 During the early 1930s Edgar Snow in his book "Red Star Over China" said that the Communist media (who were enemies of Ma Hongkui) claimed that Ma received some weapons from Japan when he was fighting the Communists, and met visiting delegations, but after Japan's invasion of China in 1937 he fought against Japan, supporting the imam Hu Songshan in spreading anti-Japanese propaganda, and sending limited numbers of troops to his cousin Ma Hongbin to fight the Japanese.According to Snow, the Communists claimed Ma had allowed a Japanese military airfield and some personnel in Ningxia, but the airfield was not there after the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, reaffirming his allegiance to China.When the Japanese asked Gen. Ma Hongkui to defect and become head of a Muslim puppet state under the Japanese, Ma responded through Zhou Baihuang, the Ningxia Secretary of the Nationalist Party, to remind Japanese military chief of staff Gen. Itagaki Seishiro that many of Ma's relatives fought and died in battle against Eight-Nation Alliance forces during the Battle of Peking (1900), including his uncle Ma Fulu, and that Japanese troops made up the majority of the Alliance forces, so there would be no cooperation with the Japanese.