By Shannon Tiezzi
The latest suicide bombing in Shandong fits in a tragic pattern that has nothing to do with classic terrorism.
A suicide bomber attacked a park in the city of Heze in China’s Shandong province on Monday, killing two (including the bomber) and injuring 24, with three people receiving“relatively severe” injuries. According to the official Weibo account of Heze’s public security bureau, the explosion took place at 10:34 pm local time on Monday at the west gate of Heze’s Huxi park.
Heze authorities identified the bomber as Jie Xingtang, a 32-year-old villager from Shan County (where Heze is located). Their Weibo post (cited by People’s Daily) described him an unemployed and a long-term sufferer of liver cirrhosis, a condition that has worsened recently according to the Heze authorities. Those explanations were the only hint into Jie’s motives for carrying out the bombing. An investigation into that, as well as how Jie created the bomb, is ongoing.
China has endured suicide bombings before. A terrorist attack in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, last May saw five suspects detonate car bombs in a crowded market, killing themselves and 31 others. Earlier, in April 2014, two suicide bombers carried out an attack at an Urumqi railway station, in what International Business Times called “the first known suicide attack in the country.”
The rise of suicide bombings as a technique for terrorists in China’s Xinjiang province, where tensions between ethnic Uyghurs and Han Chinese are high, is indeed a noteworthy (and troubling) development for China. But suicide bombings in China are not a new phenomenon, although generally the attacks have less to do with ethnic tensions and more to do with an individual’s discontent, as seems to have been the case in Shandong this week. These attacks aren’t terrorism in the classic sense — the individuals behind them seem motivated not by grand political aspirations (the establishment of a separate state or the downfall of the government) but by personal frustration: the loss of a job, land seized by a local government, a beating by China’s law enforcement.
Read the full story at The Diplomat