Donate NowI thought it was only the US that was still paranoid about water on airplanes. Apparently, China is even more afraid of liquid bombs than George Bush.
I got a pretty nerve-wracking introduction to the consequences of breaking the rigid rules of Chinese security on my flight to Kashgar.
After mistakenly spending 120 RMB ($17) on 3 cups of black tea in the Urumqi airport, I innocently filled up an empty water bottle I had brought into the gate area and boarded a China Southern Airways plane. I always bring extra water with me since I frequently get parched. All countries allowed that, including the US, I assumed.
After taking my seat, a flight attendant noticed my water bottle stuffed in my seat. With the little English he knew, asked me how the water got on board the aircraft. I told him I brought the empty bottle with me through security and filled it up in at the food stall that ripped me off with the tea. He went up front toward the cockpit, consulted with another flight attendant and returned with her as well as a tall, thin guy who looked fairly important, and really pissed off.
It turns out he was a plainclothes air marshall and had been assigned to ride on all planes flying within Xinjiang Province. He demanded my passport-the first of probably 30 times I had to present my "identity card" to a security official during my trip to Xinjiang-spoke to the pilot, and delayed take-off after requesting that I answer a series of questions that were translated by a female flight attendant who spoke fairly good English. He had made a couple of phone calls too, and read info from my passport to whomever was on the other end. Great-I hadn't even landed in Kashgar and my cover was blown!
After apologizing profusely, I sat down in my own seat and buckled up for take off. I concluded my ordeal was over. It was nowhere near over. As soon as we reached cruising altitude, the air marshall motioned for me to come back up to business class where I was coerced into filling out a form that described exactly what happened. It was my confession so-to-speak. I had just confessed to unknowingly threatening the safety of 100 passengers on a plane to China's restive Muslim heartland.
It's unclear how long Chinese air marshals have accompanied passenger aircraft to keep the peace and prevent bombs from blowing people out of the sky. The flight attendant said the forms were just standard procedure whenever an incident took place, a precautionary strategy to protect Chinese citizens and visitors during the Olympics. I think it was more than that.
Firstly, last March, Beijing revealed that it had uncovered a plot hatched in Urumqi which involved hijacking airplanes and possibly blowing them up. These planes were to have originated in Urumqi's airport. The government blamed Uyghur separatists and several of them were killed in subsequent shoot-outs with police. This marked the beginning of Beijing's 2008 crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Although I looked nothing like a Uyghur nor had any intention of killing anyone, the smuggled water bottle represented a breach in China's aviation security and a possible terrorist threat in the same place where a real plan for violence had been found. Furthermore, given the flight was bound for Kasghar and full of Uyghurs, it's no shock that the entire business class-the direct path to the cockpit- was kept empty.
This who hoopla over an imaginary liquid explosive was also about a bit of shame and face-saving too. I had unknowingly embarrassed the air marshall because the water eclipsed his radar and made him look bad in front of his colleagues. It also meant that if I could get water through an XRay and layers of Chinese officers, then a real terrorist who somehow might stun the world by making a real water bomb could do it. My confession set things straight and proved that I was wrong in his eyes.
I got a tough lesson in how one little innocent infringement of the rules compromised a whole code of security conduct which China has worked oh so hard to perfect before the opening of the Games. We were both embarrassed, and slightly scared.