Now China too has its war on terror. One of the consequences of Saturday’s ghastly attack on civilians in Kunming’s main railway station, in which assailants dressed in black and wielding long knives slashed at least 29 people to death, is the acceptance by many outsiders that Beijing is indeed dealing with a terrorist threat.
Chinese authorities immediately blamed the carnage, which left a further 140 injured, some of them critically, on “terrorist separatist forces” from the Xinjiang region that is home to predominantly Muslim Uighurs. The attack in Kunming, capital of Yunnan, thousands of miles from Xinjiang itself, marked an escalation of violence in China’s heartland after a smaller assault last October in Tiananmen Square in which two bystanders were killed.
Washington’s acceptance of the term “terrorist” was not immediate. To some in China it was begrudging. Pressed on the issue on Monday, Jen Psaki, US state department spokeswoman, said the deadly attack “appears to be an act of terrorism targeting random members of the public”. (The UN Security Council had a day earlier condemned “in the strongest terms the terrorist attack”.)