PRC's war on terror, or is it war on democracy?

FT.com / World / Asia-Pacific - China sets up squads to combat terrorism :

"Zhou Xiaozheng, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, was sceptical about the ability of any new force to have a real impact on the root cause of unrest. 'The crux of the problem lies in an unbalanced society which lacks justice and equality,' he said.

"Mr Zhou went on: 'As the income gap widens, and officials become more and more corrupt, better equipped police will only be used to protect the rich people and residents of big cities.

"'The only way out is to actively and steadily implement a reform of the political system.'"

I knew it was a bad sign when the People's Republic of China signed on to the Bush administration's global war on terrorism (GWOT). What China was looking for was a free pass for its continuing repression of minorities, in particular the Uighur-speaking people of Xinjiang who are overwhelmingly Muslim and members of the Turkic rather than the Chinese racial group.

Prof. Zhou in the quote above is, of course, speaking of the much larger problems of domestic unrest throughout China which I have mentioned previously. This article from the Financial Times notes official PRC statistics that last year saw 74,000 riots and lesser protests, up from only 10,000 in 1994. At about 200 incidents per day nationwide, the announcement of a new police formation to be deployed in only 36 cities doesn't seem like such a major augmentation to the organs of state security.

One thing in this report does seem odd, however. The force intended for Zhengzhou, capital of Henan, is to have three helicopters and an armored vehicle; and elsewhere we are told that the largest cities like Beijing and Shanghai will each have a 600-man force while those in the other major cities will be "slightly" smaller. That doesn't seem like much in the way of air and armor assets for a force of several hundred men.

Still, this new force will probably be of great advantage in keeping a lid on things at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the other major tourist destinations. After all, painting a pretty face on China is almost as good as having a pretty face. I'll try to go into this in more detail when I finish Ross Terrell's book on China.