The New Dominion

The buzz about the terrorist capabilities of armed groups based in Xinjiang was given a gruesome new twist Monday at 8:00AM when two individuals attacked a group of jogging policemen in the city of Kashgar in apparently 3 stages: first, ramming the group with a dump truck, second, leaping out and attacking them with knives, then thrid, the use of explosives. Western News Agencies are having a field day over this incident (here is the Guardian, AFP, BBC) and many now are placing the incident as their front page top story. But as is always the case, they are having a difficult time speculating past the Xinhua article on which it’s all based. And of course, natural instinct is to dig even further, by taking a look at the Mandarin language version of the article.

And as usual, there are some interesting points to look at when the three categories of news stories are taken as a whole – firstly, a number of the Western agencies are reporting that a police station itself was attacked, going so far to say that the explosives part of the attack involved throwing grenades directly into the police barracks. But the Xinhua article in English now says that the attack was carried out as the joggers were going past the Yiquan hotel (strangely called “Yiquan” in Xinhua’s own English version of the article, in Chinese, it’s called 怡金, or Yijin), 200 meters away from the station, and that there are now witnesses who were guests at the hotel. This is just most likely information getting more clear as time passes but for now the Western reports are still a little behind. Nothing underhanded, I believe.

However, another conspicuous point of note is the difference currently between the way the state news agency is covering the incident in its English language and Mandarin language presses. We’ve noted before here on The New Dominion that there is a clear tendency for Xinhua to cover things differently depending on if they’re talking to their Western audience (English) or their domestic audience (Mandarin). In English, the story is very prominently located on the front page, and the language makes it very clear that this was a “terrorist attack” and that the dreaded specter ETIM/TIP was probably involved.

Terrorist plot was suspected in the violent attack targeting border police in China’s westernmost city of Kashi, which left at least 16 policemen killed and 16 others injured Monday.

The regional public security department said it had got intelligence that the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” planned to make terrorist attacks during Aug. 1-8, just ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing.

Yet in Chinese, the story is modestly buried way near the bottom of small-font links (albeit on the front page) as I’ve captured in this picture:

Furthermore, the actual Xinhua article itself is probably an eighth of the size of the article created by the same agency on the same incident in English, stating only that two “criminal suspects” (犯罪嫌疑人) carried out a “surprise attack” (袭击). There is no reference to terrorism or ETIM whatsoever in this carefully camoflagued post. Again, as we have seen before, there is a strategy that drives the state to report the scary gory details to the foreign press but remain subdued at home (though the effect of private reporting – we’re talking blogs and twitter clones – remains unscrutinized for now).

We’ll stay on top of this story and report any more details that may come out. Something very unprecedented is that the attacks were neither remote, as with timed bus bombs, nor suicide, as with the hijacking attempt earlier this year, but ended with the arrest of both attackers, one with a “leg injury”, were apprehended, perhaps giving us more of an opportunity to discover (after the Chinese interrogators get to work and after the censorship bureaus decide what’s kosher) more about the motivations and origins of the attacks.