structural:expansion, structural:summarization, linguistic:translation
China

The history of the use of "Manchuria" as a toponym in China is uncertain. According to one stream of thought, it was not used by the Manchus or the Chinese. The name Manchu was given to the Jurchen people by Hong Taiji in 1635 as a new name for their ethnic group. However neither the name Manchu or the Chinese rendering of Manshū as Manzhou ever acquired geographical connotations, while in Japanese, both Manchuria and Manchu are rendered as Manshū. According to Nakami Tatsuo, Manzhou was used to refer to Manchu people or one of their states rather than a region: "Originally, Manzhou was the name of the Manchu people or of their state; it was not the name of a region. In fact, neither Manchus nor Han Chinese have ever called China's Northeast 'Manzhou'." Even advocates of an independent Manchuria such as Inaba Iwakichi acknowledged this. In 1912, British diplomat and sinologist Herbert Giles stated in China and the Manchus that "'Manchuria' is unknown to the Chinese or to the Manchus themselves as a geographical expression". According to Owen Latimore, during his travels in China during the late 1920s, he found "no single Chinese name for Manchuria as a unit". Historical geographer Philippe Forêt concurred, noting that there is no word for Manchuria in either Chinese or Manchu languages.

Another perspective delineated by scholars such as Mark C. Elliott and Li Narangoa argues that Manchu consciousness of their homeland as a unique place contributed to the creation of Manchuria as a distinct geographical entity, and that "Manchuria" (Manzhou) was used as a toponym by the Chinese. According to Elliott, the Manchu imperial lineage believed that their original homeland was the Changbai Mountains. The Qing court endeavored to create a regional identity focused on the Changbai Mountains, which gradually became a symbol of Manchu identity. However, it is uncertain whether that notion was shared among ordinary Manchus, and there is evidence that part of that effort was to combat widespread acculturation among Manchus, resulting in the loss of their language. As part of this effort, Jesuits were commissioned to create maps that enhanced Manchu conceptualization of their homeland, which Elliot believes to have been the original impetus to label the region as Manchuria in European and Japanese maps. In 1877, Manzhou was used as a toponym in an essay by Gong Chai, a scholar from Ningbo. The description of Manzhou located it to the northeast of Beijing and identified it as the birthplace of the dynasty. Manzhou was used as a place name again 20 years later by Qing officials. Manzhou began to appear on Chinese maps in the first decade of the 1900s. Maps that used Manzhou were in the minority during the early Republican period but the name remained in common use among the Chinese Communist Party into the 1930s. Names for the region were relatively fluid before the Mukden Incident of 1931, after which alternative names in Japanese were discarded for Manshū, and Dongbei (Northeast) and Dongsansheng (Three Eastern Provinces) became the orthodox names for the Chinese. According to Mark Gamsa, Manzhou was not widely used among the Chinese but the People's Republic of China disapproved of it regardless. By the 1950s, Manzhou had virtually disappeared as a toponym although some still used it out of habit.