The New Dominion

I found on Reuters an amusing article describing the harebrained plot of three Shandong natives to pay off some rather steep gambling debts they dug themselves into. Common sense says that when you’re in such a bind the best route to take is extortion, and you can’t extort unless you’re dark, scary, and powerful, armed with the ability to threaten, coerce, and my goodness, if necessary, kill. Or at least the ability to pretend to be in that situation. I think we’re all pretty certain that 3 unscrupulous Qingdao fellas wouldn’t be in a good position to extort, say, 2.08 million yuan, so it was up to them to find a mask to don, something that would get the fat cats shivering in their boots, scared enough to transmit some digital Maos to the right bank accounts. Hm… what kind of appearance to go for? What could strike enough fear in the wary hearts of the rich and powerful of Qingdao, which is the future site of a few Olympic events?

Of course the answer is obvious: Uyghur terrorists!

So Mr. Sun,  23, Mr. Wu, 25, and Mr. Wang, 41 (Good Uyghur names, ah-yep) called in to an as of yet unamed company posing as East Turkestan terrorists and demanding that the above amount be wired to their bank account, or else! Or else they would blow up something. The conclusion hardly need be stated: the police were notified and the unlucky idiots were immediately identified by the personal information attached to the provided bank accounts and quickly arrested.

And that’s pretty funny. It’s funny because the guys put some effort into concocting the appropriate alternate identity without bothering to wonder if their bank accounts would give them away. It’s funny because when in April details about alleged foiled terrorist plans emerged, it really seemed crystal clear from the terrorists’ purported arsenal - athletes as hostages, poisoning foodstuffs, suicide bombers - that money really wasn’t a top priority for the phantom ETIM villains.

But in spite of everything our Chinese Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe got wrong, I think they got one tiny thing right, and that’s if there’s one costume to adopt that while cause people to sweat under the collar, if there’s one shadowy specter that will get give cadres the heeby-jeebies and get the armed police moving, it’s the Muslim Uyghur Terrorist. With the silly Olympic Mind Games occuring with the torch in Xinjiang and Tibet (China gets gold for the Fool-The-Terrorist-Switcheroo event) and ghost plots that may or may not have been real appearing and disappearing into the pre-Olympic haze, I think it’s becoming clear that the image of Uyghurs is evolving in the Han popular imagination. Sure, the dancing and singing part is there, but that’s only one half the dual mold that Uyghurs and jammed into - the other half, most readres will know, was “theives.” We saw it a few weeks ago when we looked at some joke maps circulating on the internet. And anyone who has told Han friends that they’re going to Xinjiang undoubtedly was told to watch out for pickpockets. But for the sake of building the foundation of a secure and stable Olympics, a new domestic enemy has been fabricated - no longer Uyghur the theif, now its Uyghur the terrorist. And even a few dumb saps in Shandong “know” that.