China Real Time ReportToday, 8:06 PM
Just hours after a deadly police shooting in China this week, several leading Chinese media outlets took down reports that tied the incident to alleged terrorists from the restive region of Xinjiang—a move that signaled an apparent shift in the official version of events.
At least four Chinese media outlets—a state-run news agency and three commercial newspapers—published reports late Monday saying police in the northeastern city of Shenyang had shot dead three “Xinjiang terrorists” and wounded a fourth during a counterterrorism sweep in the city, which is the capital of Liaoning province. They cited a purported Shenyang police statement, images of which were posted on a verified microblog account run by provincial propaganda officials.
But many Web-based versions of these news reports, which also appeared in print, became inaccessible by midday Tuesday, while the original microblog post was nowhere to be found.
What remained instead were terse official and state-media reports that mentioned the shootings without referring to Xinjiang—a western border region that is the homeland of China’s Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking and mainly Muslim ethnic group. Beijing has blamed Uighur “separatists” for a series of deadly incidents that have rocked Xinjiang and increasingly spilled over into other parts of China in the past two years.
It wasn’t clear why news reports that linked Monday’s shootings to Xinjiang were taken offline. An official at the Shenyang police’s command center said he wasn’t authorized to comment. An official at the Liaoning provincial propaganda department directed queries to the Shenyang municipal government, which didn’t immediately respond to a separate request for comment.
“Four knife-wielding terrorists resisted arrest as Shenyang police moved to capture terror suspects on July 13,” the city’s public-security bureau said on its verified Weibo microblog late Monday. “In order to prevent grave harm to society, and after warnings proved fruitless, police opened fire decisively and lawfully, killing three and injuring one. There were no casualties among the public.”
This brief account didn’t contain references to alleged Xinjiang radicals, which reportedly appeared in the Shenyang police statement published on Weibo by Liaoning propaganda officials.
Images of the statement, reviewed by China Real Time, said that police had arrested 16 “terror suspects” earlier Monday before coming across four “Xinjiang terror suspects” in a rental apartment. The four suspects—who were masked and carried long knives—shouted slogans about “holy war” and assaulted police officers, forcing the officers to open fire, killing three male suspects and wounding one female suspect, the statement said.
Police then arrested a 28-year-old Uighur woman—a registered resident of Xinjiang’s Luopu county—and three children that accompanied her, the statement said, without providing any details about the children. The statement’s contents couldn’t be independently verified.
This statement and its contents were reported by the state-run China News Service, as well as three leading commercial newspapers—Beijing News, Beijing Youth Daily and Shanghai-based The Paper. A person at Beijing News said censors had requested the newspaper to remove its online report that cited the police statement. However, copies of these reports reproduced by other online news outlets remained available as of Tuesday afternoon.
Ethnic tensions between Uighurs and China’s majority Han Chinese have escalated in recent years, with religious, political and economic overtones. Chinese authorities say violence lined to Uighur separatists has risen sharply, with attacks on train stations and other public places moving beyond the usual targets of police stations and other government buildings. Security forces have responded with measures that human rights and Uighur advocacy groups have denounced as oppressive.
Exile groups say the Chinese government restricts Uighurs’ ability to worship freely and engage in certain cultural practices. Beijing maintains that it does not discriminate against Uighurs and that its policies have helped bring stability to Xinjiang.
—Chun Han Wong and Olivia Geng. Follow Chun Han on Twitter @ByChunHan and Olivia@keikogfy.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/07/14/shifting-reports-on-china-police-shooting-raise-questions-over-xinjiang-link/?mod=WSJBlog
