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August 07, 2007
An Arrow in the Buttocks of Terrorism
Check out the photo above of Chinese special forces soldiers assembled for the coyly named "Peace Mission 2007", which begins on Thursday in Urumqi and will quickly move west to the Ural Mountains in Russia. SCO member states have been very clear about the focus of this 6-nation military exercise:
"The joint drill will not indulge in empty talk but practice coordination and command in anti-terror combat. It will also serve to maintain regional peace and stability," Zhen said, noting that it is hard for one country or its military forces to crack down on all terrorist organizations and activities that continue to grow worldwide....
"We can only cope with security challenges, and secure peace and development by enhancing cooperation when terrorism, separatism and extremism are active in the region," Qian said.
As you can see clearly, China's show of force includes not only tanks, fighter jets, and helicopters but also bad-ass ski mask-wearing commandos equipped with carbon fiber composite crossbows. They can't wait for the moment when a deer ― splittist Rebiya Kadeer, that is ― wanders unsuspectingly into a clearing in the woods. Thwack! One down, nine million to go.
It's not exactly clear what group of "special forces" is shown in the photo above, but there was a possible clue in Saturday's South China Morning Post:
A rather secretive branch of the People's Liberation Army has been expanding, despite a general trend of downsizing in the army, to cope with growing social unrest on the mainland. The People's Armed Police was set up in 1983 to maintain internal security....
Official figures on the size of the paramilitary force, like a lot of other military data, are top secret, but there are varying estimates, with some saying up to 1 million....
"Unlike police officers who are taught to comply with the law, the armed police are trained to combat problems with violence and speed," he said.
On top of the expansion in personnel, the force's weapons have also been upgraded. Mr Wong said armed police officers were now equipped with more specialised weapons. "There are some weapons that will keep someone under control without harming them. This has become an issue, especially since the crackdown on students in... 1989," he said.
In 2003, Mei Xingrun , the armed police's commander in Xinjiang , where a Muslim separatist movement has been a thorn in the government's side, told Xinhua that military spending had been increased to crush the "terrorists" in the region.
So I guess that explains the crossbow. An arrow in the buttocks is certainly more pleasant, and less lethal, say, than a bullet in the head. Who says the Chinese government doesn't look out for the welfare of the downtrodden and disenfranchised?
The articles are available below.
SCO joint drill to improve anti-terror capability: experts
6 August 2007
Xinhua News Agency
CHELYABINSK, Russia, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- A joint anti-terrorism military exercise, sponsored by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and slated for Aug. 9-17, will enhance the exchange among SCO member countries and improve their counter-terror capabilities, experts said.
"In terms of both scale and content, the joint drill will reflect the trends of counter-terror exercises and bears an historic significance as a milestone in military cooperation between the six SCO member countries," said Zhen Shouhua, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Military Science.
The "Peace Mission 2007" drill, involving about 6,500 military personnel from China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, will be carried out in the Ural Mountains city of Chelyabinsk and Urumqi, capital of China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Commanders from the six countries will hold consultations and make decisions in Urumqi upon receiving alert of an assumed terrorist attack on a Russian town and the field practice will then continue in Russian military ranges near Chelyabinsk.
"The joint drill will not indulge in empty talk but practice coordination and command in anti-terror combat. It will also serve to maintain regional peace and stability," Zhen said, noting that it is hard for one country or its military forces to crack down on all terrorist organizations and activities that continue to grow worldwide.
Heads of states and defense ministers of the SCO member countries will attend the live fire exercise on Aug. 17, which will involve airborne troops, special task forces, armored vehicles, military helicopters and fighters, said Qian Lihua, deputy general director of the Chinese troops.
Such drill has been expanded with increasing member countries, combined troops and a much more complicated situation since the first of its kind was held in 2002, Qian said.
"We can only cope with security challenges, and secure peace and development by enhancing cooperation when terrorism, separatism and extremism are active in the region," Qian said.
Secretive arm of the law
4 August 2007
South China Morning Post
A rather secretive branch of the People's Liberation Army has been expanding, despite a general trend of downsizing in the army, to cope with growing social unrest on the mainland.
The People's Armed Police was set up in 1983 to maintain internal security.
It is administered by both the State Council through the Ministry of Public Security and the PLA's Central Military Commission.
Official figures on the size of the paramilitary force, like a lot of other military data, are top secret, but there are varying estimates, with some saying up to 1 million.
Antony Wong Dong, president of the International Military Association in Macau, said western military experts put the number at somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 personnel.
A substantial number of new recruits to the force were among those trimmed from the PLA, Mr Wong added.
"This force is something between the police and the army. Their combat ability is superb and better than the police, given their military background," he said.
Some observers have said that the armed police are expanding their ranks during a period of frequent demonstrations, riots and disputes spawned by rampant corruption and social injustice which, in turn, are the result of the government's blind pursuit of economic growth.
In one of the worst recent flare-ups, armed police shot dead at least three villagers involved in land dispute protests in Shanwei , Guangdong, on December 6, 2005.
Mr Wong said that with their military background, armed police had gained notoriety over the years for their tendency to resort to violence more often than other disciplinary forces.
"Unlike police officers who are taught to comply with the law, the armed police are trained to combat problems with violence and speed," he said.
On top of the expansion in personnel, the force's weapons have also been upgraded. Mr Wong said armed police officers were now equipped with more specialised weapons.
"There are some weapons that will keep someone under control without harming them. This has become an issue, especially since the crackdown on students in Tiananmen in 1989," he said.
The force has also acquired new duties throughout the years, one of them being a counterterrorism mission.
Those duties have gained more importance since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
In 2003, Mei Xingrun , the armed police's commander in Xinjiang , where a Muslim separatist movement has been a thorn in the government's side, told Xinhua that military spending had been increased to crush the "terrorists" in the region.
With the 2008 Beijing Olympics looming closer, the armed police, together with the police, will be responsible for ensuring the Games go smoothly.
The government has vowed to send 3,000 armed police officers to patrol every day when Beijing launches a rehearsal of the Games this month.
According to Mr Wong, units are also trained to prepare for any possible conflict with Taiwan.
Other responsibilities include guarding forests, gold mines, hydroelectric power infrastructure and transport.
Kristine Kwok
posted August 07, 2007 at 08:54 AM unofficial Xinjiang time | HaoHao This!
Comments
Are you sure that's not the cover to a Chinese Gangsta Rap album?
Posted by: CPH at August 8, 2007 05:35 AM
I couldn't help feel that it's your mean gimmick to boost your blog's 人气 and to attrract more comments to compare that old bag Uighur woman as a deer and the special task forces are after her. If China wanted to kill her, it should have done it when she was still in China. And inflamatory words like 'one down, 9 millions to go' is plain false and stupid. It is stupid because it assumes either that the special force takes 'killing over the Uighurs' as their goal or all the 9 million Uighurs are terrosists. Seems to me that controling your tongue(hand) from speaking(typing) falsehood is a trick for you to learn.
Posted by: office dweller at August 8, 2007 08:49 PM
Get lost you damned HZP! Dont leave your nasty words & buzz!
Posted by: HZP at August 9, 2007 12:45 PM
What's an HZP?
Posted by: michael at August 9, 2007 07:48 PM
China will rule Xinjiang forever. There is no doubt about it. Any country wants to mess with this will be nuked out of existence either through land nuclear missile sites or nuclear submarines with nuclear missiles. By the way, those missiles will detonate hydrogen bombs which is more than 1000 times worse than atomic bombs drop on Hiroshima, Japan in world war 2. We are talking about mushroom clouds and rain to kill anything underneath for many years.
Anyways, Xinjiang is part of China and you and your children and grandchildren will have to get use to it.
Posted by: mgtow at August 12, 2007 09:02 AM
mgtow:
E. Turkestan was never part of baddirty China and never will be! The genocide Olympics shall be baddirty China's undoing and the world shall mock Greater Han while E. Turkestan is liberated!
Posted by: nanheyangrouchuan at August 14, 2007 11:11 AM
HZP mean The Hanzu Pigs!
Posted by: HZP at August 14, 2007 11:23 AM
Interesting interpretations of the Peace Mission 2007 exercises:
SCO Prepares for Exercise; China Stretches Its Legs
By WENDELL MINNICK, TAIPEI
6 August 2007
Defense News
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) bills its upcoming Peace Mission 2007 as a counterterrorism exercise, but analysts call it practice for putting down an uprising.
Scheduled to run Aug. 9-17 in Chelyabinsk in Russia's Ural Mountains, the exercise will involve 4,700 Russian troops, 1,600 Chinese troops and contingents from the other SCO members: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
SCO officials say Peace Mission 2007 will see the largest-ever contingent of Chinese troops on Russian soil for an exercise. The Chinese forces will include six Air Force Ilyushin Il-76 airlifters and an Army aviation unit with 32 Mi-17 and Z-9 helicopters.
The exercise is far "too big to be a counterterrorism exercise unless they are aiming to level a small town in the process," said Christopher Brown at the American Security Council Foundation, Washington.
SCO's stated "Three Evils" are terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.
The scenario will involve isolating and quelling a violent insurrection, according to Vassily Kashin, research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Moscow.
"In such a situation, the militaries of the smaller SCO members will control the external borders of the conflict zone, while Russian and Chinese troops will try to solve the problem. Such an operation is likely to involve thousands of personnel, warplanes, helicopters, etc.," Kashin said.
He called this and previous joint exercises a preparation for "the worst-case scenario for Central Asia": a large-scale uprising and civil war in one of the Central Asian republics.
"SCO members expect such a rebellion to be led by radical Islamic elements and to be at least partly supported from Afghanistan territory, possibly even by the West," Kashin said.
The Islamist group that most concerns SCO members is the Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, he said, an international pan-Islamist political party that seeks to unite the Muslim world under Islamic law. Headquartered in London, the party is believed by many to be under Western sway.
Kashin said internal instability, especially in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, is forcing SCO members to coordinate options for a military response.
"In Uzbekistan, the wake-up call was the Andijon uprising in May 2005," he said. "The authorities managed to suppress it rather brutally, but the social and economic problems which caused the uprising still remain."
The exercise is also meant to cow China's own people and send a signal about Beijing's leadership, Brown said.
The second stage of the exercise will be conducted in Urumqi, Xinjiang, which shows China's importance in SCO's leadership.
"Russia in a lot of ways is playing second fiddle. After all, why move the entire operation to another country just as it is concluding? There is really no reason to conclude in Xinjiang other than as a show of strength on the part of the Chinese," said Brown.
The troops China is sending are from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwest China, an area that shares its borders with Afghanistan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia and Tajikistan.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Beijing began labeling the Xinjiang separatists as "terrorists," claiming they were connected to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.
Brown said the exercise will demonstrate China's ability to project power overland within Asia.
"This is the first time that the 'transformed' Chinese military will have a chance to stretch its legs, especially in terms of transportation and logistics," Brown said. "It should also be seen as cautionary warning for those Central Asian members of the SCO, especially as China and Russia continue to pursue the integration and improvement of land routes within the SCO under the guise of 'improving trade.'"
Posted by: michael at August 15, 2007 12:49 AM
@HZP,
If Hanzus are pigs, your people are lower than pigs. I haven't come up with a name for your name yet. Anybody here has a suggestion?
Posted by: office dweller at August 15, 2007 02:27 AM
Anti-islamic propaganda wide spread among "HZP".
Muslim in China,clip 1
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=iBnv-bKUbe8
[Quote]
You see a chinese tour guide saying that Uighur people don't eat pig because pigs are their ancestors. This believe is in fact very wide spread in China. Even among the intellectuals. It all started years ago when the government published a false anti Islamic propaganda that said, Muslims don't eat pork because pig have saved their ancestors. For those people who claim that China is very Islamically friendly is just Bull shit. We all know what the communist party did during the cultural revolution. Yes things have become better, never the less, there are still tensions between Muslims and the Chinese governement.
Posted by: li-si at August 15, 2007 07:02 PM
'Peace Mission'
By Richard D. Fisher, Jr.
15 August 2007
The Wall Street Journal Asia
(c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
The world will understandably have some questions this Thursday when Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian leader Vladimir Putin meet at Garrison Chebarkul in Russia to review troops from both their countries, as well as four states of former Soviet Central Asia. The event will mark the end of maneuvers called Peace Mission 2007, and it raises some important questions. Does this exercise signal a stepping up of already substantial military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing? And if it does, cooperation against what or whom?
The answer to the first question is clearly yes, cooperation is increasing. This year's Peace Mission in Russia involved about 4,000 troops and 100 aircraft from China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, a threefold increase in participants over Peace Mission 2005, held in China. This year's Peace Mission exercises, conducted from Aug. 8 to 17, included full-fledged conventional air-ground offensive maneuvers that stressed ground and airborne assault, and coordinated air strikes by attack aircraft and attack helicopters. Russian and Chinese reporting thus far indicates the maneuvers were directed against "terrorist" strongholds in rural and urban settings.
Less clear is against what or whom the show of force was directed. The military exercises are sponsored by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a intergovernmental group founded with Chinese help to promote worthy goals of cooperation and peace in former Soviet Central Asia. In practice, however, the organization's priorities have evolved over time, and its top mission now seems to be to stop overt Islamic identification among the peoples of the region, who are mostly ethnically Turkic and traditionally Muslim.
If one includes the currently Chinese-held territory of East Turkestan (Xinjiang), Central Asia covers nearly two million square miles in the strategic heart of Eurasia, populated by peoples who have never willingly accepted rule either from Moscow or Beijing. It is rich in resources, notably oil and natural gas. For now Central Asia's rulers are mostly former Soviet officials, as fearful of Islam as are China or Russia. But they are not secure. Change in an Islamic direction, which is possible -- even likely -- will spell trouble.
To begin with, then, Peace Mission 2007 is a cooperative exercise by the rulers of the Central Asian states, supported by China and Russia, designed to prevent political instability. But that is not all. "Peace Mission 2007" also reveals a worrying pattern of cooperation between Moscow and Beijing, broadly speaking, against the west and democratic ideas.
In July, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization decided to draw up a shared list of proscribed organizations, to include terrorists of course, but also, western human-rights advocates fear, democracy advocates. They have good reason to worry. At the Army Chief of Staffs' conference in Urumqi, in Chinese-controlled East Turkestan (Xinjiang), Russian Chief of the General Staff General Yuri Baluyevsky attacked "certain Western states" that advocate "the formation of the so-called 'true democratic' institutions of state and public management . . . which causes destabilisation of the situation in the states of the region."
Both Russian and Chinese officials have claimed the Peace Mission exercises are "not directed against any one country." But when the United States asked the Chinese government if it could send observers, hoping for a return of its generous hosting of People's Liberation Army (PLA) observers at the 2006 Valiant Shield, a large exercise involving the U.S. and its Asian allies, China said "no."
Beijing evidently wishes to minimize attention to its increasing long-distance force projection abilities, demonstrated in, but not limited to, Central Asia. The PLA's contingent included 1,600-1,700 airborne and ground troops plus associated light-weight armor and about 36 aircraft. Not large numbers to be sure, but this marks the first ever PLA foreign deployment of such a combined arms group. On July 30, PLA Senior Colonel (equivalent to a brigadier general) Lu Chuangang, told state media that Peace Mission would test their capability in "long distance mobility" and "long distance integrated support."
Most western analysts have been skeptical that Beijing harbored such large ambitions. The operations in Peace Mission suggest China does, a possibility supported by other evidence. China is refurbishing the former Russian aircraft carrier Varyag and planning its own carrier force. A military airlifter is being developed that could carry 60 tons of cargo, similar to the U.S. C-17. Last December, the PLA Navy launched a 20,000 ton landing platform dock amphibious assault ship. In May, a Chinese shipbuilding official admitted to me their development of a landing helicopter dock air-amphibious assault ship.
New PLA airlifters and new medium-weight wheeled airmobile fighting vehicles being produced by the PLA will give it a future army-airborne projection capability that would compliment nicely that of Russia's. Peace Mission 2007, in fact, resembled the coordinated operations needed to shore up a tottering dictatorship, much as Soviet forces did in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. This follows the 2005 Peace Mission exercises, which demonstrated air and naval capabilities the PLA needs to attack Taiwan.
But the SCO's ability to develop a deeper military alliance is not certain. Russian press reports note that China rejected Russia's proposal to co-host the exercises with the Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization, indicating that currently coincidental Russian-Chinese security agendas could easily diverge. Russia-friendly Kazakhstan did not allow Chinese troops to travel across its territory, adding thousands of kilometers to their journey. The SCO must soon also face the question of whether or not to make full members of current observers India, Pakistan and Iran -- respectively, a nuclear-armed democracy, a nuclear-armed failed state and a future nuclear-armed rogue state.
All in all, Peace Mission 2007 provides plenty of reason for concern. It highlights the direct military interest Russia and China are taking in Central Asia, an area of which the U.S. and Europe know very little. Even more worrying, the Chinese role in the exercise provides yet more evidence of the dimensions of Chinese military ambitions and capabilities, the potential targets of which are by no means limited to Central Asian Muslims.
---
Mr. Fisher is a vice president with the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Alexandria, Virginia.
Posted by: michael at August 15, 2007 08:40 PM
@ all HZPs.
"We all know what the communist party did during the cultural revolution."
Yesh, this is true, and people still remember what they forced on muslims! They forced them to eat pork!
Who told you pigs once were their ancestors?
How much did you know about their history?
You HZPs loves fabricating their history, and this is a well-known truth.
Idiots in HZPs believe in what their leaders' saying without any doubt.
Posted by: HZP at August 18, 2007 07:39 PM