Deadly Affront

"It was China's 9/11. Mothers, sons and daughters were slaughtered by strangers. A nationwide outrage has been stirred."
Xinhua, China's official news agency

"The psychological impact of this on the Chinese general public will be enormous. [It would make people] more supportive of hard-line policies by the government."
Shan Wei, political scientist, National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute

In this photo taken Saturday March 1, 2014, Chinese police officers form up outside a railway station in Kunming in southwestern China's Yunnan province. More than 10 knife-wielding attackers slashed people at the train station in what authorities called a terrorist attack by ethnic separatists in western China

Senseless, defiant, deadly, totally dedicated to the mission at hand, to exact revenge upon innocent civilians for what the terrorists believe is the government's oppression of Muslims in China. Given the situation world-wide of Muslim-generated atrocities against both other Muslims due to sectarian, tribal and ethnic strife, and the politics of ideological Islamism, it's hard to find sympathy for the Uighur cause.

It's doubtful to begin with that many Han Chinese felt any degree of sympathy for the Muslim population living restively in the province of Xinjiang, in western China. There have been a succession of violent events marking the area as one of grave unrest between residents, the Turkic speaking Uighurs and their Han Chinese counterparts.

In a country as vast as China where only India can quite understand the complexities of governing a variety of ethnic and religious groups, though India celebrates itself as the world's largest democracy and China as the world's staunchest Communist hold-out, one tempered by a lurch into capitalist venture as the way to global dominance, there will always be unrest.

And there seemed similarities to the Islamist Pakistan attack on Mumbai, India, in this dreadful attack on innocent people, rather than the attacks cited that took place in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. A Pakistan-based Islamist terror group that had the official sanction of Pakistan's secret service agency. The conflict over Kashmir the motivation, but hatred by Muslim Pakistan toward plural-ethnic-religious India the cause.

But, like captured Tibet, a prisoner to China's vast appetite for geographic dominance, the Uighurs have little hope of their dream of a homeland which would be dependent on rupturing China's rapacious hunger to retain the geography it has and absorb even more, if it could.

It thinks it can, challenging Japan to a rocky little island and even going so far as to claim entitlement to the very airspace over the South China Sea and the wealth of the oceans, to the consternation of the Philippines and South Korea.

The might and the power that is Beijing, ruling over the world's most populous country, cannot foresee everything, cannot protect all its territory, and its people. The attack by ten black-clad men and women wielding knives at Kunming's main railway station just as thousands of migrant workers and tourists were present, unwary victims of deadly violence, could no more be avoided than the London or Spain, Mumbai or New York attacks.

But any further such attacks may very well be prevented by stepped-up Chinese security, which translates to heavier oppression by the state over people who already feel themselves burdened by the weight of misery over their plight as a detested minority in a dictatorship of might and right.