Chinese Muslim Militarist: Ma Hongkui in Ningxia, 1933-1949.

Abstract

Ma Hongkui kept Ningxia (a northwest Chinese province) under a tight control unusual in Republican China. This thesis describes and analyzes his ethno-religious and family background, the personal army that enforced his independent dictatorship, and his regime's policies. After an Introduction describing the physical and ethnic setting of Ma's Ningxia, Chapter I explores Chinese Islam and the Chinese-speaking Muslims, the Hui. Under strong discriminatory pressure, some Hui chose accommodation with Han China, but most did not. In the Muslim revolts of 1862-73 and 1895 in Gansu, Ma's accommodationst family helped crush the rebels. It emerged from the latter revolt with its own army, whose comm and er, Ma's father, contended with increasing Han impingement on his Muslim world by Beiyang troops and Feng Yuxiang's Guominjun in the 1910s and 1920s. Lest their autonomy vanish, father and son reached an accommodation with the Guomindang in 1929. Chapter II shows that this was a natural partnership, since the party and the Ma's shared a Confucian ideology based on the Tongzhi Restoration's ideas and policies. This ideology included the conversion of the Hui from a non-Han people into Han Muslims. The chapter's second part covers Hongkui's partially successful efforts to realize this conversion. Chapter III investigates Ma's proportionally huge army that embraced 7.5 percent of Ningxia's population by 1948. Members of his family held its key posts. The army supported a regime that attempted another "Tongzhi Restoration" in Ningxia and contributed laborers to that end. Chapters IV, V, and VI concern Ma's conservative program of rehabilitation of a shattered province. He carried out currency stabilization, l and tax reduction, afforestation, an anti-opium campaign, water control, the baojia, and expansion of education so as to rebuild the agrarian economy favored by Confucians. This dissertation concludes that Ma's efforts failed because of his army's excessive consumption of money and manpower and because of outworn ideas and policies. Like the warlords of his generation, he was too self-seeking and conservative to make a great improvement in the lives of his subjects. The dissertation's sources include documents published by Ma's government; reports by eyewitness observers; and interviews with Ma's family.