Background
Nothing is known about his background.
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Ma Yii-huai
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated locally.
Career
As war with Japan approached, a number of patriotic "national salvation organizations emerged throughout China, especially in the north where the Japanese were the most aggressive. By 1938 Ma was the head of the Hui People’s Anti-Japanese Salvation Association ”for both the Central Hopeh District and for the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Che-Chi) Border Region, the latter being a Communist-inspired government established in January 1938. Ma held two military posts in these same areas during the war with Japan; he was political commissar of the “Hui People’s Detachment” and deputy political commissar of the Ninth Military Sub-district of the Central Hopeh Military District. Though Ma may not have come into contact with the highly important Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Military Region commander Nieh Jung-chen, it is likely that he had close contacts with Lii Cheng-ts'ao, commander of the Central Hopeh Military District from 1938 to 1943 and later a Party Central Committee member. The District Military Headquarters was located in a village near Ma's native Jen-ch'iu, an area where the Communists had been especially active soon after the war with Japan began. His early career suggests that he was among the first of the young men of central Hopeh to be enlisted in the Communist cause.
The record fades out on Ma during the postwar years, but he probably remained in North China as a guerrilla fighter. He was in Peking in 1949 after its capture and was to remain there for nine years until his transfer to Ninghsia in 1958. Ma's assignment in the early years of the regime was to represent the Hui people in the central government and in the Peking city government. His first specific assignment was as chairman of the Hui People’s Work Committee, established under the Peking city government in 1949, presumably to mobilize the Huis (a minority of significant size in Peking) to participate in the new government. In the fall of 1949, Ma received posts under both the national and city governments. In the former he was named as a member of the Nationalities Affairs Commission, and within the municipal government he was appointed as deputy director of the Civil Affairs Bureau, in 1954 he was promoted to be the director. He was elected in February 1951 as a member of the Peking Municipal Peopled Government and throughout the early and mid-1950's was rather active in the work of the city government. To cite but one of several examples: he served as a member of the Peking Election Committee, formed in May 1953 in preparation for the elections to the NPC in 1954. His principal activity, however, centered on the question of minority groups. He was known to have been the president of the “Hui People’s Institute” in Peking in the early 1950’s, but the work of this institute is not clear. In 1953 the Communists established two nationwide organizations involving Muslim groups. The first was the China Islamic Association, formed in May 1953. Ma, who had served from July 1952 as the secretary-general of the preparatory committee, was selected as a vice-president, a position he still retains under Burhan. The other organization was the China Association for the Promotion of Hui People’s Culture, also formed in May 1953 under Chairman Liu Ko-p'ing, China's leading Hui and later a Party Central Committee member. Ma was named as a member of this association; for reasons that are not clear this organization was disbanded in October 1958, just a few days after the formation of the Ning- hsia-Hui Autonomous Region (see below).
As already noted, Ma took part in the preparations for the elections to the NPC. When these were held in 1954 he was elected as a Peking deputy to the First NPC (1954-1959). From 1949 he had served on the Nationalities Affairs Commission, an organ of the executive branch of government; now, at the first session of the NPC in September 1954, he was transferred to the Nationalities Committee, subordinate to the NPC, the legislative branch. He was re-elected to this committee in April 1959 and January 1965 during the initial sessions of the Second and Third NPC’s, in which he served as a deputy from Ninghsia.
In April 1955, Ma was named as president of the Institute of Islamic Theology in Peking. He spoke at the inauguration of the institute in November of that year and retained the post until about 1958 (the date of his transfer to Ninghsia). It was also at this time in the mid-1950,s that the Chinese Communists were slowly emerging from the international isolation imposed on them by the Korean War. This emergence was most effectively dramatized by the Bandung Conference in Indonesia where the Chinese delegation made a strong and generally favorable impression. Chief Chinese delegate Chou En-lai invited Indonesian President Sukarno, at the close of the conference, to visit China. Sukarno accepted, and on June 1, 1955, at the time of his visit, the Chinese established the China-Indonesia Friendship Association, naming Ma as one of the vice-chairmen, another post he still retains. One month later, in July 1955, he was also named to the Board of Directors of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, one of the most important of the mass organizations. His appointment was probably due to his Hui nationality, because at this point the Communists were beginning to make their first moves to gain influence in the Islamic world. On the very day of his selection to this organization (July 19, 1955), Ma left for his first trip abroad significantly, to the heart of the Islamic world: Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. Although ostensibly subordinate to Ta P’u-sheng, the delegation leader and a much respected Moslem, Ma’s stature within the CCP suggests that he may have been the actual leader of the group. Within the next few years, he made several more important trips abroad for the PRC. In February 1956 he set out as a deputy leader under Burhan on one of the longest journeys abroad made by any Chinese delegation. Described as a culture and art delegation, the group spent lengthy periods in Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria, and Lebanon between February and June 1956. (In July Ma left for home, taking most of the delegation with him, but Burhan continued his visit in the region for a few more weeks.) It is noteworthy that when this journey began not a single nation in the Middle East or Africa recognized Peking and, indeed, few Chinese Communists had even visited the area.
Politics
A new chapter in Ma’s career began in 1958 with the inauguration of the Ninghsia-Hui Autonomous Region (NHAR). The province of Ninghsia had been abolished by the Communists in 1954, but then the province was re-created in an apparent bid to mollify Hui opinion. Ma was named to a vice-chairmanship of the NHAR Preparatory Committee in June 1958, and when the region was formally inaugurated that October he was named as a vice-chairman under Liu Ko-p'ing (and, after 1960, Yang Ching-jen). Not long after, in February 1959, Ma was identified as a secretary of the NHAR Party Committee, serving under First Secretary Wang Feng until 1961 when Yang Ching-jen replaced Wang. After Wang Feng’s transfer in 196i, Ma can be regarded as the second-ranking official in Ninghsia, being outranked only by Yang Ching-jen, a fellow Hui.
Since Ma's transfer to Ninghsia in 1958 he has spent most of his time there, although he usually goes to the capital for NPC meetings and, as described, has led several rather important delegations abroad. His activities in Ninghsia appear to be those normally associated with a person of his rank; thus he speaks at conferences of “advanced” workers, makes periodic visits to military units posted in Ninghsia, and gives reports before organs of the Ninghsia government. The only national-level position he has received since going to Ninghsia in 1958 (apart from re-election to the NPC) occurred in April 1960 when he was named to the Council of the newly formed China-Africa People’s Friendship Association, an appointment that may have been meant to take advantage of contacts he probably made on his 1956 trip to Africa. Ma has described the life of the Hui people in an article for the April 1964 issue of the English-language monthly China Reconstructs.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party