One country’s terrorist, another’s freedom fighter: the Chinese edition

Araminta Wordsworth | March 5, 2014 1:00 PM ET

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MARK RALSTON / AFP / Getty ImagesToo late: Chinese police in Kunming

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Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe.  Today: China’s response to the deaths of more than 30 people in Kunming provides a revealing glimpse into Beijing’s mindset.

State news media dubbed the attack “China’s 9/11″ and rounded on the U.S. embassy in Beijing and Western news outlets for their callousness in responding to the incident.

This seems to be something of an overreaction.

To recap, 9/11 involved a far-flung and ambitious Al-Qaeda plot that led the hijacking of four airliners, the immolation of the World Trade Centre in New York, and the deaths of  almost 3,000 people.

In contrast, the Kunming incident was the work of Uighurs from the far western province of Xinjiang — if Chinese officials are to be believed.  Armed with knives, they killed between 29 and 34 people at the train station in Kunming.

And yes, it was shocking, but so were the deaths of last week of more than 50 Nigerian students burned and hacked to death by Boko Haram terrorists; or Muslim Rohingya murdered by Buddhist mobs in Burma. Chinese media didn’t waste much time on their horrible fates.

It’s all about control. What has really shaken Beijing is its inability to prevent the attack, despite the huge apparatus of state security. Just like Falun Gong before them, a few Uighur activists succeeded in tweaking the tiger’s tail.

An editorial in the People’s Daily condemns the western media’s hypocrisy, which it clearly links to suggestions Uighurs might have reasons for their discontent.

This was an act of terrorism directed against the whole of humanity, civilization and society …

Faced with such tragedy and such unambiguous facts, it is a hard-hearted and cynical media that would engage in such hypocrisy. Don’t they love to talk about “human rights”? Did they not see the pictures of innocent victims lying in pools of their own blood? Did they show even the slightest concern for the victims and their “human rights”? Should such an event occur in America, how would they respond to the incident? Would they be quite so coy about describing the murderers as “terrorists”?

Chinese media are also using the ever-popular foreign interference claim, say The Guardian’s Jonathan Kalman and Tania Branigan.

Xinhua quoted navy rear-admiral Yin Zhuo as saying: “The well-planned attack was not an issue of [ethnicity] or religion, it was an issue of terrorism with links to terrorist forces out of the country” …

Said James Leibold, senior lecturer in politics and Asian studies at La Trobe University, “The default position of the government has always been to blame foreigners and never admit that ethnic relations in China might have serious problems.”

The BBC’s John Sudworth believes some skepticism is in order.

No details, other than that broad claim, have been released. But if true, the attack would represent a dramatic escalation of China’s simmering Uighur problem … China’s harsh security crackdown has made it next to impossible for international journalists to report from Xinjiang and to assess the real strength of radical Islamist and separatist sentiment on the ground.

The consensus, at least up until now, has been that it is probably exaggerated by the Chinese government in order to justify the restrictions it places on Uighur religion, language and culture.

Coincidentally, or not, the Kunming attack follows the arrest of Chinese scholar Ilham Tohti, one of the few people brave enough to criticize Chinese policies in Xinjiang. He’s been accused of fomenting separatism — a.k.a., splittism, chief of the alleged crimes of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader — reports The New York Times’ Andrew Jacobs.

An economics professor in Beijing, Mr. Tohti, 44, was an outspoken but careful critic of Chinese policies in Xinjiang, an energy-rich region that adjoins several Central Asian nations and is something of a geopolitical minefield. Tensions between Uighurs and the Chinese security forces have turned increasingly violent, with almost weekly clashes that in recent months have taken more than 100 lives …

Under Chinese law, even highlighting ethnic problems in places like Xinjiang and Tibet can be seen as threatening national unity because the state refuses to acknowledge that such frictions exist.