Land transportation & border securityChina's transportation vulnerability, II

We wrote yesterday about the vulnerability of China’s land
transportation systems to attacks. One unique feature of China that makes
such attacks relatively frequent compared to in the United
States is the contrast between the general
lack of gun availability and the easy access to explosives, particularly
industrial dynamite. Whereas in another country one might see a targeted or
random shooting as a way of settling a score or venting anger at society,
explosive-driven attacks against buildings, homes and buses are more likely in
China. Roger Baker of
RightSideNews writes that similar but less frequent attacks occur against the rail system. One took
place on 20 January
1999 when a railway line was bombed about four miles south of
Xingtai in Hebei province.
The bomb was likely timed to cause the train to derail, but prematurely
detonated. Another incident occurred in July 2005 when a passenger train
collided with a freight train after passing a signal that had failed after its
wiring was removed (it is unclear if this was intentional sabotage or illegal
recycling of copper).

In October 1990 Xiamen Airlines Flight 8301 crashed into
a China Southern Airlines plane on the tarmac in Guangzhou as a
hijacker struggled with the pilot of the Xiamen Airlines flight. On 17 March
2008, Turdi Guzalinur, a suspected Uighur militant from Xinjiang, smuggled two
containers of gasoline aboard China Southern Airlines flight CZ6901 from
Urumchi to Beijing but failed in her attempt to destroy the plane in flight.
There are many more examples of sabotage and attacks against the transportation
infrastructure in China, and even
more that go unreported internationally.

Some potential attackers, like jilted farmers, are hard
to identify and pre-empt, but China has both stepped up its general security
measures for transportation and increased its monitoring and intelligence
gathering against suspected Uighur militants. Although there is some suspicion
that Beijing has exaggerated the perceived threat from Uighur militants, the
fragmentation of the Uighur militant movement has left many members more
closely connected to Central Asian, Afghan, and Pakistani militants as part of
the broader international jihadist movement. There are signs that these
movements are taking more of an interest in China in recent
years and months. In March 2003, sixteen Chinese nationals were killed when
their bus was attacked and burned in Kyrgyzstan by suspected
Uighur or Central Asian Islamist militants. In May 2004, three Chinese workers
were killed near Gwadar, and in June the same year another eleven Chinese
workers were killed in Afghanistan. In October
2004, two Chinese were kidnapped in South
Waziristan, Pakistan, and around
this time there was a reported up-tick in small-scale attacks in Xinjiang. In
November 2005, there were a series of warnings, some later revoked, about
potential Islamist militant attacks against Chinese and U.S. interests in
China to coincide
with President George Bush’s visit to China. Around
November 2006, a video calling for a jihad in “East
Turkistan” (the name used by separatists for Xinjiang) began to
circulate, and in January 2007, China raided a
revived militant training camp in Xinjiang near the border with Central Asia. In July
2007, three Chinese engineers were killed near Peshawar, Pakistan, and a
suicide car bomb struck a convoy of Chinese workers near Karachi. China conducted
another series of raids in Xinjiang between January and April 2008, allegedly
crushing three different Uighur Islamist militant cells. Other reports from Beijing and Shanghai in March
suggested Chinese security forces were monitoring the activities of Muslims
outside China who were
seeking to infiltrate schools and businesses in the Eastern Chinese cities.
More recently, there are concerns that other potential militants are entering
from Kazakhstan.

It appears that as China has
increased its engagement and military cooperation with Central Asian states,
and its involvement globally, Beijing is losing
some of the low profile it once held in the sights of international Islamist
militants. Add to that an emerging murmur urging attacks against the Olympics, China’s increased
crackdowns in Xinjiang, and calls for security sweeps by its Central Asian
neighbors and Pakistan, and the
pressure is mounting for militants to strike against China. Transportation
is where both the Uighur militants and al Qaeda have a commonality of
historical interest. “Despite increased security protocols and patrols, it is
nearly impossible for China both to maintain
impenetrable security for its transportation infrastructure and facilitate the
movement of goods and people,” Baker writes. Completely securing public
transportation is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, job. Threats to
rail and air traffic remain a constant issue globally, and China is now being
faced with these challenges in a more significant manner than in the past. As
the 17 March airline incident, the 5 March bus hijacking, and potentially the 5
May bus fire in Shanghai show,
attacks against transportation are possible even in a heightened security
environment. As China tightens its
grip over Xinjiang, another flare-up in attacks is likely to result.