CHINA: Encirclement

Giant China is squeezed in a double Communist encirclement—from without and from within. Inside the country, Chinese Communists push for power. From without, unremitting pressure is applied to the frontier provinces. Last week, this pressure was squeezing hard on a huge, little-known segment of China—mineral-and oil-rich Sinkiang Province.

Crescent Flag. One focus of the trouble lies in the northwest. There, in the Ili valley where the flag of China should fly, a green flag with a yellow crescent moon and a five-pointed star has flown for nearly three years. The region contains about a million people (total Sinkiang population: about 4,000,000), mostly Moslem Turki farmers and Kazak horsemen who live in felt yurts (tents) and ride with rifles strapped on their backs. They are controlled by leaders trained and schooled in Russia. Behind the leaders is a well-equipped army of more than 25,000 tough young men who wear Russian-style uniforms and call themselves the Sinkiang Democratic Army.

There has also been trouble at Peita-shan, a mud-garrison hamlet on the Peita-shan range two days’ drive from Sin-kiang’s dingy little capital, Tihua. Last June, Outer Mongolian cavalrymen, backed by five Russian planes, demanded that the Chinese surrender the position. The Chinese held on despite some bombing attacks. They are still there, holding the Peitashan heights. Through field glasses, the Chinese can watch Mongolian patrols on the north side of the range.

It was a Chinese tragedy that distant Sinkiang had been misruled, from 1928 until 1944, by notorious Warlord Sheng Shih-tsai. Nominally as the proconsul of the Chinese Central Government, General Sheng administered a private terror that brought death to at least 50,000 people in 16 years.

Sheng had also helped the Russians into Sinkiang itself.* Because the Chinese Government was weak, distant, and preoccupied with Japan, he had even allowed the Russians to station troops in the province. They built roads, airports, factories, aircraft assembly plants. They began to develop Sinkiang’s rich, mineral wealth, bored oil wells and dug wolfram mines.

“None May Plot Murder.” The Chinese had hoped to conciliate the Ili rebels by granting local self-government, by accepting as vice governor of Sinkiang (in a coalition Government) one of the rebels themselves. But the Chinese were wondering. Young (32), trim Vice Governor Achmadjahm had suddenly packed his belongings and family last month. In a Russian plane they flew to the northwest.

In Nanking, Chinese General Chang Chih-chung addressed an open letter to Achmadjahm: “What is the meaning of your withdrawal? … Is it the abrogation of our Peace Agreement? Is another armed rebellion being hatched? … If you have no intention against peace you will return to Tihua and reopen negotiations with the Government.”

So far Achmadjahm has not answered. Sinkiang’s Governor General Masud Sabri has posted red-lettered public warnings in Tihua streets: “None may plot murder against officials, carry illegal weapons, secretly trail or torture others, incite mobs to violence.” Trigger-ready militiamen patrol oasis towns. Upon Peitashan’s snowy heights the Outer Mongolians are reported to be receiving reinforcements and probing the Chinese lines.

Tihua Picnics. Last week General Chang submitted to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek a five-year plan for Sinkiang’s reconstruction. Under it Nanking would send 60 or 70 technicians to develop agriculture and mining in the northwest. A large financial grant would be made.

In part this was General Chang’s effort to retrieve past Chinese blunders; in part it was Chang’s bid for the loyalty of the Moslem Turkis in the larger struggle which seeks to prevent Sinkiang from becoming the “Poland of Asia.”

Meanwhile, in Tihua, the Russians maintain a busy consulate general, a branch of their Foreign Trade Commissariat, the Sino-Soviet Aviation Corp., a branch of the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association, a school and a hospital. On Sundays, most of Tihua’s Russians (more than 200 in all) go up the Urumchi River for an isolated picnic. In northwest Sinkiang and the western outpost of Kashgar there are even more Russians. Sinkiang workmen are mining valuable wolfram for them at Fuwen; others are tapping the rich oil pools at Wusu.

* Not the first time the Hi valley has seen strange flags. Soldiers of Czarist Russia moved into the fertile Ili in the middle 1870s. The Manchu Dowager Empress, in one of her few feats of diplomacy, persuaded them to depart.