MCLC: Antiterror double standard

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Antiterror double standard
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (11/16/15)
Standing With France, China Complains of Antiterror Double Standard
By Chris Buckley
The Oriental Pearl Tower, dominating the darkened Shanghai skyline, glowed blue, white and red in solidarity. President Xi Jinping condemned the carnage as an “act of barbarism.” Bouquets — especially white chrysanthemums, the traditional flower of mourning — piled up at the French Embassy in Beijing.
China joined the rest of the world over the weekend in outrage and sympathy over armed attacks on Friday night that killed at least 129 people in Paris. But along with revulsion, Chinese leaders and many citizens also voiced a more complex mix of expectations and emotions, rooted in rival views of the country’s own problems.
Echoing complaints from the Chinese government, some accused the West of a double standard in its response to terrorism, while others accused Chinese leaders of the same by offering more public sympathy to France than to victims of China’s own disasters.
“This is a traumatic time for the French people, and on behalf of the Chinese government and people, and in my own personal capacity, I condemn this barbarous action in the strongest possible terms,” Mr. Xi said on Saturday, shortly after the assaults.
Later, during meetings with other Group of 20 leaders gathering in Antalya, Turkey, Mr. Xi obliquely pressed the argument that other countries should back the Chinese government’s policies on terrorism. These include the contentious position that increasinglydeadly conflict in Xinjiang, an ethnically divided region of western China, is the work of separatist forces under the spell of religious extremism.
“Step up cooperation in counterterrorism. Both symptoms and root causes must be addressed,” Mr. Xi said on Sunday. “There must not be double standards.”
His foreign minister, Wang Yi, was more explicit. Foreign governments should make China’s campaign against Uighur separatists a part of the international struggle against terrorism, Mr. Wang said on Sunday. Chinese officials often assert that Uighur violence in Xinjiang is the work of a shadowy separatist movement, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. But many foreign experts say that group is defunct, barely exists or has no effective fighting force.
“There can be no double standards,” Mr. Wang said. “China is also a victim of terrorism, and attacking the ‘East Turkestan’ terrorist forces represented by the East Turkestan Islamic Movement should become an important part of international counterterrorism.”
Xinjiang is divided between ethnic Han, many of them recent migrants, and Uighurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic people, and the region has undergone deepening convulsions of violence since 2009, reflecting heightening Uighur estrangement from Chinese policies.
While Chinese officials say a terrorist conspiracy is behind the violence there, many human rights groups and regional experts say the assaults, with cleavers and crude bombs, are almost always primitive and homegrown acts by young Uighurs who have embraced extremism out of despair.
“I think that the Chinese government is mostly speaking to its domestic audience, to deliver the message that there might be violence in Xinjiang, but this is part of a larger problem,” Nicholas Bequelin, the regional director for East Asia at Amnesty International who has long studied developments in Xinjiang, said in a telephone interview. “I think they’re also trying to gain a bit of legitimacy in the eyes of the international community by saying, ‘We’re doing the same thing.’ ”
But Western governments are unlikely to fall in line behind China’s policies in Xinjiang, despite a recent visit there by the British chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.
“China is not getting a lot of cooperation with any government on counterterrorism,” Mr. Bequelin said, “because they don’t share and nobody really trusts China’s determination of who is a separatist and what constitutes terrorism.”
Chinese security officials have already indicated that they will look for ways to enhance the already pervasive controls in Xinjiang. The government’s leading policy group on counterterrorism met on Sunday and resolved to “strengthen security protection and intelligence and early warning,” said a summary issued by the Ministry of Public Security.
The government’s positions in Xinjiang have widespread support among the Han, who make up the vast majority of China’s population. And online denunciations of the killings in Paris were mixed with accusations that Western governments and the news media have responded coldly to victims of Uighur violence.
“Each time our country has a disaster, how do they report on it, the Western countries distort the true facts,” one commenter wrote on Weibo, a popular microblog service, responding to news that the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai was bathed in the colors of the French flag. “When our countrymen are attacked, I don’t see foreigners being so sympathetic,” another said.
But not all the comments went the government’s way. Some asked why Shanghai had lit up its night sky for people killed in Paris but had not done the same for Chinese citizens, including the 36 killed in a New Year’s Eve stampede near the Shanghai riverfront in the final hours of 2015, or indeed after deadly attacks in Xinjiang.
“Did we turn on the lights when disaster struck Xinjiang or Tianjin?” asked one commenter, apparently referring to thechemical warehouse explosions in the northern Chinese city in August that killed 173 people.
Adam Wu contributed research.
Follow Chris Buckley on Twitter @ChuBailiang.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 16, 2015
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