‘China’s Chechnya:’ Terrorism in Xinjiang

It’s not really “China’s Chechnya” yet, but the insurgency in Xinjiang is growing fast. Incidents of anti-Chinese violence are getting bigger and much more frequent. Since March, 176 people have been killed in six separate attacks on Chinese police and government officials, local collaborators and ordinary Chinese residents of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwestern China, and the authorities don’t seem to have a clue what to do about it.

The Uighur attackers have mostly used knives or explosives in their attacks (guns are hard to get in China), but nobody has suggested that they are so technologically backward that their bombs come with long, trailing fuses that have to be lit by hand. Yet Chinese police in Xinjiang last month seized tens of thousands of boxes of matches.

“The confiscation has enabled us to strengthen control over important elements of public security and thus eliminate potential security threats,” said the Kashgar police. The police website in Changji declared they had acted “to ensure matches would not be used by terrorist groups and extremist individuals to conduct criminal activities.” No disrespect intended (well, maybe a little), but these are not serious people.

The rebels, on the other hand, are very serious people. Like most independence movements of the colonial era, they believe you have to take the war to the homeland of the “oppressor” if you can. One of those recent attacks was not in Xinjiang, but in Kunming in southwestern China, where a band of eight knife-wielding Uighurs killed 29 ordinary Chinese citizens and wounded 143 in the main railway station.

Another standard tactic in this sort of war is the use of violence to deter...