Word: taklamakan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...region is probably a more volatile confrontation point than even the far-eastern Ussuri River area, where Chinese and Soviet troops engaged in a series of bloody border fights last March. The Dzungarian Gates lie just 250 miles from China's nuclear-testing and research sites on the Taklamakan Desert. Moreover, the Sinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region, as it is officially called, is two-thirds populated by Kazakh peoples, many of whom resent Chinese rule Russian radio propaganda beamed there frequently urges Chinese Kazakhs to rise up in arms against the Peking authorities...
South of the Tien Shan on the Chinese side lies the Taklamakan Desert and the lake of Lop Nor, home of the Chinese nuclear tests. Beginning about 1960, the Peking government set out to transform the desert into a fertile area. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, party cadres, middle-school graduates and intellectuals thought to be in need of "reeducation" have been sent to Sinkiang to work for the cause, and their efforts have had some results. But for the most part, Sinkiang remains a wasteland, even less developed than the Soviet lands to the north...
...flying U-2s and satellite cameras record roads, railways, steel mills, oil wells, nuclear plants, missile ranges and troop movements. U.S. Government analysts early spotted China's gaseous diffusion plant at Lanchow, the plutonium reactor at Paotow, and the atom-bomb test site at Lop Nor in the Taklamakan wastes of Sinkiang. They have predicted well in advance the timing of all three Chinese atomic explosions...