Financial Times
Jamil Anderlini and Christian Shepherd in Beijing
November 17, 2015
China’s government responded to the Paris terror attacks last Friday with condolences and stepped up security measures at home — but the country has also taken the opportunity to criticise the west for what it calls “double standards”.
Barely a day after the carnage on the streets of the French capital, China’s foreign minister called for an international crackdown on the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement”, a group many international experts and human rights groups say is defunct.
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“China holds that joint forces should be formed to fight against terrorism, and that both the symptoms and root causes of the issue should be addressed,” state media quoted the minister, Wang Yi, as saying. “Double standards shouldn’t be allowed.”
The ruling Communist party blames ETIM for a series of attacks across China in recent years by ethnic Uighurs, a Muslim minority group from the western Chinese desert region of Xinjiang, many of whom support independence for their homeland. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks on the US, China convinced Washington and the UN to place ETIM on a list of terrorist organisations.
But despite a series of increasingly bloody attacks in recent years, human rights groups and most other countries say China does not provide adequate evidence to prove that these attacks are co-ordinated by ETIM or any other functioning terrorist group.
Rights groups argue that most of the attacks by Uighurs, virtually all of which have been carried out with knives or crude explosives, are spontaneous acts of homegrown terror perpetrated by desperate young people with grievances against Chinese rule.
“In Xinjiang there is almost a complete lack of access for international journalists and human rights organisations,” said Maya Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Without any kind of transparency it is impossible to really assess the extent to which China has any terrorism threats and it is rather opportunistic of the Chinese government to use the Paris attacks to call for a greater crackdown in Xinjiang.”
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China’s state-controlled media insisted there was a more sinister reason for international caution when it came to accepting Beijing’s claims of terrorist threats.
“Due to their deep-rooted bias and double standard, some western countries and their media refuse to recognise the violence and attacks masterminded by extremists in China’s Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region as acts of terrorism,” the party-controlled Global Times wrote in an editorial. “In their eyes, only terrorist attacks that happen on western soil can be called acts of terrorism.”
In March last year an attack by knife-wielding Uighur assailants in a train station in south-west China left 31 people dead and 141 injured. In May last year, in an attack at a market in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, 30 people were killed and 94 injured by assailants using knives and simple bombs.
“By denouncing double standards the Chinese government is asking the international community to accept wholesale their claims of terrorism but we know these claims are very problematic, they are very politicised and they go far beyond anti-state violence or violence against civilians to include peaceful dissent and so on,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director for Amnesty International.
“The Chinese government is paying a price for having lost credibility because for many years it has exaggerated, manufactured, or distorted claims of terrorist attacks, counter-terrorism operations and the nature of the threat that is present in Xinjiang.”
Mr Bequelin pointed out that peaceful “separatism”, the belief that Xinjiang or Tibet should not be part of China, is an offence under Chinese law that is often conflated by Beijing with “terrorism”.
“Under Chinese law holding this opinion by itself is a crime and sharing this opinion or agitating people to this end is also a national security crime,” he said.
