[8] Ma Zhongying seized Gansu's capital (Lanzhou) from the Guominjun in April 1929 but was eventually defeated and expelled by them.

While most local Hui did not participate in the revolt, they did provide supplies and food to his invading army consisting of many conscripted Salars.

Zhao Xiping (赵席聘), commander of the 17th division of the National People’s Army, under Feng Yuxiang (an ally of the Hezhou government), retaliated by burning the city, including its twelve mosques.

This made the garrison commander – an 81 year old man who had also placed his trust in a sorcerer – unwilling to surrender despite the urging of his staff and the miserable situation in the besieged city.

[20] Ma's military actions were carried out by Hui officers and included atrocities toward Han and Uyghur civilians in Xinjiang during the fighting.

Also, local Han and Uyghur were conscripted in his forces and sent to the front lines where they were subjected to heavy enemy cannon fire.

He carried Mauser pistols and liked to quote as his models Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hindenburg and Zuo Zongtang.

Timur the Lame had dominated the whole of Western Asia, and at the time of his death he had just begun a campaign against the Emperor of China, Yung Lo.

His successor in our time, Ma Chung-yin, was first to conquer the whole of Sinkiang and Kansu, and then unite with his kingdom the whole of Russian Turkestan as far as the Caspian Sea and the frontier of Iran.

Rewi Alley on Ma Zhongying[16]A Hui soldier from the New 36th Division called Swedish explorer Sven Hedin a "foreign devil".

[29] Sven Hedin's truck caravan encountered Ma's forces while he and his New 36th Division were retreating south from the Soviet Invasion of Xinjiang.

[32][33][34] "Ma denounced Sheng Shicai as a Soviet puppet, and reaffirmed his allegiance to the Chinese government of Nanjing".

[35] During the Soviet invasion of Xinjiang Ma Zhongying played a major role in fighting the invaders but his troops had to withdraw again and again.

Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet NKVD agent posted in Yarkand in 1937, gives a different version of Ma Zhongying's disappearance.

In his memoir Empire of Fear,[36] published in 1956 after defection to the West, Petrov describes how Ma was lured from Khotan onto a plane he believed was a Kuomintang flight, but was in fact staffed by Soviet agents who abducted him first to Yarkand NKVD headquarters, where he was forced to issue false orders to his own remnant troops in Khotan that would lead to their defeat, then flown on to Moscow where his fate was not known.

[39][40] In 1936 Zhang Guotao's forces crossed the Yellow River in an attempt to expand the Communist base into Xinjiang and make a direct connection with the USSR.