Escalation of terrorist violence must push Beijing to address root causes
Zhou Zunyou explains the significance of the Tiananmen suicide attack, the first of its kind in China
Last week, an SUV careered along a pavement in front of the portrait of Mao Zedong to the north of Tiananmen Square, ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames, killing three occupants in the car and two pedestrians, and injuring some 40 other people.
After two days of silence, the authorities said it was a terrorist attack that had been "carefully planned, organised and premeditated" by several people from Xinjiang . The perpetrators had been identified as the three occupants of the car, Usmen Hasan, his wife and his mother. A petrol container, an iron rod, two machetes and a flag imprinted with an extremist religious message were found in the car.
Within 10 hours of the car crash, the police had caught five suspects in connection with the attack.
Although Beijing tried to play down the ethnic identity of these Xinjiang people, their distinctive names draw a clear link to China's Uygur ethnic minority.
The Tiananmen attack signals that Chinese domestic terrorism may have reached a new dimension, in terms of the devastation and impact it generates, for three reasons.
Suicide attacks are not the acts of lone outlaws, but undertaken by motivated individuals
First, it was the first terrorist attack in Beijing. To make things worse, the attack occurred on the verge of Tiananmen Square, the very heart of the capital city and the nation's political centre. The symbolic intent of the attack cannot be understated.
