The New Dominion

I’m going to state right off the bat, unequivocally, that since portraying a truthful picture of affairs in Xinjiang is one of the top goals of The New Dominion, we’re automatically cautious when dealing with what we believe to be false or even outright fabricated reports about Xinjiang-related events. However, another important part of our goals is the desire to be more than a journalistic-type blog and to explore Xinjiang from all sorts of perspectives - historical, cultural, linguistic, in addition to journalistic - and so we naturally have decided in the past to report on false and fabricated “stories” with a Xinjiang bent circulating on the grapevine: a comical example being HIV-laced kebabs, a more sinister example being a hostage-film created and Pakistan and customized for a Uyghur speaking audience, erroneously attributed by a third party site as depicting the actions of a East Turkestan group. Regardless of the falsity of the events, we at the The New Dominion still believe there is significance that Uyghurs are being depicted in such a way in the first place, and so feel it is a requirement to report on them, with the proper amount of skepticism and caution, in order to remain faithful to our objectives.

So, having said that, without further ado, I present the next blip on the Uyghur radar as we draw closer and closer to the Olympics, courtesy a Hong Kong tabloid via the Shanghaiist. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words…

At around 9:00 AM on Monday, during peak traffic hours, a Shanghai bus filled with passengers caught on fire, resulting in 3 deaths and 12 injuries. The first official reports released about the event used the words “explosion incident” (爆炸案) but now that two days have passed and eyewitness accounts have proliferated, specifically about whether or not people in the neighborhood actually heard an explosion (most witnesses did not), most news stories are now using the phrase “combustion accident” (爆燃事故). There are a few certain things floating around - first of all, the police are being unusually ambiguous about the cause of the incident, deciding only to divulge that someone had brought “flammable materials” on board, thus ruling out an equipment failure of sorts - no word yet on whether or not it was deliberate, and whether or not there are suspects. The second certainty: with such ambiguity floating around such a sensational story, there’s no way in hell that nobody’s going to capitalize on it, and who else to do the job but a newspaper based in Hong Kong, China’s capitalism capital? While more official outlets are cautiously using words like “incident” and “combustion,” Hong Kong’s Apple Daily unabashedly proclaims in huge font on its front page: “SUICIDE STYLE BUS BOMBING IN SHANGHAI” (上海自杀式炸巴士). The usual sensationalist speculation one would expect from such an introduction (What, precisely, is suicide style? Something I can buy at Hot Topic? I thought a suicide bombing was pretty much all or nothing…) has already been translated by the impeccable Roland Soong at ESWN, but here at The New Dominion we’re more interested in another part of the article.

对于巴士起火的原因，上海市公安局在其官方网站上发布的公告称： 「经初步勘查，火灾是乘客携带易燃物品上车所致，有关情况警方在进一步调查中。 」不过，消息人士透露，有人用皮囊带汽油上车再点燃，结果引起车厢大火和爆炸，疑犯一度传出已被烧死，但后来证实已被拘捕，身份尚不得而知。
公 安部早前公布在新疆破获东伊运恐怖团伙时曾指，该团伙预谋于5月份开始在北京、上海等地进行投毒、爆炸等恐怖破坏活动，图谋干扰破坏北京奥运会，而北京奥 运圣火将于5月20日至21日在上海传递，上海巴士在早上返工高时间发生爆炸，令上海市民和内地网民议论纷纷，对公安的公告更冷嘲热讽，讥笑以后搭巴士要 像搭飞机一样执行安检。

As to the cause of the bus fire, the Shanghai Municipal PSB has published this official announcement on its website: “According to the initial investigation, the fire was caused by a passenger bringing flammable materials aboard the bus, the police are continuing the investigation of all relevant matters.” However, a informant has divulged to us that someone brought gasoline on board using a leather bag to ignite a fire, thus causing the resulting inferno and explosion inside the bus carriage. At first it was said that the suspect perished in the fire, but later it was confirmed that the suspect was arrested; the suspect’s identity remains unknown.

The Ministry of Public Security previously has made public that investigations following the breakup of a East Turkestan Islamic Movement terrorist cell in Xinjiang uncovered the cell’s intent to begin terrorist activities involving poisoning and explosions in Beijing and Shanghai starting from May, with the intent to disrupt the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Shanghai leg of the Olympic Torch Relay on May 20th and 21st as well as carry out attacks on buses during morning rush hour, causing Shanghai residents and mainlander Chinese netizens to discuss the matter and sarcastically suggest that boarding buses should have the same security preventive measures as airports.

Thus, our Hong Kong rag never bothers to explicitly create a connection between the “combustion incident” and East Turkestan terrorism, but, the obvious implication is there in that the Ministry of Public Security allegedly uncovered Shanghai bus attack plots in the previous crackdown. Also amusing, but a side note, is a sort of Hong Kong scorn for mainlanders getting their just desserts - the newspaper conspicuously uses the word for mainlander Chinese netizens as those who laughed and scorned the potential of an attack originating from the dark depths of the New Frontier.

I don’t even want to acknowledge the material by analyzing how suspect the article is - a single newspaper, an already sensationalist reputation, blaring loudly out of the one place where censorship is sort of in check, with a single, shady anonymous source - but as sensationalist as it may be, we must acknowledge the fact that the Shanghai PSB was sort of asking for it by being unusually scarce with the details. In fact, I’d say that the paucity of details divulged by government apparatuses leads one to conclude that it wasn’t a Xinjiang-based terrorist attack given the government’s eagerness to lay the blame at least four times after attempted plots and preemptive strikes in and around Xinjiang. There are differences though - a successful terrorist attack in the throbbing heart of one of China’s model metropolises is quite a different matter than a botched hijacking over Gansu province - but, unfortunately, there’s no use speculating unless the government decides to come forward with a little more information. We can rest assured that the bigwigs of the Shanghai PSB are discussing just that as they scan over what they know so far about the incident.

What we can wonder about, however, is the swiftness and enthusiasm with which an independent Hong Kong newspaper strongly suggests that “Uyghurs done it.” Why? It has already become quite apparent that the concept of the “dangerous Muslim terrorist Uyghur” is gaining currency in the Han social imagination, especially as the Olympics approach, through viral rumors about rogue, AIDS infected Uyghurs turning their kebabs into biological weapons to officially propagated accounts of minority shenanigans in apartment blocks leading the buildings’ Han Chinese residents to rethink whether or not they heard grenade explosions. Does the Shanghai bus bombing, I mean, bus burning resonate within existing ideas about dangerous Uyghurs? It most certainly does - as it was only a few months ago when another rambunctious Uyghur allegedly entered a mass transportation vehicle with some flammable material in an suicidal attempt to set the whole thing ablaze.

As much as we like to see Hong Kong as the ideal implementation of “One Country, Two Systems” policy, a bastion of capitalist-driven democracy and free thinking, I think that the freedom of press in Hong Kong can work both ways, and that we’re seeing through this tabloid a rare instance where mainlander nationalistic sentiment has only Hong Kong as a valve to express itself while state-run media outlets on the mainland obediently await the verdict on “what happened” as it is being decided right now by a very cautious Shanghai PSB - despite, of course, the can’t-be-helped swipe at mainlander sarcasm. Just as an unchecked, unedited, and unsupervised Internet has played an increasing role in the West as a barometer for “what everyone is thinking” regardless of journalistic integrity or credibility, Hong Kong’s freedom of press may in this instance have provided a voice to the type of mainlanders who refused to eat kebabs after receiving harrowing text messages. And with so many Chinese still simmering over the various catastrophes that occurred during international legs of the torch relay (a sentiment likely shared by Hong Kongers given the turnout at the Hong Kong portion of the relay), theres no wondering that the Chinese are ultra sensitive to threats to the integrity of the Olympics, and by proxy, national pride. With the torch abroad, the “Tibet splittests” insane enough to attack a woman in a wheelchair were the bad guys… now that the torch is in China, Chinese audiences are perhaps turning inward to find their enemies - and unfortunately, the rather rash conclusions the Hong Kong paper has jumped to indicate that Uyghurs may be the prime scapegoat. Should this be the case then it’s no mystery at all that the model bridge between China and the West would be the first place to gleefully express a gathering suspicion directed at the indigenous peoples of exotic Xinjiang.