COMMUNISTS IN SINKIANG

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28794, 15 January 1959, Page 9

COMMUNISTS IN SINKIANG

Order To Oppose Chauvinism

(N.Z. Press Association Copyright) (Rec. 11.30 p.m.) PEKING, January 13.

Communists in the vast multiracial region of Sinkiang, in north-west .China, were reported today to have been told to struggle against ‘‘chauvinism and localism” in the region.

There have been reports in the past of apposition to Chinese rule in this central Asian autonomous region, where less than a quarter of the population are Chinese. The Chinese Communist Party newspaper, “People’s Daily,*’ said today that a recent meeting of the Sinkiang Communist Party decided it was essential to achieve genuine national solidarity among the many different nationalities in the region in order to make progress in Socialist construction there.

The newspaper also said that the meeting, held from last December 20 to December 30, also decided that the current drive to reorganise the people’s communes in the region should continue until June. Last month the central committee of the National Communist Party in Peking decreed that the reorganisation of the communes .hould be completed by April.

When communes were set up in the region last autumn, a Sinkiang newspaper reported that “some landlords, rich peasants, counter - revolutionaries and wicked elements” had tried to' sabotage the movement. Sinkiang, which borders Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and Mongolia, has a population of about five million, nearly three-quarters of whom are Uighurs, one of the largest groups of national minorities in China.

The rest is made up of about a dozen other nationalities, including Chinese. Peking and Sinkiang newspapers repdrted last summer and autumn the exposure and defeat of various attempts by some groups of “local nationalists” in the region to set up an independent republic, to drive out the Chinese people, to oppose unification of the fatherland, to sabotage the unity of the nationalities and to hinder Socialist construction.