MAY 31, 2014
POSTED BY JIAYANG FAN
Almost a year after September 11th, I returned from high school in Massachusetts to spend two months in Beijing, as the guest of family friends. My hosts, retired office workers, were genial people, and generally incurious about my life in America; the only acknowledgement that I had spent many years abroad was an oblique apology for the absence of hamburgers on the dinner table. But they had less oblique questions about my brush with terrorism in America. Had I had seen the planes? I hadn’t. Did I still feel unsafe in public places? Did I now suspect that certain people I saw walking down the street might be terrorists? And wasn’t that the trouble with the U.S. these days—that it had become a country overrun with terrorists?
After the attack that took place last week in Urumqi, in the Chinese state of Xinjiang, it has become clear that terrorism is no longer a foreign phenomenon. At an outdoor vegetable market on Wednesday morning, two sport-utility vehicles loaded with explosives plowed through a crowd of shoppers, killing forty-three people and wounding more than ninety. Although no public claim of responsibility has been made, the five suspected assailants—four of whom were killed during the attack—have been named as members of a “Uighur terrorist gang,” according to police reports.
It was the deadliest massacre in recent memory, and the fourth in the past month—another sign of the increasingly volatile relations between Uighurs, the culturally distinct minority native to northwest China, and the Han majority, who constitute ninety-five per cent of the country’s population. Unlike many of the previous attacks, which took aim at state entities like police stations or security offices, the Urumqi bombing deliberately targeted civilians. If the assailants intended to maximize casualties, generate publicity, and radicalize Uighurs and Hans who had previously been ambivalent about this conflict, they succeeded spectacularly.
China’s state-run media has long condemned these killings as acts of terrorism—against the “country, society and humanity.” Foreign media outlets have been more wary of the word “terrorism,” sidestepping a term unavoidably freighted with political significance. In March, when the U.S. Embassy referred to a coördinated slaughter in a Kunming train station that left dozens dead as a “senseless act of violence,” thousands of indignant Chinese micro-bloggers accused Americans of applying a double standard. Some asked if we would ever refer to the fall of the Twin Towers as a “regrettable traffic incident,” or to the Boston Marathon bombing as a “fireworks and burning problem.”
Thirteen years ago, terrorism seemed almost exotic to the Chinese, entirely confined to a world outside their borders. Today, citizens are clamoring for recognition of its grave implications in their own nation. Yet the inherently political nature of the crime—particularly when it is framed as a violent protest against state injustice—makes its handling problematic. Especially in a country known for its imperious style of one-party rule, and censorship of opinions that run contrary to the official script.
If the U.S. government seemed reticent to describe earlier attacks as acts of terrorism—a description it did eventually apply to the Urumqi market bombing—it had much to do with the international discomfort over the Chinese government’s treatment of minorities. The most prominent such case, of course, involves Tibetans, and China’s aggressive methods of economic and social integration in their region, which have verged at times into authoritarian repression.
As individuals, however, neither Hans nor Uighurs nor Tibetans have much say in these policies, which are largely determined by the state. Although longtime Han residents in Xinjiang generally have amicable relationships with their nine million Uighur neighbors, the continued mass migration of Hans into Uighur cities like Urumqi has intensified tensions. The central government claims that its policies of assimilation—which include the razing of traditional homes and the prohibition of certain religious rituals—are only intended to create a “unitary and multi-ethnic” Chinese state. Many Uighurs see them as a flagrant infringement upon their rights, tantamount to a sort of cultural genocide.
And to those same Uighurs who have long felt like second-class citizens, the only way to truly wage war on the state is to alarm the majority—to shake their faith in the state and its ability to protect any of its citizens adequately, thereby undermining the legitimacy of a regime that has left its minorities so little recourse.
“Kong bu fen zi,” the Chinese word for “terrorist,” literally means “those who frighten.” In China, these days, the frightened and those who frighten, the minority and the majority, have more in common than they think. And their common enemy might not, after all, be each other.
Above: Chinese paramilitary police keep watch near the site of last week’s bombing in Urumqi. Photograph by Mitsuru Tamura/Yomiuri Shimbun/AP.
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