Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia A political history of Republican Sinkiang 1911-1949
Andrew D. W. Forbes University of Aberdeen
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and published continuously since 1884.
Cambridge University Press
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First published 1986
Printed in Great Britain by Woolnough Bookbinding, Irthlingborough Library of Congress catalogue card number: 84-17037
British Library cataloguing in publication data
Forbes, Andrew D. W.
Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia. 1. Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region (China) - Politics and government 2. China - Politics and government - 1912-1949
I. Title II. Series
951'.604 DS793.862
ISBN O 521 255147
For my parents; and for my daughter — Rashida Isabel Wilson Forbes
— who was born May 22, 1982, during the writing of this book.
Contents
List of figures, maps and tables x Acknowledgements xiil List of abbreviations xv
Introduction I
Sinkiang, 1911-28: the administration of Yang Tseng-hsin 11 Yang Tseng-hsin’s rise to power II
Yang’s maintenance of power 13
The situation in southern Sinkiang 27
The economy of Sinkiang under Yang Tseng-hsin 28
The assassination of Yang Tseng-hsin 33
Sinkiang, 1928-31: the rebellion at Kumul and the first Tungan invasion 38
The administration of Chin Shu-jen 38
The annexation of the Khanate of Kumul 42
The Kumul Rebellion 48
The involvement of Ma Chung-ying 52
The first invasion of Ma Chung-ying 56
Sinkiang, 1931-3: the rebellion of the Turkic-speaking Muslims
of the south 63
The development of Turkic nationalism in southern Sinkiang 63
The outbreak of rebellion in the south and the collapse of the Chinese administration 70
The struggle between the Turkic- and Chinese-speaking Muslims at Kashgar and Yarkand 81
Turkic factionalism at Kashgar and Yarkand 89
Vil
Vill
Contents
Sinkiang, 1933-4: Tungan invasion, Turkic secession and Soviet intervention 97 Ma Shih-ming’s attack on Urumchi and the overthrow of Chin Shu-jen 97 The second invasion of Ma Chung-ying 106 The ‘Turkish-Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan’ 112 Soviet intervention in support of Sheng Shih-ts’ai 116 The collapse of the TIRET and the flight of Ma Chung-ying 121
Sinkiang, 1934-44: the Muslims under Sheng Shih-ts’ai_ 128
The Hui satrapy of “Tunganistan’ 128
The 1937 Muslim Rebellion in southern Sinkiang 135
1937-42: Sinkiang as a Soviet satellite 144
The Muslims of Sinkiang during Sheng’s ‘Progressive’ period 152
1942-4: the fall of Sheng Shih-ts’ai and the emergence of Kuomintang authority 157
Sinkiang, 1944-6: Muslim ‘separatism’ under the Kuomin-
tang 163
KMT policies in Sinkiang, 1942-5 163
The Kazakh revolt in Zungharia and the birth of the ‘East Turkestan Republic’ in [li 170
The Soviet Union and the initial consolidation of the ETR 177
The Soviet Union and the military expansion of the ETR_ 186
The Soviet Union and the KMT-ETR armistice of 1946 190
Sinkiang, 1946-9: the Muslims on the eve of the communist
takeover 196
The establishment of ‘coalition government’ and Muslim fac- tionalism in Shara Sume and the south 196
The administration of Mas‘td Sabri and the ‘Pei-ta-shan Incident’ 206
The victory of the Chinese communists 2/5
The limitation of Muslim dissidence and the decline of Soviet influence 220
Contents 1X
Conclusions 229
Appendix I Who was who in Republican Sinkiang 235
Appendix II The constitution and composition of the ‘Turkish—Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan’ (TIRET) 255
Appendix III Notes on the structure and composition of the ‘East Turkestan Republic’ (ETR) at Kulja 259
Appendix IV
Soviet intervention in north-western Iran, 1945-6: A West Asian parallel with the ‘East Turkestan Republic’ in Sinkiang 261
Appendix V British Consuls-General at Kashgar, 1909-48 264
Notes 265
Schemes of Romanisation 344 Bibliography 345
Index 365
Ww
ND HD
10. Il. 12.
13.
14. 15.
17. 18.
List of figures, maps and tables
Figures
Section A: Early Republican Sinkiang 20
. The subjects: two Uighur mullahs . The Rulers: Yang Tseng-hsin in the mid-1920s . The Rulers: Chin Shu-jen c. 1928
Section B: Early Republican Kashgar 25-7
. Kashgar Old City: high walls and double defensive gateway
. Kashgar Old City: ‘Id-Gah Mosque and central market place . Ma Fu-hsing with Turkic wife and son, c. 1922
. Some of Ma Fu-hsing’s victims. The Chinese reads:
‘a photograph of people who had their hands and feet cut off by Ma Fu-hsing’
. Ma Fu-hsing — nemesis . Ma Shao-wu (after attempted assassination of October 1934)
Section C: Rebellion at Kumul 50
Ruins of Kumul, c. 1932
Leaders of the Kumul Rising: Khoja Niyas Hajji, c. 1932 Leaders of the Kumul Rising: Yulbars Khan, c. 1932
Section D: Rebellion in the South-West 85-6
The Khotan Amirs: A group of Khotanlik ‘ulamd, c. 1933. The Amir Muhammad Amin Bughra is in the foreground wearing a black chapan
The Amir ‘Abdullah Bughra, killed at Yarkand in April, 1934 The Amir Nur Ahmadjan Bughra, killed at Yangi-Hissar in April, 1934
. Main street of Khotan, 1932; plaited awnings provide shade
from the fierce rays of the sun
Yarkand: the Kashgar Gate
Military parade by Khotanlik forces, 1932. The Amir Muhammad Amin Bughra is in the foreground
19. 20. a1.
23: 23; 24.
25.
26. 27: 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
SAMA WN ER
oo
List of Figures, Maps and Tables xi
Section E: The Rival Warlords 105
Sheng Shih-ts’ai, probably c. 1928
Ma Chung-ying in KMT 36th Division uniform, c. 1933 Turkic conscripts near Kumul, 1933
Section F: ‘Tunganistan’ 132-3
Ma Hu-shan, 1937
Tungan rifleman
Watched by Uighur woman with child, Tungan troops drill at Khotan, 1937
Printing money at the Khotan ‘mint’, 1937
Section G: Late Republican Sinkiang — Contenders for Power 197-8
Ahmadjan Qasim
‘Uthman Batur
Ma‘sud Sabri
Wu Chung-hsin
Chang Chih-chung
‘Isa Yusuf Alptekin (Istanbul c.1970)
Burhan Shahidi
Saif al-Din ‘Aziz
Maps
Sinkiang: physical geography 2
Distribution of Muslim nationalities in China 4-5 North-eastern Sinkiang: towns and communications 39 Kumul or Ha-mi 47
Southern Sinkiang: towns and communications 64 Urumchi: region and city 102
Zungharia and the Ili Valley: towns and communications 108
‘Tunganistan’ (southern Sinkiang, 1934-7) 129
The Ili Rebellion and the ‘Pei-Ta-Shan Incident’ 164
Tables
Muslim national minorities of China: population, ethnicity and language 7
Muslim national minorities of China: distribution 8 Ministers of the ‘Turkish-Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan’ 256
Ministers of the ‘East Turkestan Republic’ 259
Xil
List of Figures, Maps and Tables Sources of figures
Figures 1, 11, 12: Hedin, Big Horse’s Flight; 2: Bosshard, Diirch Tibet und Turkistan; 3, 13, 16, 18: Ambolt, Karavan, 4: Morden, W. J., ‘By Coolie and Caravan across Central Asia’, National Geographic Magazine, October, 1927; 5: De Terra, H., ‘On the World’s Highest Plateaus’, National Geographic Magazine, March 1931; 6, 7, 8, 17: Nazaroff, Moved On!; 9, 25: Maillart, Forbidden Journey; 10, 20, 21: Hedin, History of the Expedition in Asia; 14: Bugra, Dogu Tuirkistan: Tarihi, Cografi ve Simdiki Durumu; 15: Arell, Din broders blod ropar; 19: Teichmann, Journey to Turkistan; 22: Filchner, A Scientist in Tartary; 23: Fleming, News from Tartary; 24: Maillart, ‘Dictature doungane’; 26, 29, 30: Chang Ta-chiin, Ssu-shih-nien tung-luan Hsin-chiang; 27: Karahoca, Dogu Tiirkistan; 28: Philipe, Caravanes d’Asie; 31, Alptekin, Dogu Tiirkistan Davasi; 32, 33: Chung-kuo I- ssu-lin-chiao hsieh-hui (China Islamic Association), Ch’ien- chin chung ti Chung-kuo I-ssu-lin (subtitled ‘Chinese Moslems in Progress’).
All photographs reproduced courtesy of Mr Mike Craig and staff, University of Aberdeen Photographic Section, to whom, as ever, many thanks.
Acknowledgements
In the preparation of the present study my greatest debt of thanks is due to Dr Gavan McCormack, who first introduced me to the study of modern Chinese History at the University of Leeds in 1972, and who has maintained a constant and helpful interest in the progress of my research since taking up his present post at La Trobe University, Bundoora, in the summer of 1977. He is an admirable scholar and has been, and continues to be, a good friend.
No less a debt of thanks is due to Professor David Dilks of the School of History, University of Leeds, who supervised my research between 1977 and 1981, and whose meticulous academic standards and professional guidance in the methodology of research have proved invaluable in the completion of the present study.
Special thanks are due also to Dr Tom Ewing, friend and mentor in Central Asian Studies, as well as to Professor Owen Lattimore, whose writings first awakened my interest in Chinese Central Asia and whose unique personal reminiscences — most notably around the McCormack dinner table — have helped to bring Republican Sinkiang to life for me. The late Professor Joe Fletcher of Harvard generously provided a detailed and valuable commentary on the original typescript, whilst Dr Stuart Munro-Hay, friend and former colleague at the University of Khartoum, has proved a painstaking proof-reader and offered much perceptive advice.
Numerous other friends and colleagues have helped in the preparation of this book, amongst whom my very sincere thanks go to Chris Ferrard, Joe Ford (Great Britain—China Centre, London), David Gordon, Walter Graham CBE (formerly HM Consul Urumchi, 1945-7), John Hultvall, Colin Imber, Fritz Kaiser, Mark Lavery, Lars-Erik Nyman, Toshiyuki Tanaka, and M. E. Yapp.
Thanks are also due to a number of libraries and other academic institutions, most particularly to the long-suffering staff of the Inter- Library Loans sections of the Universities of Leeds and of Aberdeen — especially Barbara Ross and Ann Spry in the latter institution — to the Milli Kitiiphane (National Library) at Ankara, and to the Flag Institute at Chester and its Director, Mr W. G. Crampton.
xiii
XIV Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my parents — to whom this book is dedicated — for both moral and financial support during the lengthy period of research leading to the completion of this study (and, most particularly, to my father for many hours of accurate and uncomplaining proof-reading). Finally, I am grateful to my wife, Fawzia, without whose help and support in innumer- able ways (and across three continents) the present study might never have been completed.
A.D.W.F.
King’s College University of Aberdeen
Abbreviations used in text
GPU
HMCGK HMCU HMVCGK HRAF INA
IO
IOR
Ir.
JAH JPRS JRCAS KMT
M.
MEJ MPR MW
Auswiartiges Amt (Bonn)
Arabic
Central Asiatic Journal (Wiesbaden)
Central Asian Review (London)
Chinese Communist Party
Chinese
Committee for National Revolution (Khotan) Communist Party of the Soviet Union
East Turkestan Republic (Kulja)
Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong)
Far Eastern Survey (New York)
Foreign Office (Great Britain)
Foreign and Political Department (India) Geographical Journal (London)
Government of India
State Political Administration (Russian abbreviation for the Soviet security service from 1922 to 34, subsequently NKVD)
His Majesty’s (British) Consul-General, Kashgar
His Majesty’s (British) Consul, Urumchi
His Majesty’s (British) Vice Consul-General, Kashgar Human Relations Area Files (New Jersey)
Ili National Army
India Office (Great Britain)
India Office Records (London)
Iranian
Journal of Asian History (Wiesbaden)
Joint Publications Research Service (New York) Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society (London) Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party)
Manchu
Middle East Journal (Washington DC)
Mongolian People’s Republic
Moslem World (now The Muslim World, Hartford, Conn.)
XV
Xvi List of Abbreviations
NKVD
NYT PLA PRC PRO REI RMM RSFSR STPNLC
TIRET Tk.
SSR YKP
People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Russian abbreviation for Soviet security service from 1934 to 43, subsequently NK GB)
New York Times
People’s Liberation Army
People’s Republic of China
Public Record Office (London)
Revue des études islamiques (Paris)
Revue du monde musulman (Paris)
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Sinkiang Turkic People’s National Liberation Committee
Turkish—Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan (Kashgar)
Turkic
Soviet Socialist Republic
Young Kashgar Party
Introduction
The central theme of the present study is the development and nature of Warlord government and Muslim dissidence in China’s westernmost province of Sinkiang during the chaotic years between the fall of the Ch’ing Dynasty in 1911 and the establishment of the Chinese People’s Republic in 1949. An ancillary but closely related theme is the consistent and largely successful Soviet effort to influence events in Sinkiang during the three decades following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the regional and national Chinese response to this challenge, and the impact which continuing Soviet influence in Sinkiang was to have upon the indigenous Muslim population of the region during this period.
Where detailed studies of Republican Sinkiang exist — and there are few in any language — there has been a perhaps inevitable tendency to concentrate on great power politics in the region, on the supposedly pivotal role played by Sinkiang in relations between China and the Soviet Union, or between the Soviet Union and Japan, just as studies of Central Asian history during the nineteenth century tend to interpret the politics of Chinese Turkestan (by which name Sinkiang was then widely known) in terms of the ‘Great Game’ played out between the British Empire and Imperial Russia across the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. Thus, previous analyses of the history of Republican Sinkiang have tended to interpret political developments within the province against a back- ground of Chinese, Soviet, British, Japanese and even American inter- ests, whilst the local and regional Islamic element has been almost completely ignored.
Perhaps the best examples of this perfectly legitimate approach are to be found in Owen Lattimore’s Pivot of Asia: Sinkiang and the Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1950), Allen S. Whiting’s Sinkiang: Pawn or Pivot? (1958), and Lars-Erik Nyman’s Great Britain and Chinese, Russian and Japanese Interests in Sinkiang, 1918-1934 (1977), all of which concentrate primarily on the strategic significance of Sinkiang in international affairs to the exclusion of Islamic political developments within Sinkiang and of that region’s position in relation to the wider Muslim world. Thus, whilst between 1931 and 1949 Sinkiang was racked by four major and numerous minor Muslim rebellions, as well as by two distinct but related Muslim
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Introduction 3
invasions from neighbouring Kansu, in previous studies of the period these events have either been passed over completely or at best have received the most cursory of examinations.
It is the purpose of the present study to redress the balance; to chart and analyse in detail and for the first time the indigenous political history of Republican Sinkiang, both for the subject’s considerable intrinsic interest and, hopefully, as a contribution to our greater understanding of the political and social factors underlying the Muslim revival in Central Asia in recent years.
Geographical and ethnic background
Sinkiang, the Chinese province which provides the setting for the major part of the present study, is a peripheral land. In a political sense it is a part of China, as it has been at times of Chinese strength and prestige since the Han Dynasty first conquered this region of Central Asia more than two thousand years ago. In a cultural sense, however, Sinkiang belongs primarily to the Muslim world, as it has done since the Islamicisa- tion of the Turkic- and Iranian-speaking peoples of Central Asia dis- placed the Indo-Buddhist civilisation which had dominated the area until the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD.
In a geographical sense Sinkiang can also be defined as a peripheral land. Isolated from Western Asia by the massed ranks of the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs and the Tien Shan, from the Indian Subcontinent by the Karakoram, Kunlun and Himalaya ranges, and from China by the Gobi Desert, Sinkiang — and most particularly its southern section, the Tarim Basin — is Central Asian in the broadest geographical sense of the word, belonging neither fully to the East nor to the West.
The province of Sinkiang, the largest and most sparsely populated in China, can properly be divided into two main regions, the Tarim Basin and Zungharia, and two lesser but economically significant regions, the Ili Valley and the Turfan Depression. The T’ien Shan range, running approximately eastwards from the Pamir Massif, forms a formidable wall between Zungharia and the Tarim Basin, making direct communication between the two areas difficult, especially in winter. The Ili Valley, cut off from Zungharia by a northern spur of the T’ien Shan, is physically isolated from the rest of the province and is easily accessible only from the west — an area which fell under Russian domination during the mid- nineteenth century, and which today constitutes a part of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.
It should be emphasised that, since the establishment of the Chinese People’s Republic in 1949, there has been a great change in both the size and the ethnic composition of the population of Sinkiang, a transforma-
4 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia introduction 5
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Map 2 Distribution of Muslim nationalities in China
6 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
tion chiefly occasioned by a massive, CCP-inspired influx of Han migrants. During the Republican Period, however, Han Chinese officials and settlers represented a small minority amongst a sea of diverse, predominantly Muslim national groups. Thus, according to the ‘best available’ population statistics for Sinkiang during the 1940s,! the seven Muslim nationalities of the province numbered collectively some 3,439,000 out of an estimated total population of 3,730,000. A further 200,000 of the inhabitants of the province were Han Chinese settlers, soldiers and officials, whilst the remaining 75,000 to 100,000 people were made up of Mongols, Russians, Tunguzic peoples (Sibo, Solon and Manchu), and a few Tibetans, Afghans, and Indian Hindu money-lenders.
The Muslim peoples Of the various indigenous Muslim nationalities of Sinkiang, the most numerous and the most politically significant are the Uighurs, a Turkic- speaking, primarily sedentary agricultural people inhabiting the oases of the Tarim Basin, Turfan and Kumul, and the cultivated lowlands of the Ili Valley. In the late 1940s the Uighur population of Sinkiang was estimated at 2,941,000. The second largest Muslim national group in Sinkiang is the Kazakh, numbering an estimated 319,000 in the late Republican Period, whilst the third most numerous is the Kirghiz, numbering an estimated 65,000 at the same time. Both the Kazakhs and the Kirghiz of Sinkiang are Turkic-speaking nomadic peoples, with the former predominating in the highland regions of Zungharia and the Ili Valley, whilst the Kirghiz inhabit the upland pasture regions of the Tien Shan and the Pamirs.
Other Muslim peoples permanently settled in Sinkiang include a small group of Iranian-speaking ‘Mountain’ Tajiks inhabiting the upland Sarikol region in the far south-west and numbering an estimated 9,000 in the mid-1940s; a group of primarily urban-based Uzbeks inhabiting the larger oasis towns and cities of the Tarim Basin and numbering an estimated 8,000 in the mid-1940s; and a still smaller group of Tatars, settled chiefly at Urumchi and in the townships along the Sinkiang—Soviet frontier, numbering an estimated 5,000 during the same period. Finally, mention should be made of the Hui, a group of Chinese-speaking Muslims settled throughout China, but especially in Zungharia and Kumul within Sinkiang and in the neighbouring north-western provinces of Kansu, Tsinghai and Ningsia. The Hui — known by the Turkic name ‘Tungan’ in Sinkiang — numbered an estimated 92,000 in that province during the mid-1940s, and wielded considerable political and military power throughout the Republican Period.
With the exception of the Ismaili Tajiks of Sarikol, the Muslim peoples
Introduction 7
of Sinkiang, whether Turkic- or Chinese-speaking, are uniformly Sunni followers of the orthodox Hanafi madhhab.
The non-Muslim peoples: With the exception of the Sinkiang Mongols, who numbered approx- imately 63,000 in the late Republican Period and who inhabit a narrow strip of land along the north-eastern frontier between Sinkiang and the Mongolian People’s Republic as well as parts of the central Tien Shan, Ili Valley and the Chuguchak district, the various non-Muslim peoples of Sinkiang — like the Hui Muslims - are all relative newcomers whose arrival in the province dates from the Ch’ien Lung Emperor’s great mid- eighteenth century conquest of the region.? Thus, although the Han Chinese now (in 1983) form a substantial part of the population of Sinkiang and may shortly come to outnumber the indigenous inhabitants taken collectively, for the period with which the present study is con- cerned, the Han Chinese, although rulers of the province, formed only a very small proportion of the population.
According to statistics dating from the mid-1940s, during the late Republican Period the Han of Sinkiang numbered an estimated 202,239 persons, or between 3 per cent and 4 per cent of the population. Although
Table 1 Muslim national minorities of China: population, ethnicity and language*
Nationality Population (1953) | Ethnic group Linguistic group
Uighur 3,900,000 Turkic Turki (Chagatay branch) Kazakh 530,000 Turkic Turki (Tatar branch) Tung-hsiang 150,000 Mongoloid Mongolian
Kirghiz 68,000 Turkic Turki (Tatar branch) Salar 31,000 Turkic Turki (Chagatay branch) Tajik 15,000 Indo-European Iranian
Uzbek 11,000 Turkic Turki (Chagatay branch) Pao-an 5.500 — —
Tatar 4,300 Turkic Turki (Tatar branch) Hui 3,930,000 Chinese Chinese
Total 8,636,000
Sources: Nagel, Encyclopedia Guide China (Geneva, 1968), pp. 62-4 (based on figures published in the Hsin-Hua tzu-tien, 1957): M. A. Czaplicka, The Turks of Central Asia (London, 1918); R. B. Shaw, ‘On the Hill Canton of Salar’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, x, London, 1878; R. B. Ekvall, Cultural Relations on the Kansu—Tibetan Cultural Frontier, Chicago, 1939; J. T. Dreyer, China's Forty Millions, Cambridge, Mass., 1976.
* Chinese communist sources from the early 1950s usually estimate the total Muslim population of China at 10,000,000. Since 1953 the overall population of China has increased by an estimated 2.5 per cent annually. If this were applied to the Muslim population, the total number of Muslim inhabitants of the People’s Republic of China would now exceed 16,000,000.
Table 2. Muslim national minorities of China: distribution
Nationality Territorial base Sinkiang Kansu Ningsia Tsinghai Throughout China Elsewhere
Uighur . 95,000 in Kazakh and Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republics
Kazakh - * ‘ 3,581,000 in Soviet Kazakhstan; minorities in Mongolian People’s Republic and Turkish Anatolia.
Tung-hsiang . ‘
Kirghiz : 970,000 in Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic; c. 30,000 in Afghan Pamirs
Salar
Tajik e 1,397,000 in Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic; small minorities in Afghanistan and Pakistant
Uzbek f 6,000,400 in Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic; c. 820,000 in Afghanistan
Pao-an - :
Tatar * 4,969,000 throughout USSR
Hui , A : : 21,000 in Kazakh and Kirghiz Soviet Socialist
Republics
Sources: Chinese Moslems in Progress (Peking, 1957), pp. vi-ix (unmarked); Hsin-Hua tzu-tien (Peking, 1971), pp. 590-3; G. Wheeler, Racial Problems in Soviet Muslim Asia (London, 1967), pp. 65-6; G. Wheeler, The Peoples of Soviet Central Asia (London, 1966), pp. 117-18; A. Benningsen and C. Lemercier-Quelquejay, /slam in the Soviet Union (London, 1967), maps 1 and 3; D. N. Wilber (ed.), Afghanistan (New Haven, 1956), pp. 37-71; US Government Area Handbooks for: Afghanistan (Washington, 1976); People’s Republic of China (Washington, 1972); Mongolia (Washington, 1974); Pakistan (Washington, 1975); Soviet Union (Washington, 1974).
+ The small ‘Mountain Tajik’ population of Wakhan and Badakshan should not be confused with the much larger plain-dwelling Tajiks of Afghanistan who form an estimated 30 per cent of the total population. The ‘Mountain Tajiks’ are Shi'a Muslims like the Tajiks of Sinkiang and Pakistan. The plains Tajiks are Sunni Muslims. The same distinction applies in Soviet Tajikistan.
Introduction 9
sizeable communities of Han Chinese existed in the main administrative areas, there were no significant territorial enclaves in which the Han predominated. The Han population of Republican Sinkiang was essen- tially made up of five main groups: the descendants of Han political and criminal offenders exiled to the Ili region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Hunanese settlers drawn from the ranks of Tso Tsung-t’ang’s victorious army which reconquered Sinkiang for the Ch’ing in 1876-7; Tientsin merchants who supplied Tso’s army and who subsequently chose to settle in Sinkiang; Shansi caravaneers who had traded with and settled in Sinkiang for many decades; and finally Kansu colonists, the poorest and most recent Han arrivals in Sinkiang, many of whom entered the province during the 1920s and 1930s under the administration of Chin Shu-jen. Besides these main regional groups, three smaller but distinct provincial groups of Han were to play signifi- cant roles in Sinkiang during the Republican Period; these were the Yunnanese, who rose to positions of prominence under Yang Tseng-hsin; the north-easterners, who entered the province in force at the time of Sheng Shih-ts’ai; and finally the Honanese, who were brought in as settlers by the KMT authorities during 1944-5.
Finally, mention should be made of the “Tunguzic Peoples’ and of the Russian presence in Sinkiang. The Tunguzic-speaking Sibo, Solon and Manchu inhabitants were settled in the Ili region as military colonists by the Ch’ien Lung Emperor in the mid-eighteenth century; taken collec- tively, in the mid-1940s they numbered 12,182 (9,023 Sibos, 2,489 Solons and 670 Manchus). The Russian inhabitants of Sinkiang also tended to live in the Ili region, though smaller Russian communities were established in Chuguchak and in the capital at Urumchi. During the Republican Period they numbered an estimated 13,400, the great majority of whom were ‘White Russian’ anti-Bolshevik refugees.
Historical background
Although Han Chinese involvement in the area of Central Asia which is today approximately conterminous with Sinkiang dates back to the conquests of Wu Ti, the fifth Emperor of the Western Han, at the beginning of the first century AD, Chinese control over the region as a whole was to remain sporadic and tenuous until the mid-eighteenth century AD. Thus, although the Kumul—Turfan region of ‘Uighuristan’ had remained in a loose vassal relationship with the Ming Dynasty, it was not until the nineteenth year of the reign of the Ch’ing Ch’ien Lung Emperor (1755) that Zungharia and the Ili Valley were brought fully under Chinese control, whilst the Tarim Basin region of ‘Altishahr’ fell to the Ch’ing with the capture of Kashgar in 1758.
10 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Over the next half century Ch’ing power in Central Asia gradually declined, so that by 1820 Jahangir, the exiled Aqtaghlik pretender to the throne of Altishahr, felt strong enough to leave his base in Khokand and to launch the first of a series of Aqtaghlik rebellions against Ch’ing rule in Eastern Turkestan. Jahangir enjoyed some success and in 1826 succeeded in capturing Kashgar; in 1828, however, he was defeated by Ch’ing forces, taken to Peking and executed. Over the next four decades the Tarim Basin was to be shaken by four major and numerous minor Muslim revolts, culminating in the great mid-nineteenth-century rebellion of Muhammad Ya‘qub Beg who proclaimed himself Khan of Eastern Turkestan in 1867, and succeeded in winning some degree of British and Turkish recognition of his position as an independent ruler during 1873-4. By 1877, however, Yaqub was dead and his Amirate was reincorporated within the Ch’ing Empire. Seven years later, in 1884, the three regions of ‘Uighuristan’, ‘Altishahr’ and Zungharia (together with the Ili Valley) were declared, for the first time, a province of China with the name Sinkiang (Ch. Hsin-chiang, or ‘New Territory’). From this time until the collapse of the Ch’ing Dynasty in 1911, Sinkiang was to remain peaceful under the rule of a succession of generally able Han bureaucrats. Yet this apparent stability was to prove deceptive. Sinkiang remained very much a part of the Muslim world despite the defeat of the Aqtaghlik Khojas and Ya‘qub Beg, and the entire province — appropriately charac- terised by Fletcher as ‘the most rebellious territory in the Ch’ing Empire’? during the nineteenth century, was to prove no less turbulent during the first half of the twentieth.
1 Sinkiang, 1911-28: the administration of Yang Tseng-hsin
The Republic is raw with youth. The wars of the Five Kingdoms, the battles of the Seven Heroes, they fight them over again. But what care we how they fight? For I have made an earthly paradise in a remote region. The Muslims of the south, the nomads of the north, I will rule them to live contentedly in the old ways. Panegyric penned by Yang Tseng-hsin in 1926, after fifteen years of his rule over Sinkiang.'
Yang Tseng-hsin’s rise to power
Yang Tseng-hsin, the first Republican Governor of Sinkiang, was born in Meng-tzu in south-eastern Yunnan in 1867. He received a classical Chinese education, passing his chin-shih degree in 1899 and entering the Imperial Civil Service in the same year.?
Over the next eighteen years Yang served the Ch’ing government as a District Magistrate, and later as a Circuit Commissioner, in the north- western provinces of Kansu and Ningsia. During these years he acquired a reputation for his ability to ‘manage’ the local Tungan Muslim popula- tion.? In 1908 Yang was transferred to Sinkiang, where he was appointed Tao-t’'ai (Circuit Commissioner) at Aksu. As a result of his years of experience in the Tungan areas of Kansu, Yang’s career prospered under Yitian Ta-hua, the last Ch’ing governor of Sinkiang. He rose rapidly to become TJao-t’ai and Commissioner for Judicial Affairs at Urumchi, the provincial capital, a post which he held at the outbreak of the Chinese Revolution of 1911.4
The 1911 Revolution had immediate repercussions in distant Sinkiang. In December, uprisings against the Ch’ing broke out in Ili and Urumchi under the leadership of disaffected Han officers belonging to the Ko-lao- hui.5 In Urumchi the rising was quickly suppressed. The ringleaders were beheaded or tortured to death, and many of their followers were sent to join garrisons in southern Sinkiang — an area which, as a result, became a hotbed of Ko-lao-hui activities.° In Ili, however, the rebels succeeded in seizing power and in setting up a rival administration under the leadership of Yang Tsuan-hsi.
The Ch’ing governor Yiian Ta-hua was in a difficult position. He had successfully put down the rebellion in Urumchi, and had the support of his Commissioner for Judicial Affairs, Yang Tseng-hsin, who comman- ded 2,000 Tungan troops from Kansu, the most potent military force in the province. It soon became apparent, however, that the wider revolu-
I!
12 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
tion elsewhere in China was succeeding. Events moved rapidly. On 1 January 1912, Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated as Provisional President of the Republic of China at Nanking; on 12 February the Empress Dowager Lung Yui signed an abdication edict in the name of the child Emperor Hsiian-t’ung, bringing to an end 268 years of Ch’ing rule; and on Io March, after an agreement had been reached with Sun Yat-sen, Yiian Shih-k’ai was formally installed as President of the newly established Chinese Republic.
Time was clearly not on the side of Yuan Ta-hua and, after transferring his authority to Yang Tseng-hsin, he fled Urumchi.’? Yang immediately declared his allegiance to the Chinese Republic, and in May was duly rewarded by receiving Yiian Shih-k’ai’s confirmation of his de facto position as Civil and Military Governor of Sinkiang, with the concurrent post of Military Governor of the Ili Region, an area still under the control of Yang Tsuan-hsii.’ For the next three years Yang Tseng-hsin was to be kept fully occupied with efforts to consolidate his internal position, threatened both by the Ili group and by the Ko-lao-hui, and in repelling an external threat to the north-east of the province posed by Mongol raiders.
The authority given to Yang by Peking - and by his 2,000 Tungan troops — proved sufficient to bring the Ili group to the conference table. An agreement was reached in June 1912 and a treaty was signed at Chuguchak by which the rebel group recognised Yang Tseng-hsin as Governor of Sinkiang and the Ili Region was fully incorporated within the province. Brigadier Yang Tsuan-hsi, the titular head of the Ili group, was correctly recognised by Yang Tseng-hsin as a figurehead; consequently he was transferred to Kashgar where he’ was appointed to the post of T’i- t’'ai (Military Commander). Two of Yang Tsuan-hsii’s fellow-revolution- aries whom Yang Tseng-hsin considered especially dangerous were given official positions in the provincial administration; shortly after their arrival in Urumchi, however, they were arrested by Yang and sentenced to death for treason.°
Yang next turned his attention to the Ko-lao-hui, especially in the south where the provincial administration was in complete disarray. During the last days of Yuan Ta-hua’s authority Ko-lao-hui adherents had murdered the Ch’ing Commissioner at Kashgar together with his wife,'® as well as the Magistrates of Kashgar, Kucha and Kara Kash.!! Yang, whose political stature had been considerably increased by his bloodless victory over the Ili group, adopted an ostensibly conciliatory approach, pardoning and transferring to other districts the most promi- nent of the Ko-lao-hui leadership. Faced with the alternatives of confron- ting Yang’s Tungan soldiery — ‘undisciplined, ignorant and ferocious’? but undeniably effective — or agreeing to their transfers, the Ko-lao-hui
Sinkiang, 1911-28 13
leaders submitted. All were later secretly executed on Yang’s orders." After the Ko-lao-hui leaders had disappeared from the scene, Yang further strengthened his authority south of the T’ien Shan by rewarding Ma Shao-wu, a trusted Lieutenant and a Hui Muslim from Yang’s native province of Yunnan, with the post of Military Commander at Kucha."4
Having consolidated his position in the south of the province, Yang turned his attention to the north-eastern frontier, where Mongol troops professing allegiance to the Jebtsundamba Khutukhtu, or ‘Holy Emperor’ (Bogd Khaan) of the newly independent Outer Mongolian state,!5 were threatening to advance into the Altai district. In August 1912, these troops had stormed the town of Khovd, until this time under Chinese jurisdiction. The victorious Mongols looted the Chinese shops, and in a grisly ceremony the living hearts of the Chinese prisoners were torn out, the blood being used to anoint the war banners of the victors. !® Yang responded by reinforcing his garrisons at a string of north-eastern bases from Kumul to Chuguchak. He also took the opportunity to strengthen his military control over other strategic centres in the Ili Valley and to the south of the Tien Shan; as a result, the whole of Sinkiang was brought under his direct control.!’
Yang had no desire for a prolonged military struggle with the Mongols, not least because he mistrusted the political loyalties of the Mongol population within Sinkiang. He was therefore content to reach an interim agreement with their forces (through the offices of the Russian Consul in Urumchi) pending a solution to the Mongolian question at international level. The crisis on the north-eastern front was eventually defused by the official Sino-Russian Declaration of 5 November 1913, by which the Chinese Republic effectively recognised Outer Mongolia’s autonomous status.'* In March of 1914, both Sinkiang and Mongolia withdrew their troops from the Altai front. At about the same time, after three years of effort, Yang Tseng-hsin finally succeeded in eliminating the last vestiges of Ko-lao-hui influence in Sinkiang.
Yang’s maintenance of power
Yang was now the undisputed master of China’s largest province, and could devote himself more fully to ‘making an earthly paradise in a remote region’. He made few changes to the basic Ch’ing administrative system; however, all former ties with Kansu were abolished, and the districts of Ili and Altai were absorbed, adding two circuits to the four original circuits of Urumchi, Aksu, Kashgar and Chuguchak. Similarly, the number of hsien in the province was increased from 40 to 47. Below hsien level, the Ch’ing system of native Begs was retained. Throughout his long rule, Yang was greatly troubled by fear of revolt.
14 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
He mistrusted his subordinates,” and he mistrusted his predominantly Muslim subjects.?! In an attempt to allay these fears, Yang surrounded himself with a coterie of his relatives and fellow-provincials from Yun- nan;”? he also introduced a series of increasingly Draconian laws designed to isolate, divide, and maintain in enforced ignorance the peoples of Sinkiang. He ruled as a complete autocrat, with all power gathered in his own hands. Sven Hedin, who travelled extensively in Sinkiang at various times during Yang’s rule, said that nowhere on earth did there exist a more absolute ruler.23 Claremont P. Skrine, the British Consul-General at Kashgar from July 1922 to September 1944, informed his superiors in New Delhi that Yang had consolidated his personal power by the following means:
(1) Instituting a system of direct correspondence between himself and the magistrates of even the most remote districts of southern Sinkiang, thus reducing all Tao-yin to the position of little more than figureheads.
(2) Despatching Officers on Special Duty (Ch. Wei-ytian) throughout the province to keep a close watch on the activities of all officials.
(3) Gradually replacing Peking-appointed officials with his own relatives and fellow-provincials.
(4) Exercising a strict personal censorship over the mails and cor- respondence of even his highest officials, whilst excluding from the province all newspapers or printed matter of any kind connected with current events.”4
When dealing with his own officials, Yang carried secrecy to obsessive lengths. He accepted the necessity of the telegraph, but reportedly kept the key to the Urumchi telegraph office always on his own person, opening the door in the morning and locking it again each night. ‘Informative telegrams he kept to himself; inconvenient ones he simply destroyed. His archives were in his own meticulous mind, and even his closest subordinates could seldom follow his trend of thought.’
Yang was quite merciless when he discovered — or even suspected — disloyalty. When, during January 1916, some of Yang’s fellow Yun- nanese domiciled in Sinkiang sought to persuade him to join the move- ment against Yiian Shih-k’ai which had broken out in their native province,* Yang would have none of it. Some days later Yang learned secretly that several of the Yunnanese were still conspiring to bring Sinkiang into the struggle on the side of Yuian’s opponents. Yang immediately had his informant executed ‘to allay the fears of the plotters and to let them know that he trusted them’.2”7 The subsequent fate of the plotters, as related to Wu Ai-chen by an eyewitness,”8 bears quotation in full; it casts interesting light on Yang Tseng-hsin’s relationship with his subordinates, and is representative of descriptions of several similar events which have come down to us:
Sinkiang, 1911-28 15
It was the Mid-January Festival. The Governor invited his officials to dine with him. The Inspector of Education from Peking was to be the guest of honour and the Sinkiang Minister of Finance. . . an elderly gentleman close upon eighty. . . was also there. The affair had every appearance of a formal function, and there was not the least suspicion in the mind of any guest that more was intended.
When the cups had been filled a few times the Governor suddenly rose and left the hall. This action aroused no suspicion, since it was known that Yang cared little for wine. But in a few minutes he returned, followed by a soldier who held concealed behind his back a long curved sword. The Governor paused behind the seat of Hsia Ting, one of the principal malcontents. Then in a cold, even casual voice speaking typical Yunnanese dialect, he said: ‘Behead Hsia Ting.’
The knife flashed, and Hsia Ting fell dead, his blood spouting on the robes of those who sat at table with him. All cowered in horror, none daring to move; but in calm tones the Governor reassured them: ‘This has nothing to do with you. Come, more wine for my guests!’ When the cups were refilled the Governor again left the chamber, but almost immediately returned, a second soldier at his side. Proceeding around the table they halted at the chair of one Li Yin, and once again the astounded guests heard the dread command. . . The table was in confusion, blood was everywhere. The Inspector from Peking looked on, speechless with horror, the old Finance Minister . . . lay half-fainting in his chair. As for the Yunnanese officials, they sat petrified with fear, expecting at any moment that they too would meet an awful end. Hsia Ting and Li Yin had been two of the most trusted officers in the Governor’s service, his own personal friends. Who then was safe if these were slain? But there was no more bloodshed. Calmly the Governor resumed his seat at the table, called for more wine, and proceeded without the least trace of emotion to give judicial reasons for what he had done. Then, having spoken, he applied himself to the dishes which were set before him, and to the astonishment of the company he made a hearty meal, finishing his two bowls of rice as usual.??
In contrast, the careers of those who served Yang well were assured. By these traditional methods (‘generous in cultivating good will and severe in punishing offences’)*° Yang sought to ensure the loyalty of members of his administration.
Yang’s policy towards the various minority peoples of Sinkiang, who constituted in excess of 90 per cent of the population, rested on the twin principles of accentuating regional and national differences, and exclud- ing external — particularly Russian — influences. Thus, in a deliberate reversal of Ch’ing policy (formulated by Yang in response to the emergence of an independent Mongolian state), the Kazakhs of Zungharia were favoured over the Mongols of the region.?! Similarly, Yang did his best to divide the oasis-dwelling Uighurs of southern Sinkiang from the pastoral nomads of Zungharia and the T’ien Shan. This well-tried technique, which had served Yang’s Ch’ing predecessors so well, proved satisfactory when applied to localised disturbances such as that faced at Kumul during the first year of Yang’s rule, or at Kucha in
16 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
1918.*4 More disturbing to the predominantly Han administration of Sinkiang, however, was a growing awareness of Islamic religious and cultural identity amongst the Turkic-speaking peoples of the province — a development paralleled elsewhere in contemporaneous Central Asia, and perhaps best exemplified by a generalised sympathy amongst Muslim peoples for the Ottoman cause during the First World War, and for the anti-Soviet Basmachi guerillas during the 1920s.
Throughout his rule, Yang Tseng-hsin considered that the chief external threat to the survival of his regime lay across the western frontier, in Tsarist Russian (and later Soviet) Central Asia.35 During the nineteenth century the Muslim peoples of Sinkiang looked to the Central Asian Khanates of Bukhara and Khokand for religious — and often political — inspiration, a factor which certainly prompted Tso Tsung- t’ang’s order for the execution of all Khokandi Muslims apprehended by his troops in southern Sinkiang after the collapse of Ya‘qub Beg’s Khanate.** The Russian conquest of Western Turkestan during the latter half of the nineteenth century temporarily relieved the authorities in Sinkiang from the pressures of Khokandi political influence,?” for the Tsarist authorities did all that lay within their power to ensure the quiescence of their new Central Asian subjects. In a policy which might have been formulated by Yang Tseng-hsin himself:
The Russians. . . aimed at . . . isolating the country from all outside influence, and at maintaining it in a state of medieval stagnation, thus removing any possibility of conscious and organised national resistance. As their religious and educational policy, the Russian administrators sought to preserve the archaic form of Islam and Islamic culture . . . Quranic schools of the most conservative type were favoured and protected against any modernist influence."
Yet despite assiduous Russian efforts to exclude pan-Turanianism and other ‘dangerous thoughts’ from their Central Asian Empire, the spread of such concepts was merely delayed and not halted. Indeed, the victorious Russians planted the seeds of modern ‘Turkic’ nationalism when they first entered the oases and deserts of Inner Asia. The presence of these Christian ‘infidels’ helped to unite the Muslim inhabitants of the various conquered Khanates; in Western Turkestan the presence of Russian settlers and political exiles contributed to the growth of Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen national consciousness, and in the Kazakh steppe a deliberate Tsarist attempt to wean the superficially Islamicised Kazakhs and Kirghiz from their more orthodox sedentary brethren to the south actively encouraged the spread of ‘Western’ concepts of nationalism and egalitarianism.*? During the last decades of the nineteenth century the Muslims of Russian Central Asia were increasingly influenced by reform- ist groups such as the Jadid movement.” Under the leadership of the
Sinkiang, 1911-28 17
Tatar intellectual Isma‘il Bay Gasprinskiy, a series of religious, cultural and educational reforms were introduced with the aim of ‘reinterpreting’ Islamic law in response to contemporary conditions (Ar. ijtihdd) and, ultimately, of uniting the various Turkic-speaking Muslims of Central Asia in response to Russian domination.‘
By the beginning of the twentieth century, as a result of these developments within the Russian Empire, concepts of Islamic religious reform and of a common ‘pan-Turanian’ political destiny had begun to emanate outwards, to the neighbouring Turkic-speaking areas of Otto- man Turkey, Qajar Iran, Muhammadzay Afghanistan and even Ch’ing China. In 1904 the Tatar Jslah movement, from which the first authentic ‘Muslim communists’ were to spring, was founded.* In 1909 a secret revolutionary organisation which went by the name of ‘Young Bukhar- ans’, drawing much of its political inspiration from the successes of the ‘Young Turks’ of 1908, was formed in Western Turkestan,®# whilst in 1912 the Alash Orda nationalist movement was founded by dissident intellectuals in the Kazakh steppe.“4 During this period the Jadid move- ment continued to grow — so that by 1916 there were in excess of 5,000 Jadid-ist schools scattered throughout the Russian Empire — and to move leftwards. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 the Jadid movement, which dominated the Turkic-speaking nationalist movement in Russian Central Asia, ‘represented a revolutionary ele- ment in the truest sense, being opposed to both the Russian presence and to the reactionary Muslim clergy’.*
Yang Tseng-hsin, the Republican Governor of Sinkiang, was determined to exclude from his domain all reformist and egalitarian influences emanating from the Russian Empire. He was in any case wary of Russian intentions. During the Ko-lao-hui disturbances of 1912 the Russians had sent Cossack troops to safeguard their interests in Kashgar, and Yang had experienced considerable difficulty in persuading them to withdraw.’ Four years later Yang had faced a major crisis when Tsarist conscription amongst the Muslim peoples of Russian Central Asia had caused large numbers of Kazakhs to take refuge across the border in Sinkiang.4
After the Bolshevik Revolution Yang’s fears were redoubled. He disliked foreigners, and was determined to isolate Sinkiang from their influence in so far as this was possible; the realities of political power in the region, however, necessitated a careful balancing act between the Russians and the British. Yang responded to the Red victory in the Russian Civil War by adopting an overtly conciliatory policy towards the victors, but he warned his Muslim subjects to ‘beware of associating themselves with a people who are entirely without religion and who would harm them and mislead their women’.
18 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
How justified were Yang’s fears of the spread of Russian, and later Soviet, political influence amongst the Muslims of Sinkiang? As early as 1909 Sir George Macartney, the British Consul-General at Kashgar, had warned that the Chinese would have to ‘take into account’ pan-Islamic influences which were awakening amongst the Turkic-speaking Muslims of the province.°° Macartney’s warning was certainly based in part on his personal acquaintance with one Husayn Bay Bachcha, a ‘widely read’ millionaire merchant of Artush who had travelled extensively in Europe. Husayn Bay was an influential: advocate of stronger links between the Muslims of Sinkiang and their co-religionists in the Middle East. He endowed a charitable institution (Ar. wagf) in Artush to build schools and libraries for the education of Muslim children of both sexes, and he personally paid for certain promising young Turkic-speaking students to study abroad.5! The outbreak of the First World War and Turkey’s part therein undoubtedly provided an impetus for similarly minded activists in Sinkiang, thus in 1915 an Ottoman subject, by name Ahmad Kamal, started a school at Kashgar where the local Muslim children were encouraged to look to the Turkish Caliph as their spiritual father. Yang Tseng-hsin initially responded by closing the school and imprisoning all those associated with it; later it was permitted to reopen on the condition that all symbols of allegiance to Turkey were removed, and that Chinese language instruction and military drill were added to the curriculum.” With the defeat of Ottoman Turkey in the First World War and the establishment of the revolutionary Soviet regime in the Russian Empire, however, the perceived threat from Turkey faded away,® to be replaced by a mounting concern over the rapid and continuing growth of Soviet influence in Sinkiang.*
Even during the course of the Civil War the Bolsheviks were able to score some notable successes in Sinkiang. In 1920 — the year in which the White Russian General Annenkov was driven across the Sino-Soviet frontier into Zungharia — an informal agreement was signed by Yang’s administration giving the Soviet authorities official representation at Kulja and special trading rights in the fertile Ili Valley and Chuguchak. As a result of this agreement the Soviets were able to open a library at Kulja which, according to one contemporary British diplomatic source:
.. . quickly became the nocturnal rendezvous for young Ili; many hundreds of Chinese subjects were enrolled in Bolshevik secret societies; tribal chiefs of the Kazakhs, Kalmucks and Taranchis were subsidised; and agents, including numerous women, were sent out in the districts to preach the blessings of communism, domestic emancipation and the new Islam.*
Yang could not tolerate this and, even at the risk of antagonising his powerful Soviet neighbours, the library was closed down. He also
Sinkiang, 1911-28 19
attempted to limit the numbers of his subjects visiting the Soviet Union. In this he was not very successful, especially in the north-west of the province where Soviet influence continued to expand. Even in remote Kashgar, as R. O. Wingate, a British consular official who visited southern Sinkiang during the mid-1920s, noted:
Several of the wealthier men are constantly travelling to and fro in Russian Turkestan; some go on business even as far as to Moscow. So their sons, even if educated at home, eventually come to learn Russian, and are much in contact with the ideas of Bolshevism as understood in Tashkent. Like the merchant families of Europe in the sixteenth century, they are the first to be affected by new ways of life, and amongst the foremost to criticize the conservative and ‘out-worn’ views of the Mullahs.
But it is not only members of the wealthy families that come into contact with Bolshevik propaganda. It has attractions for many go-ahead young fellows in East Turkestan . . . The ambitious young workman from Kashgar or Ili goes over to Russia to get a temporary job and at once finds himself in a land of unveiled women, railways, motor-cars, cinemas, and all that he believes to constitute the acme of modern civilisation.*
The growth of Soviet influence in — and around’’ — Sinkiang was as worrying to the British as it was to Yang Tseng-hsin. C. P. Skrine, the British Consul-General at Kashgar in the mid-1920s, reported back to New Delhi that,
Not only in Ili, but also to a less extent in the south, the Soviet Government is doing what it can by means of an insidious propaganda to awaken the race- and class-consciousness of the Muhammadan population. Chinese policy is directed towards the prevention of this awakening.**
Yang redoubled his system of internal surveillance. All publications in Turkic languages were banned, and restaurants throughout the prov- ince were posted with the sign ‘no political discussions allowed’.© Skrine was somewhat troubled by these policies, but clearly felt that, on balance, they were necessary and even desirable:
By means of censorship . . . and other methods, not only is all written or printed matter dealing with current events excluded from the province, but the dissemina- tion of ‘news’ in writing among the inhabitants is effectively prevented. The same policy is responsible for the official attitude towards education: all schools except those attached to mosques, at which nothing but reading, writing and the Qur’an are taught by the Mullas, are forbidden; even attempts by private individuals such as Russian refugees to make a living by teaching foreign languages are looked upon with disfavour. This stifling of progress may be reprehensible from the ideal point of view, but it at any rate serves to keep an almost exclusively agricultural population quiet and contented under Chinese rule; and after all, if the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the summum bonum for Chinese Turkistan as for less secluded countries, there is much to be said for it.°!
20 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
2. The Rulers: Yang Tseng-hsin in 3. The Rulers: Chin Shu-jen c. 1928 the mid-1920s
Sinkiang, 1911-28 21
However, Nicholas Roerich, who travelled through Sinkiang with the ‘Roerich Expedition’ in 1925-6, described the peace of the province as ‘the peace of death’.
The situation in southern Sinkiang
During the early Republican Era the most powerful representative of the provincial government in the area to the south of the T’ien Shan — and generally speaking the second most powerful figure in the province — was the T’i-t’ai (Military Commander) of Kashgar. Isolated from Urumchi by difficult terrain and poor communications, this official enjoyed consider- able autonomy, and was effectively able to make south-western Sinkiang into a private fief. We have seen that Yang Tseng-hsin took initial steps to establish his writ in southern Sinkiang (known to the Chinese simply as Nan-lu)® during his campaign against the Ko-lao-hui in 1912-14. In January 1913, Brigadier Yang Tsuan-hsii, the nominal leader of the Ili revolutionaries whom Yang Tseng-hsin had transferred to Kashgar, arrived in the city with four hundred ‘New Style’ troops to take up the office of T’i-t’ai.*4 Within a very short time Yang Tsuan-hsii had usurped the authority of the Tao-t’ai (Circuit Intendant),® and had become the most powerful official in Kashgar. As a result of his successes against the Ko-lao-hui in the south, Yang Tseng-hsin was able to appoint Ma Shao- wu, a Hui Muslim from Yang’s native Yunnan, to the post of Command- ing Officer at Kucha.® This move considerably strengthened the former’s grip on the south, but Kashgar, the chief oasis of Nan-lu, as well as the more distant oases of Yarkand and Khotan, retained considerable independence. Yang Tseng-hsin clearly did not regard Yang Tsuan-hsii as a potential ally; his association with the Ili revolutionaries made him suspect, and he had been appointed 7°1-t’ai of Kashgar only as a device to isolate him from his supporters in the former region. Consequently, Yang Tseng-hsin took no steps to support Yang Tsuan-hsii’s position in Kashgar and, when in August 1914 the T’i-t’ai was forced to resign by restive elements amongst his own troops, Yang Tseng-hsin seized the opportunity to appoint another Yunnanese Muslim, Ma Fu- -hsing, to the post of Military Commander at Kashgar.*7
Ma Fu-hsing’s background is obscure. It is not clear when he first came to Sinkiang; it may have been as one of Yang Tseng-hsin’s Hui troops, although most of these were Tungans from Kansu, and not Yunnanese Muslims. In 1911, at the time of the Republican Revolution, Ma Fu-hsing was appointed head of the Tungan levies that were raised by the Ch’ing authorities in Urumchi under the command of Yang Tseng-hsin. From 1911 to 1915 he had remained in the Urumchi area ‘shooting down Chinese sedition-mongers and riffraff’.** It is difficult to say whether
22 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Yang Tseng-hsin sent him to Kashgar because he trusted him, or simply to keep him at a convenient distance. In either case, Ma Fu-hsing’s appointment was to prove a disaster for the peoples of southern Sinkiang, whether Muslim or Han Chinese.
Ma Fu-hsing — or Ma Ti-t’ai, as he is generally referred to in contemporary sources — arrived in Kashgar, accompanied by 300 Tungan levies, in December 1915. He made his headquarters in Kashgar New City, about two and a half miles to the south of the much older Muslim town. The new T’l-(’ai was sixty-four years old and quite illiterate,” but he had a forceful character and was determined to establish his authority over the Tao-yin as swiftly as possible. The pattern of Ma’s eight-and-a- half year authoritarian rule over southern Sinkiang was set on his first full day in Kashgar when, against the wishes of the Tao-yin, he ordered the arrest and execution of three men who, according to Skrine, ‘appeared to be innocent of any possible crime’.7! On 8 March 1916, the Tao-yin, who had been completely outflanked by the wily Ma Fu-hsing, was dismissed by the provincial authorities in Urumchi, and a replacement was sent. In mid-September the new Tao-yin arrived in Kashgar; he proved to be an emaciated opium addict, none other than the brother of Yang Tseng- hsin. The new Tao-yin was never to be seen in public before 2 p.m., and he delegated most of his authority to the Kashgar District Magistrate, a man named Ma who was yet another of Yang Tseng-hsin’s Tungans.” The appointment of Yang’s enfeebled brother as Tao-yin served further to strengthen Ma T’/-t’ai’s position and, by mid-June 1916, Macartney was able to report to London that ‘at present the Governor [Yang Tseng- hsin] and T’i-t’ai wield extraordinary powers .. . and anyone, be his political creed what it may, who attempts to disturb them, they will seize and summarily shoot down’. Macartney continued with prophetic accuracy: ‘I doubt if any Chinese authority, not even that from Peking, can remove them, barring the one derived from the knife of the assassin.’”3
In Macartney’s opinion, Ma Fu-hsing realised that he had risen to as high a rank as he could ever expect to attain; he now intended to maintain this position whilst lining his own pockets.”* Having secured his position at Kashgar, he immediately set about exploiting the human and mineral resources of his new domain. C. P. Skrine, a successor of Macartney who was British Consul-General at Kashgar during the hight of Ma Fu-hsing’s absolutist power,” has left an illuminating account of an official dinner party with the 7’i-t’ai who, although nominally Muslim, was an incorri- gible drunkard.” Skrine’s description of his meeting with the 7’1-t’ai at the Kashgar New City yamen captures the half-comic, half-homicidal character of Ma Fu-hsing very well:
Sinkiang, 1911-28 23
Passing through huge painted doors we were welcomed in an inner courtyard by a short, grizzled, monkey-like old man with a long wispy moustache and fierce eyes, resplendently arrayed in a saxe-blue Chinese Field Marshal’s uniform several sizes too large for him, complete with plumed hat, several rows of stars and medals and gold lace epaulettes the size of hassocks flapping from his shoulders. With the gold-encrusted tunic hanging about his wispy old frame like a frock-coat on a scarecrow, and the overalls, as usual in the Sinkiang Army, innocent of braces, he looked a regular Chinese Count Hedzoff of Paphlagonia; but there was a sinister feel behind the opera-bouffe — or was it only because we knew about the murders and torturings which went on somewhere behind the grim walls of his citadel?”
But, as Skrine clearly indicates, there was nothing comic about Ma Fu- hsing in the eyes of his subjects. ‘He made everybody call him Padishah {Ir. ‘King’] on pain of death, and assembled a harem of the prettiest Turkic Muslim woman in Kashgar; meanwhile his agents roamed the country-side ‘“‘looking for new cows to milk” as the Titai facetiously put it.’78 Ma was not content with the forced ‘loans’, ‘subscriptions’ and ‘presents’ usually extorted by corrupt officials in Kashgar, but turned to trade and the exploitation by primitive methods of the mineral resources of Nan-lu. He claimed all the mineral wealth of the country as the perquisite of the military authorities, and exploited them for his own benefit. Thus he worked oil-wells at Aksu and at Kanjigan about thirty miles west of Kashgar, copper mines at Kanjigan, jade mines at Tung on the upper Yarkand river, and coal mines at various places throughout the region. As he employed forced labour and was also able by force both to retain a monopoly of production and to prevent competition in the local bazaars, he derived large profits from these concerns.” In the local manufacturing sector he took over the carpet factories and established jade workshops; according to one authority he conscripted craftsmen for these concerns, and forced them to ‘live like slaves on the premises’.*° The T’i-t’ai made further profits by drawing large sums from the Kashgar treasury for the upkeep of his Tungan troops:
Needless to say, not a tenth of these sums was spent. The nominal strength of the Titai’s forces was between 4,000 and 5,000; the actual number maintained may have been about 500. Most of these were quarter-trained, opium-sodden wretches who received neither pay, rations nor equipment, and lived on the country by virtue of the fear inspired by their terrible chief, and the antiquated (and in most cases quite useless) carbines they carried.*!
The fear inspired by Ma Fu-hsing was very real. Descriptions of his brutalities abound, and at least one picture of his victims has come down to us. He had a large hay-chopping machine with which he used to
24 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
amputate the limbs of his victims, starting at the extremities and proceed- ing joint by joint.®? P. S. Nazaroff, a White Russian refugee who spent some time in Kashgar during Ma Fu-hsing’s rule, records how the T’i-t’ai crucified, maimed and murdered all those who opposed his will — or even crossed his path when he was drunk. During the four years Nazaroff lived at Kashgar he frequently saw ‘bundles of men’s amputated arms or feet nailed to the city gates, with notices stating whose members they were and why they were cut off. Sometimes the lawful owner of the arms or legs would be chained to the wall with them.’83 Ma T’i-t’ai used some of his ill- gotten wealth to build a large (and leaky) palace at Bakalyk, about sixteen miles from Kashgar;*4 however, most of the gold, diamonds and other moneys amassed were transferred to Ma’s superior, Yang Tseng- hsin, in Urumchi.§5
Eventually, Ma T’i-t’ai’s behaviour became too outrageous, and Yang Tseng-hsin — who was in constant fear of revolution or assassination — decided it would be better to remove him. In the autumn of 1923 the T’i-Vai conceived the idea of forcing the citizens of Kashgar to buy a fixed quantity of paraffin wax (a largely unsaleable by-product of Ma Fu-hsing’s oil refinery at Kanjigan) every month. Cobblers, who used paraffin wax in their trade, were obliged to buy double quantities. When the head of the cobblers’ guild complained to the T’i-t’ai, he was beaten to death and his wife was fined so heavily that she was forced to sell her home and was driven into penury.** Apparently, the paraffin-wax epi- sode (which earned the 7’i-t’ai the nickname ‘bald wax seller’ in the bazaars of Nan-lu) was the last straw as far as Ma Fu-hsing’s fellow officials were concerned. A petition was sent to Urumchi, and Yang Tseng-hsin, who realised that the 7’i-t’ai’s depredations had gone too far, dismissed Ma Fu-hsing and abolished the post of 7’i-t’ai altogether. Ma Fu-hsing responded by refusing to acknowledge dismissal, and attempted to appease his subjects by arresting his own paraffin-wax agents, mutilat- ing four of them with his hay chopper, and exposing one at each of the four main gates of Kashgar Old City with their limbs nailed to the walls behind them.*’
This time, however, Ma Fu-hsing’s luck had run out. Yang Tseng-hsin sent orders from Urumchi to the Tao-yin of Aksu, who in turn despatched an armed force of 600 men under the command of Ma Shao-wu, the Yunnanese Hui whom Yang Tseng-hsin had appointed Commander of the garrison at Kucha in 1914 and who had since risen to the post of Amban at Uch Turfan.® A larger body of troops was sent to Maralbashi to mislead the 7’i-t’ai, and Ma Shao-wu’s force was thus able to approach Kashgar from the north without detection. On 31 May 1924, Ma Shao-wu and a small band of picked men made their way into Kashgar New City where the T’i-t’'ai, ‘over-confident as usual, and imagining that his
Sinkiang,
4. Kashgar Old City: high walls and double defensive gateway
5. Kashgar Old City; ‘Id-Gah Mosque and central market place
26 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
ed aS haifa #2: :
iene
ii, Oe 2 et ee
7. Some of Ma Fu-hsing’s victims. The Chinese reads: ‘a photograph of people who had their hands and feet cut off by Ma Fu-hsing’
4) Ye f iM Ma
‘yh
9. Ma Shao-wu (after attempted assassination of October 1934)
ing — nemesis
8. Ma Fu-hs
28 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
enemies were still several marches from Kashgar, had omitted to take the most elementary precautions’.®? Ma Fu-hsing was asleep in his elaborate new Kashgar palace (a building quite distinct from the leaky palace at Bakalyk), and his troops were unprepared and for the most part under the influence of opium. After a short skirmish the T’i-'ai was captured, alive but wounded in the arm, and his troops surrendered. An exchange of telegrams between Ma Shao-wu and Yang Tseng-hsin in Urumchi sealed the ex-T’i-t’ai’s fate, and on the next day he was put up against the south gate of the New City and shot. His body was later tied to a crucifix and left for the people of Kashgar to insult and defile.» Ma Shao-wu was promoted to the office of Tao-yin of Khotan as a reward for his loyalty to Yang Tseng-hsin, and, the post of T’i-t’ai having been abolished, the incumbent Tao-yin became the most influential official in Kashgar almost by default. On the death of the latter in 1927, Ma Shao-wu was trans- ferred from Khotan to Kashgar, thus attaining the second most powerful position in the province.?!
The economy of Sinkiang under Yang Tseng-hsin
Before 1911 Sinkiang had been heavily subsidised (to between two and three million taels annually)” by the Ch’ing Imperial Treasury. With the overthrow of the Ch’ing Dynasty and the subsequent political fragmen- tation of the Chinese Republic, this subsidy was ended and Sinkiang, under its new Governor Yang Tseng-hsin, was left to fend for itself. To make matters worse, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 seriously dislocated economic relations with the Russian Empire, tradi- tionally (and by geographic necessity) Sinkiang’s major trading partner.” Before 1914 Sinkiang had acted as a supplier of raw materials (chiefly cotton) to the Tsarist Empire, and had relied heavily on the importation of Russian manufactured goods.” In 1913, the second year of Yang’s rule in Sinkiang, the value of Russian exports to Sinkiang stood at 8,424,000 roubles, whilst imports in the reverse direction reached 9,846,000 roubles;% Sinkiang was thus running a healthy trade surplus of 1,422,000 roubles with the Russian Empire, and to some extent this helped to offset the loss of the Imperial subsidy. Between 1914 and 1917, however, trade declined disastrously, as did the value of the Russian rouble; when the rouble fell, it dragged the Sinkiang tael with it.% By 1919, when the civil war was at its height, trade between Sinkiang and Russia was almost non- existent.°”7 The decline of the Russian trade had disastrous effects for Sinkiang, especially in the agricultural south where the area under cotton cultivation (which in 1913 had provided just over 25 per cent of all Sinkiang exports to the Russian Empire) was cut back by 50 per cent,
Sinkiang, 1911-28 29
resulting in widespread hardship amongst the Uighur farmers of Nan-lu.%
It may fairly be said that, from an economic point of view, Yang Tseng- hsin took over the administration of Sinkiang at a singularly inopportune time. Yet Yang had certain advantages working for him; he had inherited a well-established provincial administration from his Ch’ing prede- cessors, and his province was rich in potentially exploitable mineral resources.!0°? Some authorities have portrayed Yang as something of an economic reformer. Thus Lattimore credits Yang with attempting (unsuccessfully) to abolish the system of forced labour employed by the Manchus (M. ula); with limiting official rates of interest to 10 per cent; and with preventing officials from loaning public money to private money-lenders who then reloaned it at steeply increased rates of inter- est.!°1 Similarly, Rossabi claims that Yang ‘maintained an effective system of controls over his government, imposing harsh sanctions on those who illegally alienated the local peoples. His economic policies were also designed to reduce the tax burden on the Uighurs, Kazakhs and others and to win their support.”
However, this view of Yang is seriously misleading. Far from attempt- ing to modernise or advance the economy of Sinkiang, Yang made every attempt to hold the clock back. Where reforms in the system were made (as with the attempt to abolish u/a), Yang was simply acting to prevent a possible rising amongst his Turkic-speaking Muslim subjects; he realised (as with the case of Ma T’i-t’ai) that there was a limit beyond which the indigenous peoples of Sinkiang could not, safely, be pushed. In fact, Yang judged this limit very nicely — and for fifteen years he ran the economy of Sinkiang largely for his own benefit.
Shortly after consolidating his hold on Sinkiang in 1914, Yang set about establishing an efficient machine for stripping the province of its assets. As has already been shown, whilst maintaining the Imperial administra- tion almost intact, Yang surrounded himself with relatives and fellow provincials from Yunnan. Rigorous censorship was introduced to minimise unrest amongst the inhabitants of Sinkiang, whilst a sophisti- cated system of economic checks was introduced to concentrate the wealth of the province in Yang’s own hands.
With the fall of the Ch’ing Empire in 1911, China’s unified fiduciary system disappeared. Securely isolated from the warring factions of the new Republic by the wastes of the Gobi Desert, Yang Tseng-hsin was able — indeed he was almost obliged — to issue his own currency. In fact he was to issue four regional paper currencies, the Urumchi, Ili, Kashgar and Aksu taels, each exchanging at a different rate against the other.1% Except in south-western Sinkiang, where some silver and gold specie was in circulation,' the province relied exclusively on paper and copper
30 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
currency, quite unbacked by official reserves. Yang introduced this complicated system as a safeguard against revolution — ‘for no insurrec- tion could come to a head unless it were financed, and with several currencies in use unusually large transfers of money can be detected. Furthermore, the value of paper would at once fall in any region in rebellion against the Governor, leaving the rebels without funds.’!% The various local currencies were adequate for local and intra-provincial trade, but for trade with Russia or the rest of China a system of controlled barter was necessary, with merchants roughly balancing the value of their imports to, and exports from, Sinkiang. In this way locally resident Chinese merchants were prevented from exporting profits to China without importing in return; the same criteria applied to Turkic-speaking Muslims trading with Western Turkestan. As a result of this policy it became extremely difficult for the indigenous inhabitants of Sinkiang to invest their profits other than in further trading activities, or in property within the province. Naturally this problem was not faced by Han Chinese officials temporarily resident in Sinkiang and planning to return to their native province at the end of their period of service; they were able simply to export merchandise, to sell it in China (or Russia), and to bank the proceeds against their retirement. Other locally based mer- chants wishing to export profits in China, or companies based outside China and wishing to export their profits from trade with the province, were only able to do so through a semi-official system of speculation controlled and exploited by Yang himself.
Owen Lattimore, who travelled through Sinkiang during the last years of Yang Tseng-hsin’s regime, was clearly impressed with the results which Yang’s economic and fiscal policies appeared to be yielding. In a paper published in 1928 he noted that:
The use of paper money for concentrating wealth in the hands of the ruling power is a favourite device in contemporary China. Every regional potentate issues paper money, the acceptance of which is enforced at the point of a bayonet, while for payment of taxes and other government receipts only silver is accepted, or the notes of sound banks. In Sinkiang there is no such maintenance of blatantly false values. In the first place, the government accepts its own paper. In the second place, all the nominal values are in taels, whereas in China there are no paper taels, and silver taels have been superseded for the most part by silver and paper dollars. For this reason, and because of the great distance between the province and China, and the slow transit of goods, it is not affected by the money market in China. The extent of local confidence in the paper currency is reflected by the steady rate of exchange between the Urumchi taels and the few silver dollars that arrive by way of the caravan route at Ku-Ch’eng-tze. In the third place, there is not a single bank, not even a provincial bank (that favourite engine of Chinese governors) to complicate exchange with credit transactions. The province is hermetically sealed. '™
Sinkiang, 1911-28 31
But the province was not, in fact, hermetically sealed. Throughout the province Chinese officials (and in the south-west, Indian money-lenders as well)!°” assiduously hoarded all the precious metal they could lay their hands on, with the object of transferring it to private bank accounts outside Sinkiang. Furthermore, since the demand for precious metal exceeded supply, the ruling group (chiefly composed of Han Chinese, but including the more affluent sections of other national groups) transferred wealth out of the province in merchandise. Lattimore, measuring Yang’s Sinkiang against the yardstick of contemporary Republican China, was impressed with the free-trade economy which this system seemed to have created:
The wisdom of the Chinese in Sinkiang is in not bleeding their subjects [by excess taxation]. As the civil service is not paid by the Republican Government, so the revenues of the province are not remitted to Peking. Revenue is therefore sufficient without undue taxation. The governing class combine to exploit the trade rather than the fiscal revenue. Every great firm leans on official aid. The gratifying result is that business, instead of being hampered by tolls and levies, often flourishes by going tax free.
But C. P. Skrine, who, as British Consul-General at Kashgar had access to information which was not readily available to Lattimore, saw things rather differently. In an official report on the trade of Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang) for the period 1924-5, he reported that:
The value of exports exceeds that of imports including specie [emphasis added] by no less than Taels 366,825, or 75.2 per cent. The explanation of this is that when merchants from Inner China bring specie to Chinese Turkestan to pay for goods exported from the south of the province, they are obliged by order of the Governor to deposit their money in the Government Treasury at Urumchi, and are issued cheques on treasuries in Southern Sinkiang in exchange. These cheques are cashed by the officials in Yarkand, Kashgar, etc., for local paper currency, with which the goods are bought.'®
In other words Yang Tseng-hsin’s economic policy, in both its mercan- tile and fiscal aspects, was bleeding Sinkiang to death. Moreover, there is every indication that Yang realised this, that he actively encouraged it in the interests of personal profit, and that he was planning a swift personal departure before the inevitable débacle. Certainly Yang showed no desire to re-establish commercial links with the Russians after the Red victory in the civil war; he feared Soviet economic penetration of Sinkiang, and between 1919 (when trade with Russia was almost nil) and 1925 (bv which time Russia, in its new Soviet guise, was once again firmly estab! shed as Sinkiang’s chief trading partner) every improvement in commercial relations between Sinkiang and the Soviet Union was forced on Yang by Moscow.!!° According to some sources, Yang was also loath
32 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
to permit the establishment of a modern industrial base within Sinkiang. In a move aimed at excluding the Soviet ideological penetration of the province (had Yang been reading some of the Soviet propaganda material he confiscated?), ‘factories and large commercial enterprises were strictly forbidden, for they necessitated the employment of large bodies of workmen, who might form the nucleus of a workers’ class in Sinkiang, and thus endanger the social structure of the province’.1!!
In effect, Yang was not concerned with developing the indigenous economy of Sinkiang, but only with exploiting its resources — especially gold.''2 His primary aim lay in maintaining the movement of bullion caravans and foreign bank drafts from Sinkiang to Peking or Tientsin. The imported specie which visiting merchants were obliged to pay into the Urumchi treasury was rapidly re-exported, reportedly to Manila in the Philippines where Yang is said to have maintained a personal bank account under the protection of the American flag.!!3 Deals were also struck by which Yang was saved the trouble of importing and re- exporting specie. For example, when the Sino-Swedish Scientific Expedi- tion was preparing to travel to Sinkiang in 1927, an arrangement was made whereby Yang Tseng-hsin agreed to supply the expedition with local paper currency to a face value of 60,000 Mexican silver dollars (a very sustantial sum) on its arrival in Urumchi; Sven Hedin, the leader of the expedition, agreed to pay the counter-sum (in silver) to Yang’s son- in-law in Peking.!!4
Yang’s attitude towards the economy of Sinkiang was followed, to a greater or lesser degree, by the entire administration. Whereas under the Ch’ing many Han officials attained office through success in the Imperial examinations, under Yang the passport to an official appointment became money. Administrative salaries were quite inadequate, and it was understood that an incumbent official, having bought his way to office, was free to make as much as he could from bribes and ‘taxes’, leaving his subordinates to fend for themselves and thereby extending corruption to the lowest levels of the system. “The only upper limit for taxation existed in open rebellion or complaints directly to the governor, who himself constituted the last step to this pyramid of spoils.’''5 In the words of the Swiss traveller, Walter Bosshard, who accompanied the Trinkler Asian Expedition to Sinkiang during the last years of Yang’s reign:
In Chinese Turkestan, where corruptness permeated all classes, advancement, like other marketable commodities, was bought and sold. . . The result was that nothing was done which was not specially paid for, and the people were plundered in order that their rulers might grow rich. Such was the way in which villages and towns were vampired.''6
Sinkiang, 1911-28 33
The assassination of Yang Tseng-hsin
During his sixteen years of absolute power, Yang Tseng-hsin established himself as a singularly competent autocrat, a mandarin of the old school, accurately described by Lattimore as the most able of the feudal bureaucrats to administer Sinkiang.'!7 Despite his policy of long-term economic exploitation, the inevitable result of which was the impoverish- ment and exhaustion of the province, Yang realised that there was a limit to the official rapacity which the indigenous population were prepared to endure. His solution, as we have seen, was to tolerate corruption in his administration provided it remained within acceptable limits — that is, providing it did not spark off a Muslim rising. Yang also realised that the most prominent members of the Turkic-speaking Muslim population must be permitted a share of the takings. By retaining the Ch’ing administrative structure which employed local Muslims as junior offi- cials, he was thus able to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, the Chinese administrative officials were insulated from the great mass of the indigenous Muslim peoples by a layer of junior Muslim officials who would bear the first brunt of any popular anger; on the other, the Muslim officials maintained a vested interest in protecting the system which provided them with a degree of power and affluence. Similarly Yang realised ‘the great men of the oases must be allowed to accumulate land, and the great men of the nomads to accumulate herds’.!!* By such methods, as well as by the extensive use of censorship, informers and secret police, Yang was able to minimise the chances of a Muslim (or Mongol) rebellion whilst, if unrest did occur, it was possible to isolate and cauterise the source.
As a result of Yang’s judicious policies, Muslim opposition to his rule remained limited and ineffectual. Little is known of Turkic-speaking or Tajik Muslim political organisation in Sinkiang during this period. According to R. C. F. Schomberg, a British political officer who made investigative tours of the province in 1927-9 and 1930-1, the Turkic- speaking Muslims (or at least the settled Uighur population) were still divided into the rival Aqtaghlik and Qarataghlik factions found as early as the seventeenth century,'!? although the original political distinctions seem to have disappeared or to have become blurred. At the time of Schomberg’s tours, the Agqtaghlik, or ‘White Mountain’ faction, remained the party of Turkic nationalism, with its power base in Kucha. Known as sayyid-parast, or ‘sayyid-followers’,!2° its supporters were strongly anti-Chinese. In marked contrast the Qarataghlik, or ‘Black Mountain’ faction, was content to allow Sinkiang to remain under Chinese rule. With a power base at Artush, its followers were generally referred to by the Uighurs of southern Sinkiang as the Khitai-parast, or
34 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
‘followers of China’. According to Schomberg, followers of the two groups did not intermarry. A further traditional distinction was that adherents of the Aqtaghlik faction always cut the top off a melon and said bismillah before slicing it; by contrast, the less pious Qarataghliks would slice up the melon at once, without invoking the name of God.!2! Whilst it is interesting to note the continuation of these petty Uighur differences well into the twentieth century, it is clear that they posed no serious threat to Governor Yang in Urumchi. Nevertheless, discontent was growing amongst the indigenous peoples of the province. The Chinese authorities were unable to stem the annual flow of workers from southern Sinkiang to Soviet Central Asia, largely because of the higher wages paid in the USSR. '” ‘After such a sojourn, many a Kasgharian saw his country in a new light. According to Swedish missionaries [based in Khotan and Yarkand], much indoctrination with Soviet propaganda did occur on these stays, intended to have future use in the 1930s.’!23 Nor was Yang’s system of censorship entirely successful in stopping the spread of Soviet influence within the frontiers of his domain. The Sinkiang political grape- vine, known to the local Turkic-speaking Muslims as the ‘long-eared telegraph’ ,'*4 was very effective.'!25 As a result of this age-old method of disseminating news, Soviet land reform was to have a considerable impact on the Uighur peasantry of Sinkiang; thus one contemporary French source comments:
The ‘Agrarian reforms’ implemented according to communist principles in [West] Turkestan had their echo in Sinkiang. The peasants did not fail to notice these events and to speak of Soviet power which, they said, had ‘divided the land into equal parts in order to offer it to the peasants of Turkestan’. '*
But it was Yang’s less able successors who were to reap the harvest of Turkic Muslim discontent. Throughout his rule Yang faced a far more serious threat from his own subordinates - not so much from the Tungans, who were generally unpopular with both Han Chinese and Turkic-speaking Muslims and who owed much of their position to Yang’s patronage — but from his fellow Han Chinese. Some of the latter were simply ambitious for personal power, but others (witness the Yunnanese conspirators at the time of the Ts’ai O Rebellion) felt strongly that Sinkiang should be more closely involved with events in China proper. There are indications that, after the bloody dinner party which ended the attempt to bring Sinkiang into the Ts’ai O affair, the mistrustful Yang deliberately surrounded himself with opium addicts on the grounds that ‘the inveterate opium smoker thinks more of his own comfort and convenience than of stirring up unrest among his subordinates’.!2”7 Never- theless, during the last years of his rule the ageing autocrat was seriously to alienate certain of his senior officials. Perhaps Yang was becoming over-
Sinkiang, 1911-28 35
confident — it was in 1926 that he penned his rather self-indulgent claim to have ‘created an earthly paradise in a remote region’. In the same year he turned against his Tungan subordinates; many were accused of conspiring with Ma Ch’i, the Tungan warlord of Hsi-ning in Tsinghai, and were driven from Urumchi.!28 Deprived of his formerly loyal Tungans, Yang seems to have become increasingly isolated. When the Roerich Expedi- tion visited Urumchi during 1926, G. N. Roerich noted that:
The Governor’s residence consisted of several well-isolated buildings and enclosed courtyards. The gates were carefully guarded by patrols of heavily armed men. . . The Governor’s yamen seemed to us to be in a very dilapidated condition. The glass in many of the windows on the ground floor was broken and dirty papers and rags had been pasted on the window frames. Numerous retainers roamed about the courtyards and villainous bodyguards, armed with mauser pistols, were on duty at the entrance to the yamen.'°
It seems probable that Yang had already decided to leave Sinkiang, and was actively making preparations to do so. He had amassed a considerable personal fortune,'*° and by several accounts his immediate family and much of this wealth had been sent out of the province, either to China proper,!3! or to Manila in the United States-administered Philip- pines, where Yang is reported to have maintained a personal bank account.!32 The most convincing evidence of Yang’s preparations to abandon power is provided by Mildred Cable and Francesca French, two members of the China Inland Mission, who report that ‘Wise old Governor Yang. . . aSearly as 1926. . . quietly arranged a way of escape for his family and for the transference of his wealth to the security of the British Concession in Tientsin.’ Later in the same year, accompanied by several ‘luggage cases of valuables’, Yang’s eldest son was sent out of Sinkiang, travelling incognito, in the company of these missionaries. !33 At about this time, possibly as a grandiose gesture of his leave-taking, Yang erected a statue of himself in the public gardens at Urumchi. According to Nicholas Roerich, this memorial was paid for with forced contributions ‘from the grateful population’; by all accounts the statue was in execrable taste.'*4 Finally, after the successful completion of the second stage of the Northern Expedition and the entry of the Nationalist forces into Peking during June 1928, Yang ordered that the Kuomintang flag should be raised in Sinkiang, thereby acknowledging the de jure authority of the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking over the province.'* This last uncharacteristic gesture, taken together with Yang’s advancing years and the other factors already indicated, must have convinced many of Yang’s subordinates that his departure was imminent. The most determined of these subordinates, a Han Chinese called Fan Yao-nan, decided to act.
36 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Fan Yao-nan was a ‘modernist’,!36 an ambitious official who had been educated in Japan and whom Yang had ‘distrusted on sight’. He was appointed to the post of Tao-yin of Aksu by the Central Government in Peking — an appointment which Yang could easily have ignored, but it appears that he was (grudgingly) impressed with Fan’s abilities.137 Fan must have proved useful to Yang, for he rose to the position of Tao-yin of Urumchi, and was made Sinkiang Provincial Commissioner for Foreign Affairs.'38 Nevertheless, it would seem that neither Yang nor Fan respected each other; Yang Tseng-hsin told his Industrial Commissioner Yen Ting-shan, who claims to have warned Yang against Fan on numerous occasions, that he kept Fan ‘chained like a tiger’ ,!3° whilst in March 1926 Fan Yao-nan suggested to the German scientist Filchner that Yang was mad.!# Together with a small group of like-minded officials, amongst whom were included the engineer at the Urumchi telegraph station and the Dean of the local school of law, Fan determined to assassinate the aged autocrat. Nyman has suggested that Fan may have wished to gain the favour of the Kuomintang, to which party he is reported to have belonged.'*! In any event, on 7 July 1928, 6 days after Yang had officially assumed the post of Chairman of the Sinkiang Provincial Government under the Kuomintang, Fan struck.
On the day in question, Yang was invited to a banquet to celebrate a graduation ceremony at the Urumchi law school. Fan had arranged the banquet, and eighteen of his soldiers were present, disguised as waiters ‘with red bands round their arms and Browning pistols in their sleeves’ .!42 During the course of the meal Fan proposed a toast to the health of Yang Tseng-hsin, at which time
shots rang out simultaneously, all aimed at the Governor. Seven bullets in all were fired, and all reached their mark. Yang, mortally wounded, but superb in death, glared an angry defiance at his foes, ‘who dares do this?’ he questioned in the loud voice which had commanded instant obedience for so many years. Then he fell slowly forward, his last glance resting upon the face of the trusted Yen, as though to ask forgiveness that he had not listened to the advice so often given to him."
According to Yen Ting-shan, who was himself wounded, Fan Yao-nan later finished Yang Tseng-hsin off with two further shots.'4 Immediately after the assassination, in which some fifteen or sixteen people were killed or wounded, Fan went to Yang’s official residence to seize the seals of office. Once inside the building he sent a letter summoning Chin Shu-jen, Commissioner for Civil Affairs in Sinkiang and Yang’s second-in-command. Chin called Fan’s bluff by refusing to come and sending soldiers of his own to arrest Fan. In the power struggle which followed, Fan, who had seriously miscalculated the strength of his personal support, lost out. After a short gun battle he was arrested by
Sinkiang, 1911-28 a7
Chin and subsequently executed, together with a number of his accom- plices, on 8 July.145
The outwardly dignified and austere manner of the dead Yang Tseng- hsin had made a favourable impression on many visitors, both Chinese and Western, to his domain ~ particularly when set against a backdrop of the chaotic conditions prevailing throughout much of contemporary China. Yet the administration of Yang Tseng-hsin, which has been widely represented as a period of relative calm and prosperity for the peoples of Sinkiang,'*6 was in reality little more than an ossified version of the Imperial administration extended for seventeen years into the Republi- can Era; a time when ‘economic rapacity was brought to perfection’!4” and when popular discontent smouldered behind a facade of outward calm. Thus Yang Tseng-hsin, through the application of a judicious and pragmatic authoritarianism, was able to maintain his hold over the province almost without challenge until the time of his assassination, whilst the seeds of popular revolt, sown by Yang between 1912 and 1928, were ultimately to be reaped by his less able successor, Chin Shu-jen, during the early 1930s.
2 Sinkiang, 1928-31: the rebellion at Kumul and the first Tungan invasion
One might say that China is like a bankrupt family, which is so embarrassed financially that it can hardly continue to exist, but whose ancestors, fortunately, have left it an estate in the west. If need be, there is still this vast country to fall back on.
Wu Ai-Chen, KMT representative in Sinkiang, 1932-4.'
The administration of Chin Shu-jen
Yang Tseng-hsin’s successor, Chin Shu-jen (see plate 3), was a Han Chinese of Kansu, born in Tao-ho hsien, near Ho-chou (the modern Lin- hsia) c. 1883. After graduating from the Kansu provincial academy, he served for a time as the Principal of a provincial normal school. He then entered the Imperial Civil Service, where he came to the attention of Yang Tseng-hsin, then District Magistrate at Ho-chou. Chin must have made a favourable impression on Yang, for, when the latter was trans- ferred to Sinkiang in 1908, Chin followed him to serve as a hsien (district) magistrate. Following the collapse of the Ching in 1911, Chin rose steadily in rank throughout Yang Tseng-hsin’s long period of absolute power (in the light of Yang’s known tendency to surround himself with opium addicts and sycophants, a sure sign of mediocrity). In 1927, Chin became Provincial Commissioner for Civil Affairs at Urumchi, a post which he held at the time of Yang’s assassination in July 1928.4
After his elimination of Fan Yao-nan, Chin, who was already in effective control of Sinkiang, sent a telegram to Nanking seeking official KMT recognition of his position. Faced with a fait accompli, Nanking had no alternative other than to confirm Chin in office, though under the new KMT terminology he was appointed Provincial Chairman (Ch. Chu- hsi) and Commander-in-Chief (Ch. Tsung-ssu-ling) in contrast to his predecessor, Yang Tseng-hsin, whose official titles had been Provincial Governor (Ch. Sheng-ch’ang) and Military Governor (Ch. Tu-chiin).
Immediately following his seizure of power, Chin took steps to secure his position. As a first step the secret police force was substantially increased,° salaries for all ranks in both the army and police force were doubled, and new uniforms were issued.®° Later the army was expanded, and Chin took steps to acquire new weapons.’ The administrative system employed by the late Ch’ing governors and Yang Tseng-hsin was retained almost unchanged, whilst in the appointment of provincial officials Chin followed the example of his mentor Yang Tseng-hsin by surrounding himself with a coterie of relatives and fellow-provincials. Under the new
Sinkiang, 1928-31 39
MONGOLIAN PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC
Vouyperireys : 7 P94 + een . & <+ ¢Bardosh, “9 Bai NOEL oN la
“Ara-tame
OESERT
OESERT
+ International frontiers Provincial boundaries Roads Tracks
Map 3 North-eastern Sinkiang: towns and communications
regime, therefore, Yunnanese followers of Yang (both Han and Hui) were rapidly replaced by Han Chinese from Chin’s native Kansu — especially from the Ho-chou region.’ Chin’s younger brother, Chin Shu- hsin, was appointed Provincial Commissioner for Military Affairs at Urumchi, and another brother, Chin Shu-chih, was given the senior military post at Kashgar.!° Similarly, Chin’s orderly and bodyguard, Ts’ui Chao-chi, was promoted to the position of Brigade Commander at Urumchi.!!
Chin maintained and expanded Yang Tseng-hsin’s system of internal surveillance and censorship. According to H. French Ridley of the China Inland Mission at Urumchi, people were executed for ‘merely making indiscreet remarks in the street during ordinary conversation’.!2 Besides increasing the strength of both the secret and ordinary police forces, Chin introduced a system of internal passports so that any journey performed within Sinkiang needed an official passport validated by the Provincial Chairman’s personal seal,'? thus tightening internal security and, incidentally, providing a further source of official revenue for the venal provincial administration. Travel outside the province became well-nigh impossible, especially for Han officials and merchants wishing to travel to China proper. Yet despite these precautions, Chin clearly felt insecure in his position as Provincial Chairman; several sources report that he hardly ever left his yamen, and when he did so it was only under the tightest security. !4
40 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Under Chin Shu-jen the economy of Sinkiang continued to deteriorate as the new Chairman followed the example set by his predecessor in single-mindedly accumulating a personal fortune, only less discreetly, and at a greatly increased rate.!5 As has been shown, with the collapse of the Ch’ing in 1911, Yang Tseng-hsin introduced a provincial fiduciary system based on the issue of four regional paper currencies. His initial issue of unbacked paper currency had a face value of 10 million taels. Chin Shu-jen took this process several stages further by expanding the issue to 145 million taels, thus fuelling the already considerable inflation within the province.'* Under Yang Tseng-hsin land tax was already established as the major source of provincial revenue, though Yang took care not to push the Turkic peasantry into open revolt; under Chin, however, caution was thrown to the winds and land revenues were collected to almost double the legal amount.!’ Yang had been prepared to settle for a share — albeit substantial — in the profits made by private enterprise within his domain. Chin, however, emulated Ma Fu-hsing, the barbarous T’i-t'ai of Kashgar from 1915 to 1924, in establishing ‘govern- ment’ monopolies on various profitable enterprises, notably the working of gold at Keriya and jade at Khotan. Chin also established a monopoly on the valuable wool and pelt trade of Sinkiang (notably karakul); and with the backing of the expanded police force and army he was able to force the sale of lambskins at a mere Io per cent of the market value. '8 Officials of Chin’s administration also prospered. According to one contemporary Russian source, under Chin’s regime only 12 per cent of trade capital held in Urumchi belonged to local merchants, whilst 37 per cent belonged to the ‘compradore bourgeoisie’ (i.e. Han and foreign merchants), and a massive 51 per cent belonged to Chinese officials.'9 As in Yang Tseng-hsin’s time, wealth flowed out of the province in a continuous stream, much of it to banks in China proper. Chin was deeply involved in the export of gold bullion — indeed according to Sven Hedin, the Provincial Chairman maintained a personal monopoly on the export of gold dust.2” Naturally Chin Shu-jen left no official records of his dealings in bullion, but indications of his involvement do exist. Georg Vasel, a German engineer (and Nazi agent),?! who was active in the construction of airfields in Kansu during the early 1930s, records a meeting in Soochow with a German pilot named Rathje, who had been employed by Chin to fly one million dollars’ worth of bullion from Urumchi to Peking.2? That Chin exported gold bullion by air is confirmed by Schomberg, a British Colonel who travelled extensively in Sinkiang on behalf of the British intelligence services during the late 1920s and early 1930s.23 Chin also attempted to obtain hard currency from the Citroén Expedition, using much the same method as Yang Tseng-hsin had employed in his dealings with the Sino-Swedish Expedition in 1927.74 Le
Sinkiang, 1928-31 41
Févre records that the Chairman had made an agreement with Haardt, the leader of the Citroén Expedition, to ‘advance any sum in Sinkiang currency against payment in silver dollars to his account in Tientsin’. Once again, however, Chin proved more inept than his predecessor; the rate of exchange he offered Haardt was so prohibitive that the French- man had secretly to resort to the Urumchi black market.
From the moment of his seizure of power, Chin Shu-jen did his best to exclude all foreigners and foreign influence from his domain.?6 Chin’s barely concealed hostility to those Westerners who did manage to visit Urumchi is generally attributed to his supposedly deep-seated xenophobia.’ Indeed, it seems highly probable that Chin had little love for Europeans, whether capitalist or communist. It should be noted, however, that many of the ‘diplomats’ and ‘explorers’ active in Sinkiang during the 1920s and early 1930s were, in fact, in the employ of foreign powers seeking to influence the course of events in Central Asia.?8 Nor was Chin’s ‘xenophobia’ limited to Westerners; he imposed strict limits on contacts between Sinkiang and China proper, and excluded KMT functionaries from the province whenever possible. It has been suggested that Chin sought to conceal from Nanking the extent of his misgovern- ment, but it is more probable that he simply wished to keep the KMT ignorant of his operations and thus less able to interfere; besides, in Republican China misgovernment by warlord governments, not exclud- ing that of the KMT at Nanking, was the established norm.
Doubtless Chin Shu-jen sought to emulate his more able predecessor by maintaining in Sinkiang a closed, almost medieval society, and he would probably have been content to limit external trade to the exchange of long-distance caravans with China proper.*° However, by the late 1920s this was no longer possible. Under normal conditions a transport from Urumchi to Tientsin took from 120 to 180 days,?! but following Feng Yu-hsiang’s occupation of eastern Kansu and the resultant increase in civil disorder, trade along this route was completely disrupted.?? This severing of the traditional trade route to China coincided with the re- emergence of Russia, in its Soviet guise, as Sinkiang’s major trading partner.*? In 1926 the Soviet government decided to construct a new railroad linking Frunze, the capital of the Kirghiz SSR, with Semipalatinsk in western Siberia. This railroad, to be known as the Turksib, was aimed primarily at the development of Western Turkestan and at its fuller integration within the Soviet economic system. However, it was made clear by Artemi Kalatov, a leading official in the Soviet Railway Commissariat, that the new railroad (which ran parallel to the Sinkiang frontier for over 400 miles) was also designed to ‘prevent the penetration of Western European capitalism into Sinkiang’.34 With the completion of the Turksib in 1930 the Soviet economic stranglehold on
42 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Sinkiang became all but complete.*5 China’s share of the Sinkiang market dropped to a mere 12.5 per cent,°° and the value of Soviet trade with the province, which at the time of Russian Civil War had fallen to almost nil, rose to over 32 million roubles during the course of 1930.37 Moreover, the extension of a virtual Soviet trade monopoly over Sinkiang adversely affected the local merchants and cotton farmers, who found themselves unable to compete. The resultant decline in the fortunes of these Sinkiang merchants was reflected in a fall in revenue which, in an all too familiar vicious circle, led to additional forms of taxation being devised by the provincial authorities.3* The completion of the Turksib also contributed substantially to the growth of Soviet political influence in Sinkiang. It became faster and easier to travel from China proper to Sinkiang via Vladivostok, the Trans-Siberian and the Turksib than across North-West China;°? besides adding to Soviet prestige in the eyes of the Turkic- speaking Muslims of Sinkiang, this naturally gave the Soviet government a degree of control over Nanking’s relations with Urumchi through its ability to withhold visas, and thus to control the accessibility of Sinkiang to KMT officials.“
The annexation of the Khanate of Kumul
Chin Shu-jen’s policies towards the Turkic Muslims of Sinkiang, as well as towards the Tungans and Mongols, were singularly misconceived from the very beginning of his rule. According to Mildred Cable and Francesca French, two British missionaries long resident in North-West China at the time of Chin’s seizure of power:
Chin Shu-jen, Governor of Chinese Turkestan, had none of the qualities essential to good rule or wise administration. He was a man beset by fears, alternately too feeble or too harsh, dealing out leniency to the rich and severity to the poor, and showing that combination of tyranny and vacillation which is the most fatal characteristic that an autocrat can possess.*!
According to Nyman, Chin was prejudiced against Muslims ‘because of unpleasant experiences in his home province of Kansu’.*? Whatever the basis of this assertion, Chin rapidly antagonised both his Turkic- speaking and Tungan Muslim subjects by introducing a tax on the butchering of all animals in the province,* and by forbidding Muslims to perform the hajj to Mecca, ‘probably to stop money leaving the country’.44 Clumsy attempts by the provincial administration to impose Han Chinese officials on the Kirghiz and Mongol nomads of the T’ien Shan led to armed demonstrations against Chin and the death of a number of Mongols during 1929.45 As a result of these and other similarly
Sinkiang, 1928-31 43
short-sighted policies, the Muslim majority of the province, as well as the militarily significant Torgut Mongols of the T’ien Shan, came bitterly to resent Chin Shu-jen.“
Despite this widespread hostility towards Chin, the first challenges to his autocratic rule came not from the various minority peoples of the province, but from ambitious Han officers under his command. In May 1929, the Tao-yin of Altai attempted to stage a coup against Chin’s regime, but the Provincial Chairman had been forewarned, and was able to confine any fighting to the Shara Sume area.’ In the spring of 1931 troubles broke out in Urumchi itself, as discontented Han officers and soldiers launched an attack on Chin’s yamen. The attack failed, and the instigators of the plot were summarily executed.
Chin finally pushed the Turkic-speaking Muslims of Sinkiang into open rebellion in 1931 as a result of his annexation of the Kumul Khanate, known to the Chinese as Ha-mi. After Tso Tsung-t’ang’s reconquest of Sinkiang in the 1870s, a few local principalities were permitted to survive on a semi-autonomous basis, rather like the ‘native states’ of the British Indian Empire. Kumul, the most important of these semi-autonomous principalities, was ruled by a royal family which dated back to the Ming Dynasty and which may have been descended from the Chaghatay Khans.“ The Khanate of Kumul, which dominated the chief road from Sinkiang to China proper and was therefore of considerable strategic importance to the Chinese, extended from I-wan-ch’iian northwards to the Barkul Tagh, thence along the tops of the mountains to Bai and south- eastwards to Hsing-hsing-hsia on the Sinkiang—Kansu frontier. To the south the Khanate was bounded by the barren wastes of the Ghashun Gobi (see map 3).°°
At the time of the 1911 revolution Magsud Shah, then aged about forty-seven years, was on the throne of Kumul — known to the Chinese as the Ha-mi wang (King), to his subjects as Khan Magsid or Sultan Magsid and to European travellers as ‘the King of the Gobi’. He was the ‘last independent Khan of Central Asia. . . who had seen his fellow rulers all flung into the stew-pot of progress’.5' Yang Tseng-hsin, who came to power in 1912, was content to let Kumul retain its semi-autonomous status; besides, Maqsud Shah was friendly towards the Chinese.‘? He spoke Turkic with a marked Chinese accent, and wore Chinese clothes; on the other hand, he had a long white beard and always wore a turban or an Uighur cap.*’ A staunch Muslim, the Khan ruled his petty oasis kingdom from an ancient and ramshackle palace in Kumul proper — one of the three towns making up the capital of the Kumul oasis and known to the Chinese as the Muslim City (Ch. Hui-ch’eng). The Khan had a bodyguard of forty Chinese soldiers armed with mausers, and was able to call on the services of a Chinese garrison billeted in the fortified Chinese
44 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
town, or Old City (Ch. Lao-ch’eng). The third town, known as New City (Ch. Hsin-ch’eng), had a mixed Chinese-Turkic population and con- tained the main bazaars.*4 By 1928, shortly after the assassination of Yang Tseng-hsin, it was estimated that the ageing Maqsud Shah ruled over a population of between 25,000 and 30,000 Kumulliks. The Khan was responsble for levying taxes and dispensing justice; his administra- tion rested on twenty-one Begs, four of whom were responsible for Kumul itself, five others being responsible for the plains villages, and the remaining twelve administering the mountainous regions of the Barkul and Karlik Tagh.°> Maqsud Shah also maintained an Uighur militia which was reputed to be better trained than its counterpart in the predominantly Chinese Old City.** Throughout Yang Tseng-hsin’s long period of power, Kumul remained relatively peaceful and prosperous.°” Maqsid Shah paid a small annual tribute to Urumchi, and in return the Sinkiang government paid him a formal subsidy of 1,200 silver taels each year — no doubt in Yang Tseng-hsin’s opinion a small enough sum for ensuring the con- tinued obedience of the strategically vital Khanate. For the Uighurs of Kumul autonomy meant freedom from ‘the usual swarm of rapacious Chinese officials’.58 The only tax paid by the citizens of Kumul was in livestock — generally sheep or goats — due annually to the Khan. The soil of the oasis was rich and well-cultivated, and the condition of the Kumulliks before 1929 was one of relative contentment and prosperity.°° According to Mildred Cable and Francesca French, both of whom knew Magstd Shah personally, the continued existence of the Khanate of Kumul was also of psychological importance to the Uighurs of Turfan and the Tarim Basin:
The Moslem elements in the important oases, always so difficult to conciliate, were only tolerant ... so long as their own seat of government was firmly established at Hami under Khan Maksud Shah, a man of their own race, religion and speech, who still held the proud title of King of the Gobi.”
Whilst Yang Tseng-hsin appreciated the importance of Kumul’s auto- nomous status for the continuing peace of the province, his successor, Chin Shu-jen, clearly did not. For the first nineteen months of his rule Chin Shu-jen was content to maintain the traditional status quo, although when Schomberg visited Kumul in February 1929 (only seven months after Chin’s seizure of power) the area was under martial law, presum- ably because of Tungan warlord activities in neighbouring Kansu.*! Then, in March 1930, Khan Magstd Shah died of old age. Maqsud’s eldest son and heir, Nasir, should have inherited the throne of Kumul, but Chin Shu-jen and his Han subordinates stationed in Kumul Old City had other plans for the future of the Kumulliks. Shortly after his father’s death, Nasir travelled to Urumchi, the provincial capital. There is some
Sinkiang, 1928-31 45
doubt as to the reason for his presence in Urumchi. Both Lattimore and Hai state that Nasir was unpopular and that he went to Urumchi to seek Chin’s aid in imposing himself on the people of Kumul.® According to several other sources, however, Nasir, together with his chief counsellor Yulbars Khan, was ordered to Urumchi by Chin Shu-jen in order to make formal submission to the provincial government.® Chin’s subsequent behaviour and the fate of the Kumul Khanate would seem to indicate that the latter version of events is nearer the truth.“
At the time of Maqsiid Shah’s death, Li Hsi-ts’eng, a Han Chinese Divisional Commander stationed at Kumul, suggested to Chin Shu-jen that the Khanate should be abolished and its inhabitants brought under the direct control of the provincial administration.® There can be little doubt that Chin welcomed this advice — control over Kumul would offer the possibility of increased revenue and new positions for Han Chinese officials. He therefore took up the suggestion, ordered Nasir and Yulbars to Urumchi, and rushed a resolution through a meeting of his ministers abolishing the Khanate and dividing Kumul into three separate administrative districts, Ha-mi (centred around the capital), I-ho and I-wu.6’ When Nasir arrived in Urumchi he was given the position of ‘Senior Adviser’ to the provincial government and forbidden to return to Kumul;® he remained in Urumchi as a virtual prisoner, and according to one Chinese source only escaped with his life by bribing Chin heavily. Yulbars, on the other hand, was sent back to Kumul with a group of Chinese officials who had been instructed by Chin to set up the new administrative machinery.”
It has been suggested by Lattimore that the Kumulliks had little love for their Khanate, and that only a minority of the population wished for Nasir to inherit his father’s position.”' It is true that the old Khan had, on occasion, over-taxed his people and earned their ire as a result.72 There were other factors, however, which suggest that Lattimore’s analysis (which relies primarily on Tu Chung-yiian, a Han Chinese source) may overstate the disregard in which the Kumulliks held their Khan; besides the question of Uighur national pride, already mentioned above, the Khanate is reported to have held some religious significance for the Turkic Muslims of Sinkiang.”? There was also an important economic factor: elsewhere in Sinkiang Han Chinese immigrants were permitted to settle on untilled land; with the abolition of the Khanate traditional restrictions on Han settlement in the region were lifted, a development which found absolutely no approval with the Uighur citizens of Kumul.74 Whatever the original attitude of the Kumulliks to Nasir, Chin Shu-jen was shortly to learn that — in the words of the Nanking official Wu Ai-chen ~ ‘subject peoples obstinately prefer self-government to good govern- ment’.’”> Since Chin’s government of Kumul was anything but good, the
46 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
bitterness with which the Kumulliks regarded the passing of their Khanate may easily be imagined.
The newly appointed Chinese administration upset the people of Kumul almost from the minute of its installation. It was announced that the privilege of exemption from direct taxation by Urumchi was to be abolished; moreover, to add insult to injury, one year’s ‘arrears’ of taxes were to be collected from the Uighur Kumulliks. Meanwhile Kumul was thrown open to Chinese settlement, and it was decreed that settlers taking this offer were exempt from taxation for two years.” To make matters worse, Kumul, which is situated on the chief road from north- western Kansu to Sinkiang, was at this time subjected to a flow of refugees from famine and warfare in the former province.” A column of these unfortunate emigrants was seen by Berger Bohlin of the Sino- Swedish Expedition in April 1931; his account makes it clear that people in Kansu were well aware of Chin’s opening of the Kumul region to Han settlement:
During my stay at Hua-hai-tze I witnessed a curious spectacle. The Chen-fan region had for a number of years been visited by failure of the crops and famine, and large numbers of people therefore emigrated to more prosperous tracts. Such an emigration-wave now passed Hua-hai-tze. It consisted of a caravan of 100 camels, transporting 150 persons with all their baggage to Sinkiang, where it was said that land was being thrown open.78
The refugees clearly were not entirely destitute, however, for Bohlin emphasises that all were ‘carefree and happy’ and seemed ‘fairly pros- perous’. Chin Shu-jen, a Kansu man himself, was anxious to settle in Sinkiang as many of these refugees as possible — yet fertile land was not as plentiful nor Sinkiang as prosperous as the refugees had been led to believe.”? Chin solved the problem by ordering Lung Hsieh-lin, the Chinese Amban in charge of I-ho district, to provide land for the would- be settlers from Kansu.®° Lung responded by forcing his Uighur subjects to leave their own cultivated land and handing it over to the Kansu Chinese. The expropriated Uighurs were ‘compensated’ with untilled lands on the fringe of the desert where the soil was barren.8! According to Lattimore the resettled Uighurs were then assessed for landtax on the basis of their old holdings (despite the fact that it was customary in Sinkiang for previously untilled land to be exempted from taxation for the first two years of cultivation), whilst the Kansu settlers who had been given the expropriated Uighur land were excused payment of tax for three years.®2 The Kumulliks, sorely tried, organised a petition which was duly despatched to the Chairman’s yamen in Urumchi. No acknowledge- ment was received, and nothing was done to redress the grievances of the dispossessed Uighurs.® Instead, the settlement of Kansu Chinese was
Sinkiang, 1928-31 47
lf KUMUL or | — 1 HA-MI | bee Gravel i Karys.\ mounds | plain 4 Tampie embadded in trees Gravel 1- Yramer plain 7 Gully with lrees Q2- Barracks leh eodisimgle houses Tilled plain A_- Village of with single houses Ruins \ . fo Anst 4 of walt = Ee ease ee ; = oes ° —t IA New City a alee ny . ‘ . Debcsjir Leve! F a ‘ coe, 7 rs plair ye , River Village ‘ 2 se 7 rt ff Leni ‘ of Savash Cemeter Ke 2? We Tlage of le eee 3 si e > site e Neekicat Ajar mu zaar eee Yr sa fal. 8 rilled) platn jt Muslim Old City ;, Cit : ' a Si y ne with single house: us : eo = © “ Villaga of Building < < with tover tee ce e 2 Lower Ajar of trees ad es °o ' tse am
Map 4 4 Kumul or Ha-mi: Based on a map drawn by Field Marshal C. G. Mannerheim in 1907 (Across Asia), p. 386. The oasis was divided into three towns and numerous villages. The Muslim city and surrounding villages were predominantly Uighur, whilst the New City was mixed Han—-Uighur, and the ‘Old City’ (in fact, much newer than the Muslim City) was dominated by Han Chinese.
continued, and the price of food in the Kumul region began to climb steeply as a result of the large numbers of provincial troops billeted in the oasis and on the Kansu frontier.“ For the moment the Turkic-speaking Muslims of the region remained peaceful, perhaps lulling Chin Shu-jen into a false sense of security, but according to Sven Hedin, whose Sino- Swedish Expedition remained in Sinkiang and Kansu during Chin’s
48 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
period of control, ‘Discontent increased; the people clenched their teeth and bided their time; the atmosphere was tense and gloomy. Inflammable matter accumulated, and only a spark was needed to fire the powder magazine. ’®
The Kumul Rebellion
The explosion at Kumul began as the result of a religious and cultural slight which offended the sensibilities of the whole Muslim population, both Turkic-speaking and Tungan, and united them against the Chinese authorities. As a result of the administrative reorganisation which accompanied Chin Shu-jen’s annexation of the Kumul Khanate, a young Chinese called Chang Mu,* from Chin’s native district in Kansu, was appointed tax collector and chief of police to the small village of Hsiao- pu, located to the north of Kumul.8? According to Wu Ai-chen, this Chang was a ‘wastrel’ whose conduct soon became a public scandal.% Early in 1931 Chang’s attention was caught by a pretty Turkic Muslim girl of Hsiao-p’u. He attempted to make use of his position to force the girl’s father, an Uighur called Salih,* to give him the girl in marriage. Islamic Sharia law specifically prohibits marriage between Muslim women and men of any other religion, a proscription which is rigorously observed by all Muslims, regardless of sect.” Two versions of the subsequent events exist. According to Hai, who relies primarily on Fu Tung-hsien, on the night of 4 April 1931, Chang was invited to eat at the girl’s house, apparently in honour of the forthcoming wedding. During the course of the meal Chang was attacked by Uighur conspirators, and was killed along with thirty-two members of his ‘bodyguard’.®! Wu Ai-chen implies that Chang had already seduced the girl, and that the ‘ulama’ never had any intention of permitting the marriage to take place. Instead, on the night of the proposed ceremony, a mob appeared in the streets of Hsiao- p’u. Chang and his soldiers had been drinking, and were easily overcome by the infuriated Uighurs; all were killed, including the unfortunate Uighur girl, and between twenty and thirty rifles were captured. The rebels next turned their attention to the Kansu Chinese, said to have numbered about a hundred families, all of whom were massacred ‘and their heads buried in the soil of their farms’.%
Following these successes, the rebels turned their attention to the Chinese outposts at Tu-lu-hu and Lao-mao-hu, at both centres the Chinese garrisons and tax collectors were killed, and the small arsenals were captured.?} Armed with weapons taken from Chin’s soldiers, the rebels felt strong enough to move against Kumul itself. It seems that Kumul Muslim City, with its overwhelmingly Uighur population, fell into the hands of the rebels with little or no fighting; most of the Han Chinese,
Sinkiang, 1928-31 49
however, withdrew into the fortified Old City and barred the gates. Those Chinese caught outside the Old City were apparently massacred wholesale, but when the fighting died down it became clear that a stalemate had been reached. The rebel forces controlled Kumul Muslim City and the surrounding countryside, but the provincial forces remained secure within the fortified Old City, retaining control of its important arsenal. Kumul New City, which seems to have had no fortifications worth speaking of, was probably abandoned to the rebels.*
It is not clear whether the Hsiao-p’u incident was a carefully planned challenge to the Chinese authorities, or whether it was simply a spon- taneous outburst by a small Uighur community pushed beyond the limits of tolerance by a corrupt Chinese official. There are indications, however, that the troubles at Hsiao-p’u sparked off a much larger rebellion before the insurgent leaders were fully prepared. According to Mildred Cable and Francesca French, who were resident in the Kumul area during and shortly after Chin’s annexation of the Khanate, a rising against Chin Shu-jen was being systematically planned by certain promi- nent Kumulliks:
While officials surreptitiously transferred their wealth to a place of safety, the instigators of trouble were equally persistent in their secret preparations for war. Camels and mules were requisitioned to transport weapons, ammunition and stocks of food over little-known tracks, that they might be stored in mountain caves known only to the few. Steady streams of small caravans carrying ammuni- tion to the mountains came from the South Road, from Tunhwang and across the most lonely tracks of the desert connecting Kansu with Barkul. All these converged on the Khan’s summer palace grounds in Aratam, and the stronghold of Bardash was stocked with huge supplies of food and firearms.”
If this was indeed the case, then after the Hsiao-p’u incident the leaders of the planned rising were faced with a fait accompli. Yulbars Khan, the former Chancellor of Maqstd Shah, claims to have been in the T’ien Shan ‘escaping from the heat’ when the fighting started.°” Whether he was at Bardash, secretly preparing an uprising, must remain open to speculation. Certainly he was soon to emerge, together with Khoja Niyas Hajji (a prominent Uighur whose name indicates that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca), as joint leader of the Muslim insurgent forces. Cable and French indicate that the Tungan population of Kumul also joined the revolt at this stage® -— indeed it is likely that a prominent Tungan Kumullik, referred to by the missionaries as ‘Wang the Mer- chant’, was party to the planned rebellion and may have helped to finance the purchase of arms. He is described as being ‘a man of means’, with business links which extended to China, India, Iran and the Soviet Union, as well as to the ownership of a string of caravanserais scattered throughout the oases of Sinkiang.” Besides the Tungans, the Uighur
50 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
c Ft ig”
11. Leaders of the Kumul Rising: 12. Leaders of the Kumul Rising: Khoja Niyas Hajji, c. 1932 Yulbars Khan, c. 1932
Sinkiang, 1928-31 51
insurgents of Kumul were joined by the neighbouring Kirghiz of the Karlik Tagh who held a grudge against Chin because of his attempts to impose Chinese officials on them during 1929;!° according to Wu Ai- chen troubles also broke out at Barkul and the Kazakhs of that area joined the insurgents ‘to a man’.!°! Chin had clearly succeeded in alienating all the Turkic-speaking peoples of north-eastern Sinkiang, and great skill in diplomacy was needed if a full-scale Muslim rising was yet to be avoided.
Unfortunately, Chin decided that the situation demanded strong action. Blind to the limited power of his own military forces, and rejecting the advice of Liu Wen-lung, his Commissioner for Education, and Yen Yu-shan, his Commissioner for Reconstruction, both of whom advocated a policy of conciliation,!™ he ordered troops to proceed against the rebel areas where, according to Wu Ai-chen, they were instructed to ‘act with the utmost severity’.!°3 Meanwhile the Muslim insurgents, unable to breach the fortifications at Kumul Old City, fanned out through the surrounding countryside looking for Han settlers and soldiers. According to R. P. Watts, the British Vice Consul-General at Kashgar, an initial detachment of 300 soldiers, sent by Chin to relieve the beleaguered troops at Kumul Old City, were surprised by the insurgents and killed almost to a man, their rifles, ammunition and a machine-gun being captured by the Muslim forces.' Many of the troops thus slain were said to have been sleeping off the effects of opium, the probability of which is borne out by Schomberg’s 1930 report which describes the officer in command of a key garrison at Kumul ‘lying stretched on the kang, smoking his opium in a jade pipe’.!% Despite this initial success, the insurgent forces were unable to prevent provincial forces under the command of Chu Jui-ch’ih, the Tao-yin of Aksu, from marching to the relief of Kumul Old City.' In late April the siege was lifted. Chu occupied the Old City fortress and ordered his second-in-command, Hsiung Fa-yii, to hold Kumul Muslim City.!°’ The Muslim insurgents retained control of the countryside and were able to harass Chu’s forces whenever they strayed too far from their fortified citadel, but they were unable to offer a serious challenge to the provincial troops in Kumul Old City. In the meantime the Chinese troops, under the leadership of Hsiung Fa-yii, began a series of reprisal massacres against Muslim non-com- batants in Kumul Muslim City and the surrounding villages. !°
In an attempt to break this stalemate the Uighur leaders determined to seek external help in their struggle against Chin Shu-jen. According to Yulbars Khan, a decision was taken to send an appeal to the Kuomintang government in Nanking. Accordingly ‘one day in June’ 1931 Yulbars, who may have been chosen because of his fluency in Chinese, set out secretly for Kansu, ostensibly en route for the Chinese capital;!°° whether
§2 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
he genuinely intended to appeal to Chiang Kai-shek must remain uncertain. Yulbars claims that he travelled directly to Soochow, an important city in north-western Kansu which was at that time under the control of Ma Chung-ying, the youngest and most volatile of the ‘Five Ma’ Tungan warlords and a man destined to play a vital role in the history of Republican Sinkiang.
The involvement of Ma Chung-ying
Little is known of Ma Chung-ying’s early years. He was born c. 1910 at Ho-chou in south-eastern Kansu. Almost nothing is known of his father,'!° but Chung-ying shared the same paternal grandfather as the Kansu/Tsinghai warlords Ma Pu-ch’ing and Ma Pu-fang, and was thus a scion of the powerful Ma family of Pieh-ts’ang, a small village some thirty kilometres south-west of Ho-chou.!!! He was also distantly related to the Kansu/Ningsia warlords Ma Hung-k’uei and Ma Hung-pin. Together these warlords came to be known as the ‘Five Ma’ (Ch. Wu Ma) warlord clique. Ma Chung-ying first entered military service in 1924 when, at about the age of 14, he joined the local Muslim militia. One year later the Kuominchin forces of Fen Yii-hsiang, the so-called ‘Christian General’, invaded eastern Kansu. The Tungan warlords of western Kansu remained, for the most part, aloof from the struggle. Ma Chung-ying, however, who had been appointed an officer in the forces of his uncle Ma Ku-chung, is said to have laid siege to and captured the important city of Ho-chou on his own initiative. Ma easily defeated the troops (under the command of Ma Lin, a great-uncle) which were sent to recapture the city. As a result of these victories Ma Chung-ying, still only sixteen or seventeen years old, won a reputation as a military strategist and the nickname Ga Ssu-ling or ‘Little Commander’. Ma Chung-ying’s triumph was short-lived, however, for Ma Ku-chung had not ordered the occupa- tion of Ho-chou, and promptly dismissed his nephew for insubordination. The ‘Little Commander’ learned this lesson well; he withdrew to the Hsi- ning area of Tsinghai and began to build up his own private army.!!2 The Kuominchin ‘pacification’ of Kansu left large areas of the prov- ince devastated, but failed to break the independent spirit of its people. In 1927 north-western Kansu was racked by a violent earthquake; this, combined with the increased use of good arable land for the cultivation of opium by Feng Yii-hsiang’s Regional Commander, Liu Yii-fen, caused widespread famine. Early in the spring of 1928 the patience of the north- western Tungans ran out, and the standard of revolt was raised against the Kuominchiin by the Muslim General Ma T’ing-hsiang. Ma Chung- ying rapidly became involved in the fighting, leading three separate attacks against Kuominchiin forces in Ho-chou. According to Robert
Sinkiang, 1928-31 53
Ekvall, an American who travelled in south-eastern Kansu at this time:
The revolt had by this time assumed all the aspects of a holy war. Chanting prayers, forty or fifty thousand fighters went into battle with fanatical zeal . . . the young rebel leader Ma Chong-ing [sic] seemed to bear a charmed life and by his reckless courage gained the utmost in obedience and devotion from his ruffian troops. The Chinese were panic-stricken at the desperate courage of the Moslems, but eventually, by machine gun fire and light artillery, proved superior. !13
According to American diplomatic reports, the ravages of war and famine in Kansu reduced some people to cannibalism; between 1926 and 1929 as many as two million people may have died.!!4 One casualty was Ma Chung-ying’s father, who was executed by Liu Yii-fen as a reprisal against Chung-ying during the winter of 1929.1'5
In 1929 Ma Chung-ying, his position strengthened by several victories over the Kuominchiin,!!¢ travelled to Nanking, where he enrolled briefly in the Military Academy. It has been suggested that during his short stay at Nanking Ma offered his services to the Nationalist Government on the understanding that, if he could win control of Sinkiang, he would be recognised by the KMT.'"” After leaving Nanking Ma made his way to Chung-wei on the Yellow River where he rejoined his troops. He then marched his forces across the southern fringes of the Ala Shan desert to north-western Kansu where he assumed control over the four districts of Tun-huang, An-hsi, Soochow and Kan-chou.!!8
Ma Chung-ying was thus the Tungan warlord chieftain controlling north-western Kansu at the time of the Kumul rising in April 1931. According to Yulbars Khan, who claims to have set out for Nanking in June 1931, he arrived in Soochow en route for the national capital and was, apparently by chance, invited to go and eat with the ‘Little Commander’ (who was still only some twenty-one years of age). Accord- ing to his recently-published memoirs, Yulbars was entertained by Ma Chung-ying and a number of senior Tungan officers of his command including Ma Shih-ming, Ma Fu-yiian, Ma Shih-lu and Ma Ho-ying. (Yulbars comments that there were so many ‘Mas’ in Ma Chung-ying’s army that it was familiarly known as the Ma-chia-chtin, or ‘Ma House- hold Army’.)''9 After the meal Chung-ying dismissed his officers and began to question Yulbars about the origins and progress of the Kumul rebellion, and about the present state of affairs of the Kumul administra- tion. Yulbars claims that he was careful not to criticise Chin Shu-jen because he was unsure of Chung-ying’s purpose. At this point the ‘Little Commander’ began to curse Chin Shu-jen and to say that he was unfit to govern Sinkiang. Yulbars claims that on hearing this he realised for the
54 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
first time that ‘not all Kansu people were supporters of Chin’; he therefore took Chung-ying into his confidence and explained the purpose of his mission to Nanking. Ma Chung-ying immediately asked Yulbars what he expected to gain from such an appeal to the KMT. On being told that the Kumulliks wanted Nanking to replace Chin with a new Gov- ernor, Ma sat silently for some time, apparently considering the matter. He then asked whether Yulbars had any personal contacts in the Nanking government, and on receiving a reply in the negative he advised Yulbars in the strongest terms not to go to Nanking ‘or he would be disappointed’. He gave three reasons for this:
(1) The Kuomintang had just finished its Northern Expedition and needed peace; it was therefore in no position to replace its frontier governors, whatever their faults.
(2) Even if the Nanking government were to agree to Chin Shu-jen’s replacement, it would take two or three years to put the decision into effect because of the distances involved.
(3) Because of Chin’s avarice, he would be disinclined to comply with an order to step down and might well turn to a foreign power to bolster his position. In such circumstances Sinkiang might fall under foreign domination.
Yulbars listened to this advice but then pointed out to Ma that he had been chosen by his people to go to Nanking. What would happen if he failed to go? Ma replied:
Ihave away. . . I can meet the needs of the Uighurs of Ha-mi. . . In the name of Muslim brotherhood, I shall take my army into Sinkiang. First I shall alleviate the suffering of the Uighurs of Ha-mi, then I shall drive Chin Shu-jen from the stage by force of arms. !2°
Despite Yulbars’ version of events — not surprisingly the only record of the discussion known to exist — it is highly unlikely that Ma conceived his invasion of Sinkiang over a spontaneous dinner with the Uighur leader in the yamen at Soochow.!?! There is a possibility, though no more than that, that even in his memoirs, written almost forty years after the Kumul rising, Yulbars was anxious to conceal the existence of a carefully planned Uighur rising against Chin Shu-jen to which the Tungans of north- western Kansu were also party.!22 Ma Chung-ying was certainly inter- ested in the Kumul rising before Yulbars’ arrival in Soochow; moreover Yulbars was aware of this interest, for he tells us elsewhere in his memoirs that Ma Chung-ying had sent messengers to him seeking information, but that he was unable to help because he ‘knew nothing’.'23 Ma must also have received information on the political situation in Sinkiang from two Turks, both apparently originating from Istanbul, who travelled to north- western Kansu from Urumchi early in 1931.'74 Both men subsequently
Sinkiang, 1928-31 55
became attached to Ma’s military headquarters and one, Kamal Kaya Efendi, became Ma’s Chief-of-Staff.'2 A possible indication of Ma Chung-ying’s earlier involvement in Sinkiang affairs may also be found in the gun-runners of Bardash. According to the British missionaries Cable and French, the arms caravans reaching Kumul came from the south and east — that is, from north-western Kansu. Such traffic would have been all but impossible without Ma Chung-ying’s acquiescence, if not his active participation. Moreover, the important Tungan community of Kumul is known to have backed the rising, chiefly with funds. Certainly a Tungan like ‘Wang the Merchant’, with business contacts as far afield as Iran, India and Siberia, might reasonably be expected to have approached his fellow Tungans in neighbouring Kansu for aid in the planned rebellion. !6
Ma’s unstable military and financial position in north-western Kansu would also seem to indicate a premeditated rather than a spontaneous movement into Sinkiang. His power base in Kan-chou was strictly temporary. According to Mildred Cable and Francesca French, both of whom were resident in north-western Kansu under Ma Chung-ying, the young warlord’s strategy was
based on the assumption of the paralysing effect of frightfulness in action, and asa method of temporary invasion it answered his purpose well, but it never served him as a basis of true conquest, nor did he ever establish rule over one single acre of the land which he invaded. His was the method of the locust . . . and his army was always viewed as a plague. It came, it devoured, and when it had passed over, the patient, constructively minded peasants instantly began to repair the damage done to their fields, and to beget sons to replace those who had been swept away in his train. !2”
In 1931 Ma Chung-ying’s personal army was by no means large — despite some exaggerated reports it probably numbered no more than 1,000 men.!?8 Yet by the very nature of its modus operandi — aptly described by Cable and French as ‘that of the locust’, Ma’s army needed to move ever onwards. Besides, Ma Chung-ying was a highly ambitious young warlord who was to dream, in his wilder moments, of creating a Muslim empire which would include the whole of Soviet, as well as Chinese, Central Asia.'2 In the spring of 1931, however, Ma Chung-ying, as warlord of north-western Kansu, had only two possible directions in which to move. One was back towards China, but this would have involved an attack on his uncle, Ma Pu-fang, with whom he was conducting a vigorous propa- ganda war, but who may have been his secret ally;'3° the other was into Sinkiang, where his Muslim co-religionists were apparently ready to welcome him as a liberator from the corrupt Chin Shu-jen. It is therefore at least certain that, whether or not Ma Chung-ying was party to a planned Kumullik rebellion which was sparked off prematurely by the
56 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Hsiao-p’u incident, and whether or not Yulbars Khan really intended to travel beyond north-western Kansu to Nanking,!3! the 1931 rising at Kumul occurred at a most opportune moment for the young Tungan warlord from Kansu.
The first invasion of Ma Chung-ying
Although Ma Chung-ying had clearly been contemplating an invasion of Sinkiang for some time, he did not move directly against Kumul, but began a series of manoeuvres within Kansu which may have been designed to confuse the Sinkiang authorities or may alternatively have reflected continuing indecision on the part of the young Tungan warlord. According to Cable and French, Ma Chung-ying made an impetuous decision to move against Ningsia, but was advised by Kamal Kaya Efendi to turn suddenly against Sinkiang, thus taking the provincial authorities off their guard.'32 Having taken the decision to attack Chin Shu-jen’s forces in Sinkiang, Ma Chung-ying wasted no time making his move. After assembling a force of 500 Tungan cavalry,'3 he made a swift crossing of the desert between An-hsi and Kumul in the full heat of mid- summer, !*4 arriving in the oasis on 28 June at almost exactly the same time as the French Citroén Expedition. An initial encounter between the vanguard of Ma’s Tungan cavalry and a Chinese machine-gun detach- ment took place at the village of Yi-k’o-shu. Le Févre’s account of the ensuing fighting would seem to indicate that the Chinese forces included a number of Mongol soldiers.'35 After the Tungans had been beaten back by the Chinese machine guns, the Citroén Expedition was able to continue to Kumul Old City, which they found in a state of turmoil, feverishly organising its defences. The French were immediately taken to see the Chinese Commandant, Chu Jui-ch’ih. En route through the muddy streets of the town, packed with military convoys and soldiers of all kinds, they saw the faces of anxious Muslims peering from their shuttered homes, and hanging from a telegraph pole the head, heart and liver of an insurgent.'36 Chu gave his permission for the French to continue towards Urumchi at their own risk. The Expedition accordingly set out on 1 July 1931; however, three of their number, including a Franco-Russian engineer called Petro, were left behind to await the arrival of spare motor parts from Kansu. They were thus to witness the first stages of Ma Chung-ying’s siege of Kumul Old City.!*”
On or about 3 July Ma Chung-ying sent two messengers to Chu Jui- ch’ih bearing, according to Petro, the following message:
By order of the National Government of China I have been appointed comman- der-in-chief of all military forces of Kansu and Sinkiang. Having assumed my new
Sinkiang, 1928-31 57
post on this date, I allow you to petition for your resignation and I order you to hand over to me command of the Ha-mi garrison. Urgent order.'8
Chu Jui-ch’ih replied by ordering the execution of one of the messengers, and sending the head back to Ma by means of the other. On the same night Ma began a fierce attack on Kumul Old City. However, his Tungan cavalry were ill-suited for siege warfare, and the Chinese appear to have been well armed. According to Petro, the garrison had an ‘immense stock’ of modern rifles and ammunition, four machine guns, two Krupp 65 mm howitzers, and a number of old brass cannons.'39 Kumul Muslim City had been abandoned to the insurgents, and the Chinese garrison had withdrawn within the walls of the Old City. No contemporary description of the Old City fortifications would appear to exist, but Field Marshal Mannerheim, who visited Kumul in 1907, has left a detailed account of the fortifications at that time.!“° They appear to have been strong enough to pose a serious problem for Ma’s Tungan cavalry, a force which was to prove itself all but invincible when facing Chin Shu-jen’s troops in the open field.
Petro’s description of Ma Chung-ying’s first attack on Kumul Old City is worth quoting at some length, as it presents a rare picture of warfare on Sinkiang’s eastern front during the first Tungan invasion. It is immedi- ately apparent that Ma Chung-ying’s struggle with Chin Shu-jen’s troops was hard and brutal — not at all like some of the mock ‘battles’ fought out between rival warlords in some parts of contemporary Republican China. On the night of 3 July Petro was awoken by cannon, machine-gun fire and savage yells. He climbed to a point of vantage on the city walls from where he had a commanding view of the western and northern approaches to the city:
From numerous points on the wall the Chinese were firing flares which gave a certain amount of light. There were no enemy on the glacis, but a little distance beyond, among the bushes, could be seen the flashes of their muskets. Suddenly, to the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets, the glacis swarmed with men tushing towards the high city wall. The front rank consisted of Chinese peasants (conscripts from Kansu) carrying scaling ladders, who were driven forward by Tungan soldiers armed with huge curved swords.
The air was rent by the shrill battle cries of the Tungans and the yells of defiance of the defenders. In spite of a murderous fire, ladders were placed at different spots, and the rebels . . . began to climb up one after the other. Then the defenders discarded their firearms for pikes and axes, and hurled down on the attackers heavy rocks, blazing tow soaked in oil and hand-grenades . . . Notwith- standing the stubborn defence, several scaling ladders were placed against the wall, and the Tungans clambered up one after another. Many were speared or pushed away, but as they fell on the ground others took their place. Then the cannonade ceased, and only the clash of steel, the cries of the wounded, and an
58 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
occasional pistol shot could be heard as hand-to-hand fighting began on the wall itself . . . just when the place seemed to be doomed a machine gun, which up to this had been silent. . . suddenly came to life. Emplaced in a blockhouse flanking the wall, it opened fire, mowing down the assault, and the glacis was soon cleared except for heaps of corpses. '*!
It is clear that the attacking Tungans lacked heavy artillery for breach- ing the city walls. Three separate attacks were made on the night of 3 July, but all were beaten back. Chu Jui-ch’ih, a military veteran, had no intention of surrendering to the ‘Little Commander’ whom he dismissed contemptuously as a ‘thieving cub’.'!* Ma Chung-ying clearly had little enthusiasm for this sort of siege warfare, besides which his forces needed more armaments. On 5 July he led the greater part of his Tungan cavalry away from Kumul Old City leaving some 2,000 provincial troops under siege by an estimated 1,000 Uighur insurgents and a handful of Tungans.'43 Chu Jui-ch’ih, who was unaware of Ma Chung-ying’s real purpose, decided against making a sortie because he feared a trap. Meanwhile the ‘Little Commander’ led his highly mobile forces over the Karlik Tagh to Barkul, a move which was quite unexpected by the provincial authorities. Faced with an imminent Tungan attack, Barkul surrendered without a struggle. According to Hedin, the local Comman- dant went over to Ma, who seized 2,000 rifles and a large store of ammunition held in Barkul arsenal.'45 Leaving a garrison of a hundred to occupy the captured town, Ma turned back to the south.' According to Wu Ai-chen, with Ma’s already considerable charisma much increased by the desert crossing and the subsequent capture of Barkul, Kazakhs and Tungans from the region to the north of the Karlik Tagh flocked to join his forces.'47 By mid-July Muslim insurgents were in effective control of the whole territory of the old Kumul Khanate, from Hsing-hsing-hsia on the Kansu-Sinkiang frontier to the vicinity of I-wan-ch’tan on the road to Turfan. Groups of invading Tungan troops from Kansu, in alliance with the insurgent Sinkiang Muslims, held Hsing-hsing-hsia and Barkul and were participating in the siege of Kumul Old City; moreover at this time Ma Chung-ying seems to have enjoyed the full support of the indigenous Muslim peoples, whether Uighur, Kazakh, Kirghiz or Sinkiang Tungan.
Chin Shu-jen’s initial response to this first Tungan invasion seems to have been precipitate and ill-judged. On hearing that Ma Chung-ying, backed by the main body of his Tungan cavalry, was approaching Ch’i- chiao-ching, Chin appointed his Chief Secretary, Lu Hsiao-tsu, to be Commander-in-Chief of the provincial forces; Tu Chih-kuo and an ambitious newcomer, Sheng Shih-ts’ai, were appointed joint Chiefs-of- Staff. Lu Hsiao-tsu was a civilian with little or no military experience, moreover, according to Chan Fook-lam he was a bitter rival of Chin Shu- hsin, the Commissioner for Military Affairs at Urumchi and a younger
Sinkiang, 1928-31 59
brother of Chin Shu-jen.'48 Lu hurriedly mustered a force of about 1,000 men, almost all of whom were lacking in military training or experience. !4? Under the command of Tu Chih-kuo, this quite inadequate force was sent to Ch’i-chiao-ching where it had orders to stem the Tungan advance pending the despatch of further reinforcements. In the event, these promised reinforcements were never to arrive. !°°
Shortly after their arrival at Ch’i-chiao-ching, these troops were surprised in a night attack by Tungan forces and killed almost to a man;!°! the Commander, Tu Chih-kuo, is reported to have committed suicide. !°? According to Kamal Kaya Efendi, Ma Chung-ying’s Turkish Chief-of- Staff, the Tungan force that defeated Tu’s troops at Ch’i-chiao-ching was commanded by Ma Chung-ying in person, the young warlord having approached the oasis by little-known trails through the Karlik Tagh and Bogdo Ula after his successful capture of Barkul.'%3
Following his victories at Barkul and Ch’i-chiao-ching, Ma Chung-ying is believed to have left a detachment of troops guarding the road westwards to Urumchi before returning to Kumul with the intention of completing his reduction of the besieged Old City. It is difficult to understand why Ma failed to follow up his annihilation of Tu Chih-kuo’s forces with an advance on Urumchi. It may be that he overestimated the strength of Chin Shu-jen’s forces defending the provincial capital; alter- natively, the Tungan Commander may have been unwilling to advance further into Sinkiang without first eliminating the Kumul Old City garrison which might conceivably — were military fortunes to be reversed — block his retreat to the security of north-western Kansu. It has been suggested by Wu Ai-chen that Ma Chung-ying was wounded during the engagement at Ch’i-chiao-ching and that this prevented him from march- ing on the capital.'54 No mention of such a development is made by Petro, however, who spent a week at the Tungan HQ at Kumul shortly after the Muslim victory at Ch’i-chiao-ching and who claims to have seen and spoken with Ma Chung-ying at this time.'’’ Wu is therefore probably mistaken, and is likely to have written in confusion over a wound received by Ma on the western front later in the autumn of 1931.
Both during and after the Tungan campaign in the west of the old Kumul Khanate, the insurgent Uighurs maintained their pressure on the forces of Chu Jui-ch’ih besieged within Kumul Old City. After Ma Chung-ying’s return to Kumul the siege proceeded with renewed vigour. Between 3 July and 16 October, during which time Petro was present at Kumul either in the besieged Old City or at the Tungan HQ,!56 Ma’s forces are reported to have staged forty-three separate attacks on the besieged Chinese garrison. The Tungans dug trenches and built bar- ricades in their attempts to storm the walls; meanwhile the besieged troops were forced to eat their camels, horses and mules. By 1 October
60 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
the defending troops were reduced to a per capita ration of 750 grammes of kaoliang flour daily, and this was due to run out by the end of the month. Ammunition was also running very low, and Chu Jui-ch’ih resorted to the use of archaic weapons — ‘fire arrows’ and ‘big swords’ — preserved in an arsenal established by Tso-Tsung-t’ang during his Sinkiang campaign in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Petro reports that nothing but opium was available for sale in the bazaar. Supplies of oil were gradually exhausted — partially as a result of its being hurled, boiling, on the heads of the attackers. The Tungans made several attempts to mine and blast the walls, but they lacked sufficient supplies of powder. On one occasion a breach was made in the walls, but the besieged troops blocked it with bales of wool before an entry could be forced. A ditch was subsequently dug around the walls, flooding the Tungan trenches and preventing further mining. By mid-October the defending garrison was reduced to desperate straits. According to Petro who, after 108 days in Kumul, broke out of the encircled town on 16 October in a (successful) attempt to reach Urumchi:
What sustained the men was opium. They could not have held out without it, and so long as it lasted and no strenuous effort was demanded of them, they could get along on practically no food. At night the opium lamps of the sentries could be seen sparkling like little stars the length of the ramparts. The whole garrison was in fact intoxicated. It was fantastic!!*”
It is equally likely that the predominantly Han garrison was driven to continued resistance by the thought of their probable fate at the hands of the Tungans should they succumb. Ma Chung-ying refused to accept any terms other than unconditional surrender, and since the struggle in Sinkiang had assumed an overtly communalist aspect, neither side had shown much inclination to take prisoners. In any case, the unexpectedly fierce resistance of Kumul Old City delayed the Tungan advance on Urumchi and enabled Chin Shu-jen to begin a hasty reorganisation of the provincial forces. Asa first step, which was to prove singularly unsuccess- ful, Chin ordered Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen, Regent and ‘Living Buddha’ of the Sinkiang Torgut Mongols, to lead his famed Torgut cavalry against the Tungan forces at Kumul. These Torgut troops were undoubtedly the best available to the provincial government, and were probably the only indigenous Sinkiang force capable of facing Ma Chung-ying’s formidable Tungan cavalry.'°§ Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen was still smarting, however, from Chin Shu-jen’s ill-considered attempt to force Chinese officials on the Sinkiang Torguts in place of their own leaders;'59 moreover a plot had recently been discovered by which the Regent was to have been assassin- ated by members of his own confederacy at Kara Shahr. Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen suspected Chin Shu-jen’s complicity in this plot, and, when the
Sinkiang, 1928-31 61
would-be assassins fled to Urumchi and Chin refused to surrender them or to bring them to justice, these suspicions were largely confirmed.'® The ‘Living Buddha’ accordingly refused to become involved in the hos- tilities at Kumul, taking his forces instead to Kara Shahr in a demonstra- tion of power which he hoped would be noticed and understood by Chin Shu-jen. Chin understood very clearly, but for the present he was pre- occupied with the deteriorating position in the north-east of the province.
Lacking sufficient numbers of reliable Han Chinese troops, Chin turned next to the sizeable White Russian community which had been established in Sinkiang, especially in the Ili Valley,'*! since the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. Lu Hsiao-tsu, who had proved incompetent as Provincial Commander-in-Chief, was consequently replaced by Chang P’ei-yiian, the Military Commander of the Ili region. Chang immediately began to build up a force of White Russian ‘volun- teers’ — in effect, refugees who refused to fight for the Chinese authorities at Urumchi until threatened with forced repatriation to Stalin’s Russia. ! In late September or early October Chang P’ei-yiian’s forces, headed by a force of some 250 White Russians under the leadership of Colonel Pappengut, a former Staff Officer of the Russian Imperial Army, left Ili with the object of relieving the besieged garrison at Kumul Old City. According to British diplomatic sources, almost all these Russian troops were experienced soldiers who had served with both the Tsarist and White Russian forces — military experience which was to make the Russian émigré army (Ch. Kuei-hua-chtin) the most competent force in Sinkiang.'® It is not clear whether Ma Chung-ying was informed of the approach of Chang P’ei-yuian and Pappengut, or whether, as indicated by Cable and French, he simply became tired of the siege at Kumul Old City and decided to march on the provincial capital.!4 Whichever might be the case, he drew most of his Tungan cavalry away from Kumul and rode westwards along the road to Ch’i-chiao-ching and the advancing Rus- sians. What happened next is not certain, but it is clear that no major battle between Pappengut’s forces and the Tungan forces took place at this time. It seems probable that during one of the initial skirmishes, according to one report at the village of Liao-tun (some 97 miles east of Ch’i-chiao-ching), Ma Chung-ying was quite seriously wounded, being shot through both legs.'* Casualties appear to have been minimal, however, with the White Russians sustaining losses of one dead and two wounded. !66
Asa result of the injury sustained by Ma Chung-ying, a large part of the Tungan forces present in Sinkiang retreated to north-western Kansu, taking their wounded leader with them. It has been suggested that Ma was ‘bought off’ for a substantial sum by Chin Shu-jen,'*’ but there is no real evidence for this, and Ma’s injuries were certainly serious enough to
62 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
merit a prolonged period of recuperation away from the front line.1® Once safely back across the Kansu-Sinkiang frontier, Ma Chung-ying was given control of the four districts of An-hsi, Tun-huang, Yii-men and Soochow by his uncle Ma Pu-fang, a development which suggests that the two Tungan warlords had indeed been acting in concert at the time of Chung-ying’s original invasion of Sinkiang.'!®
Meanwhile, the advancing forces of Chang P’ei-yiian, still spearheaded by Pappengut’s White Russian troops, moved further into the territory of the old Kumul Khanate, relieving the besieged garrison at Kumul Old City on or about 1 November 1931.!”° The victorious Chinese troops were given permission to sack Kumul, a ‘reward’ denied to the White Russians but not, apparently, to Chang P’ei-yiian himself.!7! The provincial forces then set about the systematic destruction of large parts of the Kumul Khanate, levelling whole villages and terrorising the inhabitants. Chu Jui-ch’ih, the Commander of the besieged garrison, returned to Urum- chi; however, his lieutenant, Hsiung Fa-yii, remained at Kumul and began a series of mass executions. These reprisals were on such a scale that even those Uighurs who had remained neutral felt bound to join the rebellion.'”? Refugees poured westward towards Turfan, whilst the Uighur insurgents withdrew to the Karlik Tagh, especially to their well- stocked mountain fastness at Bardash, which was to prove impregnable. From Bardash, according to Cable and French, they organised a wide- spread guerilla war against Chin’s troops in collaboration with units of Ma’s Tungan forces who remained in Sinkiang pending the recovery of their leader. Messages were regularly exchanged between Bardash and An-hsi by means of the desert track leading from Barkul.'73 Meanwhile, secure in his stronghold of north-western Kansu, Ma Chung-ying nursed his wounds and began to expand and re-equip his forces.
3 Sinkiang, 1931-3: the rebellion of the Turkic- speaking Muslims of the south
The Tungans are no less our enemy than the Han Chinese . . . Neither the Han Chinese nor the Tungans have any legitimate claim to Eastern Turkestan. We, the People of Eastern Turkestan, no longer need foreigners to be our masters. Sabit Damullah, Prime Minister of the ‘Turkish-Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkestan’, Kashgar, 12 November 1933.'
The development of Turkic nationalism in southern Sinkiang
Following the execution in June 1924 of Ma Fu-hsing, the barbarous T’i- t’'ai of Kashgar, and the subsequent appointment of his executioner, Ma Shao-wu, to the post of Tao-yin at the oasis city of Khotan later in the same year,” the situation in southern Sinkiang remained peaceful until several years after the assassination of Governor Yang Tseng-hsin in July 1928. During the last years of Yang’s rule southern Sinkiang, often known as ‘Kashgaria’, remained very much a British sphere of influence, a state of affairs which had existed since the collapse of Tsarist influence at the end of the First Word War and the subsequent closure of the Imperial Russian Consulate-General at Kashgar.?
In August 1918, Sir George Macartney, Britain’s long-serving Consul- General at Kashgar, finally left Sinkiang to go into retirement. He was succeeded by Colonel P. T. Etherton, a committed anti-Bolshevik who, in line with contemporary British policy, co-operated with the anti-Soviet Basmachi guerillas in Western Turkestan while working to limit the spread of Soviet influence in southern Sinkiang.4 Yang Tseng-hsin, who correctly perceived that British policy in Sinkiang aimed at excluding Soviet influence by encouraging the survival of (his own) stable Chinese administration,’ was content to permit Etherton and his successors the exercise of considerable political influence to the south of the T’ien Shan. Moreover, as Soviet prestige and influence increased in Ili and Zungharia, so Yang increased discreet co-operation with the British in Kashgar in an attempt to counter the growth of Soviet power in the north of the province.®
By 1924 a combination of military realpolitik and the re-emergence of (Soviet) Russia as Sinkiang’s major trading partner had forced Yang politically to incline away from the British at provincial level. Following the signing of the Sino-Soviet agreement of 1924 (Article 1 of which provided for the re-establishment of normal diplomatic relations between Peking and Moscow),’ the Soviet government at Omsk sent an envoy to
63
100 miles 100 kms
Kara Shah
“Maral Bashi
TAKLAMAKAN DESERT
-
Charkhlik
,Guma Bazar
Kara Kash 2
‘ ; . PGiigit : SSughak seems ~ International Frontiers
———=_ Roads Seccecre Tracks
KASHMIR ". an pease ’ oo Old and New Towns
Map 5 Southern Sinkiang: towns and communications
Sinkiang, 1931-3 65
Sinkiang to discuss the question of mutual consular representation with Yang Tseng-hsin. As a result of this mission an agreement was signed on 6 October (bilaterally, without the participation of the Chinese govern- ment), providing for the exchange of consulates-general between Tash- kent and Urumchi, as well as for the establishment of Soviet consulates in Sinkiang at Chuguchak, Kulja, Shara Sume and Kashgar.® Yang Tseng- hsin seems to have accepted the increased Soviet presence in the north of the province with resignation if not with equanimity. The Soviet presence at Kashgar was, however, another matter. It upset the carefully main- tained balance of power between Britain and the Soviet Union to too great an extent; moreover, as Yang was well aware, it permitted direct Soviet access to the densely populated oases of the Tarim Basin — the source of nearly all provincial revenue in Sinkiang.°
Shortly after the official opening of the Soviet Consulate at Kashgar on 10 October 1925, a local power struggle began to develop between Max Doumpiss (the Soviet Consul — a Lett by origin), Major Gillan (the British Consul-General at this time) and the Tao-yin of Kashgar. Sino- Soviet relations in southern Sinkiang began inauspiciously with the discovery in November 1925 of large quantities of silver bullion concealed in thirty-four boxes of Soviet ‘diplomatic bags’ en route to the Kashgar consulate.!° The Kashgar Tao-yin, who was also reportedly affronted by the ‘barely concealed dissemination of Soviet propaganda’ in the southern oases, retaliated by ordering the expulsion of a number of suspected Russian agents.'' In March 1926, serious riots broke out in Kashgar which were blamed by the Chinese on an interpreter employed by the Soviet Consulate, by name Akbar ‘Ali. The rioters were suppres- sed by a force of 400 (local) Tungan troops and Akbar “Ali was thrown into prison; subsequent Soviet demands for his release were ignored by the Tao-yin.'* The Chinese authorities were also seriously disturbed at the rapid expansion of Soviet consular staff of European origin from about fifteen persons in 1925 to between thirty and forty persons in 1927.'3 All these factors must have been brought to the notice of Governor Yang Tseng-hsin in Urumchi. Yang was doubtless faced with a series of similar developments around the new Soviet Consulates at Kulja, Chuguchak and Shara Sume.'4 It seems that in Kashgar, with the discreet support of the British, he determined to take action to limit the spread of Soviet influence. '5
The Kashgar Tao-yin accordingly adopted a strong anti-Soviet line. Censorship, already severe, was tightened still further. Moreover, Yang Tseng-hsin’s ‘favourite nephew’, the Officer in Command of the Chinese troops on the Sino-Soviet frontier north of Kashgar, became a frequent and friendly visitor to the British Consulate-General at Chini Bagh in
66 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Kashgar.'¢ With the death of the old Tao-yin in 1927 and the subsequent transfer of Ma Shao-wu from Khotan to take his place, anti-Soviet measures in southern Sinkiang were substantially increased. Ma Shao- wu’s first actions included the jailing of a group of sixty alleged local comraunists and the tightening of Chinese control over the Sino-Soviet frontier to the north of Kashgar.!7 Subsequently the freedom of the Soviet Consul to travel within southern Sinkiang was severely curtailed, and Kashgar citizens suspected of pro-Soviet sympathies became liable to the confiscation of their property and deportation to other oases.'§ Yang Tseng-hsin reinforced Ma Shao-wu’s attempts to limit Soviet influence in the Tarim Basin by imposing a severe tax on Muslims leaving southern Sinkiang to go on hdajj via the Soviet Union. Similar new legislation required merchants visiting the Soviet Union to deposit a substantial sum with the Chinese authorities at Kashgar which was forfeit if the depositor failed to return to Sinkiang within sixty days.'°
These policies failed to isolate southern Sinkiang entirely from Soviet influence, but they did ensure that at the time of Yang Tseng-hsin’s assassination in 1928 the southern part of the province, and particularly Ma Shao-wu’s fief around Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan, retained considerable independence from the Soviet Union. This was in marked contrast to the Ili Valley, Chuguchak and Shara Sume (where Soviet influence became paramount soon after 1925), and even to the provincial capital at Urumchi, where, by the spring of 1928, the Soviet Consul- General wielded considerable influence.?°
It was perhaps due to Ma Shao-wu’s anti-Soviet stance and the continuing dominance of British influence in southern Sinkiang during the last years of Yang Tseng-hsin’s rule that Kashgar was to emerge as a centre of conservative Muslim reaction to Chinese rule during the 1930s. Because of Yang Tseng-hsin’s deliberate attempt to isolate southern Sinkiang from Soviet influence, the Uighurs (and to a lesser extent the Kirghiz) of the Tarim Basin were less influenced by the ‘progressive’ nationalist propaganda emanating from Soviet-dominated Western Turkestan than were the Turkic-speaking Muslims of the Ili Valley and Zungharia. This is not to suggest that the socialist nationalism advocated by the Jadid-ists after 1917 failed to make any headway south of the Tien Shan; nevertheless Kashgar, which lay outside the Soviet sphere of influence in north-western Sinkiang, provided a natural haven for right- wing Turkic nationalists and Islamic traditionalists who rejected Chinese rule but who were still more bitterly opposed to the advance of ‘atheistic communism’ and its Soviet champions in Central Asia. Many of these right-wing Turkic-speaking nationalists were defeated Basmachi gueril- las, chiefly of Uzbek, Kazakh and Kirghiz nationality, but including a number of Ottoman Turks and, according to Caroe, ‘old men who had
Sinkiang, 1931-3 67
fought against the Chinese at Kashgar’.”) Perhaps the most prominent Basmachi leader to flee to Kashgar was Janib Beg, a Kirghiz who was to play an important role in the politics of southern Sinkiang during the early 1930s. After Yang Tseng-hsin’s assassination in July 1928, Soviet influence in southern Sinkiang began rapidly to increase; nevertheless, at the time of the Kumul Rebellion in 1931, rumours of forced collectivisa- tion and the suppression of nomadism in Western Turkestan sufficed to make many Turkic Muslims of southern Sinkiang suspicious of Soviet motives.
If, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Turkic Muslims of southern Sinkiang were divided in their approach towards the Soviet Union and the newly emergent Turkic (and Tajik) SSRs in Western Turkestan, they were at least united in their attitude towards their Tungan co-religionists to the east. Unlike the Turkic Muslim rebels of Kumul, the Uighurs and Kirghiz of southern Sinkiang were too far distant from Kansu to appeal for assistance from the Tungan warlords of the ‘Five Ma’ clique. Besides, Han Chinese rule in the oases of the Tarim Basin had long been maintained by Tungan troops and officials.22 Ma Fu- hsing, the T’i-t’ai of Kashgar who had so ruthlessly exploited his Turkic Muslim subjects between 1916 and 1924, had been a Hui Muslim from Yunnan; similarly Ma Shao-wu was himself a Yunnanese Muslim. The Turkic Muslims of southern Sinkiang therefore entertained no illusions of ‘Muslim brotherhood’ with their Tungan co-religionists. It was Tungan troops who intervened to suppress any demonstration against Chinese misrule. The Tungans of the Tarim Basin were the allies of the Han Chinese administration and as such the enemies of the Turkic Muslim peoples — at least until they proved themselves otherwise.
The Tarim Basin, and particularly its western rim, was therefore unique in Sinkiang politics during the latter half of Yang Tseng-hsin’s rule in that a large part of its Turkic Muslim population looked neither to the ‘progressive’ Muslim leadership of Western Turkestan nor to the Tungan warlords of Kansu; instead attention seems to have been focused on the conservative reformist regimes in Turkey and Afghanistan. Contacts between Turkey and southern Sinkiang were never strong, though the Sinkiang Muslims doubtless recalled that between 1873 and 1877 the Ottoman flag had flown over Kashgar and coins had been minted which bore the name of the Turkish Sultan ‘Abd al-‘Aziz.”3 Since the time of the Ch’ing reconquest tenuous links had been maintained through the activities of pan-Turanian idealists such as Husayn Bay Bachcha of Artush, but with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War contacts ceased almost completely. Emotional links remained strong, however,?° and the nationalist revolution of Atatiirk (who had little personal interest in pan-Turanianism) represented a
68 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
Turkish national renaissance which inspired all shades of Turkic opinion from the Crimea to Kumul.
Political and religious contacts with Afghanistan, which shares a common frontier with southern Sinkiang, were rather more concrete than the links with distant Turkey. In 1919 Amir Aman Allah, the last Muhammadzay ruler of Afghanistan, seized the throne of the country on the death of his father. Aman Allah was an impetuous ruler who was ultimately to bring about his own downfall through the implementation of a series of drastic and forced reforms which were to result in the revolution of 1928.76 In 1919, however, shortly after his seizure of power, Aman Allah won widespread support amongst the Muslim peoples of Central Asia by launching, in the Third Afghan War against the British, a combined jihad and struggle for Afghan independence. As a result of this conflict the British were forced to acknowledge Afghanistan’s right to an independent foreign policy.2’
During the decade following the outbreak of the First World War there emerged widespread support for Islamic revivalist and even ‘pan- Turanian’ sentiment in Afghanistan.”8 In 1915 a joint Turco-German mission under the leadership of the German Von Hentig travelled to Kabul where, by emphasising the shared Islamic links between Afghanistan and the Ottoman Empire (as well, no doubt, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s claim to be the defender of the Muslim World), it attempted to persuade the Amir Habib Allah to declare war on the British in India. Habib Allah, though no friend of the British, was too cautious to commit himself; accordingly the mission left Kabul in May 1916,7? and Von Hentig, together with two German colleagues, travelled to Yarkand in southern Sinkiang. Once in Yarkand, Von Hentig is reported to have intrigued with members of the city’s influential Afghan population until his arrest by Hsu Tao-yin and subsequent deportation to China proper cut short these activities.*” Despite the failure of the Von Hentig Mission, Afghan support for the Ottoman cause remained strong at popular level throughout the First World War, and with the defeat of Turkey this support seems to have been transferred to the Basmachi guerillas, under the leadership of Enver Pasha, in their struggle against the Soviets.”! Moreover, in 1919, soon after the conclusion of the short-lived Third Afghan War, Enver Pasha’s brother, Jamal, arrived in Kabul. Jamal, who may have been receiving Soviet backing, immediately established the ‘Islamic Revolutionary League’, an organisation purportedly dedi- cated to the freeing of India from British domination.
Aman Allah thus came to the throne of Afghanistan at a time of considerable religious and political ferment. He is known to have been influenced by the pan-Turanian Basmachi movement, and during the first years of his rule he is said to have toyed with the idea of creating an
Sinkiang, 1931-3 69
Islamic Confederacy which was to have included Afghanistan, Bukhara, Khiva and Khokand.?3 Certainly Aman Allah was interested in promot- ing Afghan influence in Sinkiang, where numerous Afghan merchants (particularly from Badakhshan) had long resided under British protec- tion. Following Britain’s recognition of Afghanistan’s right to an independent foreign policy by the Treaty of Peshawar in 1919, British diplomatic protection of Afghan citizens in Sinkiang was withdrawn. Aman Allah accordingly determined to establish independent diplomatic links between Kabul and Urumchi, and, following negotiations with a (Sinkiang) Chinese delegation sent to Kabul by Yang Tseng-hsin in the summer of 1922, an Afghan mission under Muhammad Sharif Khan was despatched to Yarkand, arriving in the autumn of the same year. The Chinese authorities regarded the Afghan mission as a trade delegation, but Muhammad Sharif Khan carried printed visiting cards styling himself ‘Afghan Consul-General in Sinkiang’; moreover he submitted a draft agreement to the Chinese demanding full extraterritorial rights and other privileges for Afghan subjects in Sinkiang, as well as the right to import opium freely into the province. Not surprisingly, Yang refused to agree to these demands, restricting his recognition of the Afghan mission to the level of that enjoyed by the Soviet representative at Kulja. An acrimonious dispute between Muhammad Sharif Khan and the provin- cial authorities dragged on throughout the remainder of Yang’s rule, but the Afghan mission refused to leave Sinkiang, remaining at Yarkand as a focus of discontent for the Turkic-speaking Muslims of the south. As a result of this Afghan presence something of an Afghan cult began to develop at Yarkand, and the Chinese authorities at Kashgar were disturbed to hear that some local Turkic-speaking peoples were studying Pushtu.** Certainly links were established between the Afghans and Turkic nationalist circles in southern Sinkiang during this period; both British and German diplomatic sources report that in February 1927 a deputation came from Sinkiang to Kabul where it sought the backing of the Afghan government for a projected Muslim rising against the Chinese. Aman Allah, beset by problems of his own, held out no prospect of aid for the intended insurgents, but apparently indicated his willing- ness to accept Muslim refugees from Sinkiang in Afghanistan.*> Despite this rebuff, many Turkic Muslims of southern Sinkiang continued to look to Kabul (and in some cases beyond, to Ankara) at the time of Yang Tseng-hsin’s assassination in 1928.
70 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
The outbreak of rebellion in the south and the collapse of the Chinese administration
Throughout the initial stages of the Kumul rising and the subsequent Tungan invasion, Chin Shu-jen made every effort to prevent news from the north-east of the province reaching the Muslim population of the still quiescent south.*° However, contemporary British diplomatic reports (as well as subsequent events)°’ indicate that all attempts to isolate the south ended in failure; rumours and reports from the rebellious north-east continued to flood into the oases of the Tarim Basin, inflaming anti- Chinese feeling amongst an indigenous population already indignant at the imposition of increased taxes and the forced issue of huge quantities of unbacked paper currency to pay for Chin’s war effort.38
Chin Shu-jen was doubtless aware of the tensions existing in the south of the province, but, encouraged by his apparent victory over Ma Chung- ying as well as by the delivery of 4,000 rifles and 4 million rounds of ammunition from British India,3° he determined to maintain his uncom- promising stance. This decision was to prove most unwise. The rebellion at Kumul, far from being crushed, continued to smoulder; moreover the brutalities inflicted on the Muslim inhabitants of the Kumul area by Hsiung Fa-yii following the relief of Kumul Old City in November 1931 caused widespread anger amongst the Turkic-speaking elements of the population and a constant movement of refugees westward towards Turfan. In or about May 1932, Ma Chung-ying sent one of his Lieutenants, a young Tungan called Ma Shih-ming, to take command of the Tungan forces remaining in Sinkiang.” Ma Shih-ming established his base near Turfan, probably in the mountains to the north of the town. From here he worked in close co-operation with the Turkic-speaking Muslim insurgents owing allegiance to Yulbars Khan and Khoja Niyas Hajji; he is also thought to have made contact with Ma Fu-ming, a Tungan Officer in Command of the Sinkiang provincial forces at Turfan.*!
By coincidence, it was also during May 1932 that Chin Shu-jen decided to revenge himself upon Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen, Regent of the Torgut Mongols inhabiting the T’ien Shan north of Kara Shahr, for the latter’s refusal to commit his Torgut cavalry to the struggle against Ma Chung- ying’s invading Tungans. Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen was accordingly invited to travel to Urumchi where it was understood that he would be able to attend an investigation into the assassination plotted against him.42 On 21 May, shortly after his arrival in Urumchi, Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen, together with two Torgut Officers and the young Torgut Prince (who was under age), were invited to an official banquet at Chin Shu- jen’s yamen. Once again, in the best tradition of Yang Tseng-hsin, the
Sinkiang, 1931-3 71
banquet was to become a bloodbath. According to R. P. Watts, the British Vice Consul-General at Kashgar who chanced to arrive in Urum- chi on the very day of the murders:
While drinking the usual preliminary cup of tea the regent and the two military officers were led out into a courtyard and executed. According to Chinese custom in such matters proper observance was accorded to the high rank of regent even at the moment of execution. A red carpet was spread on the ground on which he was invited to seat himself. He was then killed by being shot through the head from behind by one of the governor’s special executioners. His two companions being men of inferior rank were not given the privilege of a red carpet to sit on whilst being executed.”
The young prince was later permitted to return to Kara Shahr. Seem- ingly, Chin intended by his harsh action to remove the stubborn and powerful Torgut Regent whilst terrifying the young Torgut Prince with a display of ruthless power. In the event, Chin’s treachery and brutality merely served to alienate the Torgut Mongols — the one minority nationality in Sinkiang which might normally have been expected to side with the Han Chinese against the Turkic-speaking Muslims of the province.“ With trouble about to break out amongst the Uighurs and Tungans of Turfan, as well as amongst the nomadic Kirghiz of the Tien Shan, Chin Shu-jen could hardly have chosen a worse time to anger the Torguts.
Early in 1932, Turkic Muslim opposition to the forced collectivisation and suppression of nomadism pursued by Stalin in the Kazakh and Kirghiz regions of Soviet Central Asia, began to spill over the Sino-Soviet frontier into Sinkiang.** In March 1932, large numbers of Kirghiz were driven across the Sinkiang frontier by pursuing Soviet forces. A series of guerilla counter-attacks against the Soviets were mounted from Chinese territory, and in raids on Koksu and two other Soviet posts a total of thirty-seven Russian troops were killed.** The ‘Soviet’ Kirghiz refugees naturally received aid and support from their ‘Chinese’ Kirghiz brethren, and in June 1932 a Chinese official was killed by Kirghiz insurgents in the T’ien Shan. The Chinese were reportedly ‘much incensed’ at this development, and Ma Shao-wu despatched 300 troops from Kashgar New City and 200 troops from Kashgar Old City to the frontier area. These units were joined by a further 100 troops from Opal, twenty-five miles south-west of Kashgar, and 200 troops from the Uch Turfan area, the combined forces being placed under Brigadier Yang, Yang Tseng- hsin’s ‘favourite nephew’, reportedly one of the few competent officers in the Kashgar region.‘’ In July 1932, Yang’s force began joint operations with the Soviet forces against the Kirghiz insurgents under the leadership of ‘Id Mirab. The Chinese forces ‘who are said to have been suffering badly from want of opium’, reportedly behaved very badly towards the
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Kirghiz, a number of whom were driven to take refuge in Russian territory. In an attempt to ensure future Kirghiz submission to Chinese rule, Yang’s forces took about seventy hostages from a wide number of Kirghiz families; these unfortunate individuals were carried off from the high Tien Shan and held prisoner in the lowland oases of Khotan, Keriya and Charchan.* Chin Shu-jen and Ma Shao-wu thus succeeded, within a few months of Ma Chung-ying’s withdrawal to Kansu, in alienating both the Turkic-speaking and Mongol nomads of the T’ien Shan. Nor can the lesson of joint Sino-Soviet action against the Kirghiz and emerging Soviet military backing for Chin Shu-jen’s regime have been lost on the Turkic-speaking Muslims of southern Sinkiang;* indeed it is likely that these developments strengthened the position of the conservative Uighur nationalists at Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar. Meanwhile the influence of the continuing Muslim rebellion at Kumul spread rapidly westwards. In the autumn of 1932, some months after Ma Shih-ming’s arrival in the Turfan region, Ma Fu-ming, the Tungan Officer in Command of the provincial garrison at Turfan, went over to the rebel forces together with his troops.5° Wu Ai-chen implies that Ma Fu- ming’s decision was based on the continuing flow of Muslim refugees from Kumul to Turfan combined with reports of the mass executions being carried out in the Kumul region by Hsiung Fa-yii;*'! however, it is at least as probable that Ma Fu-ming came to an arrangement with his fellow Tungan, Ma Shih-ming, and decided to throw in his lot with the Kansu Tungan forces threatening Turfan. According to Wu Ai-chen, Ma Fu- ming’s first action was to send a telegram to Chin Shu-jen at Urumchi requesting the despatch of reinforcements; he also sent a letter to Hsiung Fa-yii at Kumul, asking him to come to Turfan as swiftly as possible. A detachment of troops was duly despatched from Urumchi to Turfan; they entered the oasis without suspecting treachery and were shot down ‘to the last man’ by Ma Fu-ming’s forces as they passed the city gates.** Some days later a detachment of just over 100 men under the command of Hsiung Fa-yii reached Turfan from the east and suffered the same fate. Hsiung was taken prisoner and later ‘tortured to death in public with every refinement of cruelty and vileness of method’.*} Following Ma Fu- ming’s defection, the Turfan Depression became the main centre of Muslim rebellion in north-eastern Sinkiang; Kumul, which had been largely destroyed by the vengeful Chin Shu-jen after Ma Chung-ying’s withdrawal to Kansu, was left to the Turkic Muslim insurgents and a handful of Tungan troops, but the greater part of the Tungan forces opposed to Chin Shu-jen, whether rebels under the ‘renegade general’ Ma Fu-ming, or invaders from Kansu under the command of Ma Chung- ying’s adjutant Ma Shih-ming, massed at Turfan in preparation for an
Sinkiang, 1931-3 73
attack across the Dawan Ch’eng on Urumchi itself, a mere 100 miles to the north-west.
The developments at Turfan, following closely on the Muslim rising at Kumul, were shortly followed by a series of apparently unco-ordinated risings amongst the Turkic-speaking Muslims of southern Sinkiang. It was doubtless apparent to the Uighurs of the Tarim Basin and the Kirghiz of the T’ien Shan that Chin Shu-jen’s grip on the province was slipping; moreover, the presence of rebel Tungan forces in Turfan at the southern end of the Dawan Ch’eng effectively isolated the oases of the south from the provincial capital at Urumchi and Chin Shu-jen’s White Russian troops — a force which might otherwise have intimidated the Uighurs and Kirghiz of Nan-lu. As it was, however, the White Russian and other provincial forces were hard-pressed by the combined Tungan forces of Ma Fu-ming and Ma Shih-ming; reports that Ma Chung-ying would shortly re-enter the fray in person were rife, and Chang P’ei-yiian, the Military Commander at Ili, had fallen out with Chin Shu-jen and could no longer be relied upon by the Urumchi authorities.54 The Turkic-speaking Muslims of southern Sinkiang were thus in a better position to rebel against Chinese rule than at any time since the rising of Ya‘qiib Beg in the early 1860s.
Events moved with startling rapidity. In the winter of 1932-3 successful risings occurred at Pichan (Ch. Shan-shan) to the east of Turfan, and at Kara Shahr some 175 miles to the south-west.5> Lack of Torgut support at Kara Shahr following the murder of Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen sealed the fate of the Chinese forces in that city, and a new Tungan leader, Ma Chan-ts’ang, emerged as Commander of the rebel forces in this area.% Ignoring the increasingly bitter struggle between Ma Shih-ming and the provincial forces on the Turfan—Urumchi road, Ma Chan-ts’ang marched westwards, capturing Bugur in early February and advancing to Kucha where he entered into an alliance of convenience with Temir, the local Uighur leader, described by Wu Ai-chen as ‘an able fellow who had been head of the mule waggon service’. Having occupied Kucha without hostilities, the joint forces of Ma Chan-ts’ang and Temir then advanced towards Aksu, taking the small town of Bai en route.5’
Ma Shao-wu, the Yunnanese Muslim Tao-yin of Kashgar and the second most powerful official in the provincial administration after Chin Shu-jen, thus found himself cut off from the provincial capital at Urumchi by two separate armies of Muslim rebels, each composed of separate but allied Tungan and Turkic factions. One such army, apparently compris- ing a small but militarily competent Tungan force under Ma Chan-ts’ang and a much larger but poorly-armed mass of Uighur peasants owing allegiance to Temir, was advancing south-westwards towards Aksu; the
74 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
other army, a loose alliance of extremely competent Tungan troops under Ma Shih-ming and Ma Fu-ming fighting alongside a predominantly peasant army of Turkic-speaking Muslims owing allegiance to Khoja Niyas Hajji and Yulbars Khan, continued to press its attack across the Dawan Ch’eng on Urumchi.
In February 1933, completing the confusion in the south (as well as the isolation of Ma Shao-wu at Kashgar), the rebellion against the Chinese spread southwards across the Tarim Basin to its southern rim. Fitzmaurice, the British Consul-General at Kashgar, blamed this development on Tungan agitators sent to the Khotan and Keriya oases from Kucha.°8 Whatever the truth of this assertion, risings against the Chinese administration broke out almost simultaneously amongst the gold-miners of Surghak, near Keriya, and of Kara Kash, near Khotan. The gold-miners of the southern oases had long resented the imposition by the provincial government of a fixed rate for the purchase of gold throughout Sinkiang; moreover conditions of employment were extremely harsh.°? As a result of the spiralling inflation which resulted from Chin Shu-jen’s unrestrained issues of unbacked paper notes, the miners of Surghak and Kara Kash were forced to exchange their gold for increasingly worthless paper currency. By the spring of 1933 their patience with the provincial authorities had clearly run out, and Uighurs under the leadership of Ismail Khan Khoja seized control of Kara Kash, killing the Amban and a number of other Han Chinese; at the same time rebellious Uighurs at Keriya seized control of the Surghak mines and threatened to take over the whole oasis. Rebel notices displayed at Kara Kash and subsequently conveyed to the British Consul-General at Kashgar indicate that rebellion broke out as a result of economic unrest in the gold-mining community. Prominent rebel demands included the lifting of government-imposed trade monopolies, the payment of a fair price for the purchase of gold and silver, and prohibition on the purchase of precious metals with paper currency. More general demands included the lowering of taxes, a prohibition on usury, an end to government tyranny, the introduction of Islamic Shari'a law, and the stationing of Muslim soldiers ‘in every city’.*'| The notices indicated a willingness to compromise with the Chinese authorities, promising that, if their demands were met, the rebels were ‘ready to live as peaceful subjects’.* Moreover it is noteworthy that, although the gold-miners of Kara Kash represented a rare example of a genuine proletariat in Republican Sinkiang, there was no indication of Soviet or socialist influence in the terminology employed by the rebel leadership; rather the tone was distinctly Islamic, adding weight to the evidence that the south Sinkiang rebellion of 1933 was primarily of a religious nationalist charac- ter, and not pro-Soviet. Thus the anonymous author of one of the
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Karakash notices addressed the Chinese authorities in the following terms:
A friend for the sake of friendship will make known a friend’s defects and save him from the consquences of his defects. You, who are supposed to rule, cannot even realise this, but try to seek out the supporter of Islam to kill him. Foolish infidels like you are not fit to rule. . . How can an infidel, who cannot distinguish between a friend and a foe, be fit to rule? You infidels think that because you have rifles, guns. . .and money, you can depend on them; but we depend upon God in whose hands are our lives. You infidels think that you will take our lives. If you do not send a reply to this notice we are ready. If we die we are martyrs. If we survive we are conquerors. We are living but long for death.”
Ma Shao-wu, the Kashgar Tao-yin, decided to move first against the Muslim insurgents threatening Aksu — no doubt reasoning that, should Ma Chan-ts’ang and Temir be defeated, the much weaker rebel forces at Kara Kash and Surghak would offer little resistance. Another reason for relieving Aksu lay in the fact that Ma Shih-ming’s forces at Turfan had severed the telegraph line between Urumchi and Kashgar; the line had been re-routed via Aksu, but, if Aksu were to fall to rebel forces, communication with the provincial capital would be possible only via the USSR, thus permitting Soviet interception of secret cables. Accord- ingly Brigadier Yang, at the head of a mixed force of 280 cavalry and 150 infantry, set out for Aksu on 6 February 1933.
Ma Shao-wu’s position was not strong. On 9 February Chin Shu-chih, the younger brother of Chin Shu-jen and Commander-in-Chief at Kash- gar New City, died after a sudden illness. His place was taken by a Chinese officer called Liu, who took command of three detachments of cavalry (estimated strength 480 men) and one detachment of artillery (estimated strength 160 men) formerly under the command of Chin Shu- chih. Ma Shao-wu retained direct command over two regiments of cavalry (estimated strength 700 men) and three detachments of infantry (estimated strength 300 men), all stationed at Kashgar Old City.’ In the middle of February reports reached Kashgar that Brigadier Yang, heavily outnumbered by the rebels under Ma Chan-ts’ang and Temir, had fallen back from Aksu and was holding a defensive line at Maral Bashi. On 23 February celebrations were held at Kashgar to mark Chin Shu-jen’s conferral of the title ‘Special Commissioner for the Suppression of Bandits’ on Ma Shao-wu: salutes were fired at the yamen and Kuomin- tang flags were flown on buildings throughout the city. Shortly after- wards ‘practically all’ the New City forces under the command of Liu were despatched to Maral Bashi to bolster the position of General Yang.® In a bid to suppress the risings at Surghak and Kara Kash before a full-scale rising could develop on the south road, 200 men under the command of a Colonel Li were despatched to Khotan; similarly a force of
76 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
unspecified strength under Colonel Chin, the former Amban of Maral Bashi, was despatched to Yarkand.” Since the movement of troops to both the Khotan and Maral Bashi fronts resulted in the serious depletion of the forces defending Kashgar, Ma Shao-wu ordered the raising of a force of Kirghiz levies and recalled Chinese troops from the frontier districts to the west of Kashgar. As a result of these policies, the Chinese garrison at Sarikol withdrew to Kashgar on 12 February, leaving the region’s Tajik inhabitants to their own devices pending the restoration of Chinese authority elsewhere in southern Sinkiang.7! At Kashgar itself soldiers were posted on the walls of both cities, orders were given for the closure of all city gates at 7 o’clock in the evening, and restrictions were placed on the movement of the local inhabitants.”
Despite these moves, the provincial forces proved quite incapable of stemming the rebel advance along both the north and south roads to Kashgar. On 25 February rebel forces entered Aksu Old City, shot all the Chinese residents and seized their property; it seems probable that this was the work of Temur’s men, as the Tungan forces of Ma Chan-ts’ang are reported to have peacefully occupied Aksu New City, where they took possession of both the arsenal and the treasury. British consular sources reporting the fall of Aksu indicate clearly for the first time that Ma Chan- ts’ang, at the head of approximately 300 well-armed Tungan troops, was allied to Ma Shih-ming at Kara Shahr, and hence to Ma Chung-ying, still recuperating from his wounds in north-western Kansu. The contents of the Aksu New City treasury and arsenal were reportedly sent to the Tungan headquarters at Kara Shahr.? Later Ma Chang-ts’ang, accompanied by Temur at the head of an estimated 4,700 ill-armed Uighur irregulars, resumed his advance on Maral Bashi and Kashgar.”
Meanwhile, on the southern road, both Keriya and Khotan passed into the hands of Uighur insurgents. In the Keriya oasis the Han Chinese officials agreed to adopt Islam and to hand over their goods, but on 3 March a group of thirty-five Chinese, including the leading officials, were executed and their heads hung up in the bazaar.”> Khotan Old City seems to have passed into rebel hands with minimal resistance on or about 28 February, whilst Khotan New City came under siege before surrendering to the insurgents on 16 March.” As a result of the rebel victories at Khotan, a reported 266 Han Chinese agreed to accept Islam, whilst both the New City treasury and arsenal, containing ‘thousands of weapons and almost a ton of gold’, fell into insurgent hands.”7 Meanwhile successful risings also occurred at Chira, under the leadership of a Uighur called ‘Abd al-Qadir, and at Shamba Bazaar, where numerous Han Chinese and two Hindu money-lenders were murdered.” Beyond Keriya the oasis town of Niya fell to rebel forces from Khotan,’”? whilst still further to the east, at the remote oases of Charchan and Charkhlik, bloodless risings
Sinkiang, 1931-3 77
are reported to have taken place after a small Tungan force owing allegiance to Ma Shih-ming advanced into the region via the little-used desert track between Kara Shahr and Lop.°°
Meanwhile, to the west of Khotan, Uighur forces under Ismail Khan Khoja blocked the main road to Yarkand at the caravanserai of Tokhta Langar and turned back all but two of a delegation of Uighur notables sent from Kashgar by Ma Shao-wu in an attempt to negotiate with the rebel leadership at Khotan. Nothing further was heard from the two Begs permitted to proceed to Khotan, and with the failure of their mission the whole south road from the eastern fringes of the Guma oasis to distant Lop Nor passed out of Chinese control. The rebel leaders at Khotan secured their position against possible counter-attack from Kashgar by destroying the roadside wells in the desert to the east of Guma, and proceeded to set up an overtly Islamic administration in the ‘liberated areas’ .8!
By mid-March 1933, Ma Shao-wu’s political control over southern Sinkiang was effectively limited to a wedge of territory roughly defined by the provincial garrisons at Kashgar, Maral Bashi and Yarkand. Morale, already low, was not improved by the refusal of the British Indian government to send troops to the assistance of the Chinese at Kashgar despite an official request made to the British Consul-General by Ma Shao-wu on 25 February.* It was all too apparent that no help would be forthcoming from Urumchi; after the cutting of telegraph links between Kashgar and Urumchi at Aksu, Ma Shao-wu received three telegrams from Chin Shu-jen via the Soviet Union. The first confirmed Ma in his position as Commander-in-Chief of the provincial forces in the south; the second related to the winding up of the estate of Chin’s late brother, Chin Shu-chih; and the third directed Chin’s Kashgar representative to remit a large sum of money to Tientsin where the Provincial Chairman main- tained a personal bank account.*
Despite the reinforcement of Yarkand by troops under the command of Colonel Chin (subsequently sent to the south-eastern front at Guma), rampant inflation continued unchecked and a sense of panic developed amonst the Chinese officials stationed in the region.*4 In response the Chinese Amban at Yarkand New City, described by Fitzmaurice as a ‘classical scholar’, ordered his counterpart and all Chinese residents of Yarkand Old City to withdraw at once within the fortified New City, the walls of which were hurriedly repaired and stocked with heavy stones to throw on the heads of beseiging rebel forces; at the same time 500 dummy figures were added to these defences ‘in order to give the impression of a well-manned rampart’.*S Meanwhile, on or about 21 March, the insurgent forces at Tokhta Langar resumed their advance on Yarkand. Colonel Chin’s forces seem to have made no attempt to resist the rebel
78 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
attack, but instead looted Guma, and fell back via little-used hill tracks by-passing Karghalik and Posgam, killing a large number of Uighur civilians en route.® The rebel forces, advancing unopposed by the main road towards Yarkand, seized Karghalik on 24 March and Posgam one day later. In both places a number of Hindu moneylenders of British Indian nationality were killed, and their property looted.8’
Meanwhile, in Yarkand New City, the provincial forces continued to strengthen their defences. Towards the end of March a group of 150 Chinese troops who had succeeded in fleeing the rebels at Khotan arrived in Yarkand; a further 300 Chinese troops were reported to have arrived in the oasis on 2 April.*® No doubt these troops were used to strengthen the New City garrison, which had been sadly depleted by fighting on the Maral Bashi front.®° During late March and early April, large numbers of Muslim insurgents had massed on the east bank of the Yarkand River; although reportedly ill-armed and untrained, the rebels crossed the river in the first week of April and advanced against Yarkand itself. On 11 April Yarkand Old City fell to a mixed force of insurgents from Khotan, Karghalik and Posgam; an estimated 100 Han Chinese who were still outside the fortified New City were caught and massacred. According to British sources, Afghan nationals from Badakhshan present in Yarkand took part in the attack on the Old City yamen.” During the afternoon of 11 April the bazaar between Yarkand Old and New Cities was set on fire and destroyed; the shops of Chinese moneylenders were destroyed and their property looted, and Yarkand New City came under siege. On 12 April rebel forces advanced beyond Yarkand to Kok Rabat, one stage on the road to Kashgar; meanwhile insurgent reinforcements from Khotan began to stream into the Yarkand Oasis.®!
By early April 1933 Ma Shao-wu’s position was almost untenable. His only hope lay in reaching an agreement with the attacking force of his fellow Hui, Ma Chan-ts’ang, or failing that in the militarily competent but politically unreliable Kirghiz levies raised in March after the withdrawal of Chinese units from the western frontier at Sarikol and elsewhere. Negotiations with Ma Chan-ts’ang were duly opened through the agency of Fitzmaurice, the British Consul-General at Kashgar; these appeared promising, but Ma Chan-ts’ang could not speak for his Uighur ally, Temir — indeed, relations between the two rebel leaders had apparently become increasingly strained.
Unfortunately for Ma Shao-wu, his harsh action against the Kirghiz rebels under ‘Id Mirab during the previous summer had made Kirghiz co- operation in the maintenance of Chinese power a vain hope.®} On § April a large force of Kirghiz levies mutinied at Sughun Karaul, a Chinese fortified post some sixty-five miles north-west of Kashgar. Almost simultaneously, peasant risings broke out amongst the Uighur population
Sinkiang, 1931-3 79
at Artush, some fifteen miles north-west of Kashgar, and at Fayzabad, approximately forty miles due east of Kashgar. Calculating correctly that the mounted and well-armed Kirghiz levies posed a more immediate threat to Kashgar than either the Khotanlik rebels, still largely occupied with the siege of Yarkand New City, or the forces of Ma Chan-ts’ang (with whom discreet negotiations were still in progress), on 13 April Ma Shao-wu ordered Brigadier Yang and the troops on the Maral Bashi front to fall back on Kashgar. Before withdrawing from Maral Bashi, Yang’s troops looted and burned the town, after which:
They set out on their way to Kashgar with a large number of carts laden with refugees or loot or both; but this proved to be the last straw. The troops made slow progress, and in the meantime the whole countryside, incensed beyond endurance, rose against the Chinese. A bridge was broken at Kara Yulgun and, while the column was halted, it was set upon by a vast horde of rebels.*
As a result of this attack, Brigadier Yang was wounded and taken prisoner by the rebels. Of his original force, estimated by Fitzmaurice at well over a thousand men, a mere sixty-five had straggled back to Kashgar by 27 April.%° Meanwhile the main force of the Kirghiz mutineers had advanced to Artush by 15 April; from here they menaced Kashgar whilst other Kirghiz bands attacked Kizil Oi and Ulugh Chat on the road to Irkeshtam and demolished the Chinese post at Bulun Kil in Sarikol.%” With the disintegration of Yang’s Maral-bashi force Kashgar was com- pletely isolated.
Ma Shao-wu, no doubt still hoping to reach an agreement with Ma Chan-ts’ang, remained in residence at the Old City yamen, but took the precaution of putting Kashgar New City, with its comparatively small Uighur population, into a state of defence. Guns were accordingly set up on the New City walls, the city gates were kept almost permanently closed, and freedom to enter or leave was restricted to residents carrying official passes.%
At this stage, with the Chinese administration supine and apparently awaiting the coup de grace, trouble began to develop between the invading Tungan forces and the various Turkic Muslim factions. It appears that Ma Chan-ts’ang, apparently worried by reports of Uighur insurgency at Khotan and beyond which clearly owed no loyalty to his own Tungan forces,” determined to reach an agreement with Ma Shao- wu (who had already indicated a willingness to compromise) by which Tungan power might be established at Kashgar, the military and economic key to all southern Sinkiang. He accordingly sent a message to the besieged Tao-yin via the British Consul-General at Kashgar in which he offered assurances that the sole objective of the Tungan forces in Sinkiang was the overthrow of the tyrannical Chin Shu-jen and the
80 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
reform of the provincial administration.!© Having thus distanced himself from the Turkic-speaking Muslims of the south, whose apparent aim was complete secession from the Chinese Republic, Ma Chan-ts’ang advanced on Kashgar in the company of Temir and his Uighur forces.!%
Meanwhile, in Kashgar Old City, Turkic-speaking nationalist elements represented by a group referred to in British diplomatic sources as the Young Kashgar Party (YKP) had become suspicious of Ma Chan- ts’ang’s motives, and were anxious to prevent collusion between the Kansu Tungans and Ma Shao-wu - a development which the Uighur nationalists feared would lead to Tungan domination of Kashgar and the replacement of a Han Chinese colonial regime by a Tungan colonial regime. Accordingly seven leading members of the YKP set out from Kashgar to persuade Ma Chan-ts’ang that Ma Shao-wu was determined to offer resistance. The YKP representatives met the Aksu leaders at Fayzabad, where consultations were apparently being held with ‘Uthman “Ali, the leader of the Kirghiz mutineers. On hearing that Ma Shao-wu was not prepared to surrender but had armed all the Chinese in the oasis, the rebel leaders agreed that ‘Uthman “Ali should attack and attempt to capture Kashgar Old City. Ma Chan-ts’ang doubtless agreed to this move in the hope that the elimination of Ma Shao-wu — who had remained at his yamen in the Old City — would open the way to a deal with some more compliant Tungan leader in the better fortified New City.'”
Following the rebel conference at Fayzabad, the attack on Kashgar Old City went ahead as planned. Early in the morning on 2 May a consider- able force of Kirghiz under the command of ‘Uthman ‘Ali approached Kashgar from the direction of Artush. After crossing the Tiimen River the mounted Kirghiz opened a swift attack on the Old City. According to eye-witness reports reaching the British Consul-General,
They took up positions opposite each of the four gates of the city and at the same time sent parties to call up the country people (Uighurs). These appeared from all sides in thousands, armed with clubs and sticks, and there was a great display of enthusiasm . . . Firing continued until about two in the afternoon, when the Kirghiz either forced an entry or were admitted by the Tushik Gate.'"
Most of the non-Chinese garrison reportedly went over to the side of the rebels, into whose hands the whole city, with the exception of the yamen, rapidly fell. At the yamen Ma Shao-wu and his bodyguard continued to hold out, and many Han Chinese caught in the Old City by the speed of the Kirghiz attack were able to take refuge in this stronghold. During the course of these events, a letter from the Kirghiz leader ‘Uthman ‘Ali was delivered to the British Consulate-General (which was situated at Chini Bagh, between the Old and New Cities), in which the rebel Commander explained the reasons for the rising, stated his objection to any continu-
Sinkiang, 1931-3 81
ation of Han Chinese or Tungan rule in southern Sinkiang, and expressed a pious hope that the British might assist the insurgent forces in their quest for independence.
Meanwhile the Kirghiz levies, having secured the Old City, prevented the Uighur peasantry from looting and ordered them to return to their villages. The reason for this unexpected display of restraint became clear on the morning of 3 May, when the Kirghiz, left in sole possession of the Old City, proceeded to sack and loot it themselves. According to the British Consul-General, about 100 Chinese were killed, as well as the Turkic wives and mistresses of any Chinese on whom the Kirghiz could lay their hands. The looted property of the unfortunate Chinese was either carried off or auctioned on the street. !%
During the afternoon of 3 May about 300 Uighurs under the command of Temur arrived at Kashgar and were admitted to the Old City ‘without question’ by the Kirghiz; on the same afternoon the advance guard of Ma Chan-ts’ang’s Tungan forces also arrived, but, instead of joining the victorious Kirghiz and Uighurs in Kashgar Old City, they marched to the walls of Kashgar New City, some two-and-a-half miles distant, and after brief negotiations were admitted by the Chinese defenders. No doubt, as Fitzmaurice speculated, the latter thought it ‘better to surrender to the Tungans than to be slaughtered by the Kirghiz’.'% With the fall of Kashgar New City on 3 May 1933, Han Chinese power in southern Sinkiang — except at the beseiged garrison of Yarkand New City, which continued briefly to hold out — was effectively brought to an end.!°
The struggle between the Turkic- and Chinese-speaking Muslims at Kashgar and Yarkand
On 7 May, four days after the fall of Kashgar New City, Ma Chan-ts’ang and the main body of Tungan troops from Aksu arrived at Kashgar. The Tungan Commander soon learned that he had been misled by the Young Kashgar Party at Artush, and that Temtr, who had come under the influence of this Turkic nationalist organisation,'"’ was no longer a reliable ally. During the period between the initial capture of Kashgar Old City and the arrival of Ma Chan-ts’ang at Kashgar, the Kirghiz, no doubt involved in negotiations with Temar over the distribution of the spoils of their victory, had made no serious attempt to storm the Old City yamen where Ma Shao-wu was still holding out. Ma Chan-ts’ang, whose troops retained undisputed control of Kashgar New City, realised that the influential (and still legitimate) Tao-yin would make an invaluable ally against the Turkic nationalists who controlled Kashgar Old City and much of the rest of southern Sinkiang. He accordingly entered the Old City yamen shortly after his arrival and began negotiations with Ma Shao-
82 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
wu. The latter, who through Fitzmaurice had already indicated a willing- ness to compromise, readily entered into an agreement with the Tungan Commander. As a result of this, on 8 May, Ma Chan-ts’ang had notices posted announcing that the Tao-yin and all other Ambans of the former regime should retain their official posts. This move ‘caused a sensation’ amongst the Turkic Muslims, who did not share Ma Chan-ts’ang’s professions of loyalty to Nanking. The Kirghiz accordingly closed the Old City gates and manned the walls in preparation for a trial of strength with the Tungan forces. At this point the diplomatically astute Ma Shao-wu temporarily defused the situation by resigning as Tao-yin and handing over his seals of office to Ma Chan-ts’ang.! The latter did not assume the office of Tao-yin, but retained control of the Old City yamen as well as the New City, and kept Ma Shao-wu under his protection as a possible ally in his continuing struggle with the Turkic-speaking nationalists.
Ma Chan-ts’ang’s strategy seems to have been to drive a wedge between ‘Uthman ‘Ali’s Kirghiz and Temur’s Uighurs before a unified Turkic alliance, possibly including the Khotan forces, might be formed. He was also concerned to limit the influence of the Turkic nationalist Young Kashgar Party, which seems to have been as anti-Tungan as it was anti-Chinese.!!° On 10 May he ordered the arrest of the most prominent Y KP activist, “Abd al-Rahim Bay Bachcha, who was released only after agreeing to supply the Tungan forces with 1,000 uniforms at his own expense.!!! Following this move against the YKP, Ma Chan-ts’ang attempted to neutralise the Uighur forces by seizing Temir, who had been proclaimed Commander-in-Chief of the combined Muslim armies at Kashgar on 7 May.'!2 Temtr was accordingly invited to a meeting at the Old City yamen on the evening of 17 May and placed under arrest shortly after his arrival. Had Ma Chan-ts’ang been able to transfer the captive Uighur Commander to the Tungan stronghold of Kashgar New City, his plan might have worked. As it was, he had insufficient troops to defend both New and Old Cities, and when he attempted to seize control of the latter by locking out Temir’s leaderless Uighur forces and ‘Uthman ‘Ali’s Kirghiz, the Turkic-speaking Muslims (led by the Kirghiz, who made excellent irregular fighters) scaled the city walls and forced Temar’s release.!!3
With the failure of his attempt to hold Temtr, Ma Chan-ts’ang had revealed his purpose to the Turkic Muslims and had largely confirmed the Y KP in their claims that he intended to set up a Tungan administration at Kashgar. On 18 May the incensed Kirghiz (who, as a result of Tungan participation in the suppression of the ‘Id Mirab rebellion of 1932, had always been more anti-Tungan than Temir’s Uighur forces from Aksu) mounted a surprise attack on the Old City. They avoided the Old City yamen where Ma Chan-ts’ang and Ma Shao-wu remained under the
Sinkiang, 1931-3 83
protection of a powerful Tungan force armed with artillery and machine- guns,!!4 but during the course of the day sought out and murdered any Tungan (or surviving Chinese) residents of the Old City on whom they could lay their hands. Heavy firing continued until the evening, and Fitzmaurice recorded that casualties were probably heavier than they had been on 2 May when the Kirghiz had originally seized the Old City from Ma Shao-wu.!5
As a result of the Kirghiz attack, Ma Chan-ts’ang agreed to hand over control of Kashgar affairs to Temir and ‘Uthman “Ali. On 19 May a very inconclusive truce was agreed by which Temir was confirmed as Com- mander-in-Chief with headquarters at Kashgar Old City, and ‘Uthman “Ali was given the rank of General in command of the Kirghiz forces. Ma Chan-ts’ang was given no official position, but retained control of the Tungan forces and on 22 May, accompanied by his fully armed troops from the Old City yamen, withdrew to the Tungan stronghold at Kashgar New City. Ma Chan-ts’ang’s Tungan Chief-of-Staff, Su Chin-shou, and Yunus Beg, an Uighur of Kumul, were appointed joint Tao-yin of Kashgar, whilst Ma Shao-wu was permitted to leave the Old City yamen and to take up residence at a nearby country house under the formal protection of Temuir and Ma Chan-ts’ang.!!6
Following the truce of 19 May, Kashgar subsided into an uneasy peace, with the Tungans in firm control of the New City (including its treasury and important arsenal) and the Turkic-speaking Muslims controlling the Old City and Tao-yin’s yamen. Fitzmaurice records that ‘Ma Chan- ts'ang, Temir and ‘Uthman ‘Ali all settled down to the congenial business of accumulating wealth and wives’ ,!!7 whilst the Y K P continued its intrigues against the Tungans, organised a ‘parliament’ of forty members (subsequently greatly expanded), and sent two delegates to Khoja Niyas Hajji, the leader of the Uighur rebels at Kumul.'!® Temiar seems to have passed completely under YKP influence, as a result of which he began to issue passports styling himself ‘Temir Shah’; these documents employed only the Islamic Hijri date, the Chinese Republican date having been dropped in a clear repudiation of Nanking’s authority.!!9
Meanwhile, on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin in an area untroubled by the invading Tungans and free from the complication of Kirghiz involvement, Khotan had emerged as a centre of exclusively Uighur influence. Isma‘il Khan Khoja, the leader of the rebellious gold- miners at Kara Kash, was soon eclipsed by the Uighur nationalist Committee for National Revolution (CNR) which had been founded in Khotan at the beginning of 1932 by Muhammad Amin Bughra, a Muslim scholar in his mid-thirties,'° together with his two younger brothers, ‘Abdullah and Nar Ahmad, and a number of similarly minded ‘friends
84 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
and students’.'2! At the beginning of 1933 this group was joined by ‘Abd al-Baqi Sabit Damullah, a school teacher and former qadi (judge) from Kulja who had travelled extensively in the Soviet Union, Turkey, Egypt and India.'2 According to Muhammad Amin Bughra, Sabit Damullah ‘brought political information and experience’ to the Khotanlik Commit- tee for National Revolution, a group which at this time numbered slightly in excess of 300 members, and which possessed about fifty antiquated rifles.!23 The political philosophy of the CNR, like that of the YKP, was uncompromisingly ‘Turkic nationalist’; however, it stood further to the right, being pronouncedly anti-communist and anti-Christian as well as anti-Tungan and anti-Han Chinese. The CNR leadership apparently favoured the establishment of an Islamic theocracy in Sinkiang, probably with Muhammad Amin Bughra as head of state. Links had been established between the Khotanlik Muslim revolutionaries and Khoja Niyas Hajji of Kumul as a result of the latter’s visit to southern Sinkiang in 1927; it seems improbable, however, that there existed any coherent co-ordination between the Kumul and Khotan rebellions of 1932 and 1933.24
According to Hayit, Muhammad Amin Bughra was working in Khotan as a mudarris, or teacher at Qur’anic college, at the time of the Kara Kash and Surghak risings in Februrary 1933. On 20 February the CNR leadership met somewhere in the Khotan Oasis — probably in the Old City — and formed a provisional government with Muhammad Niyas A‘lam (the qadi of Kara Kash), as President, Sabit Damullah as Prime Minister, and Muhammad Amin Bughra as Commander of the Armed Forces. !*5 The elder Bughra, who appears to have been the most powerful member of the provisional administration, took the title ‘Amir al-Islam’ , whilst his younger brothers styled themselves ‘Amir ‘Abdullah Khan’ and ‘Amir Nutr Ahmad Jan’ respectively.'26 As a result of these somewhat grandiose titles, the Khotan Islamic Government (as the CNR provisional administration was subsequently renamed)!’ is more generally referred to in contemporaneous sources as the ‘Government of the Khotan Amirs’.
The religious intolerance of the Khotan Amirs was revealed in their capture of Khotan New City on 16 March, as a result of which an estimated 266 Chinese were forcibly converted to Islam.!25 Following this event, numerous Hindu moneylenders were murdered and the Swedish missionaries resident at Khotan were ordered to leave southern Sinkiang.'2? Meanwhile, Islamic Shari‘a law was implemented in the southern oases under CNR control, with the strict application of hadd criminal legislation.'3° At some time in March or April the conservative nature of the Amirs’ regime was reinforced by the arrival at Khotan of Janib Beg, a well-known Basmachi leader who, after fleeing from Soviet
Sinkiang, 1931-3 85
a SU gai = Pa a tect Mal 7
an
13. The Khotan Amirs: A group of Khotanlik ‘ulama, c. 1933. The Amir Muhammad Amin Bughra is in the foreground wearing a black chapan
14. The Khotan Amirs: The Amir 15. The Khotan Amirs: The Amir Nir ‘Abdullah Bughra, killed at Yarkand in Ahmadjan Bughra killed at Yangi-Hissar April, 1934 in April 1934
86 Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia
haem
16. Main street of Khotan, 1932, plaited awnings provide shade from the fierce rays of the sun
17. Yarkand: the Kashgar Gate
18. Military parade by Khotanlik forces, 1932. The Amir
mad Amin Bughra is in the foreground
Sinkiang, 1931-3 87
territory to Kashgar, had been banished to the Keriya Oasis by Ma Shao- wu in 1931.3! Janib Beg made common cause with the Amirs and, probably in recognition of his military experience during the Basmachi struggle, was placed in charge of a large body of the Khotanlik rebel forces.
Following the consolidation of their hold on the Khotan Oasis, the Amirs began to extend their influence both eastwards, towards Lop Nor, and westwards, towards Kashgar. In response to an appeal from the Uighurs of Charchan who had risen against their Tungan ‘liberators’,!*? a force of 100 Khotanliks was despatched to that oasis to guard against the Kara Shahr Tungans (who appear to have remained in control of the Charkhlik Oasis throughout the period from 1933 to 1937).!%? Mean- while, on the western front, Khotanlik forces had seized Guma, Karghalik, Posgam and Yarkand Old City by 11 April, and an estimated 2,000 Han Chinese and Tungans were beseiged in Yarkand New City.!
On 24 April the Amir ‘Abdullah Khan, styling himself Wali al-hukima of the Khotan Islamic Government (a post approximating to Vice- Regent), arrived in the Yarkand Oasis to prosecute the siege of the New City.'35 According to Fitzmaurice