Tuesday, March 24, 1964 University Daily Kansan
Peking, Moscow Bid For Sinkiang Riches
Page 7
dollar stakes.
The prize is Sinkiang—an immense Chinese province five times the size of Texas. It is an untapped natural treasure house, rich in oil and the uranium the Chinese need to build an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
TOKYO — (UPI) — Out in the windswept desert of northern China, Peking and Moscow are playing a deadly game of diplomacy for billion dollar stakes.
Fawns in the game are a people called the Uigurs, who for centuries have inhabited central Asia. Followers of Islam, they are racially related to the modern people of Turkey.
IN OLDEN TIMES the Uigurs raided China and often made life miserable for Chinese governments. But in recent centuries, the Uigurs' history has been a continual struggle to keep at a minimum the authority Peking and Moscow exercise over them.
The Chinese have admitted publicly that armed clashes took place in recent years between their frontier guards and Russia's. Reports from India, now at odds with China, say the Chinese Uigurs have been fleeing China, attempting to join their kinsmen in Russia.
It is getting harder all the time. With modern methods of transport and communications at their disposal, the governments in Peking and Moscow find it far easier to assert their authority over the table lands of central Asia.
TODAY THE RIVALRY between Russia and China rubs raw in Sinkiang.
Largest numbers of them live in Sinkiang—others in three of the smaller "republics" of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union is so powerful that it feels confident of its ability to control the Uigurs within its boundaries. It allows them a large amount of local authority. And because Russia is more advanced than China, it offers them a higher standard of living.
The Chinese have not been able to be so generous.
They need Sinkiang badly, and to assert Chinese authority there they have taken to settling Chinese army veterans on the arid table lands of Sinkiang.
Industrialization also is being
REPORTS OF MASS flights of Uigurs from China into the Soviet Union filter out of central Asia. The clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops are said to have occurred when Chinese crossed into Russian territory to hunt for fleeing Uigurs
pushed in an effort to get at Sinkiang's oil and uranium.
BY 1958, the Chinese and Russians were heading for a clash over leadership of the Communist world. The Chinese halted construction of a trans-Sinkiang highway which would have given the Russians greater entry into Sinkiang.
sources.
The Chinese, in return, agreed to allow the Uigurs in China to use the Russian script employed by their kinsmen living just over the boundary in the Soviet Union.
The Russian script they were employing make it a little too easy for them to be progpandized by their kinsmen across the border.
Recent pictures in Japanese newspapers of Sinkiang's major city, Uramuchi, show a nearly treeless landscape, dotted with heavy masonry buildings. There are more factory smokestacks than Westerners, dedicated to a belief in Chinese backwardness, would expect to see.
As recently as 15 years ago, the Russians probably could have cut Sinkiang loose from China without much trouble. The Chinese Communists, who came to power in 1949, were in no position to challenge a Russian effort to take over the area at that time.
But Josef Stalin was in a generous mood toward China and decided to let Sinkiang alone in return for promises that Russia would share in exploitation of Sinkiang's resources.
Russian consulates there were closed. The Uigurs were told they would have to learn to write all over again, this time in the Latin alphabet.
Time alone will tell whether this potential economic treasure chest remains in the hands of the Peking Communists or is added to the enormous resources already at the disposal of the Soviet Union.
Sideline
DALLAS — (UPI)— Don Bishop,
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season.
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