This Reuters article follows the standard mainstream media practice of couching all Chinese reporting about jihad activity in China as Chinese government claims, as if it were rather unbelievable that China could be facing a jihad threat. After all, who ever heard of a Muslim minority in a country agitating for a separate Islamic state and committing acts of jihad terror in service of that goal? (Pay no attention to the Philippines, Thailand, or to similar jihad violence in Nigeria, Syria, etc.!)
Note also the use of the all-purpose sobriquet “restive” for areas where jihad activity is common. In mainstream media reports, Xinjiang is restive, southern Thailand is restive, Mindanao is restive, Nigeria’s Kano state and other areas are restive, etc. It’s their standard Homeric epithet for places where Muslims are committing regular acts of violence in the name of Islam.
“China says station attackers wanted to carry out jihad abroad,” from Reuters, March 5 (thanks to Lookmann):
Beijing: A group of people from China’s restive western region of Xinjiang who carried out a deadly weekend attack at a train station were trying to leave the country to wage a holy war, state media said on Wednesday.
China says militants from Xinjiang, home to a large Muslim Uighur minority, launched the attack last Saturday in the southwestern city of Kunming, killing at least 29 people and wounding about 140.
Police shot dead four of the assailants and captured the other four.
Qin Guangrong, Communist Party chief of Yunnan province where Kunming is located, said that the eight attackers “originally wanted to participate in ‘jihad’,” state media, including Xinhua news agency, reported.
“They could not leave from Yunnan, so they looked elsewhere, and went to Guangdong province, but also could not leave, so they returned to Yunnan,” Qin was quoted as saying.
They then went to Yunnan’s Honghe county, which borders Vietnam, where they planned, if they were unable to leave the country from there, to carry out jihad either in Honghe or at railway or bus stations in Kunming, he added….
Many Uighurs say they are unhappy at Chinese restrictions on their culture and religion, though the government says they are given widespread freedoms.
Beijing says it faces a real threat from militant Islamists in Xinjiang who want an independent state called East Turkestan. Authorities say many have links with foreign groups, though rights groups and some foreign experts say there is little evidence to support this….