A bomb attack hits sensitive region after presidential visit
By J.M. | BEIJING
A violent attack on April 30th at the main railway station in Urumqi, the capital of western China’s Xinjiang region, has left at least three people dead and nearly 80 injured. The authorities have been quick to blame “terrorists” (here, in Chinese), a term that in the context of Xinjiang means only one thing: Muslim extremists from Xinjiang’s ethnic Uighur population who resent Chinese control over the province. President Xi Jinping had been visiting Xinjiang (if he had already left, it was at most a few hours earlier) when an unspecified number of assailants staged their early evening attack just outside the station using knives and explosives. In a brief response, Mr Xi said China “must resolutely continue fighting against the overweening arrogance of these violent terrorists” (see Xinhua news agency, in Chinese).
The timing and location are likely to have alarmed the authorities as much as the violence itself. Numerous attacks blamed on terrorists have occurred in Xinjiang in recent years. Remarkably, however, this was the first fatal one in the region’s capital since 1997 when explosions on three public buses killed nine people. Clashes between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the country’s largest ethnic group, erupted in Urumqi in July 2009, leaving some 200 people dead. Security forces in the city have been on heightened alert ever since, and would have been all the more so around the time of a visit by the president. Mr Xi’s trip was his first to Xinjiang since taking office. Counter-terrorism measures were a major focus of it.
The daylight attack on such a high-profile target would thus have been a big embarrassment to local security officials. After knife-wielding assailants, believed to be Uighurs, killed 29 people in March at a railway station in the south-western city of Kunming, security was tightened at railway stations around the country. The party chief of Urumqi, Zhu Hailun, had called for extra security (here, in Chinese) at all crowded places in the city, including stations. Just two days before the attack at Urumqi’s railway station a police officer stationed there had been quoted in the local press as pledging to make “practical efforts” to implement a call by President Xi (here, in Chinese) for the building of a “wall of copper and iron” against terrorism so that perpetrators would become, as Mr Xi put it, “like rats crossing the street with everybody shouting, ‘kill them’”.
In a report from Urumqi, a correspondent for Reuters news agency reflected on the “apparent sophistication and daring” of the violence on April 30th. That it caused alarm well beyond the region itself was evident in a frenzied attempt by officials to suppress all but the barest of news about it in the first few hours after it occurred. Even terse announcements of what had happened, posted on the microblogs of official media, were deleted by censors. The Communist Party’s own mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, as well as the main government news agency, Xinhua, found themselves in the unusual position of having their initial postings blocked. The results can be seen on FreeWeibo.com, a website outside China that displays the results of such censorship in near real-time (Xinhua’s blocked message in English is here and the People’s Daily’s in Chinese is here).
Whether intended as such or not, the attack will appear to security officials as a direct challenge to Mr Xi. The response is likely to be an even harsher crackdown on anti-government sentiment in Xinjiang, and even more suspicion directed at ethnic Uighurs by security officials as well as ordinary Chinese. This will not help secure stability in the region, which Mr Xi said during his tour of the region was “vital to the whole country's reform, development and stability; to the country's unity, ethnic harmony and national security as well as to the great revival of the Chinese nation.”
