized countries, with a total of 9,789,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel and is the fifth-largest in the world behind Russia, as a consequence of the tensions after the Manchu-Korean War. It is now a transitioning market economy similar to China and the former Soviet states, and is only second to Russia in the size of the economy of the former Soviet Republics. Manchuria joined the UN in 1991, but was suspended in 1998 to 2000, when the President of Manchuria at that time, Tien Fengshan stepped down due to pro-democracy protests and an attempted coup by General Tonggiya Dunming.
It remains a nuclear-weapons state, a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty , although it says it will no longer build nuclear weapons, stopped aiming them at other countries such as China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, and will eventually dismantle the arsenal by 2030 and eventually sign the treaty. It also has an active space program, and also sent a man into space.
By the way, because the military is Soviet-aligned, it used Soviet equipment and warships.
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