The Cult of Red Martyrs at the Zanbuhu Mosque

Tommaso Previato
Academia Sinica, Institute of History and Philology 

There is a tendency in scholarly circles to look at Maoist China (1949–76) as an atheist space where religion barely survived the violence of ‘anti-superstition’ (Ch. pochu mixin) campaigns. Scholars have been accustomed to thinking of Maoism as an iconoclastic movement. They offered countless examples of radical attacks against temples and their property, which was seized to make room for peasant associations. Iconoclastic attacks did not spare Chinese mosques, which were also targeted, especially during the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The Chinese state no doubt managed religious affairs in ways comparable only to Stalin-era (1927–53) Soviet Russia, but what about Communist-controlled China before the advent of Maoism (1927–49) or the revival of religion made possible by post-Maoist market reforms (early-1980s to mid-2010s)?

This report challenges the conventionally defined ‘atheist’ orientation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by drawing on the history of an ill-fated regiment of Red Army women who, at the close of the Long March (1934–36), were deported to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and made to build a mosque by a local Muslim warlord. In recent years, the mosque has become a tourist destination in the context of state-led ‘red pilgrimage’ or ‘red tourism’ (hongse lüyou) initiatives, attracting both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and thereby attesting to a particular blend between patriotism and religious observance.

1. Background of the Deportation and Encounter of Red Army Women with Islam

In October 1936, a break-away section of the Chinese Red Army made up of regular troops from Zhang Guotao’s (1897–1979) Fourth Front Army (Ch. Si fangmian jun) poured into central Gansu, but was intercepted by the cavalry forces of Muslim general and acting governor of Qinghai Ma Bufang (1902–75). The Western Route Army (Xilujun, henceforth WRA), as this section is called, was deployed there to receive aid from Russian agents in Xinjiang and open up a communication line with the Kremlin. As Stalin’s promised aid for a massive military expansion west of the Yellow River was never delivered, the WRA found itself heavily outnumbered and almost destroyed by Ma’s cavalrymen. Some ran away but the only refuge they could get was the merciless Gobi Desert, where they died without being given adequate instructions, reinforcements, food supplies and winter clothes.[i] In April 1937 out of the 21,800 soldiers who managed to cross the river, about 7000 were deported to Qinghai. Only a few hundred under the lead of Li Xiannian (1909–92)entered Xinjiang.[ii]

Women soldiers and non-combat auxiliary staff were either tortured, or stoned and thrown into ditches, sometimes still alive, or distributed to Ma Bufang’s men as concubines or second wives, thereby converting to Islam. Estimates show that among the women who lived on and could not return to Yan’an, where the CCP had set up its headquarters, 231 put roots down in Gansu and 136 in Qinghai.[iii] Those who returned to Yan’an or did escape to Lanzhou, arrived there only to discover that they had been stripped of the party membership and that the Red Army’s headquarters had been transferred directly under Mao Zedong (1893–1976).

Of the 7000 WRA’s senior officers and ordinary soldiers deported to Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, 400 were women and no less than 300 surrendered to Ma Bufang. Attached to the army proper, there were also ‘red drama’ (Ch. hongse xiju) actresses, paramedics and other auxiliary personnel. The majority were younger than 25, and some even gave birth during the march, while others carried children along with them. The life tragedies of these women and their children have little place in Western scholarship. Below is a tentative reconstruction of a few women profiles based on party materials and research data collected during a short field trip to the mosque in the spring of 2016.

2. Indentured Labourers Building the “Red Mosque” Neighbourhood

The most high-ranking profile is that of Wang Quanyuan (1913–2009), commander of an all-female regiment known as the ‘Women’s Independent Division’ (Funü dulishi). She led over 1300 fighters, 800 of whom died in battle. They were all caught by Ma Bufang’s elder brother, Ma Buqing (1901–77), around Zhangye. In November 1937, Wang was given in marriage to Ma Jinchang (n.d.), the Head of Ma Buqing’s Corps of Engineers (Gongbing ying),[iv] with whom she lived in slavery-like conditions for almost two years until she was given a safe passage to Lanzhou. She remarried a Kuomintang (KMT) track driver at the age of 26. Several other women of her regiment settled down in the same city and through (re)marriage, avoided starvation and prostitution.[v]

2.1. The Mosque

A sizeable number of women who belonged to Wang Quanyuan’s regiment and whose names have remained mostly unknown were absorbed into the Corps of Engineers. In the summer of 1937, they were dispatched to Chahandusi (Chahanduz) — an administrative district on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in the Salar Autonomous County of Xunhua — to work as road maintenance or agricultural labourers in a few hamlets on the southern shores of the Yellow River. In the hamlet of Zanbuhu, not too far from where now lies the Gongboxia hydroelectric plant, they worked on the construction of a mosque (Fig. 1 and 2), which in 1987, in the middle of a period of political reform and mild liberalisation of the religious sphere, was renamed Hongguang qingzhensi (lit. ‘Red Bright Mosque’).

Despite constant surveillance by their capturers, the women were able to conceal the hammer, sickle, five-pointed stars and other iconic symbols of the Red Army in the roof brick tiles used for the mosque’s main prayer hall (Fig. 3). In 1998, the whole complex which consists of an area of about 4 mu (2700 square meters) was added to the provincial list of protected cultural heritage, and in 2006 to the national list of ‘patriotic education’ sites (Ch. aiguo zhuyi jidi).[vi] Two stone stelae were raised in the mosque’s courtyard as proof of such recognition (Fig. 4 and 5). To strengthen the link between religious material culture and Chinese-style patriotism, another five-pointed star was placed next to the Islamic crescent moon on top of the roof. Further infusing the site with a sense of ‘sacredness’ is the martyrs’ monument at the entrance. The monument occupies a perimeter of about 40 square metres, at the centre of which lies a quadrangular column about 10 meters high. One side of the column bears the inscriptions in capital letters ‘long live the revolutionary martyrs’.[vii] In the courtyard, there is also a small exhibition hall collecting the WRA’s biographies and pictures, most of which feature old Sichuanese women wearing a black hijab (Fig. 6 and 7). As shown in the biographical plaques accompanying the pictures, the only two left survivors who at the time of my visit were almost 90 years old must have already passed away.

Moreover, one of the walls carries a calligraphy by Li Xiannian, with a CCP’s flag adorning it. Composed in March 1983, just a few months before Li took oath of office as the President of the People’s Republic of China, the text reads: ‘the WRA martyrs will always live in our heart’ (Fig. 8). Among the other revolutionary heroes celebrated in the hall is the 9^th Army Commander, Sun Yuqing (1909–37), who in May 1937 was stabbed to death and his severed head is said to have been stored as a war trophy in Xining at the Ma Bufang’s New 2^nd Army Division.[viii] The story goes that before deportation, Sun had a love affair and an illegitimate child with the then 19 year old Chen Shu’e (d. 2005), an actress who like many committed women of her age had joined the Red Army’s ‘New Drama Troupe’ (Ch. Xin jutuan) and played a part in boosting team morale, fomenting hatred toward class enemies and mobilizing the peasant masses as the army marched westward. In Xining, the troupe was reformed and numbered a total of 20 women, all of whom kept performing for Ma Bufang and other KMT-backed Muslim warlords,[ix] and all things considered, were treated much better than the women soldiers described above. Chen was still pregnant when she fell prisoner. Ma Bufang’s Commander-in-Chief of Infantry and Cavalry Forces, Ma Yuanhai (1888–1951), took her as his second wife but eventually abandoned her. In 1951, her 13 year old son was sent to fight in the Korean War with the People’s Liberation Army.[x]

2.2. The Residential Quarter

On the opposite side of the road that leads to the mosque is a cluster of traditional residential houses, similar to Beijing’s siheyuan and known as zhuangkuo in the local parlance. These were erected by unnamed WRA soldiers from Wang Quanyuan’s regiment to accommodate Ma Bufang’s tenant farmers and have so far been inhabited by Salar families. There is also an elementary school called hongguang xiaoxue which was established in 1939 and is purported to be the only school ever established by the Red Army in the whole of Qinghai.[xi] This unique mix of Communist ideology, patriotic martyrology and Muslim culture is best encapsulated in the words of one of the mosque’s former custodians. In 2005, when interviewed by an investigation team of the Qinghai’s Provincial Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology, he stated:

The [Zanbuhu] villagers who endured [the devastation of those years] are indebted to the Red Army as much as the dead are. Our mosque and houses have all been built by the Red Army, the land on which we grow our crops was reclaimed by the Red Army, and the walls that circle the mazār [Ar. ‘shrine’] before the mosque have been raised by the Red Army as well.[xii]

3. Conclusion

Rather than the shrinking or desecration of the space for religious expressions, the case of the Zanbuhu mosque signals a consistent attempt on the part of Chinese state authorities to appropriate, redefine and even defend such expressions. The dramatic life stories of WRA women’s forced conversion to Islam played a crucial part in making this possible. They are the medium through which ‘religious’ tradition is reformulated, and what allowed the cult of red martyrs to converge with Islamic practice. It is by capitalizing on these stories that the mosque’s traditional landscape has been transformed to promote tourism, ideological guidance and ethnic unity (Ch. minzu tuanjie) among the Muslim and Han-Chinese masses. It is thanks to these stories that, in the party’s official narrative, the women who built the mosque, sang and danced for the local warlords, and died in the process or years afterwards as Muslim converts, are now sanctified as martyrs of the Communist revolution and celebrated as posthumous incarnation of the spirit of Islamic patriotism.

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Notes

[i] William Whitson, The Chinese High Command: A History of Communist Military Politics, 1927–71 (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 150–53.

[ii] Zhongguo Gongnong Hongjun Di Si Fangmian Jun Zhanshi Bianji Weiyuanhui, Zhongguo Gongnong Hongjun Di Si Fangmian Jun Zhanshi Ziliao Xuanbian (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe, 1992), vol. 3, pp. 972–73, 996; Feng Yaguang, Xilujun: Shengsi Dang’an (Xi’an: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 2009), vol. 2, p. 47.

[iii] Zhang Ying, and Deng Lijiang, ‘Xunzhao Na zhi Xiaoshi de Hongjun’, Zhongguo Gongchandang Xinwen, 24 Nov. 2006, on-line at http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64093/67507/5083600.html (last accessed 17 Nov. 2022).

[iv] Sue Wiles, ‘Wang Quanyuan’, in Lily X. H. Lee & A. D. Stefanowska, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century, 1912–2000 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe Inc.), vol. 2, 2003, p. 536.

[v] Lily X. H. Lee & Sue Wiles, Women of the Long March (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), pp. 137–38, 141.

[vi] Cf. Fan Qianfeng, Ma Bufang Chuan (Xining: Qinghai renmin chubanshe), 2014, p. 92.

[vii] Author’s field notes, May 6, 2016.

[viii] Zhang Junqi, ‘Saluo zai Salazu zhi Xiang de Hong Wu Xing’, in Ma Chengjun & Ma Wei, eds., Minzu Xiaodao: Xin Shiji Salazu Yanjiu (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2010), p. 336; Zhonggong Jiuquan Diwei Dangshi Ziliao Zhengji Yanjiu Weiyuanhui Bangongshi, ‘Hong Jiu Jun Junzhang Sun Yuqing Jiangjun Mengnan Jingguo’, in Hao Chengming & Zhu Yongguang, eds., Zhongguo Gongnong Hongjun Xilujun: Diaocha Yanjiu Juan (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2009), vol. 2, p. 203.

[ix] Brian J. DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 25–27, 37–38, 42–45.

[x] Ibid. pp. 28–30.

[xi] Author’s field notes, May 6, 2016.

[xii] Zhang, ‘Saluo zai Salazu zhi Xiang’, pp. 337–38.

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