Two vehicles rammed into pedestrians in an open market at 7:50 this morning on Gongyuanbei Street in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killing at least 31 people and injuring more than 90, according to Chinese state media. AP reports that “the Xinjiang regional government said in a statement that the early morning attack was ‘a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.’”

More details:

The SUVs then crashed head-on and one of them exploded, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. It quoted an eyewitness as saying there were up to a dozen blasts in all and that at one point one of the vehicles stopped because it was blocked by bodies and handcarts.

Authorities have blamed separatists for the attack, with president Xi Jinping once again urging severe punishment and stability. He’s had to make similar statements in the very recent past: three were killed in a bomb and knife attack at a Urumqi railway station on April 30.

Also, this via SCMP:

In a statement domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu vowed to “destroy the arrogance of violent terrorists”.

Just the day before, on Wednesday, China sentenced 39 people to jail on charges of terrorism, many (or all?) with “ethnic Uighur names,” as Reuters points out.

If you’re wondering if the terrorist attacks will stop, Fear of a Red Planet offers this bit of distressing insight: “Nothing is ever likely to give the terrorists carrying out attacks like today’s what they want because what they want – at the very least independence for Xinjiang – is not achievable.”

Of course, the heinous act of targeting innocent civilians achieves less than nothing, and is the surest way to ensure one’s message goes unheard.

Some more photos from around the web (h/t China Digital Times):

Watching the leaked surveillance video of two men walking with a sea of migrant workers in front of the train station in Ürümchi makes your blood turn cold. You want to look away but you can’t. You want to understand what was going through the heads of those men with their hats pulled low as they marched with the crowd – but you can’t. Only after the shock of the fireball and the smoke clears can you stop looking, but then you can’t un-see it. You can only play it over and over in your mind.

Xi Jinping said the attackers at that train station on Wednesday, April 30 were feeling an “overweening arrogance.” I don’t know what they were feeling; none of us can really know.

But it is in times of grief and shame like this that Uyghurs might turn to people like the late poet Rozi Sayit for a clearer understanding of themselves and what Uyghur life should be.

In his lyric (performed above by Abdulla), Rozi lays out what he sees as the proper role for Uyghur men. He says:

Don’t Call Him a Man

Don’t call someone who denies his origin a man,
Don’t call someone who is ashamed of his friend a man,
The true value of one’s humanity is keeping one’s promise,
Don’t call someone who denies promises a man.

Don’t tie your fate with a liar,
Don’t set out on a journey with one who is ashamed of you,
There is a big difference between flower buds and a useless tumbleweed,
Don’t call someone who deviates from “the path” a man.¹

This beautiful world feels like heaven to good people.
This is because it is the deeds of those good people that have made this place beautiful.
Whoever raises a blade against the people, whoever is takan²,
Whoever is a foolish beast, don’t call him a man.

Some people if they find two pieces of bread will use one as a dap.³
Some people if they find a bit of money they will brag about it to the whole world.
Clannish,⁴ ignorant, white-breads,⁵ sectarians,⁶
Don’t call a person who has these traits a man.⁷

Rozi is referred to as a farmer-poet mainly because his poems reflect the lives and struggles of farmers. He, more than many Uyghur intellectuals, understood the lives of Uyghur farmers since he spent his young adult life working on state farms in the 1960s. He knew what it was like to work hard and eat cornflour bread. He knew what it was like to have one’s life path blocked. According to his official biography, in 1973 when he was finally admitted to Kashgar Teachers’ College at the age of 30, he published a poem called “even a farmer can became a da xuesheng [university student].”

Rozi Sayit was a very popular poet in the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote about the problems of rural life, the struggles of Uyghur men, and the dignity of the past. He was conservative, defiantly rural in his positioning. He called people toward a tradition of honoring the legacy of those who came before by performing one’s social role not as a duty but as a matter of pride and privilege. As the lyric above puts it, he would not call anyone who raises a blade against the people a man.

¹ The way we interpret this reference to “the path” is that it is path of faithfulness to Uyghur traditions.

² We are uncertain about how to translate takan.

³ A Uyghur hand drum roughly shaped like a round, flat piece of bread

⁴ The word Rozi uses here is yurt-vas, which, like kitab-vas (dogmatic), has a strongly negative association of being too attached to what would otherwise be a positive character quality. Yurt simply means hometown, while yurtvas means something like clannishness.

⁵ As in the Chinese “chi bai fan,” this refers to someone who eats the finest food – bread made with wheat flour – but doesn’t earn it themselves. Many Uyghurs who came of age in Maoist times remember eating the now staple rice and noodle dishes of polu and laghman only on rare occasions. Instead, most meals were made with cornflour during those days. “To eat white bread” therefore carries the meaning of undeserved luxury.

⁶ Here Rozi is referring to the old Sufi practice of following a derivish, or leader of a path. For some Uyghurs these are seen as threats to Uyghur unity. In more recent times this feeling is associated with local religious leaders who lead their followers down a path of dogma.

⁷ Abdulla adds a line here, “Don’t call a person who uses heroin and sells his family’s property a man.”

Beige Wind runs the website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

This morning, a series of explosions shook the provincial capital of Shanxi province, Taiyuan, not far from the Shanxi Province Communist Party Committee building. WSJ reports:

A report posted to the Shanxi provincial news website said at least one person had died in the blasts, while another was seriously injured. Seven others received light injuries, the report said.

Steel beads and nails were scattered at the scene. Here’s a picture from NetEase:

More info as it becomes available. For the meantime, there are several pictures here in slideshow form, a few sampled below:

And some videos from the scene:

Ji Zhongxin, a 34-year-old petitioner born in Heze, Shandong province, blew himself up on Saturday in Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital International Airport. Watch how he did it, above, in a video that’s been viewed 2.6 million times on Tencent.

Ji was reportedly in Beijing to petition decade-long grievances from his time working in Guangdong province, suffering the abuse of authorities and chengguan. Shanghaiist managed to grab Ji’s Sina blog before it was deleted on Sunday (preserved on James Griffiths’s Pastebin), in which Ji wrote:

Because we are farmers, and are poor, no matter who we turn to, nobody wants to help us. And what’s more, when the chengguan found us, they turned around and called us tramps and beat us. If it weren’t for them taking us to hospital on time, I wouldn’t have survived…

We looked to the sky, and the sky looked away; we called to the earth, and the earth did not respond. We have been forsaken but have nobody to turn to, so all I could do was to hold back tears and go back to Shandong. And now I am festering away, paralysed and over 100,000 yuan in debt. Our family have suffered an unimaginable fate. My uncle died when he was young, and soon after so did my mother and grandmother. The only thing that’s keeping me going is the thought of seeking justice.

Justice in the form of a homemade bomb, apparently, detonated in the international arrivals hall of a major airport.

Ji, who is recovering in a hospital as we speak, may find solace in at least this bit of news: officials have reopened Ji’s case in Dongguan, Guangdong province, reports SCMP:

The Public Security Bureau in Guangdong asked the Dongguan branch to carry out a thorough investigation into mistreatment claimed by Ji Zhongxing, the bomber, and his ensuing petitions, the national broadcaster CCTV reported yesterday, adding that the probe was already under way.

(H/T Derrick Sobodash)

A man in a wheelchair detonated a homemade explosion this evening at Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal 3. It happened in the international arrivals hall at 6:24 pm, according to Xinhua, with no one else getting injured.

CCTV identified the man as Ji Zhongxing from Shandong province. The explosive was reportedly made using gunpowder from fireworks, and probably should be hashtagged “fail.”

Reuters reports that the area was cleaned up fairly quickly, with authorities basically shrugging: “A Reuters witness said things had returned to normal about 90 minutes after the explosion and there were no signs of extra security.”

Updates as they become available.

UPDATE, 7/22, 4:20 pm: Check out video of the explosion:

UPDATE, 7/21, 2:36 am: The man may have been a petitioner whose appeals fell on deaf ears. The Telegraph reports:

According to his older brother, Ji Zhongji, Mr Ji had been working as a rickshaw driver in the southern Chinese city of Xintang when he was beaten by local police with a steel tube, leaving him disabled.

“We filed two legal cases against the police in Xintang but we never received any official compensation,” he said.

In 2008, Mr Ji went to Beijing to put his case before the central government, his brother said, but had been asked to return home and had not ventured to the capital since.

Two days ago, however, their father, who lived with Mr Ji and cared for him, reported that he had gone missing.

(H/T Valentina Luo)

UPDATE, 7/30, 2:47 pm: He has been arrested.

Ji Zhongxing, who was suspected of setting off a home-made explosive at the Beijing Capital International Airport, has been arrested, police said Tuesday.

UPDATE, 9/18, 1:51 am: He asked for forgiveness in court.

In the worst bombing on US soil since 9/11, three are dead and more than 100 are injured after two blasts ripped through a crowd at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on an otherwise perfect day.

You’ll find updating coverage everywhere at this moment, led by the Boston Globe and Gawker, so we’ll spare the words here. Just a little China angle though, via Reuters:

Of the 23,326 runners who started the race on Monday, 17,584 finished before the blast, marathon officials said. Runners were diverted before officials brought the marathon to a halt.

The official Boston Marathon website listed 47 individual runners with Chinese citizenship, which may include Hong Kong and Taiwan; 32 runners were listed as from Hong Kong.

A slight discrepancy in numbers here, but Shanghaiist notes, “85 runners from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were taking part in the race, none are believed to be among the injured, but two Taiwanese participants are currently missing.”

The above image, which you’re likely to see everywhere, if you haven’t already, is by John Tlumacki of the Boston Globe. More images here.

Also, someone uploaded the following video via Boston Globe onto Youku, where it’s drawn 540,000 views in six hours.

“Squid bomb” can refer to squid jigs for catching squids, a World War II anti-submarine weapon, or this annoying video featuring Squidward Tentacles. It’s never meant to be taken literally, i.e. a bomb inside a squid.

Until now. Now it can mean exactly that: a bomb inside a squid.

In Guangdong province’s Jiaoling County, a market seller discovered, while gutting a squid, a metal object that looked like a bomb. It was a bomb: about 20 centimeters long (about two and a half feet) and 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds).

The Nanfang reports via Guangzhou Daily:

The sherriff’s department later confirmed it was an active bomb and carried out a controlled explosion.

The seller, Mr. Huang, speculated that the squid had swallowed the bomb thinking it was a fish.

A reminder that more than 10 million mines are buried in the earth. How many swim the seas?

Live bomb found at Guangdong fish market… inside a squid which ate it (The Nanfang)

The smart fellas over at Discovery Channel’s MythBusters recently decided to take a closer look at a traditional Chinese popcorn-maker, which I can tell you from experience makes a great (cheap!) snack.

Vaporized water, liquefied starch, relief of pressure, cooking in a bomb suit… this segment has it all.

“Notice that the way that it exploded creates shape that’s more like puffed rice than it actually is popcorn because of the speed of the kind of plasma form of the starch bursting out,” co-host Jamie Hyneman muses. “I think that if we took the pressure down or just didn’t do it as long it’d probably be really good.”

I’d still eat it.

(H/T SCMP)

A man seeking overdue wages blew himself up on Friday at about 3:53 pm in Guangzhou, according to Xinhua. He died while injuring seven people. The incident happened in a residential community on Tianhe North Road.

Some pictures have begun to pop up on Sina Weibo, as you see below (top, bottom), but no one really knows anything. The kind of comments we’ve been seeing include, “I want to ask who common people should look to for protection,” “Who can explain how this happened?” and “All reform is futile.” Indeed, there’s nothing quite like a suicide bombing to shake people to their core; there was also one in November, involving a wheelchair. That was in Henan province, and in that incident as well, only the bomber died (he injured nine).

Updates as they become available in the morning.

Violence between Burmese government and rebel forces has apparently spilled across the border from northern Kachin to China.

Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying said yesterday that three “bombs” from Myanmar landed in Yunnan province, and added — rather diplomatically — that Myanmar should probably stop letting bombs land in Yunnan. Via Wall Street Journal:

“The Chinese side has launched representations … with Myanmar, requiring them to take the effective and immediate measures to avoid the repetition of similar incidents,” Ms. Hua said at a media briefing in Beijing.

And:

While the conflict in Myanmar’s northern regions was an “internal affair” for the country, Ms. Hua said China wants Myanmar to deal with the issue through “peaceful negotiation” to “maintain tranquility and stability of the border area.”

It’s unclear whether those bombs were from the ground or air, though rebels reported they were mortars.

Thousands of civilians have been displaced since the latest ceasefire broke down in 2011, and one figures that many of those refugees now call China home. The Kachin Independent Army’s (KIA) headquarters is in Laiza, separated from China by a small river. CNTV adds that the bombs fell into “Yunnan’s Yingjiang County and destroyed a civilian building, but caused no casualties.”

Obviously China has a vested interest in Burmese peace. And the US happens to be in agreement — via AP:

The United States earlier said the use of air power in Kachin state is “extremely troubling.” On Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. is seeking clarity on the situation following conflicting statements from Myanmar authorities, and is urging both the government and Kachin representatives to stop fighting.

“Our view is that all sides need to cease and desist and get into dialogue with each other,” she told a news briefing.

UPDATE, 3:05 pm: Via Xinhua:

There has been no influx of Myanmar’s border residents into Chinese territory, authorities of southwest China’s Yunnan Province that borders Myanmar said Friday.

Here’s something you only see in awesome TV shows. On Sunday, a man in a wheelchair in Tanghe County, Henan province blew himself up in front of a large shoe store, injuring nine people around him (no life-threatening injuries). Authorities are still investigating. The official write-up that was released to several news outlets is asking people to not listen to any rumors.

Rumors such as these, perhaps, that totally obfuscate everything. According to Free More News:

Local government said it was an accident and denied any possibilities of terrorism.

It was also reported as a suicide bombing since the suspect was killed and pedestrians were wounded on a busy street. Witness said there was no blood at the scene, and it may not be an explosion. The police quickly blocked the scene and the details remained unclear.