A serious violent terrorist attack happened in a morning market in Urumqi, the capital city of western China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, on Thursday. Two cars without license plates ploughed into busy crowds and then tossed explosives, killing 31 and injuring 94. The malicious incident has solicited a new round of shocks to public opinion.

The massive knife attack at Kunming railway station early March and the suicide bomb attack at Urumqi South train station make this incident all the more prominent. Chinese people are increasingly aware of and concerned about terrorist attacks.

Violent terrorism haunting Xinjiang has become more ferocious and obstinate than we expected and it is becoming a chronic challenge to our social governance. The causes of the terrorist attacks are perhaps so complicated and profound as to go beyond our traditional view.

We lack experience in cracking down on violent terrorism in today's highly open era. However, unity and action constitute the basic experience we need.

Unity means, first and foremost, we should accept the fact that we are living in an unfortunate stage mired by violent terrorism in China. Therefore, we need to add "anti-terrorist" elements to our life by making some adjustments. Though policy errors in the course of history partly contributed to the current plight, we must impede complaints and criticism from shaping public opinions on Xinjiang.

Catalysts for violent terrorism in China have spread, so we need to keep sober-minded. No matter how we adjust relevant policies and how many measures we take, we cannot ensure they will take immediate effects. If we are too impatient, we may flounder, doubt everything and finally lose confidence, thus leading to escalated chaos in ideology as well as social governance.

Amid the smooth decades of reform and opening up, most of the crises we have undergone were temporary and hence the spasmodic protracted conundrum of violent terrorism is quite strange to us.

Looking around the world, extremism notably separatism has resulted in countless tragedies such as state disintegration, civil war and mass genocide. Effective policies for intractable ethnic issues are difficult to find in Western countries as well.

Beset by violent terrorism in Xinjiang, we should clearly see it's an overall challenge to public security instead of "ethnic conflict" in a universal sense. Terrorists are a common enemy of all the Chinese people including Xinjiang residents.

It has been proved that governing Xinjiang is not an easy task and we should advance with the times and find major contradictions at present. We should give full play to the strong aspiration of the Uyghur people for sustained peace and a better life. They should play a major role in fighting violent terrorists who are just a handful of separatists.