Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China By Jonathan N. Lipman
… in the villages, Deng Zeng and his commanders were not able to prevent non-Muslims from being ambushed and slaughtered by Muslims in broad daylight, within sight of Xining’s walls. Nonetheless, as the weather improved, so did conditions for infantry and cavalry assaults, supported by the few Qing artillery pieces. Finally, in March, the Duoba Muslims, their numbers greatly reduced through unsuccessful sorties and depleted food supplies, surrendered unconditionally. Their leaders lost their heads, and the common soldiers dispersed to their ruined, empty villages. Thousands of Muslims tried to follow the tracks of Bai Yanhu west toward a Muslim refuge. Unlike Bai’s veterans in the 1870s, they never reached Russian territory but were hunted down by pursuing armies, frozen by the late winter of the north Tibetan marches, and starved by the barren wasteland. Finally captured and relocated near Korla, in Xinjiang, fewer than two thousand survived.
Slaughters
The Hezhou city wall was strong and easy to defend, but the suburbs, without walls, often fell victim to manmade disaster. If contemporary reports are to be believed, each victory for Muslim or non-Muslim was accompanied by slaughter among the non-Muslim, Muslim, Tibetan, and other civilians, for communal war never excludes noncombatants from its casualties.+++(4)+++ Despite commercial symbiosis and the intercommunity cooperation that it entailed, Hezhou had a sinister reputation as a center for heterodox Muslim movements and as a headquarters for Muslim bandits. The Hezhou Muslims served Gansu mothers as a bogeyman for disobedient children: “When I was a baby, whenever I wouldn’t stop crying, my mother would say to me sternly, ‘Don’t cry any more! If the Hezhou Muslims hear you, they’ll come and kill you!’“89 By the late nineteenth century, as we have seen above, those Gansu mothers could draw on a century of violent memories to terrify their children and verify their fear of the Muslims.
Lessons Learned
The violence between some Muslims and Qing loyalists and allies of various cultures had devastated a fourth of a province, killed tens of thousands, and sustained the worst fears of all. The Qing officials retained their conviction that religious disputes among the Muslims, particularly those caused by the New Teaching (whatever that may have been) and the menhuan, led to conflagration and bloodshed. 137 The local non-Muslim Chinese verified their tradition, that their Muslim neighbors were bloodthirsty fanatics.+++(4)+++ The Muslims confirmed that they were to be discriminated against, excluded, even slaughtered, because they were Muslims, and thus different. The total Qing military victory did not bring lasting peace, for even brutal pacification could not eliminate communal mistrust and hatred. As long as the Muslims and non- Muslims remained neighbors and state authority could not maintain local order, the problems would continue to exist.
The events of 1895 also illustrated again the disunity of the Gansu Muslims, their vulnerability to piecemeal attack. Official and local fears still emphasized the ferocious loyalty Muslims supposedly felt for one another, but the Muslims could not actually unify their communities in …