Absurdity, Allegory and China

When I hear any story that reports on “Needle Attacks” my initial response is “Here we go again.” Sophie Beach at China Digital Times has linked to two different stories that both call into question the veracity of the incidents reported from Urumqi. From the Toronto Star’s Was needle panic in China a fake frenzy?:

“I don’t think there’s very much evidence to support the idea that there was any sort of campaign,” says Gerald Groot, a specialist in Chinese studies at the University of Adelaide. “I’ve seen reports suggesting there could have been as many as 500 people who were stabbed. But there’s really been nothing to show for it.”

The government said more than 500 people claimed to have been attacked, but only 170 show any signs of injury. Of those, 22 were being monitored and none were expected to suffer repercussions, it said.

“It seems more like mass hysteria than reality to me,” observed Groot.

Even China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency dialed down its reporting of the alleged attacks.

“Some of those who said they had been stabbed actually suffered from mosquito stings and other psychogenic reasons,” Xinhua said.

Other agency reports noted that of the four people officially charged last week, most were drug addicts involved in acts of plain criminality.

In Misinformation age in Urumqi Reuters reporter Lucy Hornby blogs:

The syringe scare was started by a police department text message last Monday, warning residents against attackers with syringes. Based on the indictments so far, some drug addicts had robbed a cab driver by threatening him with a syringe; another tried to fend off police who were trying to rescue them. And then there was a teenager who stuck a needle in a fruit seller’s buttock.

The government warned of a coordinated separatist attack. The effect of the text message, especially in buses crowded with Urumqi residents who are fearful and suspicious of each other, was panic. Over 500 people have gone to the police saying they were attacked; only 106 of them had a clear mark, bump or rash on their skin, official figures show.

I want to point to my blog post First I Look at the Schools from March 12, 2008 that addresses two street scares in Tianjin that ran like wildfire through the community earlier in this decade. One was the rumor of bubonic plague and the other was a needle attack scare.

The first had to do with bubonic plague. Word got rolling that a kid or two at a local middle school had died from the plague, after having eaten from one of the street food sellers outside that particular school. People talked about it, but nothing was ever reported in the news. Eventually I heard from a person I knew who had a child at that school that there had been a ‘memo’ sent home with all the children that warned the parents of the evils of buying food from unauthorized street vendors. This was happening as China was making its bid to enter the WTO. Another rumor circulating at the same time was that someone from an international funding agency had visited Tianjin and assessed that the roads were too jammed with bicycles and people selling everything from vegetables to family antiques to be seriously considered as a target of development monies, and that if they wanted to get the goods they had to do something about the unfathomable congestion. And this began the street sweeping campaign to get Tianjin up to some level of international credibility, as the mobile entrepreneurs disappeared.

The next one was an equally alarming health rumor: there were disgruntled AIDS victims from Henan province who were turning up along the Binjjiang Dao downtown walking mall in the evenings, poking the innocent with infected needles. This too was [eventually] reported to have been the topic of a memo that went home with students from schools, though there was no mention of anything on the news. I was not able to come up with a reason for getting this one going, but I found it curious that, again, the avenue of ‘reporting’ was a memo from the schools. This was just prior to the SARS outbreak, and though I could stretch things here, I will not. Curiously, both instances were rumors of diseases, the great invisible, the viral fear.

Needle attacks are a well-documented urban legend, and there has only been one case in the world where HIV has actually been transmitted via an attack of this sort, which happened in an Australian prison when an inmate attacked a guard in 1991, and the guard died of AIDS six years later. A search on needle attack urban legend will turn up a lot of tales attached to purported needle attacks.

That the police, via text messages, may have been the source of what could very well be rumors is not a surprise. A lot more qualified info will have to be presented in order for me to be a believer. It sounds like another half-baked sub-plot in a failed ethnic policy that has cost five more Han Chinese their lives.

The most interesting bit of news that has come out of this latest mess in Xinjiang is that the protesting Han Chinese in Xinjiang called for the ouster of Wang Lequan, Mr. Hu’s minority wrangling Party cowboy in the Far West. The book that is waiting to be written by an academic in the future will be Failed Ethnic Policy: Hu Jintao, His Shandong Henchmen, Wang Lequan (Xinjiang) and Zhang Qingli (Tibet) and the Bigger Hammer Strategy of Assimilation. Perhaps there will be a chapter on needle attacks, following the chapter which will attempt to explain what the Chinese police and paramilitary forces were doing while the Uighurs were killing Hans. There are still many questions that have not been answered, and I suspect that they will remain unanswered.