by Edgar Snow
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.
Such was the picture, as the Reds saw it, which encouraged them to believe that they could “stir up a great wind” that could bring the Ma brothers’ empire toppling in ruins. Ma’s troops might have had little interest in fighting, but it still remained for the Communists to overcome the Moslems’ aversion to cooperating with Chinese, and to offer them a suitable program. This the Reds were trying hard to do, for the strategic significance of the Mohammedan areas was manifest. They occupied a wide belt in the Northwest which dominated the roads to Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia—and direct contact with Soviet Russia. As the Communists themselves saw it:
“There are more than ten million Mohammedans in the Northwest occupying an extremely important position. Our present mission and responsibility is to defend the Northwest and to create an anti-Japanese base in these five provinces, so that we can more powerfully lead the anti-Japanese movement of the whole country and work for an immediate war against Japan. At the same time, in the development of our situation we can get into connection with the Soviet Union and Outer Mongolia. However, it would be impossible to carry out our mission if we failed to win over the Mohammedans to our sphere and to the anti-Japanese front.”†
Communist work among the Mohammedans had begun several years before in the Northwest. Early in 1936, when the Red Army moved across Ninghsia and Kansu toward the Yellow River, vanguards of young Moslems were already propagandizing among the Ninghsia troops, urging the overthrow of the “Kuomintang running-dog” and “traitor to Mohammedanism,” Ma Hung-kuei—and some had lost their heads for it. These were the main promises the Reds made to them:
To abolish all surtaxes.
To help form an autonomous Mohammedan government.
To prohibit conscription.
To cancel old debts and loans.
To protect Mohammedan culture.
To guarantee religious freedom of all sects.
To help create and arm an anti-Japanese Mohammedan army.
To help unite the Mohammedans of China, Outer Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Soviet Russia.
Here, presumably, was something to appeal to nearly every Moslem. Even some of the ahuns reportedly saw in it an opportunity to get rid of Ma Hung-kuei (punishing him for burning the mosques of the Old and New schools), and also a chance to realize an old aspiration—to reestablish direct contact with Turkey through Central Asia. By May, the Communists were claiming that they had achieved what skeptics had said was impossible. They boasted that they had created the nucleus of a Chinese Moslem Red Army.
4
Moslem and Marxist
One morning I went with an English-speaking member of Hsu Hai-tung’s staff to visit the Moslem training regiment attached to the Fifteenth Army Corps. It was quartered in the compound of a Moslem merchant and official—a thick-walled edifice with Moorish windows looking down on a cobbled street through which filed donkeys, horses, camels, and men.
Inside, the place was cool and neatly kept. Every room had in the center of its brick floor a place for a cistern, connected to a subterranean drain, to be used for bathing. Properly orthodox Moslems showered themselves five times d
aily, but although these soldiers were still loyal to their faith and obviously made use of the cistern occasionally, I gathered that they did not believe in carrying a good thing to extremes. Still, they easily had the cleanest habits of any soldiers I had seen in China, and carefully refrained from the national gesture of spitting on the floor.
The Reds had organized two training regiments of Mohammedans at the front, both recruited largely from former troops of Ma Hung-kuei and Ma Hung-ping. They were taller and more strongly built than the Chinese, heavier of beard, and darker-skinned, with large black almond-shaped eyes and strong, sharp Caucasian features. They all carried the big sword of the Northwest, and gave a skillful demonstration of various strokes by which you can remove your enemy’s head at one swift blow.
Cartoons, posters, maps, and slogans covered the walls of their barracks. “Down with Ma Hung-kuei!” “Abolish Ma Hung-kuei’s Kuomintang Government!” “Oppose Japan’s building of airfields, map making, and invasion of Ninghsia!” “Realize the Independent Government of the Mohammedan people!” “Build your own anti-Japanese Mohammedan Red Army!”
From this it may be gathered that there was some dissatisfaction with General Ma Hung-kuei among his soldiers, and this seemed to be shared by the Ninghsia peasants. I stopped on the road one morning to buy a melon from a Moslem farmer who had a whole hillside covered with them. He was an engaging old rustic with a jolly face, a humorous manner, and a truly beautiful daughter—so rare an apparition in those parts that I stayed and bought three melons. I asked him if Ma Hung-kuei’s officials were really as bad as the Reds claimed. He threw up his hands comically in indignation, spluttering watermelon seeds between his gums. “Ai-ya! Ai-ya! Ai-ya!” he cried. “Ma Hung-kuei, Ma Hung-kuei! Taxing us to death, stealing our sons, burning and killing! Ma-ti Ma Hung-kuei!” By which last expression he meant you could defile Ma’s mother and it would be too good for him. Everyone in the courtyard laughed. On the other hand, the occasion was hardly appropriate for the old gentleman to offer testimony to Allah in praise of Ma Hung-kuei—if he had been so inclined.
The Moslem soldiers with the Reds ostensibly had been won over by subversive propaganda conducted among Ma’s troops, and by political lectures when they reached the Red camp. I asked one commander why he had joined.
“To fight Ma Hung-kuei,” he said. “Life is too bitter for us Hui-min under Ma Hung-kuei. No family is secure. If a family has two sons, one of them must join his army. If it has three sons, two must join. There is no escape—unless you are rich and can pay the tax for a substitute. What poor man can afford it? Not only that, but every man must bring his own clothes, and his family must pay for his food, fires, and lighting. This costs several tens of dollars a year.”
Although these Red Moslem regiments had been organized less than half a year, they had already achieved considerable “class consciousness,” it seemed. They had read, or heard read, the Communist Manifesto, brief lessons from Class Struggle, and daily political lectures, à la Marxism, on the immediate problems of the Mohammedan people. This instruction was given to them, not by Chinese, but by Mohammedan members of the Communist Party—men who had been through the Reds’ Party school. I was told that more than 90 per cent of Ma Hung-kuei’s troops were illiterate, and that most of the Moslem recruits to the Red Army had been unable to read at all when they joined. Now they were said to know a few hundred characters each, and to be able to study the simple lessons given to them. Out of their two training regiments the Communists hoped to develop cadres for a big Moslem Red Army, to defend the autonomous Moslem republic they dreamed of seeing established in the Northwest. Already nearly 25 per cent of these Moslems had joined the Communist Party.1
With the autonomy slogan the Moslem population could be expected to agree; that had been their demand for many years. Whether the majority of them believed the Reds were sincere in their promises was quite another matter. I doubted it. Years of maltreatment by the Chinese militarists, and racial hatreds between Han and Hui (Chinese and Moslem), had left among them a deep and justified distrust of the motives of all Chinese, and it was unbelievable that the Communists had been able to break down this Moslem skepticism in so short a time.
Such Moslems as cooperated with the Reds probably had reasons of their own. If Chinese offered to help them drive out the Kuomintang, help them create and equip an army of their own, help them get self-government, and help them despoil the rich (they no doubt said to themselves), they were prepared to take the opportunity—and later on turn that army to uses of their own, if the Reds failed to keep their bargain. But it seemed, from the friendliness of the farmers, and their readiness to organize under the Reds, that their program had some attraction, and that their careful policy of respecting Moslem institutions had made an impression.
Among the soldiers themselves it appeared that some of the historic racial animosity was being overcome, or gradually metamorphosed into class antagonism. Thus when I asked some Moslem soldiers whether they thought the Hui and Han peoples could cooperate under a soviet form of government, one replied:
“The Chinese and the Moslems are brothers; we Moslems also have Chinese blood in us; we all belong to Ta Chung Kuo [China], and therefore why should we fight each other? Our common enemies are the landlords, the capitalists, the moneylenders, our oppressive rulers, and the Japanese. Our common aim is revolution.”
“But what if the revolution interferes with your religion?”
“There is no interference. The Red Army does not interfere with Mohammedan worship.”
“Well, I mean something like this. Some of the ahuns are wealthy landlords and moneylenders, are they not? What if they oppose the Red Army? How would you treat them?”
“We would persuade them to join the revolution. But most ahuns are not rich men. They sympatize with us. One of our company commanders was an ahun.”
“Still, suppose some ahuns can’t be persuaded, but join with the Kuomintang to oppose you?”
“We would punish them. They would be bad ahuns, and the people would demand their punishment.”
Meanwhile intensive instruction was going on throughout the First and Fifteenth Army corps to educate the soldiers to an understanding of the Communist policy toward Moslems and their effort to create a “Hui-Han United Front.” I attended several political sessions in which soldiers were discussing the “Mohammedan revolution,” and they were quite interesting. At one session there were long debates, especially about the land question. Some argued that the Red Army should confiscate the land of great Mohammedan landlords; others opposed it. The political commissar then gave a concise statement of the Party’s position, explaining why it was necessary for the Mohammedans themselves to carry on their own land revolution, led by a strong revolutionary organization of their own, with a base in the Moslem masses.
Another company reviewed a brief history of relationships between the Moslems and Chinese, and another discussed the necessity for strict observance of the rules of conduct which had been issued to all soldiers stationed in Mohammedan districts. These latter decreed that Red soldiers must not: enter the home of a Moslem without his consent; molest a mosque or a priest in any way; say “pig” or “dog” before Moslems, or ask them why they don’t eat pork; or call the Moslems “small faith” and the Chinese “big faith.”
Besides these efforts to unite the whole army intelligently behind the Moslem policy of the Reds, there was incessant work with the peasantry. The two Moslem training regiments led in this propaganda, but companies in the Red Army also sent their propaganda corps from house to house, explaining Communist policies and urging the farmers to organize; army dramatic clubs toured the villages, giving Mohammedan plays, based on local situations and incidents of history, and designed to “agitate” the population; leaflets, newspapers, and posters were distributed, written in Chinese and Arabic; and mass meetings were frequently called to form revolutionary committees and village soviets. The peasant, Chinese or Moslem, had a hard squee
ze of it to avoid indoctrination to at least some degree. By July several dozen Mohammedan communities in Ninghsia had elected village soviets, and were sending delegates to Yu Wang Pao to confer with Moslem Communists there.
Four months later the Fourth Front Red Army was to cross the Yellow River, move over two hundred miles farther west, and reach Hsuchow, in Ma Pu-fang’s territory, astride the main road to Sinkiang. Early in September enough progress had been made in Ninghsia to convene a meeting of over 300 Moslem delegates from soviet committees elected by the villages then under the Red Army. A number of ahuns, teachers, merchants, and two or three small landlords were among them, but mostly they were poor farmers, members of the wealthier class having fled with the arrival of the “Han bandits.” The meeting of delegates elected a chairman and a provisional Moslem Soviet Government Committee. They passed resolutions to cooperate with the Red Army and accept its offer to help create an anti-Japanese Mohammedan army, and to begin at once the organization of a Chinese-Moslem unity league, a poor people’s league, and a mass anti-Japanese society.
The last item of business attended to by this historic little convention—and I suspect the most important to the peasants there—was the disposal of a Kuomintang tax collector. This man had evidently earned himself considerable enmity before the Reds arrived, and after that he had fled into the neighboring hill villages, to a place called Changchia Cha, and there continued to collect his taxes. It was alleged that he had doubled his levies—and had announced that this was due to the regulations of the new Red government which he claimed to represent! But the Mohammedan farmers learned that the Reds appointed no tax collectors, and half a dozen of them captured this miscreant and brought him into Yu Wang Pao for a mass trial. My personal reaction to the story was that any man who had sufficient nerve to act as an imposter in such a role at such a time had talents that should be preserved. The Moslems thought otherwise. There was no dissenting vote when the delegates took the decision to execute him.