Red Star over China (44 page)

Hsu said that the next day he led his whole army out to that valley and showed them the dead, among whom some of the soldiers recognized peasants they had known, men and women who must have given them shelter at one time, or sold them melons, or traded at the cooperatives. They were deeply moved. Hsu said that this experience steeled his troops with a stubborn morale and a determination to die fighting, and that throughout the entire twelve months of the last great annihilation drive not a single man had deserted from the Twenty-fifth Army.

“Toward the end of the Fifth Campaign,” he continued, “nearly every house had dead in it. We used to enter a village that seemed empty until we looked into the ruined houses. Then we would find corpses in the doorways, on the floor, or on the
k'ang,
or hidden away somewhere. Even the dogs had fled from many villages. In those days we did not need spies to watch the enemy's movements. We could follow them quite easily by the skies filled with smoke from burning towns and hamlets.”

This was a very small part of what I heard from Hsu Hai-tung and others who fought through the terrible year, and finally trekked westward, not their army but its human “base” destroyed, its hills and valleys stained with the blood of its youth, the living heart of it torn out. Later on I talked to many warriors from Oyuwan, and they told tales more pitiful still. They did not like to talk of what they had seen; they did so only under questioning, and it was clear their experiences had permanently marked the matrix of their minds with a class hatred ineradicable for life.

Again one asked whether that meant that the Reds were innocent of atrocity and class revenge themselves. I thought not. It was true that during my four months with them, as far as I could learn from unrestricted but limited inquiry, they had executed but two civilians. It was also true that I did not see a single village or town burned by them, or hear, from the many farmers I questioned, that the Reds were addicted to arson. But my personal experience started and ended with the few months spent with
them in the Northwest: what “killing and burning” might have been done elsewhere I could not affirm or deny.

One of the two ill-fated “counterrevolutionaries” mentioned above was not killed by the Reds, but by some Ninghsia Moslems with a strong distaste for tax collectors. Further on it will be told in what manner he met his demise, but first let us see how these Moslems had been ruled.

One might say that Chinghai, Ninghsia, and northern Kansu were the prototype of that fantasia of Swift's, the land of the Houyhnhnms, for they were ruled as the satrapy of Four Great Horses whose fame was widespread in China. Over the areas mentioned power was divided (before the Reds began edging the Houyhnhnms out of considerable portions of their domain) by a family of Mohammedan generals named Ma—the Messrs. Ma Hung-kuei, Ma Hung-ping, Ma Pu-fang, and Ma Pu-ch'ing. And this particular
Ma
means
horse
.
^*

Ma Hung-kuei was governor of Ninghsia, and his cousin, Ma Hung-ping, former governor of the same province, was now ruler of a shifting fiefdom in northern Kansu. They were distantly related to Ma Pu-fang, many-wived son of the famous Mohammedan leader Ma Keh-chin. Ma Pu-fang inherited his father's toga and in 1937 became the Nanking-appointed Pacification Commissioner of that province, while his brother, Ma Pu-ch'ing, helped out in Chinghai and in addition ruled the great Kansu panhandle which in the west separated Chinghai from Ninghsia. For a decade this distant country had been run like a medieval sultanate by the Ma family, with some assistance from an Allah of their own.

Two of the Great Horses claimed to be nobles, descendants of a Mohammedan aristocracy which sometimes played a decisive role in the history of China's Northwest. The brothers Ma, like many Moslems in China, had Turkish blood in them. As early as the sixth century a race
which we now know as the Turks had become powerful enough on China's northwest frontier to make important demands on the monarchs of the plains. In a couple of centuries they had built up an empire extending from eastern Siberia across part of Mongolia and into Central Asia. Gradually they filtered southward, and by the seventh century their Great Khan was received almost as an equal at the Court of Yang Ti, last Emperor of the Sui Dynasty. It was this same Turkish Khan who helped the half-Turkish General Li Yuan overthrow the Emperor Yang Ti and establish the celebrated T'ang Dynasty, which for three centuries reigned over Eastern Asia from Ch'ang An (now Sianfu)—then perhaps the most cultured capital on earth.

Mohammedan mosques had already been built in Canton by seafaring Arab traders before the middle of the seventh century. With the advent of the tolerant T'ang power the religion rapidly penetrated by land routes through the Turks of the Northwest. Mullahs, traders, embassies, and warriors brought it from Persia, Arabia, and Turkestan, and the T'ang emperors formed close ties with the caliphates to the west. Especially in the ninth century, when vast hordes of Ouigour Turks (whose great leader Seljuk had not yet been born) were summoned to the aid of the T'ang Court to suppress rebellion, Islamism entrenched itself in China. Following their success, many of the Ouigours were rewarded with titles and great estates and settled in the Northwest and in Szechuan and Yunnan.

Over a period of centuries the Mohammedans stoutly resisted Chinese absorption, but gradually lost their Turkish culture, adopted much that was Chinese, and became more or less submissive to Chinese law. Yet in the nineteenth century they were still powerful enough to make two great bids for power: one when Tu Wei-hsiu for a time set up a kingdom in Yunnan and proclaimed himself Sultan Suleiman; and the last, in 1864, when Mohammedans seized control of all the Northwest and even invaded Hupeh. The latter rebellion was put down after a campaign lasting eleven years. At that time of waning Manchu power the able Chinese General Tso Tsung-t'ang astounded the world by recapturing Hupeh, Shensi, Kansu, and eastern Tibet, finally leading his victorious army across the desert roads of Turkestan, where he re-established Chinese power on that far frontier in Central Asia.

Since then no single leader had been able to unite the Moslems of China in a successful struggle for independence, but there had been sporadic uprisings against Chinese rule, with savage and bloody massacres on both sides. The most serious recent rebellion occurred in 1928, when General Feng Yu-hsiang was warlord of the Northwest. It was under
Feng that the Wu-Ma, or “Five Ma,”
^*
combination acquired much of its influence and secured the nucleus of its present wealth and power.

Although theoretically the Chinese considered the Hui or Moslem people one of the five great races of China.
†
most Chinese seemed to deny Moslem racial separateness, claiming that they had been Sinicized. In practice, the Kuomintang decidedly followed a policy of absorption, even more direct (though perhaps less successful) than that pursued toward the Mongols. The Chinese official attitude toward the Mohammedans seemed to be that they were a “religious minority” but not a “national minority.” However, it was quite evident to anyone who saw them in their own domain in the Northwest that their claims to racial unity and the right to nationhood as a people were not without substantial basis in fact and history.

The Mohammedans of China were said to number about 20,000,000, and of these at least half were concentrated in the provinces of Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Szechuan, Chinghai, and Sinkiang. In many districts—particularly in Kansu and Chinghai—they were a majority, and in some large areas outnumbered Chinese as much as ten to one. Generally their religious orthodoxy seemed to vary according to their strength of numbers in a given spot, but in the dominantly Mohammedan region of northern Kansu and southern Ninghsia the atmosphere was distinctly that of an Islamic country.

It could be said that the Mohammedans were the largest community left in China among whom religious leaders were the real arbiters of temporal as well as spiritual life, with religion a deciding factor in their culture, politics, and economy. Mohammedan society revolved round the
men-huang
and the
ahun
(ameer and mullah), and their knowledge of the Koran and of Turkish or Arabic (scant as it usually was) provided the sources of authority. Mohammedans in the Northwest prayed daily in the hundreds of well-kept mosques, observed Mohammedan feast days, fast days, and marriage and funeral ceremonies, rejected pork, and were offended by the presence of pigs and dogs. The pilgrimage to Mecca was an ambition frequently realized by rich men and
ahuns,
who thereby strengthened their political and economic power. To many of them pan-Islamism rather than pan-Hanism was an ideal.

Chinese cultural influence was nevertheless very marked. Moslems dressed like Chinese (except for round white caps or ceremonial fezzes
worn by the men and white turbans by the women) and all spoke Chinese as the language of daily life (although many knew a few words from the Koran). While markedly Turkish features were common among them, the physiognomy of the majority was hardly distinguishable from that of the Chinese, with whom they had for centuries intermarried. Because of their law that any Chinese who married a Mohammedan must not only adopt the faith but also be adopted into a Mohammedan family, cutting away from his or her own kinsmen, the children of mixed marriages tended to grow up regarding themselves as a species different from their Chinese relatives.

The struggle of three sects among the Chinese Moslems somewhat weakened their unity, and created a convenient alignment for the Chinese Communists to work among them. The three sects were simply the Old, New, and Modern
^*
schools. Old and New had formed a kind of “united front” of their own to oppose the heretical Modern school. The latter nominally advocated giving up many of the ceremonies and customs of Mohammedanism and embracing “science,” but its real objectives were evidently to destroy the temporal power of the mullahs, which the Four Mas found inconvenient. Since it was supported by the Kuomintang, many Mohammedans believed the, Modern school aimed at a so-called “pan-Hanism”—absorption of the national minorities by the Chinese. In the Northwest the Four Mas were leaders of the Modern school. Around them they grouped their own satellites, bureaucrats, and wealthy landowners and cattle barons upon whom their regime depended. And yet the Great Horses were not precisely the men one would expect to lead a reform movement in religion.

Take Ma Hung-kuei, probably the richest and strongest of the quartet. He had numerous wives, was said to own about 60 per cent of the property of Ninghsia city, and had made a fortune in millions from opium, salt, furs, taxes, and his own paper currency. Still, he proved himself modern enough in one sense when he chose his famous “picture bride.” Importing a secretary from Shanghai, he had him gather photographs of eligible educated beauties and made his choice. The price was fixed at $50,000. Old Ma hired an airplane, flew out of the northern dust clouds to Soochow, where he swooped up the latest addition to his harem—a graduate of Soochow Christian University—and then swept back again to Ninghsia like an Aladdin on his carpet, amid a blaze of publicity. That news was well reported by the Kuomintang press at the time, as were some of the “death and taxes” data mentioned below.

A government bulletin published in Ninghsia listed the following
taxes collected in that province by General Ma: sales, domestic animals, camels, salt carrying, salt consumption, opium lamps, sheep, merchants, porters, pigeons, land, middlemen, food, special food, additional land, wood, coal, skins, slaughter, boats, irrigation, millstones, houses, wood, milling, scales, ceremonies, tobacco, wine, stamp, marriage, and vegetables.
^*
While this did not exhaust the inventory of petty taxes collected, it was enough to suggest that people had relatively little to fear from the Reds.

Ma Hung-kuei's method of salt distribution was unique. Salt was not only a monopoly, every person was required to buy half a pound per month, whether he could use it or not. He was not allowed to resell; private trade in salt was punishable by whipping or (according to Mohammedan Reds) even death. Other measures against which the inhabitants protested were the collection of a 30-per-cent tax on the sale of a sheep, cow, or mule, a 25-cent tax on the ownership of a sheep, a dollar tax for the slaughter of a pig, and a 40-cent tax on the sale of a bushel of wheat.

Excessive taxation and indebtedness had forced many farmers to sell all their cattle and abandon their lands. Great areas had been bought up by officials, tax collectors, and lenders at very cheap rates, but much of it remained wasteland because no tenants could be found to work under the tax burden and rents imposed. The concentration of land, cattle, and capital was accelerating and there was a big increase in hired farm laborers. In one district investigated it was found that over 70 per cent of the farmers were in debt, and about 60 per cent were living on food bought on credit.
†
In the same district 5 per cent of the people reportedly owned from 100 to 200
mou
of land, twenty to fifty camels, twenty to forty cows, five to ten horses, five to ten carts, and had from $1,000 to $2,000 in trading capital, while at the same time about 60 per cent of the population had less than 15
mou
of land, no livestock other than one or two donkeys, and an average indebtedness of $35 and 366 pounds of grain—much more than the average value of their land.

According to the Communist press, Ma Hung-kuei was suspected of intriguing for Japanese support against the Reds. A Japanese military mission had been established in Ninghsia city, and General Ma had given them permission to build an airfield north of the city, in the Alashan Mongol territory.
^‡
Some of the Moslems and Mongols feared an actual armed Japanese invasion.