Kunming, a city of six million people deep in China’s remote southwest, is famed for its mild climate and sprawling flower market. It is a long way from Hotan, a small, dusty city in the country’s far northwestern corner, near the borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. To travel the distance by train takes four days. But the two places share a closer cultural bond than the vast geographic gulf that separates them would suggest. Both once lay on the ancient silk route, a network of caravan trails that once linked China to Central Asia and India. Islam traveled the route centuries ago, finding a home in the Middle Kingdom and giving Kunming and Hotan the large Chinese Muslim populations they have today.
That connection became painfully apparent one evening last March. Shortly after 9 p.m., six men and two women, later identified as Islamic extremists from Hotan, rushed into Kunming’s main railway station, dressed in black, and began stabbing Chinese travelers at random with long knives. The onslaught lasted only 12 minutes, but it left 29 dead and more than 140 injured.
Such events are rare in China. After the initial shock, some Chinese micro-bloggers and state media began drawing comparisons with 9/11. The central government was caught completely off guard as it prepared to open the People’s Political Consultative Conference, a yearly gathering in Beijing that allows the ruling Communist Party consult with representatives from other political groups, grass-roots organizations, and ethnic minorities. Not since Kunming’s Hui Muslims rose up against the country’s Manchu rulers during the Qing dynasty, in the nineteenth century, had the city witnessed such a large and deadly attack by Muslims on its Chinese Han majority.
When police arrived at the station, amid pools of blood, abandoned luggage, and bodies strewn across the floor, they shot dead four of the attackers, three men and one woman, and captured a female suspect. It soon became apparent that the assailants were not local Hui but Uighur Muslims from Hotan in the Xinjiang autonomous region, which Islamic separatists want to make into an independent state called East Turkestan.
Uighur Muslims differ from Hui Muslims, despite their shared faith in the Prophet Muhammad. The Hui—the name once simply meant “Muslim” in Chinese—are one of China’s ten Islamic ethnic minorities. They are descended from Arab and Persian traders who first came to China in the 7th century and intermarried with the Han. Many migrated to Kunming after Kublai Khan, grandson of the infamous first Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, conquered the country in the 13th century. Though they have suffered from periodic persecutions, they have blended in with Chinese culture and, for the most part, managed to live in relative harmony with their Han neighbors.
Xinjiang’s Uighurs, however, tell a different ethnic narrative. A people of Turkic descent, they claim to be indigenous to China’s northwestern region, which they once briefly proclaimed an independent Islamic state called the East Turkestan Republic in the 1930s, before falling under a coalition government administered by the republican Kuomintang regime and the Soviet Union. In 1949, when Mao Zedong’s communists came to power, the People’s Liberation Army peacefully took control of Xinjiang. Since then, Uighurs have continued to speak their own language and practice Sufi Islam, largely resisting integration with the country’s Han majority. As a result, they say, they have been subjected to decades of economic discrimination by the Han, who have flooded into Xinjiang—the word literally means “New Frontier”—by the millions to work for Chinese companies exploiting the region’s rich natural resources. Those resources may include the country’s largest oil and gas reserves.
Beijing designated Xinjiang as an “Uighur Autonomous Region” in 1955. At the time, Uighurs made up just over 70 percent of the population, according to China’s first modern census, conducted in 1953. Today that number has plummeted to 45 percent. Uighurs accuse Beijing of cultural genocide—attempting to assimilate them to Han culture or displace them from the region in order to consolidate control over it.
Ethnic unrest has long simmered in Xinjiang, and frequently flared up with deadly repercussions, even before communist rule. It boiled over into mass riots in July 2009 after some Han Chinese killed migrant Uighur factory workers in southern China for allegedly raping a Chinese girl. Hundreds of Uighurs in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, swept through the city with knives and clubs, indiscriminately attacking Han Chinese, leaving more than 150 dead and hundreds more injured. In the days that followed, the city’s Han Chinese rampaged through the streets, assaulting Uighurs with meat cleavers and sticks in retaliation. The People’s Armed Police rounded up more than 1,400 Uighurs and later executed dozens.
Since then, the Chinese government has tried to curb Islamic religious and cultural expression in Xinjiang. It periodically closes mosques and uses state media to dissuade Muslims from wearing beards or fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. Officially, it says such efforts are meant to harmonize Islam with a socialist society and deter religious extremism. According to China’s president, Xi Jinping, China wants to ensure that the “leadership of religious organizations is maintained firmly in the hands of people who love the country as much as they love their religion.”
Rights activists give a different interpretation. They say the government’s heavy-handed policies are only alienating Uighurs and inciting further unrest and violence. But the government blames the escalating violence, including the Kunming attack, on militant Islam spreading to China from Central Asia. Chinese security forces claim they have found abundant evidence to prove that Uighur separatists are receiving assistance from al Qaeda and the Taliban, some of which they gathered from a raid on a terrorist training camp close to the Afghan and Pakistani borders in January 2007.
If true, this claim would only confirm what the U.S. military apparently discovered when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. It captured 22 Uighurs who had received weapons training at a camp in Pakistan and detained the men for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Beijing alleged they were preparing to carry out strikes in Xinjiang and demanded their return to China. After realizing the men posed no threat to Americans, the U.S. released them instead to Slovakia, fearing they would be tortured in China.
Today, Beijing believes that Uighur separatists are now being trained by, and fighting alongside, al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq. And it says the internet has quickly become the main channel for distributing militant Islamic propaganda in Xinjiang. China’s State Internet Information Office in 2013 identified 109 foreign-produced audio and video files that encourage Uighur youth to join international jihadist groups or fight for an independent East Turkestan, compared to only 32 in 2012. State media aired sample clips in a June 2014 documentary, including Uighur-language instructional videos on how to make explosives and handle firearms.
If militant Islam is making inroads into China from other countries, it may account for the rise in suicide bombings—a tactic rarely used by Uighurs in the past. In May, for example, Uighur separatists in two SUVs plowed through a crowded open-air market in Urumqi, running down pedestrians and throwing dozens of homemade bombs from their windows before exploding the vehicles and themselves. Thirty-one people were killed and more than 90 injured, many of them elderly Han shopping for groceries.
The attack occurred two days after 39 Uighurs were sentenced to prison for terror-related crimes, such as illegal gun manufacturing and inciting ethnic hatred over the internet. It was not the first suicide attack. Two months earlier, two Uighurs detonated explosives at the exit to the Urumqi railway station, killing themselves and one other person.
Beijing saw its first suicide bombing attributed to Uighur separatists last year. One October morning in 2013 a black plume of smoke rose above the north end of Tiananmen Square, marking the spot where a jeep flying a black banner with Arabic writing had rammed into a pedestrian bridge and burst into flames under the iconic portrait of Mao. The occupants of the vehicle—an Uighur and his wife and her mother—had sped through a crowd of pedestrians, killing two tourists and injuring 40 people before igniting gasoline canisters in the vehicle. At first, China’s state media downplayed the incident, and police confiscated video footage of the scene taken by foreign journalists. Later, however, government officials identified the attackers as Xinjiang separatists.
Before that, the last bomb attack in Beijing suspected to have been carried out by Uighur extremists occurred in 1997. An explosion on a public bus during rush hour in a busy shopping district killed at least two people and injured dozens. It followed three simultaneous bus bombings in Xinjiang weeks earlier, shortly after the death of former Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s modern economic reforms.
Uighur extremists have mounted larger and better-planned attacks in recent years, and their tactics appear to be evolving over time. Kunming demonstrated this perhaps better than any other. The change is evident from a comparison with earlier attacks. In 2008, for example, two Uighur men—a taxi driver and a vegetable seller—stole a dump truck in Kashgar, an ancient oasis town in Xinjiang, and rammed it into a group of 70 Chinese police officers on their morning jog, killing 16. But with media controls tightened just 16 days ahead of the Beijing Olympics, the attack went largely unnoticed in China.
The more Beijing downplays smaller symbolic attacks on Chinese security forces and government buildings within Xinjiang, and the longer it continues its policy of tightly controlling media coverage, extremists appear more and more willing to strike civilian targets outside the region to gain publicity and excite widespread terror.
Kunming also suggested deepening ties with international Islamic militant groups. Qin Guangrong, Yunnan’s Communist Party Secretary, the highest political official in the province, said the eight suspects initially tried to cross the border into Vietnam, possibly on their way to join a jihadist group overseas. But when they found their way out of the country barred, they became desperate and returned to Kunming to wage a holy war there.
The attack itself had certain hallmarks of an international jihadist connection. The assailants carried black banners with Arabic writing, rather than the pale blue and white flag that has come to symbolize the East Turkestan Independence Movement. They also included two young women, leading some to speculate they may have been trained abroad, perhaps in the Caucuses, where Islamic terrorist groups have used young women for their ability to bypass security and attract greater media attention through their involvement. Observers have long warned that it is only a matter of time before foreign Islamic terror groups join forces with Xinjiang’s extremists. Philip Potter, an assistant professor of public policy and political science at the University of Michigan, says that China’s growing interest in the natural resources of the Middle East and North Africa, together with its political meddling in that region, has roused the ire of Islamic militant groups and made it a target for terror attacks.
“China’s ongoing security crackdown in Xinjiang has forced the most militant Uyghur separatists into volatile neighboring countries, such as Pakistan, where they are forging strategic alliances with, and even leading, jihadist factions affiliated with al Qaeda and the Taliban,” Potter wrote in a 2013 paper published by Strategic Studies Quarterly. “The result is cross-fertilization between previously isolated movements, leading to the diffusion of tactics and capabilities that have the potential to substantially increase the sophistication and lethality of terrorism in China.”
Under mounting pressure to find a solution to the problem, President Xi convened a special working group of the Politburo in April. He proposed bringing the nation together to form a united “people’s front” against terrorism.
“We should unite the people to build a bronze and iron wall against terrorism,” Xi said, “and make terrorists as unpopular as rats crossing the street that are chased by all.”
Since then, the government has launched a nation-wide campaign to promote public security awareness. The campaign includes anti-terrorism training programs and courses at schools such as the People’s Public Security University, Beijing’s elite police academy. Chinese colleges and research centers have started inviting foreign counter-terrorism experts to come to China as visiting professors and researchers.
For months, police in major cities across the country, such as Shenzhen, have been encouraging citizens to report possible terrorist activities. They have set up reward systems, offering thousands dollars for information on suspicious activities, such as individuals purchasing large quantities of chemicals or gasoline without a permit. Xi’s “bronze and iron wall” is beginning to look much like “Fortress America,” but with greater moral ambiguity, at least in foreign eyes.
The international community has shown considerable reluctance to label the attacks as terrorism. Until recently, they have tended to see them largely as expressions of legitimate political dissent incited by China’s persecution of Uighurs. Describing the attacks, Western media outlets have often placed the word “terrorism” in inverted commas, reflecting suspicion around the government’s lack of transparency on anti-terrorism operations and the restrictions placed on foreign media coverage.
The New York Times, for example, characterized the Kunming attack as a possible “spillover” of “volatile tensions between [Xinjiang’s Uighurs] and the [Chinese] government,” without once using the word terrorism. This echoed earlier remarks made in October 2013 by U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. She declined to describe the Tiananmen suicide attack as terrorism and instead reiterated U.S. support for Uighur human rights.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement earlier this year that such remarks are “irresponsible” and that “double standards” will “not help international cooperation on counter-terrorism.”
China’s anti-terrorism cooperation with Western countries is still in its infancy, partly because Beijing has been reluctant to disclose information on its operations to mistrusting Western governments. According to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism, China-U.S. cooperation in 2013 “remained marginal.”
After 9/11, the U.S. Treasury Department placed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement on its watch list of terrorist organizations but later removed it. Increasingly frustrated with the U.S. response, China released videos in June it says were made by those who carried out the Tiananmen attack. They show Uighur Muslims chanting “God is great” and one of the suspects burning Chinese and American flags.
China’s cooperation with neighboring countries has made greater progress, mainly through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an Eurasian intergovernmental political, economic, and military league. SCO member states—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—set up a special anti-terrorism unit in 2013 to coordinate border control, surveillance and information sharing. Zhang Xinfeng, director of the SCO executive committee, said that the unit provides key intelligence and assistance to China because “terrorist attacks in Xinjiang are closely related to the activities of terrorist, separatist and extremist forces in Central Asia.”
Beijing has started to become more forthcoming about its counter-terrorism measures. And as it does so, Western attitudes appear to be shifting. In response to May’s market bombing in Urumqi, for example, former White House press secretary Jay Carney said in an official statement: “the United States resolutely opposes all forms of terrorism.” It was the first time the Obama administration used the word terrorism in connection with attacks led by Uighur separatists.
Lawmakers in China have sought introduce a clearer and more focused legislative framework for dealing with terrorism since 9/11. Reaching a consensus on what that framework should include, however, has proven difficult. In 2011 the State Council, China’s cabinet, compiled a draft bill to be submitted to the National People’s Congress. It includes specific definitions of terrorism, a major step forward as China has not previously defined terrorism in a legal sense and currently tries such cases under its Criminal Law. This year Xinjiang reviewed its own anti-terrorism law, the first time any regional government has included one in its legislative agenda.
With new legislation now in the works, Beijing is focusing on keeping people informed and prepared for any future attacks. In July, the National Anti-Terrorism Leading Group Office distributed an updated counter-terrorism handbook, which calls on citizens to watch for anything out of the ordinary, such as strange noises, odd smells, or neighbors behaving suspiciously. In the event of abduction by terrorists, people are urged to “stay calm, not resist, and trust the government,” according to state-run news agency Xinhua. Public security awareness and the new legal framework are just supporting elements of a greater pro-active counter-terrorism campaign that includes hard measures. Major cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, have stationed special armed police in busy markets and train stations.
Security at border crossings, airports, seaports, and railway stations has also been beefed up. For the first time, regular police have been armed with guns and placed at Beijing’s central subway stations around Tiananmen Square.
Beijing appears to have taken Xi’s call for a “bronze and iron wall” to heart in a more literal sense. In April the city installed bronze-colored anti-terror railings along Chang’an Avenue, the massive 10-lane road directly before Tiananmen Gate, which is used for parades during important national celebrations. The railings, manufactured in Inner Mongolia, are constructed from specially reinforced metals capable of withstanding a direct collision. They went largely unnoticed until a Volkswagen sedan lost control and crashed into one, causing substantial damage to the vehicle but barely denting the railing.
While Beijing is determined to secure national stability and ethnic unity, it remains to be seen how effective its “bronze and iron wall” approach will prove in country already blighted by widening social and economic disparities. A similar “bronze and iron wall against separatism” campaign was tried with some success in Tibet in 2008. But that campaign was not on a national scale, and it did not face the same radical elements that inform militant Islam.
Paul Nash is Senior Editor at Diplomatic Courier. Lucrezia Seu is the Asia-Pacific Producer for RAI Italia, Italy’s national public broadcasting company, based in Beijing. She previously worked for CNN’s Beijing bureau and is a graduate of Tsinghua University, China, and the University of Westminster, England.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's September/October 2014 print edition.
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Behind China’s Bronze and Iron Wall
September 10, 2014
Kunming, a city of six million people deep in China’s remote southwest, is famed for its mild climate and sprawling flower market. It is a long way from Hotan, a small, dusty city in the country’s far northwestern corner, near the borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. To travel the distance by train takes four days. But the two places share a closer cultural bond than the vast geographic gulf that separates them would suggest. Both once lay on the ancient silk route, a network of caravan trails that once linked China to Central Asia and India. Islam traveled the route centuries ago, finding a home in the Middle Kingdom and giving Kunming and Hotan the large Chinese Muslim populations they have today.
That connection became painfully apparent one evening last March. Shortly after 9 p.m., six men and two women, later identified as Islamic extremists from Hotan, rushed into Kunming’s main railway station, dressed in black, and began stabbing Chinese travelers at random with long knives. The onslaught lasted only 12 minutes, but it left 29 dead and more than 140 injured.
Such events are rare in China. After the initial shock, some Chinese micro-bloggers and state media began drawing comparisons with 9/11. The central government was caught completely off guard as it prepared to open the People’s Political Consultative Conference, a yearly gathering in Beijing that allows the ruling Communist Party consult with representatives from other political groups, grass-roots organizations, and ethnic minorities. Not since Kunming’s Hui Muslims rose up against the country’s Manchu rulers during the Qing dynasty, in the nineteenth century, had the city witnessed such a large and deadly attack by Muslims on its Chinese Han majority.
When police arrived at the station, amid pools of blood, abandoned luggage, and bodies strewn across the floor, they shot dead four of the attackers, three men and one woman, and captured a female suspect. It soon became apparent that the assailants were not local Hui but Uighur Muslims from Hotan in the Xinjiang autonomous region, which Islamic separatists want to make into an independent state called East Turkestan.
Uighur Muslims differ from Hui Muslims, despite their shared faith in the Prophet Muhammad. The Hui—the name once simply meant “Muslim” in Chinese—are one of China’s ten Islamic ethnic minorities. They are descended from Arab and Persian traders who first came to China in the 7th century and intermarried with the Han. Many migrated to Kunming after Kublai Khan, grandson of the infamous first Mongol emperor, Genghis Khan, conquered the country in the 13th century. Though they have suffered from periodic persecutions, they have blended in with Chinese culture and, for the most part, managed to live in relative harmony with their Han neighbors.
Xinjiang’s Uighurs, however, tell a different ethnic narrative. A people of Turkic descent, they claim to be indigenous to China’s northwestern region, which they once briefly proclaimed an independent Islamic state called the East Turkestan Republic in the 1930s, before falling under a coalition government administered by the republican Kuomintang regime and the Soviet Union. In 1949, when Mao Zedong’s communists came to power, the People’s Liberation Army peacefully took control of Xinjiang. Since then, Uighurs have continued to speak their own language and practice Sufi Islam, largely resisting integration with the country’s Han majority. As a result, they say, they have been subjected to decades of economic discrimination by the Han, who have flooded into Xinjiang—the word literally means “New Frontier”—by the millions to work for Chinese companies exploiting the region’s rich natural resources. Those resources may include the country’s largest oil and gas reserves.
Beijing designated Xinjiang as an “Uighur Autonomous Region” in 1955. At the time, Uighurs made up just over 70 percent of the population, according to China’s first modern census, conducted in 1953. Today that number has plummeted to 45 percent. Uighurs accuse Beijing of cultural genocide—attempting to assimilate them to Han culture or displace them from the region in order to consolidate control over it.
Ethnic unrest has long simmered in Xinjiang, and frequently flared up with deadly repercussions, even before communist rule. It boiled over into mass riots in July 2009 after some Han Chinese killed migrant Uighur factory workers in southern China for allegedly raping a Chinese girl. Hundreds of Uighurs in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, swept through the city with knives and clubs, indiscriminately attacking Han Chinese, leaving more than 150 dead and hundreds more injured. In the days that followed, the city’s Han Chinese rampaged through the streets, assaulting Uighurs with meat cleavers and sticks in retaliation. The People’s Armed Police rounded up more than 1,400 Uighurs and later executed dozens.
Since then, the Chinese government has tried to curb Islamic religious and cultural expression in Xinjiang. It periodically closes mosques and uses state media to dissuade Muslims from wearing beards or fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. Officially, it says such efforts are meant to harmonize Islam with a socialist society and deter religious extremism. According to China’s president, Xi Jinping, China wants to ensure that the “leadership of religious organizations is maintained firmly in the hands of people who love the country as much as they love their religion.”
Rights activists give a different interpretation. They say the government’s heavy-handed policies are only alienating Uighurs and inciting further unrest and violence. But the government blames the escalating violence, including the Kunming attack, on militant Islam spreading to China from Central Asia. Chinese security forces claim they have found abundant evidence to prove that Uighur separatists are receiving assistance from al Qaeda and the Taliban, some of which they gathered from a raid on a terrorist training camp close to the Afghan and Pakistani borders in January 2007.
If true, this claim would only confirm what the U.S. military apparently discovered when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. It captured 22 Uighurs who had received weapons training at a camp in Pakistan and detained the men for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Beijing alleged they were preparing to carry out strikes in Xinjiang and demanded their return to China. After realizing the men posed no threat to Americans, the U.S. released them instead to Slovakia, fearing they would be tortured in China.
Today, Beijing believes that Uighur separatists are now being trained by, and fighting alongside, al Qaeda in Syria and Iraq. And it says the internet has quickly become the main channel for distributing militant Islamic propaganda in Xinjiang. China’s State Internet Information Office in 2013 identified 109 foreign-produced audio and video files that encourage Uighur youth to join international jihadist groups or fight for an independent East Turkestan, compared to only 32 in 2012. State media aired sample clips in a June 2014 documentary, including Uighur-language instructional videos on how to make explosives and handle firearms.
If militant Islam is making inroads into China from other countries, it may account for the rise in suicide bombings—a tactic rarely used by Uighurs in the past. In May, for example, Uighur separatists in two SUVs plowed through a crowded open-air market in Urumqi, running down pedestrians and throwing dozens of homemade bombs from their windows before exploding the vehicles and themselves. Thirty-one people were killed and more than 90 injured, many of them elderly Han shopping for groceries.
The attack occurred two days after 39 Uighurs were sentenced to prison for terror-related crimes, such as illegal gun manufacturing and inciting ethnic hatred over the internet. It was not the first suicide attack. Two months earlier, two Uighurs detonated explosives at the exit to the Urumqi railway station, killing themselves and one other person.
Beijing saw its first suicide bombing attributed to Uighur separatists last year. One October morning in 2013 a black plume of smoke rose above the north end of Tiananmen Square, marking the spot where a jeep flying a black banner with Arabic writing had rammed into a pedestrian bridge and burst into flames under the iconic portrait of Mao. The occupants of the vehicle—an Uighur and his wife and her mother—had sped through a crowd of pedestrians, killing two tourists and injuring 40 people before igniting gasoline canisters in the vehicle. At first, China’s state media downplayed the incident, and police confiscated video footage of the scene taken by foreign journalists. Later, however, government officials identified the attackers as Xinjiang separatists.
Before that, the last bomb attack in Beijing suspected to have been carried out by Uighur extremists occurred in 1997. An explosion on a public bus during rush hour in a busy shopping district killed at least two people and injured dozens. It followed three simultaneous bus bombings in Xinjiang weeks earlier, shortly after the death of former Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s modern economic reforms.
Uighur extremists have mounted larger and better-planned attacks in recent years, and their tactics appear to be evolving over time. Kunming demonstrated this perhaps better than any other. The change is evident from a comparison with earlier attacks. In 2008, for example, two Uighur men—a taxi driver and a vegetable seller—stole a dump truck in Kashgar, an ancient oasis town in Xinjiang, and rammed it into a group of 70 Chinese police officers on their morning jog, killing 16. But with media controls tightened just 16 days ahead of the Beijing Olympics, the attack went largely unnoticed in China.
The more Beijing downplays smaller symbolic attacks on Chinese security forces and government buildings within Xinjiang, and the longer it continues its policy of tightly controlling media coverage, extremists appear more and more willing to strike civilian targets outside the region to gain publicity and excite widespread terror.
Kunming also suggested deepening ties with international Islamic militant groups. Qin Guangrong, Yunnan’s Communist Party Secretary, the highest political official in the province, said the eight suspects initially tried to cross the border into Vietnam, possibly on their way to join a jihadist group overseas. But when they found their way out of the country barred, they became desperate and returned to Kunming to wage a holy war there.
The attack itself had certain hallmarks of an international jihadist connection. The assailants carried black banners with Arabic writing, rather than the pale blue and white flag that has come to symbolize the East Turkestan Independence Movement. They also included two young women, leading some to speculate they may have been trained abroad, perhaps in the Caucuses, where Islamic terrorist groups have used young women for their ability to bypass security and attract greater media attention through their involvement. Observers have long warned that it is only a matter of time before foreign Islamic terror groups join forces with Xinjiang’s extremists. Philip Potter, an assistant professor of public policy and political science at the University of Michigan, says that China’s growing interest in the natural resources of the Middle East and North Africa, together with its political meddling in that region, has roused the ire of Islamic militant groups and made it a target for terror attacks.
“China’s ongoing security crackdown in Xinjiang has forced the most militant Uyghur separatists into volatile neighboring countries, such as Pakistan, where they are forging strategic alliances with, and even leading, jihadist factions affiliated with al Qaeda and the Taliban,” Potter wrote in a 2013 paper published by Strategic Studies Quarterly. “The result is cross-fertilization between previously isolated movements, leading to the diffusion of tactics and capabilities that have the potential to substantially increase the sophistication and lethality of terrorism in China.”
Under mounting pressure to find a solution to the problem, President Xi convened a special working group of the Politburo in April. He proposed bringing the nation together to form a united “people’s front” against terrorism.
“We should unite the people to build a bronze and iron wall against terrorism,” Xi said, “and make terrorists as unpopular as rats crossing the street that are chased by all.”
Since then, the government has launched a nation-wide campaign to promote public security awareness. The campaign includes anti-terrorism training programs and courses at schools such as the People’s Public Security University, Beijing’s elite police academy. Chinese colleges and research centers have started inviting foreign counter-terrorism experts to come to China as visiting professors and researchers.
For months, police in major cities across the country, such as Shenzhen, have been encouraging citizens to report possible terrorist activities. They have set up reward systems, offering thousands dollars for information on suspicious activities, such as individuals purchasing large quantities of chemicals or gasoline without a permit. Xi’s “bronze and iron wall” is beginning to look much like “Fortress America,” but with greater moral ambiguity, at least in foreign eyes.
The international community has shown considerable reluctance to label the attacks as terrorism. Until recently, they have tended to see them largely as expressions of legitimate political dissent incited by China’s persecution of Uighurs. Describing the attacks, Western media outlets have often placed the word “terrorism” in inverted commas, reflecting suspicion around the government’s lack of transparency on anti-terrorism operations and the restrictions placed on foreign media coverage.
The New York Times, for example, characterized the Kunming attack as a possible “spillover” of “volatile tensions between [Xinjiang’s Uighurs] and the [Chinese] government,” without once using the word terrorism. This echoed earlier remarks made in October 2013 by U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. She declined to describe the Tiananmen suicide attack as terrorism and instead reiterated U.S. support for Uighur human rights.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement earlier this year that such remarks are “irresponsible” and that “double standards” will “not help international cooperation on counter-terrorism.”
China’s anti-terrorism cooperation with Western countries is still in its infancy, partly because Beijing has been reluctant to disclose information on its operations to mistrusting Western governments. According to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism, China-U.S. cooperation in 2013 “remained marginal.”
After 9/11, the U.S. Treasury Department placed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement on its watch list of terrorist organizations but later removed it. Increasingly frustrated with the U.S. response, China released videos in June it says were made by those who carried out the Tiananmen attack. They show Uighur Muslims chanting “God is great” and one of the suspects burning Chinese and American flags.
China’s cooperation with neighboring countries has made greater progress, mainly through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an Eurasian intergovernmental political, economic, and military league. SCO member states—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—set up a special anti-terrorism unit in 2013 to coordinate border control, surveillance and information sharing. Zhang Xinfeng, director of the SCO executive committee, said that the unit provides key intelligence and assistance to China because “terrorist attacks in Xinjiang are closely related to the activities of terrorist, separatist and extremist forces in Central Asia.”
Beijing has started to become more forthcoming about its counter-terrorism measures. And as it does so, Western attitudes appear to be shifting. In response to May’s market bombing in Urumqi, for example, former White House press secretary Jay Carney said in an official statement: “the United States resolutely opposes all forms of terrorism.” It was the first time the Obama administration used the word terrorism in connection with attacks led by Uighur separatists.
Lawmakers in China have sought introduce a clearer and more focused legislative framework for dealing with terrorism since 9/11. Reaching a consensus on what that framework should include, however, has proven difficult. In 2011 the State Council, China’s cabinet, compiled a draft bill to be submitted to the National People’s Congress. It includes specific definitions of terrorism, a major step forward as China has not previously defined terrorism in a legal sense and currently tries such cases under its Criminal Law. This year Xinjiang reviewed its own anti-terrorism law, the first time any regional government has included one in its legislative agenda.
With new legislation now in the works, Beijing is focusing on keeping people informed and prepared for any future attacks. In July, the National Anti-Terrorism Leading Group Office distributed an updated counter-terrorism handbook, which calls on citizens to watch for anything out of the ordinary, such as strange noises, odd smells, or neighbors behaving suspiciously. In the event of abduction by terrorists, people are urged to “stay calm, not resist, and trust the government,” according to state-run news agency Xinhua. Public security awareness and the new legal framework are just supporting elements of a greater pro-active counter-terrorism campaign that includes hard measures. Major cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, have stationed special armed police in busy markets and train stations.
Security at border crossings, airports, seaports, and railway stations has also been beefed up. For the first time, regular police have been armed with guns and placed at Beijing’s central subway stations around Tiananmen Square.
Beijing appears to have taken Xi’s call for a “bronze and iron wall” to heart in a more literal sense. In April the city installed bronze-colored anti-terror railings along Chang’an Avenue, the massive 10-lane road directly before Tiananmen Gate, which is used for parades during important national celebrations. The railings, manufactured in Inner Mongolia, are constructed from specially reinforced metals capable of withstanding a direct collision. They went largely unnoticed until a Volkswagen sedan lost control and crashed into one, causing substantial damage to the vehicle but barely denting the railing.
While Beijing is determined to secure national stability and ethnic unity, it remains to be seen how effective its “bronze and iron wall” approach will prove in country already blighted by widening social and economic disparities. A similar “bronze and iron wall against separatism” campaign was tried with some success in Tibet in 2008. But that campaign was not on a national scale, and it did not face the same radical elements that inform militant Islam.
Paul Nash is Senior Editor at Diplomatic Courier. Lucrezia Seu is the Asia-Pacific Producer for RAI Italia, Italy’s national public broadcasting company, based in Beijing. She previously worked for CNN’s Beijing bureau and is a graduate of Tsinghua University, China, and the University of Westminster, England.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's September/October 2014 print edition.
