Mumbai Attacker's Confession

What's interesting about Mr. Kasab's confession is not the detail of the planned attack, but how he became a terrorist (or extremist). According to the transcript, Kasab said he was "working for a pittance at a decorating shop in the town of Jhelum, in Pakistan, a job he hated. He and a friend decided to become armed robbers. They went to the garrison city of Rawalpindi, next to Islamabad, where they decided to ask a jihadist group to train them to be militants. They would then use those skills to become expert robbers. " Ultimately, they were captivated by a higher calling and gave up the worldly pursuit of money.

In a plain situation, desperate young people would more likely turn into criminals, as gangsters, robbers, drug dealers, theives, and so on. Some Uygur youth did become such people after they dropped out of school or failed to find a job. The bad image was spreading among Han Chinese in more developed area and making Uygurs a easy target for fear and discrimination. If that's the case, social program and policing actions would work and change the situation. However, as Kasab's experience showed, once these people found another way to channel their anger and grievance, things would drastically differ from a mere question of social inequality. Now, their violent actions are justified by religious and nationalistic fervor, not material compensation, which makes them much harder to be pursuaded back to normal and much easier to be grouped for a common cause.

Developmental ideology is only good for people who seek for a better material living and identify with social progression. That's why the Chinese communist party had a hard time putting down competing ideologies, particularly religious and nationalistic ones that address metaphysical world. But fundamentally the promise of a heaven after this life or a dreamland of independence is playing on the failure of a developmental promise. The problem is indeed created by the penetration of capitalism into the heartland of the Chinese nation. Extremist ideas just used the confrontation between capitalist forces and local social relations and transformed that into ethnic hatred and conflict. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate ethnic minorities into the developmental progress, otherwise we'll face the danger of losing them to the hands of terrorists. Particularly the young and the educated must be pacified through affirmative action and balanced assimilation. Note, there's no contradiction between maintaining ethnic language and culture and joining the process of development. Human rights protection does not mean stagnation for minority people. On the contrary, participation in this development is the best way to preserve their heritage while having a better life.

RUSSELL LEIGH MOSES's Op-Ed

An old friend and mentor Dr. Moses wrote to NY times to criticize the indifference of the Chinese government in the Xinjiang ethnic conflict and more broadly, he believed that the government failed to see the meaning of the late conflicts throughout China. For starters, I am pretty sure that the Chinese government is neither comfortable or over-confident in these event, nor arrogant enough to totally ignore the threat posed by these connected dots. I am surprised that Dr. Moses, without even a reliable investigation, said such a thing just to cave into the normal image of the Chinese government depicted by the western media. I'd rather believe that it was the editor who adds those words into the lines, just like what they usually do to other countries. Now to the real point.

Dr. Moses must believed that he had stayed in China long enough to warrant any criticism on the Chinese policy as truthful. He claimed that there were "discriminatory policies", but when look closely, the only thing that bothered him was the lack of religious “freedom”. As always the case, any attempt by the Chinese government to modernize educational system and give children a modern education, like in the West, would be deemed as cultural genocide of some sort. Regardless the need of a sovereign country to build a legitimate national identity based on modern education, Dr. Moses and other western scholars continue to side with the “underdog” and claim the fault of a “repressive government”. By the way, they never mention, or maybe intentionally forgot, how their military machine crusaded into Iraq and Afghanistan and destroyed those people’s religious freedom (in those cases called religious extremism) and even their lives.

It is always easy to ridicule government positions as so called “propaganda”. That way the truth will never exist, as Dr. Moses actually taught us. He seems also prefer such a course by saying the protesters were peaceful and turned violent only after they met with security forces. According to his logic, no police should show up and the mob should be allow to kill and loot, only then the police would have an excuse to show their faces, or maybe they should never have come at all. For Moses, apparently, Uighur’s “grievances” are more important than innocent people’s lives. I’d be delighted to hear his opinion on what should happen if the same situation arises in the U.S.

Moreover, all methods adopted by the government to curb rumors and reduce innocent casualties were seen by Dr. Moses as violating freedom of speech. Again, it shows that his ideology has deprived him of any humanity and caring of the Chinese people. And again, other than repeating his political belief, he refuses to understand the Chinese situation in a more thorough and complex way. Sure, we can understand his position as a professor coming from America to “teach” us a lesson. But we also know that for what he cares, planting western democracy in China is more important than peace, stability and unity of a Chinese nation.

His fake sympathy with Islamic freedom is derived from his quest for democracy in China and now he realized that social upheaval is less likely to accomplish such a mission. Maybe that’s a plea to Western powers to stop supporting those who instigate such events in China again and again. And if the causal relations were to be cleared, the so called Chinese “nationalistic fervor” was actually a making of the Western interference instead of a home grown menacing movement.

When Dr. Moses volunteered to come to China, we thought he’d be different from the mainstream western political ideologues, but it turns out, such a regime is too tight even for him to escape. Until the day Dr. Moses stop applying double standard and the West stop playing both sides, common people will pay the ultimate price and be sacrificed for the fanatic illusion promoted by western supported puppets that somehow “religious freedom” and “democracy” are going to bring ethnic minority in China a better life.

The Peril of Open Space

Some liberals and mindless people are wildly applauding the birth of open space on the Internet. To them, tweeter, facebook, YouTube, or whatever websites that network people and bring about flow of information is good. The logic is simple and powerful, tyrant can be exposed and freedom can be achieved through unstoppable penetrating information network that equalize every netizen who uses it. It is a dream of the liberal ideology, a representation of individual liberty, and ultimately a weapon of change. And yet, we are nervously witnessing the rise of a new monster unfettered in the global open space. Millions of people are feeding this monster everyday with lies, misinformation, bias, prejudice, venom and hatred. Since it supposed to be a people's democratic space, authorities are intentionally dissolved and earthly powers are dethroned. As a result, a recipient could also be a fabricator, flooded could also contribute to the flood, and no one could challenge the righteousness of this openness.

The myth of civil society is widely celebrated in this case. Any attempt to regain control of this monster would be deemed as a provocation or repression against social justice. However, in this seemingly chaotic realm of open space, a force of evil is disguised as an angel of truth and a liberator of the mind. It is so easy to establish a duality, a schism, a dichotomy between good and evil, right and wrong, free and slave, liberty and tyranny that each time a complex issue is presented in the unregulated open space, a clear public opinion is formed, reducing all historical complexity into simple moral stands. Then, social mobilization is completed in such a short temporal and such a wide spatial setting, all previous mechanisms are dwarfed.

Now, it is morphing into another prison in which the bars are the social conflicts created by the past and projected into the future. The giant monster feeds on the new opium of the West and becomes addicted to the illusion and false consciousness. The blood is now shed and the real criminals are faceless. Justice is locked up by the roaming mob in the open space where police has no control and innocent people pay the ultimate price.

In the era when all the other globalizing forces are criticized, only the jewel of the crown, a power deeply rooted in computing, escapes the gaze and has even been treated as a counter-globalization force. When the peril of open space grows quicker and larger than the "civil society", we will lose peace and prosperity before we enjoy them.

Riot in Urumqi

What I worried about in the last couple of days has come true. What happened in Guangdong wouldn't go away quitely, even if the government tried to do so. In order to reestablish legitimacy of sovereignty over all frontiers of China, Chinese government has adopted the progressive approach of interpreting history. In this linear scheme of history, the right to rule came from first liberation and second development. Accordingly, frontier regions were described as backward and barbaric, and the communist force was there to ensure positive social transformation. The unintended consequence of capitalist uneven development in China to ethnic relations is that minorities, usually lives in remote part of China, are more and more deemed by developed Han Chinese as uncivilized people. All underdeveloped regions have rumors of rampant negative social behavior and many uneducated people took such image to the heart and even essencialize individual cases to ethnic characters or religious common practice. Demonizing minorities thus became an uncontrolable developmental problem and was seen by the minorities, particularly those in exile, as a form of colonial repression. Economic grievance once coupled with ethnic conflict, itwould be very hard to decouple them. Under such circumstances, legal justice would be even harder to pursue.

One major problem from the source could be the toy factory's worker management method.

Apparently, in a capitalist system without close government supervision, workers tend to group according to their regional identities. If workers from Xinjiang are put together in order to avoid their interactions with workers form elsewhere, the real effect would be accumulating small frictions into large conflicts. Of course, language could be a problem, but mix up might be better than divide up. In a word, there're a lot of things need to be done to bring equal citizenship into reality. Until then, elites in exile could always use cases like this to mobilize massive riot against the government. On the other hand, such riot is no less common in the West. LA riot in 1992 and many other cases represented the same problem for multiethnic/multiracial societies. The best way to tackle it should be two-pronged. One is to have a visible affirmative action plans and activities so that social mobility in minority groups could be linked to the whole society. Second is to form a consensus across the ethnic lines that any social disruption would invariably lead to mutual destruction. Common people will not gain from the situation.

The development of internet gives the rise of ethnic conflict because language convenience makes local people search linkage not with the center of the state, but with the virtual community created on the internet and manipulated by exiles. Without proper channels of communication, these online closed communities will only breed extremism on both size. More laws and regulations also should be promulgated to curb the spread of lies and punish the ones who did that. Quicker government response and information transparency are required in the age of "politics of light". Hopefully, we will learn from this incident and will prevent future meaningless conflicts and loss of innocent lives.