History
The Ma clique traces its origins to the officers of Qing dynasty General Dong Fuxiang. General Ma Anliang was the de facto leader of the Muslims of northwest China.
The Three (or Five) Ma took control of the region during the Warlord Era, siding first with the Guominjun and then the Kuomintang; they fought against the Red Army during the Long March and the Japanese during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
The Ma Clique controlled vast amounts of land in the northwest, included Xining and Hezhou.
The Qing dynasty had granted Ma Bufang's family a yellow standard which had his family name "Ma" on it. Ma Bufang continued to use this standard in battle.
Ma Bufang recruited many Salar officers from Xunhua County into his army like Han Yimu and General Han Youwen.
During one campaign againast the Communists in the Civil War, in Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia, Muslim soldiers numbered 31,000.
During the final stages of the Chinese Civil War, the Ma fought for the Kuomintang side in defiance until the communists wiped out his cavalry and liberated Gansu in August 1949, just months before the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Upon the arrival of communist forces, Ma Hongbin had little choice of winning and went to communists side. He was appointed vice-chairman (later restyled vice-governor) of Gansu province. He later died in Lanzhou in 1960.
Ma Hongkui fled with the Kuomintang to Taiwan. He was indited by Nationalist Chinese Control Yuan as a scapegoat. He later migrated to the ], where he died on January 14, 1970.
Ma Bufang with his son Ma Jiyuan fled by an airplane from Qinghai to Chongqing, then Hong Kong. In October 1949, Chiang Kai-shek urged him to return to the Northwest to resist PLA, but he chose to migrate to Saudi Arabia with more than 200 relatives and subordinates, in the name of hajj. He later worked as first ambassador to Saudi Arabia for Rep. of China.
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