Chinese Official: Internet Freedom Caused Terror Attacks

A Chinese official in charge of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China recently blamed Internet circumvention technology, which allows free Internet access, for terrorist attacks in China.

Zhang Chunxian, the Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang, made the comments in response to media questions while giving a government work report at the National People’s Congress on March 6. The NPC is the Chinese Communist Party’s rubber-stamp legislature, currently having its annual meetings in Beijing. 

“90 percent of the violent terrorist attacks by Xinjiang [separatists] are due to circumvention technologies for breaking the firewall,” he said. “They use videos on the Internet to continue organizing the attacks,” he told journalists.

“If we continue to learn advanced methods, raise awareness, and be professional, we can still press it down to the minimum.”

Zhang also took the opportunity to praise the Party’s leadership for restricting terrorist attacks.

“Terrorist attack are inevitable… If Xinjiang was not under the central Party’s leadership, would it not happen? Without a strict crackdown, would it not happen?” Zhang said.

Many Uyghur groups and supporters, in fact, have argued that it is precisely the Communist Party’s harsh ethnic policies that led to the radicalization of Uyghurs, and the violent backlashes currently being witnesses in China.

“Violent terrorist attacks is not a result of crackdowns,” Zhang said. “It is a malignant tumor a society inevitably generates.”

Zhang’s response, as is often par for the course when Chinese officials speak in public on controversial topics of the day, was met with some ridicule on the Internet. Chinese Internet users complained that the regime was shirking its responsibility for contributing to the tensions in Xinjiang. 

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