BEIJING, March 12 (AFP) - Major state dailies in China gave a call for multi-ethnic unity front-page coverage Wednesday, amid growing separatist unrest by the Uighur minority in the western region of Xinjiang.

Pictures of President Jiang Zemin wearing a Uighur cap together with Uighur singing star Abudu Kelimu accompanied reports in the ruling party mouthpiece People's Daily and other official newspapers.

Tomur Dawamat, a vice chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC), or parliament, was quoted as telling an informal gathering of top leaders that China must "hold still higher the banner of patriotism and equality and unity among all ethnic groups."

"We must ... resolutely resist the attempts of the Western hostile forces to 'Westernise' and 'split up' China by exploiting ethnical and religious issues, oppose all conspiratorial schemes to undermine ethnic unity and separate the motherland," he said.

Over the last month, exiled Moslem Uighur groups in Kazakhstan have claimed responsibility for three bus bombings in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi that killed nine and injured 74.

Chinese authorities say they have found no links between a bus blast last Thursday in Beijing and indigenous inhabitants of Xinjiang, but one claim by a Uighur separatist group was reported on Tuesday in Istanbul.

Anti-Chinese riots in the Xinjiang border town of Yining in February killed at least 10, according to an official Chinese toll.

Tomur Dawamat said China's third generation of leaders led by Jiang had inherited a policy of attaching "overriding importance" to equality and common prosperity among different ethnic groups from Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.

He was speaking at a tea party attended by Jiang, Premier Li Peng, NPC Chairman Qiao Shi, and other members of the politburo standing committee, including Li Ruihuan, Liu Huaqing and Hu Jintao.

Although 93 percent of China's population of 1.22 billion is Han Chinese, the remainder is made up of some 55 ethnic minorities, largely dispersed in vast border regions including Moslem-dominated Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia.

Ethnic Chinese make up 37 percent of the population in Xinjiang, but most were shipped to there after 1950, when China re-took control of the region, ending short-lived state of East Turkestan.

The latter was declared during China's civil war in 1945.