TL;DR at the Bottom

The political situation surrounding Manchuria (or the Northeast, dongbei) is extremely complex. After the collapse of the Qing, and the general chaos ensuing between and during the Republican Period, Japan had strong economic ties to Manchuria, which at the time led the world in soybean production ( http://www.soyinfocenter.com/HSS/production_and_trade1.php for more information on the trade of soybeans). In fact, one of the main catalysts for the assassination of Japanese prime minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was his reluctance to accede to a full-out military invasion of Manchuria prior to 1931. Indeed in some respects the invasion itself was never fully justified or approved of by all Japanese politicians, but that's getting into murky territory for myself and is of much academic debate. The Soviets, too, had large interests in Manchuria, and owned half control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, which ran through Harbin and Qiqihar. By 1930, however, Zhang Xueliang, "The Young Marshall," was in control of the Northeastern government and was openly patriotic toward China. So Manchuria was never actually conquered by the Kuomintang after the Northern Expedition. To further trouble your question, by the mid 18th century, Manchuria was predominately Han, the main "Chinese" ethnic group which makes up 95% of China today; even today the Manchu make up a relatively small portion of the population of the Northeast, with even less ethnic Manchu's speaking Manchu as a native language. So if what you're asking is "Did the Manchu (the ethnic group) feel any sense of nation pride/separate identity from China?" then I cannot answer that specifically, because I am no expert on the Manchu themselves. And even if they did, the point would've been, frankly, moot, as little-to-no ethnic Manchu held any sort of political power in the Manchuria during the 1930s.

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but I can answer about Chinese resistance against, and collaboration with, the Japanese during the existence of Manchukuo, or Manzhouguo as it's pronounced in Chinese. And for the purpose of this, Ill be using the amazing book The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China by Rana Mitter. The entire thing is free on JSTOR if you have an account, and if this is a subject that interests you I highly recommend you to read it, its fantastic.

If you're only interested in the final conclusion of the idea of national pride and ideology in Manchukuo, then go ahead and skip to the conclusion I'll provide at the end. The first two parts will focus on the collaboration and resistance in Manchuria.

Collaboration

So starting with collaboration, while Zhang Xueliang was in Beijing during the Kwantung Army's invasion of Manchuria where he would stay for the next few years, most of the local elite Chinese opted to collaborate with the Japanese immediately after they took over. This cooperation was crucial for the Japanese to reign in Manchuria, as the Kwantung Army itself had roughly 64,000 troops during the invasion, a nice portion, but not nearly enough to hold down a territory that's 350,000 sq/mi. Fortunately, since Zhang Xueliang and most of his deputies were away in other parts of China, any resistance (which I'll get to later) was poorly coordinated, and lower ranking officers taking advantage of the Japanese occupation, such as Yu Zhishan, the Eastern Borders Garrison commander, defected immediately. In another smack in the face to ultra-nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek himself issued an order of non-resistance, approved by Zhang, to the commanders in Manchuria.

Now, it may seem odd to you that the Chinese were so willing to cooperate with such eagerness, but understanding some background in Japanese politics in Manchuria helps. To keep it brief, Zhang's father, Zhang Zuolin, was appointed as warlord in 1916 with the help of Japanese military material (he was originally just a bandit who pillaged rural areas), so after Zuolin's death in 1928 (ironically, assassination by Japanese) and Zhang Xueliang's ascension, many of the senior government officials were still deep in the pockets of Japanese businesses and military-men, and Zhang never did have full control over Manchuria during his brief reign.

Very quickly, the Japanese began setting up various public government programs, many of which fell in-line with the increasingly zealous Pan-Asiatic ideologies that were being espoused by Japanese generals during this time. The Liaoning Public Order Maintenance Committee was the first to be set up, and various others would begin siphoning the massive amounts of taxes the Zhang's used to keep their military afloat into public building programs. Universities, roads, sanitation systems; all these were built by Japanese engineers, and social programs were being run by Japanese anthropologists and sociologists who came to Manchuria in great numbers to study what they saw as the real-time actions of Pan-Asianism. Still, it is important to know that most of these programs, although they answered to Japanese superiors, were run almost entirely by local Chinese elites. It went something like this:

The strategy of co-optation, with overall supervision by a centrally controlled Self-Government Guiding Board, was not improvised. In 1929, the Kwantung Army had set up a research group to consider the best method of governing an occupied Northeast... Among the suggestions (from the research) in it were that a new Japanese controlled central military government should be set up, but that "local governments were to be preserved to administer to local affairs... Chinese civil officials below hsien directors were to remain in their posts or be replaced by other Chinese - The Manchurian Myth, 82.

Yu Chonghan, a former administrator during Zhang Zuolin's reign, would be at the head of this governing apparatus. But again, things get tricky. Because while the Japanese were in command, they were not shying away from using Chinese propaganda techniques in order to persuade Chinese officials to work with them. Yu, for example, was convinced to take the job after Morita Fukumatsu, a member of the Fengtian Japanese Residents' Association, talked to him about "the Northeast and the use of the Kingly Way (Wangdao) as a doctrine to underpin the new state." Aha. So here we see the making of a sort of national identity, but one that is still distinctly Chinese, not Manchu. In practice, of course, Manchukuo was a Japanese puppet. But, the propaganda underlying Japan's conquest of Manchuria was fitted to both reassure, and please, the local native populations. This is important to understand in order to understand the Japanese ideology behind their conquests throughout the 1920-40s. It was not solely driven by economical gain, like that of Western imperialism in Asia which sought to profit from unequal trade treaties, but rather that the races of Asia were to be "wedded" together in order for a final showdown between Asia and the West, a showdown which would eerily come true just a few decades later. That being said, there was certainly major economic interests in Manchuria for Japanese businessmen, and one would be wrong to totally ignore those factors when considering this.

So as we see with this, the Japanese and Chinese collaborated greatly during the existence of Manchukuo. Local Public Order Maintenance Committees were the Japanese favorite in organizing their newly acquired land (according to Mitter, rouoghly 40% of taxes collected by the Japanese in 1932-33 went to the "work of peace preservation"). And in most places, the Japanese armies retired to garrisons and allowed local Chinese policing forces to police major cities. However, not everyone in Manchuria was so happy about the change of command and the subjugation by the Japanese, and many local leaders, continued to carry out guerilla wars of resistance.

Before reading my two cents, do check out the amazing answer of r/Drdickles. But since the above answer mainly focuses on changes in 1931-1933, I’ll talk a bit more about Manchurian ‘nationalism’ in 1933-1945.

Was Machukuo a Japanese puppet? Yes, to a certain extent. But as to whether Manchukuo had any sort of national identity, the question is harder to answer. You see, being a puppet and having a national identity is not strictly contradictory per se. In fact, the Japanese tried very hard to give Manchukuo the legitimacy and the authenticity of a modern nation.

It is an undeniable fact that Japanese military and civilian authorities had considerable influence on Manchukuo administration. Japanese control was exerted through the General Affairs Board (zongwuting) of the State Council, which was the most powerful administrative body. The director general of the Board was always Japanese, and the Board had the right to hire and fire high ranking officials. Although most top political positions were filled by Chinese, there was always close Japanese supervision and observation. Despite this, Japanese bureaucrats seemed to have genuinely believed in Manchukuo as a state.

These bureaucrats envisioned Manchukuo as a ‘modern national defense state’ - in simpler words, a totalitarian state with state-controlled resources. How, you might ask, is this different from any other colony that hands over its resources and profits to its coloniser? The answer is in the idea of a Japanese (and Confucianist!) family-state. From the Manchurian Komin magazine produced by the Law and Order Ministry, we have this statement:

National citizenship is the expanded version of family membership. Just as the family member has an obligation to obey the family unconditionally, so does the citizen have to obey the state...No matter what race or religion, all the people are guaranteed to enjoy equality in the nation....We are a country of different nationalities/races (minzoku) and religions, and the nation-state guarantees equality among them.

By downplaying citizen rights and upholding ideals of ‘family’ and ‘nationalities’, Manchukuo was a fascist state that aimed to mobilise its population for political, economic and ideological projects. Therefore, its citizens were not treated as labourers who lived to serve their colonial masters. Instead, they were seen as members of society and state, who would in return contribute willingly to society through mass mobilisation. Rather than describing Manchukuo as a ‘colony’, Myers and Young use the term ‘modern enclave’. This term better explains Manchukuo as a Japanese experiment in heavy industry, a ‘testing ground for industrial management and planning techniques.’ There was little transfer of capital or significant economic integration between Manchukuo and Japan - Manchukuo was considered its own individual entity. A good comparison made by Duara equates the relationship between Manchukuo and Japan to that between Japan and the United States in the post-war period, a junior partner directed by a hegemonic state.

To achieve mobilisation, the new state needed to win hearts and minds, and they attempted to do so through the Concordia Association (滿洲國協和會). The Association was supposed to represent the will of the people, by granting different nationalities their rights and self-respect under a state structure. A notion of Asian traditionalism was emphasised, with support for Hui mosque communities, Mongol lama monasteries, and Manchu villages. The Manchukuo government also allied themselves with popular traditionalist societies to co-opt them into the banner of Pan-Asianism. At the same time, modernity was given equal status. The development of infrastructure was given high priority, and indeed, the quality of dams, ports, railroads, and modern cities developed by Manchukuo was outstanding. Healthcare and welfare was far better in comparison to Nationalist China, with education, drinkable water, shelters and inoculations available to the masses. A genuine attempt was made to improve living standards and generate a spirit of cooperation between different ethnic groups in Manchuria.

Despite the rhetoric, Japanese racism inevitably contradicted with the multi-ethnic utopia proposed by Concordia. On an economic level, the disparity of wages between Japanese and Chinese factory workers is startling: in 1939, for every 100 yuan made by a Japanese, a Chinese worker made 29 yuan. Chinese farmers were forced off their land by the Land Records Bureau to make way for Japanese settlers. The resistance movements described by u/Drdickles were heavily suppressed, and villages were decimated in order to deny resisters bases to operate from. In the Korean-dominated Jiandao region, 5.5 million rural residents were forcibly relocated to concentration camp-like hamlets, leading resisters to attack the hamlets themselves to gain supplies. And perhaps most horrific of all, the germ warfare experimentation group, Unit 731, was based in Manchuria and experimented on victims of various ethnicities. Institutional racism and brutality were hallmarks of the Manchukuo government.

Manchukuo is inherently contradictory - its status as nation conflicts with its role in the Japanese imperialist structure. Much like South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Manchukuo was constrained from exercising much independence, but at the same time had some characteristics of a nation-state. This is why Manchukuo can be seen as a puppet, but still have, however artificial, a national identity.

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Sources:

Mitter, Rana, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley, 2000).

Young, Louise, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley, 1998).

Chu Huei-chu, ‘Representing Han Chinese Family under the Japanese Empire in Manchukuo and Colonial Taiwan [帝國下的漢人家族再現:滿州國與殖民地台灣],’ Chung Wai Literary 37 (2008), 153-194.

Nish, Ian, The History of Manchuria, 1840-1948, Vol. I & II: A Sino-Russo-Japanese Triangle (Folkestone, 2016).

Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, ed. by Mariko Asano Tamanoi (Honolulu, 2005).

Duara, Prasenjit, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, 2003).