Chinastan

September 4, 2008

Author: Staff Writer

Source: The Economist

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12060405

On the roads crossing the dusty fields of cotton and maize around the oasis city of Kashgar, China’s police are on alert. Terrorists, as they call them, have been stepping up their attacks. Officers at checkpoints turn back foreigners venturing towards troublespots. Citizens entering Kashgar line up by the roadside to have their identity cards scanned.

Kashgar’s recent troubles began on August 4th when the police said a lorry was driven into a group of border guards jogging in the heart of the city. Home-made explosives were detonated and the police were attacked with knives. Sixteen policemen were killed, bang in front of a posh hotel. Just ahead of the opening of the Beijing Olympics, the incident unnerved the government. It blamed two “terrorists”, arrested on the spot. That is its usual term for Muslim militants pushing for the independence of Xinjiang, a vast Central Asian expanse of mountain and desert.

Despite an intensified campaign against potential troublemakers, violence has continued. On August 10th, with the games under way in Beijing, 2,800km (1,750 miles) to the east, assailants threw home-made bombs at a police station in the town of Kuqa during the night, killing a guard. Again, they were Uighurs, members of the mostly Muslim, Turkic ethnic group estimated to make up nearly half Xinjiang’s 20m population. They let off several more bombs in Kuqa’s broad, deserted shopping streets, killing a Uighur civilian.