FOUR OF THE FIVE CULPRITS OF THE TERRORIST attack on Thursday came from a poverty-stricken county in the south of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

Most of the more than 200 suspected terrorists apprehended in less than a month for attacks in Xinjiang and elsewhere in the country are in their 20s. This sends the message that the importance of education in this region cannot be overestimated.

This explains why the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee mapped out a specific policy to address these issues at a meeting on Monday.

Efforts will be made to make sure that a family without any member in work will have a job secured for at least one member of the family.

The policy also stipulates that senior high-school education will be free for all students in the southern part of Xinjiang where about 80 percent of the population is Uygur. For most parts of the country, free education is only for primary and middle school students.

In the impoverished rural areas in southern Xinjiang, it is easy for young rural villagers who have failed to receive enough education and cannot land a job to be brainwashed by extreme religious ideas such as jihad, which instigates them to get involved in violent attacks on innocent people in the name of Islam.

Whether the local economy can be developed for the benefit of local Uygur residents and the quality of education local youth receive will make a great difference to local social stability and the future of the region.

Rome was not built in a day. It is unrealistic to expect that the new policy will result in a fundamental change in a short period of time.

But at the same time, there is no time to lose in the urgency of putting a check on the propensity of an increasing number of ignorant Uygur youths to get involved in terrorist activities.

Therefore a severe crackdown on terrorists and down-to-earth work by local governments to enact the central authorities' policy to the letter should be jointly implemented immediately, so it dawns on more and more youths in Xinjiang that an obsession with deviant religious ideas will only lead to their own destruction, to the loss of innocent lives and to the interruption of social stability.

(China Daily USA 05/28/2014 page11)