Canadian police announced Monday that they had broken up a major terrorist plot by two men who were planning to attack a passenger train traveling from Toronto to New York. On Tuesday, a car bomb destroyed about half of the French embassy in Libya. Both cases revealed the still present danger of terrorism around the world.

When Chinese people hear about terrorist attacks, they may instinctively feel like they are remote and no threat to their lives, but this is an illusion. The reasons for the terrorist attacks in western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are undoubtedly different from those that caused the Boston bombings. But no one can guarantee that China's inland cities are immune to terrorist attacks.

Chinese society does not have a high level of vigilance when it comes to terrorism. From a broad perspective, China, unlike the US, is not the main target of international terrorist groups. It is hard to say whether the Chinese people's indifference is a good thing or not. It allows society to remain calm, but if individual terrorists or certain groups designate inland Chinese areas as their target, they may succeed more easily.

As China becomes increasingly involved in international affairs, its international strategic environment is becoming more complicated. Chinese cities are growing more prosperous, but they are also more exposed to the potential of terrorist attacks.

While the government is implementing all kinds of identification and tracking systems, the public almost invariably links them to effects on democracy and freedom, and few think about social security issues. As for government crackdowns on terrorist activities in Xinjiang, some netizens have begun to follow the Western perspective and focus on the so-called ethnic issue.

Terrorist activities, though occurring in different forms in different regions, ultimately have the same results - killings and social panic.

We believe there are professional, low-profile forces who have been working in the anti-terrorism field in large Chinese cities. Besides the necessity of maintaining secrecy, the government probably does not want to bring about social anxiety by publicizing these efforts.

However, compared with Westerners, the Chinese public seems psychologically over-protected from terrorism. At the very least, people should be told on certain proper occasions that terrorism is not totally irrelevant to us, and the public should at least have an awareness of the need to fight terrorism.

Regulations on explosives and other dangerous goods need to be further stressed, and basic information systems to handle the growing floating population must be constantly improved. As a result, as long as any symptom of a possible terror plot appears, we will able to detect it in time and take immediate actions.