Bai Chongxi

Who was Bai Chongxi?

Bai Chongxi was a Chinese general in the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China and a prominent Chinese Nationalist Muslim leader. He was of Hui ethnicity and of the Muslim faith. From the mid-1920s to 1949, Bai and his close ally Li Zongren ruled Guangxi province as regional warlords with their own troops and considerable political autonomy. His relationship with Chiang Kai-shek was at various times rivalrous and cooperative. He and Li Zongren supported the anti-Chiang warlord alliance in the Central Plains War in 1930, and then supported Chiang in the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. He was the Minister of National Defense of the Republic of China from 1946 to 1948. After losing to the Communists in 1949, Bai fled to Taiwan, where he died in 1966.