In the last few months, reporters for a number of major newspapers and magazines (most notably Foreign Policy and The New York Times) published articles that discusses different aspects of China's Islamic community, and the Hui in particular. In many cases, these articles offered the Hui as a contrast to the Uighur as a model Islamic minority that received favorable treatment from the government, and played a pivotal role in the PRC's efforts to forge ties with the Middle East via it's New Silk Road/"One Belt One Road" initiative. I've also blogged on the subject, and it's true that the Hui, especially those in Ningxia, now find themselves front and center in the state's ongoing public relations campaign. And it's also true that, especially in the last 20 years, Hui communities have benefited both from their close ties to the state, and their increased contact with the greater Islamic World. But, even as we highlight the importance of the mutually beneficial relationship between the Hui and the state, we also ought to acknowledge that, historically speaking, the relationship between the Hui and the state has not always been so rosy.
Indeed, much of the Qing Dynasty's rule saw tensions flare in the northwest and southwest regions of Qing territory (today's provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Yunnan) as Islamic groups, led by self-styled Hui caliphs and Muslim warlords, attempted to break free of Qing rule. Opposing Hui sects clashed throughout Qinghai and Gansu during the Dungan Revolt, and a Hui leader in Yunnan attempted to create a Sultanate ruled from the city of Dali during the Panthay Rebellion. After the fall of the Qing, during the Republican Era, a group of Hui generals known as the Ma Clique, controlled most of China's Northwest. The Mas were nominally aligned with the state, but, as was the case for much of the country during this era, the relative weakness of the Republic of China allowed them a great deal of power and autonomy in governing.
In Xining, the former residence of the Ma Bufang, the last warlord of the clique to serve as governor of the Northwest, stands as testament to the power and influence of the Ma family. The house was built in 1942, and has been preserved as a museum since it was abandoned by its former tenant in 1949. The complex not only includes the living quarters of the general, his sons and their wives, but also contains an elaborate reception hall made out of precious local stone, and a barracks that staffed a garrison of troops.
The house's current role as a museum highlights some of the problems facing the current state in dealing with the legacy of relations between the Hui and state in the northwest. Ma Bufang aligned with the Chinese Nationalist KMT during China's Civil War. Though he and his troops resisted Japanese invasion during the Sino-Japanese War, he also fiercely resisted the Communist 8th Route Army under the command of General Peng Dehuai, dealing them several setbacks in their attempts to seize control over the northwest. While Ma was an anti-Communist, he also is credited by some sources (including the renowned Chinese-Mongol scholar Uradyn Bulag) with taking steps to eliminate serfdom in Qinghai's Tibetan and Mongol communities. Though he ruled the northwest in a tightly controlled manner, western observers who visited Ma, like Doak Barnett, noted that he also successfully and efficiently undertook programs to modernize the northwest's infrastructure, industrial, education and commercial sectors. Because of all of these contradictions, Ma Bufang presents contemporary China with a problem. What does the current CCP do with the legacy of such a man? On one hand Ma was a patriotic, reform-minded, Chinese nationalist who fought foreign invasion and (like the current leadership) attempted to build up the developmental capacity of the west. On the other hand, Ma fought bitterly against the PLA, and vowed to lead an Islamic insurgency from abroad after fleeing to Saudi Arabia.
The solution? Largely the museum side-steps the issue. The rooms in the house are meagerly furnished, and the signs outside the buildings do not delve deeply into Ma's biography. The descriptions they give of the rooms of the house are largely functional. Aside form one room that has been converted into a display about the PLA campaign in the Northwest, the Civil War is largely not invoked. Military items, like weapons, uniforms, etc. are presented largely without any kind of explanatory context. Here, Ma is neither the hero of the anti-Japanese resistance nor the scourge of the anti-Communist resistance. The man, himself, is largely absent from his own former estate.
Even less discussed is Ma's identity as Hui. In his early life, Ma Bufang was sent by his father, Ma Qi, to study at a madrasa to become an imam. During his rule over the northwest, Ma was a patron of Islamic intellectualism, specifically promoting the the Yihewani School of Islamic thought. In the nearby city of Linxia in Gansu, Ma opened an Islamic school for girls. In the city of Xining, he's credited with commissioning the renovation of both the Dongguan Grand Mosque, and the Shuichengmen Mosque. Later, after fleeing China, Ma served as the Taiwanese Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. While it is perhaps not the primary facet of his identity, Ma's identity as a Muslim is an important facet of understanding who he was, how he governed Qinghai, what effect he had on the area's development, and even the status of Islamic ethnic minorities in Qinghai to this very day. However any discussion of Ma's Hui identity is all but absent from the museum. In a few rooms of the house, Islamic wall hangings can be glimpsed on the wall as decor. Little to no explanation is given for their presence.
Instead, the museum offers a strange acknowledgement of Qinghai's ethnic diversity. The back courtyard of the museum-- an area that would have been reserved for residents of the complex who were not part of Ma's immediate family, has been converted into a rather minimal showcase for exhibits on QInghai's five major ethnic minorities: Hui, Tibetan, Mongolian, Tu and Salar.
The glimpses visitors get of these minorities' identities is woefully incomplete. Most of the rooms contain little more than a glass case displaying a set of ethnic costumes meant to represent the typical dress of minority group members. Other items in the exhibit usually include a few furniture items, like a prayer rug, or some Islamic woodcarving. In the exhibit on the Hui, a plaque containing a single paragraph about Hui culture in Qinghai provides the only real context to anything in the room. Visitors walk away from the exhibit with little more information than they began with. Most of the other rooms in the courtyard have been converted into souvenirs shops. Inside these converted rooms, visitors are able to buy faux-Tibetan jewelry and tacky wall hangings featuring generic depictions of vaguely recognizable "ethnic minorities" (usually dressed in a manor suggestive of Tibetans or Mongols) engaged in pastoral activities: herding, planting, etc.
Dealing with the legacy of Ma Bufang is certainly no easy task, especially since his biography presents too many points of contention to easily resolve in a tidy, politically correct narrative. But, by stripping out so much of Ma's personal identity from the museum itself, the Ma Bufang Mansion museum showcases an interesting problem in discourse about ethnic relations in China. While the recent narrative of the Hui as a patriotic, model Islamic minority may be getting a significant amount of coverage, the case of Ma Bufang illuminates a much more complicated history of Han-Muslim relations that lies just beneath the historical surface.