By CHARLES HUTZLER - Associated Press Writer

Saturday, July 13, 1996 11:12 am EDT

BEIJING (AP) -- Saboteurs are active in Tibet. Muslim separatists are on the prowl in the west. Mongolian activists are preaching nationalism in the north. Across China's vast, restive border lands, unrest is flaring again.

The latest strife, although sporadic and not always violent, has unnerved Communist Party leaders by demonstrating that their rule is not immune from challenges. It also threatens the stability they need to carry out further economic reforms and coax Taiwan into reuniting with the mainland.

"The long-term trend is against central government control. This is what the Communist Party in Beijing is afraid of," said Greg Austin, a researcher at the School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australia's National University.

Beijing has accused local officials too busy making money under the market-oriented reforms of encouraging separatism through negligence if not outright collusion.

To reassert control, Beijing has ordered the police and military to expand a national anti-crime campaign to snare separatists. It told local officials they will be removed if the crackdown fails.

Much of the unrest in Xinjiang and Tibet-China's westernmost regions that cover more than a third of the nation is rooted in historic resistance to control of the sparsely populated areas by China and the ethnic Han Chinese.

Austin and other scholars say separatist sentiment has been fueled by Beijing's heavy-handed control of Islam and Tibetan Buddhism as well as Iranian-inspired pan-Islamic ideals and ethnic nationalism unleashed when the former Soviet Union crumbled.

Word of the latest violence came from exile groups and, more obliquely, from state-run news organizations when the unrest began quickening this spring.

A bomb, the sixth in nine months, exploded outside party and government headquarters in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, in March.

Around the same time, Chinese leaders pressed a campaign to close down Buddhist monasteries suspected of supporting independence for Tibet and to ban photographs of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader accused by Beijing of fomenting the unrest.

In May, monks in one of the Himalayan region's largest monasteries, Ganden, stoned and beat officials enforcing the ban. Police moved in, shooting and wounding at least three monks and arresting 40.

Ganden remains closed, and several other monasteries and temples were reportedly shut for a period after monks and nuns clashed with security forces.

To the north, in Xinjiang - a region of desert and high-altitude pastures dominated by Muslim Uighurs and other Turkic ethnic groups- police engaged in a running gunbattle in April with a separatist group that had been planting bombs. Seven of the rebels were reported killed.

Several weeks later, two men in the bazaar town of Kashgar near the Pakistani border tried to assassinate a high-ranking Muslim cleric who advises the government. Police shot one dead and wounded the other trying to arrest them after a long manhunt.

There have been no reports of violence in Inner Mongolia. But over the winter police arrested about a dozen campaigners for democracy and Mongolian nationalism and officials are trying to make sure violence from neighboring Xinjiang does not spread.

The party's top official in Inner Mongolia, Liu Mingzu, called on the region's people to "safeguard the sovereignty and unity of all nationalities" and "reduce the market for ethnic separatist activities."

Chinese officials in charge of security, religious and minority affairs refused to be interviewed about the unrest.

In state-run news media, party and government leaders of Tibet and Xinjiang have accused "foreign forces" of inciting the disturbances and criticized local officials for allowing it to happen.

"The Dalai (Lama) clique ... has frantically pounced on us again and has constantly carried out violent, terrorist sabotage," Tibetan party Secretary Raidi told a mass rally in Lhasa.

The state-run Xinjiang Daily accused people of using religion to "propagate pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic ideas", in some cases in collusion with local officials.

The party wants to punish members who practice Islam and promote a separate ethnic identity, Xinjiang television said.

The United Revolutionary National Front of Eastern Turkistan, an ethnic Uighur group based in neighboring Kazakstan, a former Soviet state, estimates that China has arrested 5,000 Uighurs since the crackdown started in late April.

The crackdown is "a reflection of failure" after a decade of investment in the regions' economies and their security forces, said Austin, the Australian academic.

A similar combination of repression and economic growth has worked in quelling overt dissent in China proper.

"The difference is because the non-Han areas are organized. They have organization and they have a goal," said David Shambaugh, a China scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Non-Hans have also fiercely resisted efforts to set up the spy networks that so effectively help police neighborhoods in most Chinese cities, Shambaugh said.

China's clamp-down is not expected to be brief or restrained, especially since the stakes go to Beijing's broadest territorial ambitions.

Austin believes Chinese leaders think separatist violence encourages independence sentiment on Taiwan the last piece of imperial China evading the party's control.

China's army conducted nine months of missile tests and war games ending in March to reinforce Beijing's demand that Taiwanese leaders not abandon the shared goal of eventual reunification.

"Taiwan and Tibet are inalienable parts of Chinese territory," one of China's top generals, Liu Huaqing, told a visiting dignitary two months later.