Wilful blindness to reality a poor strategy
Beijing appears powerless to prevent a fledgling insurgency in the northwest, in part because it cannot grasp the origins. reports from Urumqi.
The most unsettling feature of Gongyuan Beijie street in Urumqi is not the bristling circles of soldiers with their submachineguns, the swarms of plainclothes police, or the sense of shock among the locals. It’s the cleanliness.
Within three hours of this leafy side street becoming a blazing, corpse-strewn war zone last Thursday, it had gone back to being a leafy side street. Confronted on Thursday with the bloodiest single terrorist incident in recent memory, in which 39 people died, authorities in this, the capital of Xinjiang province, resorted to a clean-up that ensured they could tell the world ‘‘nothing to see here’’.
That wilful blindness to reality is a poor strategy on the part of Beijing, and is rapidly becoming one of the most deadly pretences of a government addicted to fallacy. On the evening of the Urumqi bombings, China’s state broadcaster interviewed various locals, all of them appropriately baffled that terrorists would carry out such an atrocity when the Communist party is doing such a good job in Xinjiang, and has been such a positive force for the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority.
The scary thing is that the party may be equally mystified. For years, it has used its propaganda machine to denounce Xinjiangbased violence as the work of separatists and terrorists, but the past few weeks of horrific bloodshed in Urumqi, and in Xinjiang province more generally, suggest that China has an insurgency on its hands; that it has misjudged its ability to cope with radicalised Islam and that the ‘‘nothing to see here’’ myth is imploding.
A combined suicide bombing and knife rampage in Urumqi last month took place while President Xi Jinping was visiting nearby, and Xinjiang was under the tightest security that China can muster. Jihadist-style terrorism has arrived in Xinjiang, and Beijing has no real way of stopping it, and has not even begun to penetrate its origins.
Urumqi is a gleaming outpost of the great China narrative of economic growth and urbanisation. Skyscrapers soar against snowy mountains, billboards promote luxury apartment complexes with evocative names; there is a distinctively Chinese throb of commerce.
According to Beijing, Xinjiang’s Uighurs, mostly Muslim, should be grateful for all this prosperity – and it is possible that many are.
The problem, however, is that it comes with conditions that most find unacceptable. Uighurs complain that their religion and culture are repressed, and that the influx of millions of ethnic Han Chinese has made that process all the more unbearable as the benefits of growth accrue more readily to the incomers. These grievances have been growing for at least 15 years – the same period in which Islam has become an increasingly efficient radicalising force for the aggrieved around the world.
Many Uighurs are appalled at the bloodshed – but they understand where the anger comes from.
China has attempted to curtail the visible trappings of Islam, the beards and the veils, rather than the fundamentals of why it happens.
Everyone seems to have a story of Chinese heavy-handedness, particularly in the southern towns of Xinjiang. One woman told me about a relative who was waiting outside a maternity hospital where his wife was giving birth to their first child. As he received the joyous news, police arrived and pressed guns to his head, and ripped savagely at his beard. What did not come off in their hands was shaved off at the police station.
The party’s great problem is that it has expended colossal efforts fortifying itself against the grand notional threats of democracy, but has overlooked the very pure hatred that can be generated by dishing out low-level ill-treatment.