Foreign journalists have started making their way to Kashgar today after the official Xinhua News Agency reported that 16 police officers were killed when two terrorists drove a truck into an electricity pole and threw two home-made explosives sometime around 8 a.m. Monday. So far, the few foreigners who have made the double-hop plane connection to Kashgar through Urumqi, haven't disputed that account. The Guardian's Jonathan Watts made the trip, and a Reuters team got there by nighttime. AP last reported from Urumqi at this writing. Others tell CPJ they are on the way, and it looks like access to the region has not been blocked yet. Maybe the media lockdown we saw in Buddhist Tibet in March won't be repeated in the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a concern we wrote about yesterday.
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Coverage of today's attack on a police station in Kashgar will be important to watch. The coming hours will determine if the government's more liberal rules on foreign reporters' travel will be observed or ignored. The policy--which ostensibly allows foreign media to travel and interview people freely--was put into place in January 2007 as part of China's Olympic pledge to remove restrictions on journalists. It was summarily sidelined when ethnic rioting broke out in
China watchers in Hong Kong say there is a feeling within the Beijing government that completely closing off Tibet in March might have been a bad strategy that led to a "news vacuum" that was going to be filled one way or another by the foreign media. The lesson learned, the feeling here is, that a more lenient approach might have worked to the government's advantage in
Information about today's attack on border police in the western Chinese city of Kashgar is coming almost entirely from the official Xinhua News Agency. What's interesting is the huge difference in the agency's own reports, depending on what language you're reading. In English, the attack was a suspected act of terrorism by Uighur separatists. In Chinese, it barely warrants a mention, and it was described as simply a criminal act.
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