Among Peking's suffering subjects, special torments are visited on those who live in Red China's own Wild West, the twice-Texas-sized, rugged but rich Sinkiang province. On one side it abuts Russian Kazakhstan, on the other Tibet, to which it is linked by the disputed Ladakh Road through Indian-occupied Kashmir. In Sinkiang as in neighboring Tibet, the Chinese are an invading minority. Half a million Chinese are outnumbered by 4,500,000 hard-riding, xenophobic Moslem herdsmen, the Uighurs and Kazakhs, who pledge friendship by daubing their foreheads with lamb's blood. The literal meaning of...
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