Grievances over systemic injustice, not terrorism, remain the greatest threat to the Chinese government. Speculation continued to swirl in China on Tuesday about the incident Monday in which a sport-utility vehicle drove through crowds of people at the edge of Beijing's Tiananmen Square, crashed into a guardrail on the Jinshui Bridge and burst into flames under the iconic portrait of Chairman Mao at the entrance of the Forbidden City. Today, Chinese police published a statement, pursuant to an unspecified "major case," seeking information about two residents with ethnic Uighur names from the restive Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwestern China. Investigators are searching for eight suspects and treating the case as a suicide attack, according to the South China Morning Post and Reuters.
The incident may appear to have been an unsophisticated suicide attack by Uighurs, but questions remain about the profile and motives of the attackers. Several witnesses said the driver honked at pedestrians to warn them while driving up the walkway, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. The incident still qualifies as an attack of some sort, since the driver was clearly willing to cause casualties if necessary for his purpose -- two people died and another 38 were wounded. But if the attackers sought to stage a dramatic self-immolation at the symbolic location and were willing to kill to do so, such a motive would suggest a profile different from Uighur militants such as members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, who typically use weapons and seek to maximize casualties.
One of the suspects was reportedly from Shanshan, Xinjiang, the same county where Chinese police clashed with alleged militants in June. The Hong Kong-based watchdog Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy (a questionable source) suggests that Chinese police shot and killed one of the suspect's relatives during a religious gathering.
Of course, Uighur militants have come under sustained, heavy pressure from the state's intelligence and security apparatus in recent years, especially since the 2009 Urumqi uprisings. And most such militants lack training, use low-tech tools and struggle to execute their missions effectively. A pattern of high-profile police raids in Xinjiang this year may suggest that authorities had intelligence about recruitment or plans for an impending attack like the one Monday in Beijing but lacked the details needed to prevent it.
Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether yesterday's incident happened as it did because militants lacked training or because they were not actually militants but instead suicidal individuals who sought to make a political statement. The full details may never be known, but at this point a botched self-immolation intended to garner political sympathy cannot be ruled out. It even has precedent in a very similar incident in which three Uighurs burned themselves in a car in Wangfujing in 2009.
Though it is not clear whether the attackers intended to embarrass the Party on the eve of its big event, the timing of the incident also raises eyebrows. The Communist Party Central Committee is expected to hold its Third Plenary Session on Nov. 9-12 -- a much-vaunted gathering that will give new President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang a chance to launch their first-term agenda.
Regardless, in terms of regime security, yesterday's incident was not highly significant. Xinjiang is a strategic region, to be sure, but the Chinese regime has the intelligence and security capabilities to keep militancy there in check. In fact, an incident involving suicidal Uighurs even plays into the leadership's hands, giving the Party further justification for using a heavy hand against suspected militants and dissidents in Xinjiang and elsewhere. It may provide an example of extremism, ethnic and religious division and violence to contrast with their message of a unified and stable China. Indeed, while the government has censored much information about yesterday's event, state media has still reported on it regularly in order to gain the initiative in framing public perceptions.
When it comes to regime security, a much greater threat comes in the form of mounting discontent and grievances among the ethnic Han majority. China has spent the past year advertising "ambitious" and far-reaching reforms to be announced at the Third Plenum. Leaders have especially invoked 1978's Third Plenum, which launched market-oriented economic reforms and marked a true turning point in modern Chinese history. They claim that the new reforms will touch not only financial liberalization and industrial restructuring -- familiar themes to economic observers -- but also more fundamental problems of social mobility, social welfare and trust in local governance.
The reason the new administration has devoted so much energy to promoting its upcoming reforms is not because it feels more capable than previous administrations of implementing and enforcing the perennial challenges facing China that will take decades to address. Rather, the Party recognizes the dangers of slowing economic growth, disparities of wealth, deteriorating quality of life and widespread perceptions of officially sponsored corruption and injustice. These grievances affect ethnic minorities in many regions, but by striking at the Han majority, they cannot be marginalized or neglected. Beijing is on the cusp of a major attempt to prevent widespread dissatisfaction through policy and propaganda. Thus, while the Jinshui Bridge incident -- whether a terrorist attack or a botched self-immolation -- does not point to an underlying threat to the regime's existence, the party's reform agenda does.
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