Heather Timmons puts in context Saturday’s knife attack, which the Chinese are attributing to “Xinjiang separatists”:
Tensions in resource-rich western China have been escalating for years, as Han Chinese emigrate to the [Xinjiang] region, in many cases taking the best jobs while locals, especially those who don’t speak Mandarin, face widespread poverty and growing unemployment. The Chinese government has clashed with Xinjiang citizens many times in recent months, resulting in dozens of deaths, and six weeks ago authorities detained the group’s best-known moderate voice, economics professor Ilham Tohti. He was recently charged with “inciting separatism,” a charge his lawyer and wife deny.
But international terrorism experts and influential Chinese commentators believe China’s policies in the Western region are just one factor contributing to rising terrorist activity like this weekend’s attack. China’s economic rise, and particularly its growing reach in the Middle East and North Africa, areas contested by extremist Islamic jihadi organizations, could also be fueling terrorism inside the country itself.
Evan Osnos has more on why “militant Uighurs are motivated largely by resentment of their relationship to Han Chinese”:
Xinjiang’s Uighur population has dropped from ninety-five per cent, in the early twentieth century, to forty per cent, in 2008, thanks to an explicit migration policy intended to bind the country more tightly. On the ground, the development policy has created vast new infrastructure and economic activity, but, crucially, it has also accentuated the socioeconomic gaps between Hans and Uighurs. In Xinjiang today, Hans hold more than thirty five per cent of the region’s the high-income jobs, while Uighurs hold thirteen per cent. The ratio is widening by the year, fuelled by, and creating, even more resentment and suspicion. The events of 3/1 will make that worse.
Nisid Hajari argues that the “Chinese might want to think twice before they start adopting the U.S.’s politically charged, post-Sept. 11 enthusiasm for labeling terrorists and terror attacks”:
The Chinese regime has tagged Uighur separatists as “terrorists” at least since Sept. 11, 2001, when Beijing sought to link long-running tensions in Xinjiang to the newly sexy “war on terror.” The discovery of several Uighur men in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion bolstered China’s claims. Some of the fighters were indeed looking for insurgent training; others may have been traveling through the country on their way to the Middle East.
But of the 22 Uighurs who landed up in Guantanamo Bay, U.S. officials eventually determined none had any real links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban leadership. Indeed, more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, concrete ties between Uighur extremists and the global jihadist movement are hard to corroborate.
Many Chinese are furious, however, that the US government and Western media outlets have declined to use the t-word:
A post by the official account of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing fueled the outrage. It did not, as many Chinese had hoped, characterize the attack as terrorism, but instead called it a “senseless act of violence.” Almost all of the more than 50,000 comments left on the post accused the U.S. Embassy of a double standard when it comes to violence in China. “If the Kunming attack were a ‘horrific, senseless act of violence,'” the most up-voted comment reads, “then the 9/11 attack in New York City would be a ‘regrettable traffic accident.'” (The United Nations Security Council released a statement late Sunday condemning “in the strongest terms the terrorist attack.”)
Some of the fallout from the embassy’s statement stems from an unfortunate translation. “Senseless violence,” a common diplomatic phrase the Obama administration has also used to describe the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, which killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, read as “meaningless violence” in Chinese.
Julie Makinen points out that the attack took place far from the Uighur heartland of Xinjiang province:
Analysts said the location and nature of Saturday’s attack — a “soft target” in the balmy, tourist-friendly capital of Yunnan province in southwestern China — indicates further bloodshed well beyond Xinjiang’s borders is likely. “It shows that Uighurs are, like Chechens in Russia, expressing their discontent throughout the country, not just where they are based,” said Dru Gladney, a professor at Pomona College and author of “Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic.”
“It’s a sad day for China and a sad day for Uighurs,” he added. “Many Han think all Uighurs are violent, and this could lead to a real backlash.”
The Dish 