Hundreds of black clad, rifle-toting soldiers took to the streets of Urumqi as officials announce terrorist activity will be \u2018smashed to pieces\u2019<\/p>\n
Tom Phillips in Beijing
Monday 20 February 2017 01.59 EST<\/p>\n
Thousands of heavily armed troops have paraded through cities in China\u2019s troubled far west with officials there vowing a \u201cthunderous\u201d anti-terror crackdown after an apparent upsurge in deadly ethnic violence.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of black clad, rifle-toting soldiers took to the streets of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang<\/a>, on Saturday, according to local media reports.<\/p>\n Zhu Hailun, the region\u2019s deputy Communist party chief, told the assembly authorities would wage a unflinching campaign against the Islamic terrorists and separatists they blame for the bloodshed.<\/p>\n \u201cWe shall load our guns, draw our swords from their sheaths, throw hard punches and relentlessly beat, and strike hard without flinching at terrorists who must be brought down a peg or two,\u201d Zhu was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinjiang Daily<\/a> newspaper on Sunday.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the caring and strong leadership of the Communist Party Central Committee, where President Xi Jinping serves as the core \u2026 the strong support of 23m people from all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, and with the powerful fist of the People\u2019s Democratic Dictatorship, all separatist activities and all terrorists shall be smashed to pieces,\u201d Zhu added.<\/p>\n The Urumqi parade was the third such event to be staged in Xinjiang in under a week.<\/p>\n Thousands of troops paraded through Hotan<\/a>, a city in southern Xinjiang, last Thursday while Kashgar, a Silk Road trading hub near China\u2019s border with Kyrgyzstan, saw a similar march the following day. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are ready for [combat] and we definitely will win,\u201d a Kashgar-based special forces operative named as Diar Dago told the Xinjiang Daily. <\/p>\n The parades come after two separate eruptions of bloodletting claimed more than a dozen lives in Xinjiang, a sprawling border region which has been blighted by repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence and terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n Last Tuesday three machete-wielding attackers were reported to have been gunned down by police after they killed five civilians in Hotan\u2019s Pishan county.<\/p>\n On 28 December four assailants were reportedly shot dead<\/a> after using home-made explosives to launch a deadly assault on a government compound in Karakax county.<\/p>\n China<\/a> says Islamic extremists and separatists are behind such attacks although human rights activists suspect much of the violence is driven by resentment at Communist party rule among the region\u2019s predominantly Muslim ethnic Uighur population.<\/p>\n James Leibold, a specialist in China\u2019s ethnic policies from La Trobe University in Melbourne, said the spectacular anti-terror demonstrations were designed to reassure the domestic audience that authorities were in charge. <\/p>\n \u201cThe message is: \u2018We are in control and Uighurs in particular had better not act out otherwise we have got tremendous resources at our disposal to round up and persecute any people who attempt to disrupt social stability and ethnic harmony\u2019,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Leibold said he believed the show of force was also an attempt by Xinjiang\u2019s new Communist party chief, Chen Quanguo, to project strength after his predecessor, Zhang Chunxian, was perceived to have been too soft on security issues.<\/p>\n \u201cChen has gone in the opposite direction with these military parades which are quite remarkable really \u2026 We saw similar-type events after the 2009 riots<\/a> but here we are talking about in response to what was really a small knife attack in Hotan. So it is out of proportion, I would say, to the level of violence that we have seen in Xinjiang this year.\u201d<\/p>\n China\u2019s leaders declared a \u201cpeople\u2019s war on terror\u201d<\/a> in 2014 after a series of attacks that took place or were linked to Xinjiang.<\/p>\n Those incidents included a street bombing in Urumqi<\/a>, a knife attack on civilians at a train station<\/a> in Kunming, and a car-bomb attack in Beijing\u2019s Tiananmen Square<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, until the recent killings a period of relative calm appeared to have descended on the region.<\/p>\n Leibold said a likely explanation was the massive increase in surveillance there including some \u201cquite spooky Orwellian stuff\u201d such as grid management, face recognition software and big data analytics. \u201cXinjiang increasingly resembles a police state.\u201d<\/p>\n Additional reporting by Wang Zhen<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hundreds of black clad, rifle-toting soldiers took to the streets of Urumqi as officials announce terrorist activity will be \u2018smashed to pieces\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-3421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3421"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=3421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}