Islam among the Hui people is a little bit different than it was in Central Asia. The Hui people are very similar to the Han people, with the primary distinction being that they are mostly Muslim. In fact, if a Han marries a Hui, under the current ethnic group standards, that person must change his/her ethnicity to Hui.

The thing about Islam in China is that it was very detached from the rest of the Islamic world. The centers of Islamic thought were in the Middle East and Iran, and later Antanolia. For the most part, Islam spread to China via the Silk Road, where Muslim traders would go to trade and spread their creed.

This caused Islam to develop very differently, however. The name "Ma," as in the Xibei San Ma warlords, is in this case the Chinese equivalent for "Muhammad." But because of extremely strong Chinese cultural influence, and relative detachment from Islamic culture, many of the Muslims in China formed very China-centric sects.

Under the Qing dynasty, the Hui Muslims revolted in what became known as the Dungan rebellion. But this resulted in an extremely unusual situation, as the rebels were had no particular goal and the Qing dynasty made it very clear that only certain Muslim sects were rebels and that anyone who turned their coats would be rewarded. In addition, many Hui fought each other as well, depending on what sect that were from. And the Hui in the east of China did not react at all to the revolt, partly due to the Qing efforts. Ultimately the end result was that the groups that aligned with the Chinese survived relatively intact.

Thus, the three Ma warlords allied with the KMT during the Chinese Civil War, partly because of KMT secular policies that also promised freedom of religion, and partly due to Chinese solidarity. He also gave them a free hand in crushing their rival sects, thus allowing them to cement power over the Muslims in the area, and incidentally stopping Salafist thought from spreading in China. The Uighurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz in Xinjiang were, on the other hand, not ethnically Han. So they had no interest in supporting any Chinese ruler. This is why, when East Turkestan declared independence in the 1930s, the Ma warlords used their troops to crush the rebellion on behalf of the KMT government.

After the KMT were forced to withdraw to Taiwan by the CCP, the Ma warlords either surrendered and joined the PRC or were defeated and/or killed. They resisted in Qinghai and Western China for a while until they were defeated in the 1950s. However, the Ma warlord that had surrendered had his troops as part of the Tibetan occupation force.