"Safety is our top concern," said China's Vice President Xi Jinping in late July, pointing to the deployment of 100,000 troops around Beijing and the surface-to-air missile batteries that protect the main stadiums as proof of the regime's determination to ensure that no terrorist attack would disrupt the Olympic Games. But it couldn't stop two equally determined Uighur militants from killing 16 Chinese police and injuring another 16 in an attack on a border post near Kashgar.
True, Kashgar is in the far northwestern province of Xinjiang, 4,000 km from Beijing, but if two men armed only with hand grenades and knives could do that much damage there, what is to stop others from doing it in Beijing? Certainly not surface-to-air missiles.
The best way to prevent terrorist attacks is to remove the grievances that often motivate them, and to penetrate the terrorist organizations with informers. China hasn't done very well on either front. In Xinjiang as in Tibet, it has inundated the local population with a wave of Han Chinese immigrants who live essentially separate and far more prosperous lives, and created great resentment as a result.