By Benjamin David Baker
The al-Qaeda attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali’s capital left 3 Chinese citizens dead. How will Beijing react?
As Shannon Tiezzi reported for the Diplomat, seven Chinese citizens were among the 170 hostages taken at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali on November 20. According to Xinhua, a total of 27 hostages were killed, including three Chinese nationals. The three killed were senior executives in the China Railway Construction Corporation, a state-owned firm. The attack was carried out by the jihadist groups al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and al-Mourabitoun.
These killings are symptomatic of the vulnerability Chinese citizens face abroad. Although the Chinese citizens present at the Radisson were probably not the main target for these attacks, they are as vulnerable to transnational terrorism as anybody else. Secondly, it shows that for all the hype, China’s non-interference policy in Africa is under threat and Beijing is struggling to find an effective way to secure its economic interests there.
Over the last couple of years, the protection of Chinese nationals overseas has become a key priority for Beijing. This is a problem that is not isolated to China’s presence in Africa. For example, as Shannon reported last week, a Chinese hostage was recently killed by ISIS in Syria. Chinese nationals have been kidnapped and killed in Sudan,Ethiopia, the Gulf of Aden, and throughout the Middle East. In fact, in the African context, Chinese nationals are increasingly at risk, not least due to the fact that there are so many of them on the continent. This has generated pressure among the population for the Chinese Communist Party to do more to protect its citizens overseas.
Read the full story at The Diplomat