Xinjiang

No one wants to talk about the riot. Not the Muslim men trading gossip over tea and mutton kebabs. Not the merchant selling raisins and dates from famous Central Asian oases. Not China's busy Communist Party functionary. The most serious challenge this decade to Chinese rule over its predominantly Muslim far west region, the Yining riot runs like an ominous undercurrent through the Xinjiang region. Nearly two years since the upheaval, the border city remains shaken by fear.

Imam Aronghan Aji looked the image of respectability as he set out in clerical robes and white turban to lead morning prayers at the ancient Adighar Mosque. But the leader of state-sanctioned Islam in China's rugged western reaches never made it. He was stabbed by assassins intent on wiping out Chinese rule. A year and a half later, the dignified octogenarian's health is frailer, his gait slower, his psyche shaken and his assailants' message clearer.

China has executed three people and jailed 27 others for their roles in bloody riots that shook the Muslim region of Xinjiang in February, officials said Saturday. A police spokesman from the Yili district in Xinjiang said the executions took place Thursday. But a spokesman for exiled Muslim separatists in neighboring Kazakhstan disputed the number of people executed. He contended that seven people were executed Thursday and five last month for their part in the unrest.

Authorities arrested several suspects in last week's bomb attacks that killed nine people and wounded 74 in the far western region of Xinjiang, where Muslim separatists are waging a campaign for independence. Those in custody were suspected of having made and planted the bombs that went off on buses in the regional capital, Urumqi, or of having sold detonators for the explosives, the official Xinjiang Daily said.

Conventional wisdom says China will not fragment; that it will not split into independent multiple governing groups, whether based on province-city, north-south, ethnic, military or other divisions; and that the party and military would not tolerate separatism. This thinking lulls U.S. and world policymakers away from considering whether fragmentation would be good for China, Asia and the world. Still, there are factors that point toward fragmentation.

For up to 4,000 years, the salty sand of the Taklimakan Desert in China held a secret--unusually well-preserved mummies wearing colorful robes, boots, stockings and hats. Today, the mummies still hold a mystery: The people were Caucasian, not Asian. "We are trying to figure out, from many different angles, who these people were and where they came from," Dr. Victor H. Mair said. "It's important to the question of how civilization developed across Eurasia."

Prime Minister Sergei Tereschenko of Kazakhstan said here Wednesday that his newly independent nation is quickly establishing good-neighbor relations and expanded economic ties with China. He played down any possibility that Islamic fundamentalism will spread from his republic across its 1,000-mile border with China into the Xinjiang region, which has large and restless Muslim minority populations.

A Chinese restaurant where no one eats rice? Eyyaaahhh. Well, listen. Xinjiang, China's rugged westernmost province, is full of Muslims, mostly a people of Turkic extraction known as the Uighurs. I visited the province in 1983 and spent a few days in the city of Turfan, a quiet oasis in the middle of one of China's largest deserts. And no kidding, there was no rice in Turfan. In fact, there was nothing to eat except flat bread and lamb shish kebab.

China has sent troops into a remote northwest border region near the Soviet Union to quell ethnic unrest among Muslim Uighurs, Chinese sources said. There were no accounts of casualties and few details from the border in the Xinjiang region. However, the area is adjacent to Soviet Asian republics torn by ethnic violence earlier this year. The sources said that several hundred Uighurs rioted Friday and that rioting continues.

Archeologists in northwest China have discovered 50 well-preserved corpses believed to be at least 3,000 years old, the official New China News Agency reported Monday. Officials of the Cultural Relics Bureau said the bodies have high noses, low cheekbones and blond or brown hair tied in a bun--different characteristics from the Mongoloid race, to which most Chinese belong. Five corpses are tattooed with geometric patterns.