Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Will 9/11-style terrorist attacks take place again on the continental United States? That possibility has declined, but no one is sure it will never happen again - Neither the White House nor US State Secretary Mike Pompeo dares or is able to rule out that possibility. 

In 2018, there were more than 9,600 terrorist attacks around the world, which killed more than 22,980 people, including 7,290 suspects and 15,690 victims, according to the latest report of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism based in the University of Maryland. 

Counter-terrorism is still one of the toughest challenges the US faces. I'm not saying that the US has achieved nothing in countering terrorism, but it is too early to say the country has found its way out on this issue. 

One reason is the US should have eradicated the soil that breeds terrorism. Maybe the US government wants to do so but is not able to. 

If Pompeo or other US politicians could view China's governance in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region from such a standpoint, the US or other countries will probably have more reference to help them figure a way out to fight terrorism.

China is also threatened by terrorist attacks, particularly in its Xinjiang region. Terrorism and extremism used to run rampant in Xinjiang. As mentioned in the white paper on Xinjiang released in August, there had been thousands of terrorist incidents in Xinjiang, including bomb attacks, assassinations and poisonings from 1990 to 2016.

China has taken action to explore measures to deal with the threat of terrorism it has been facing. China has found its key, which has proven to be effective. The past three years have not seen any terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. On the contrary, Afghanistan and India, which are China's close neighbors, have experienced 1,776 and 888 terrorist attacks in 2018, respectively, which caused more than 10,000 deaths. 

China's governance in its Xinjiang Autonomous Region is not and will never be aimed at cracking down on Muslims or minority ethnic groups. When people like Pompeo use so-called human rights and freedom of religion as excuses to smear China, when they attack a straw man in order to achieve their strategic goal of balancing China, they have actually left the door open for terrorist attacks.

Every country has the right to go its own way to guarantee its development and the safety of its people. China, of course, won't change its measures and policies that benefit its people just because Pompeo or somebody else says something else.

We won't force other countries to follow the footsteps of China, although what we are doing has something in common with what Americans hope for. If Washington really cares about its people's safety, it should find a more feasible way of counter-terrorism. China's measures can be a good reference.