March 15 was the day many foreign media scrambled to try to reach Tibetan communities in Western China in the wake of Lhasa's ferment. It also happened to be the day that stricter no-liquids-allowed airport security checks came into force. The pileup of people waiting to go through security at Beijing's Capital International Airport was so long that one Beijing-based foreign correspondent missed his plane.

     On my own quest for fresh news from Tibetans, I flew out to Lanzhou, in the western province of Gansu, first thing the next morning, March 16. Anyone who hadn’t seen news of the regulations ahead of time was in trouble. For one, Chinese are not the most patient or trusting travelers; they seem particularly averse to checking in bags. Add to that the fact that at many check-in counters (like mine), the airline staff neglected to make note of the new rules.

      The first I heard of it came over the P.A. in the hall near the security checkpoint, by which time it was too late. Hordes of people had amassed behind me, and many many more in front. The announcement played on and on in a repeating loop, a death knell to the liquid-toting masses.

    I waited in line for about 50 minutes. During that span, I stood behind two Chinese businessmen wearing sweaters under suits. They seemed clear enough about the reasons for the added hassle. “It’s all because of Uighurs making trouble,” one quipped to the other - a stereotypical remark. This couldn’t be good for race relations, I thought. Now Tibetans were ‘making trouble’ too, I told the men. That they didn’t yet know. Together we joked that if officials didn’t get the lines at security under control, they’d be dealing with a popular uprising of their own.

    Things did devolve quickly. The crush of bodies might have suited a Chinese train station before a national holiday, or a supermarket with promotional giveaways on cooking oil, but not the expanded Beijing Capital International Airport with its Sir Norman Foster-designed terminal.

     In the former main terminal, Chinese jetsetters jostled for position. Spats broke out. Young children shrieked in frustration. In the scramble, a bespectacled woman lost the stub of her boarding pass, and was almost trampled after she dropped to her knees to retrieve it. A man in a silk tie retreated on tiptoe along tables moved in to partition the lines, in order to check in his male clutch purse full of toiletries.

    Most passengers simply elected to surrender theirs. It was either that, they figured, or risk missing their flights. At the front of the line, female attendants from the Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) were collecting discarded bottles. There was green tea, nail remover polish, cologne and hand lotion. The haul of confiscated cosmetics and other personal grooming items was enough to open a hotel kiosk.

     Would the CAA officers divy up the take? “No,” said one. “We probably just throw it all away.” She didn’t sound convincing. The next day, I imagined, her husband could be shaving with a half can of lime-scented shaving cream. My shaving cream.

    I was forced to hand over a tube of toothpaste and a bottle of contact lens solution, along with the aforementioned shaving cream. I put up a fight for the lens solution, since some containers smaller than 100 milliliters were still allowed provided they passed screening -- and I only had a few days’ worth of drops left. But my objections were futile. All that mattered was the size of bottle, I was told. There was no period of leniency, no room to negotiate.

    One of the attendants was apologetic for the “inconvenience”. Most were stone-cold. “Sorry this is the policy. It’s for your security. We’re just doing our best to execute it,” uttered one woman. At the checkpoint, a male officer inspecting bags one by one rejected any suggestion that CAA was caught unprepared. I began to argue with him. But another businessman in front of me had had enough of my quibbling. “Okay, Okay. Enough already. You should just be happy you got to this point!”

    On the Web, some Chinese Netizens have vented frustrations and criticism toward news of the ban. From the thread of comments appended to one report carried on Sina.com in early April, I found the following:
 

    “1. Chinese people always go to the extreme in handling matters. Thus it’s come to the point where you can’t bring anything.
    2. Say that for checked luggage, the compensation for every kilo lost became US$50. Then everyone would definitely be willing to check their luggage. With checked bags right now, first, it’s very dirty; second, it wastes a lot of time; third, it’s too easy to lose something!”

    “I wish the makers of hair products and cosmetics would produce smaller containers.”

    “It’s appropriate to be strict. But it should be more human.”

             And my personal favorite:

    “…No liquids are allowed, not even baby’s milk. If the kid’s hungry, find a stewardess.”

     Since September 11, goes the wry expression in liberal America, “security is the new freedom”; whereas in China, security has always taken precedence. Few Chinese have any illusions over that approach, and in many cases the masses tends to agree with it.

    The age-old Chinese faith in order and fear of chaos kicks in, hammered home for many by lingering memories of the Tiananmen crackdown, and the Cultural Revolution. By now, most people are well-acclimated the drill of everyday life under the whims of an insecure policing regime, which in reality functions in extreme spells of laxness and stringency. While levels of enforcement are highly irregular, at least the timing of a crackdown is much more predictable. New ground rules tend put everyone on alert, and to numb many people's instincts to question the need for them. After all, the official argument goes, the Olympics are at stake. In response to which the people understand that this, too, shall pass.

     A few weeks later, I was back at Capital International for another trip out west, this time bound for Xinjiang, to investigate a protest in the Muslim Uighur outpost of Khotan. This time I checked my rucksack. I found that the wait at the security checkpoints had subsided considerably. At front of some of the lines, sample bottles of liquids were arrayed as a reminder of what not to bring. Passengers had learned the drill, and were more patient and compliant. On the plane, for once, there was some extra room in the overhead bins.

     I caught my connecting flight to Khotan in Urumqi, where Uighur assailants reportedly boarded the flight that was targeted in March. Every check-in counter at the airport there displayed a full-size photo of restricted combustible, inflammable, explosive, toxic, corrosive, compressed, radioactive, infectious, oxidizing or otherwise “dangerous goods”. These signs weren’t all new; CAA last instituted caps on liquid containers in 2002, after a fire tore threw the cabin of a plane and it plunged into the sea off of Dalian, killing all 111 people aboard. (A suicidal passenger is believed to have set the blaze).

    The still-life shots showed tanks of gasoline and camp-stove propane, tins of paint and paint thinner, bullets and flares. Passengers were prohibited from carrying on any of the above, the placard said, or from failing to declare any “dangerous” items as such in checked luggage. There was a disturbing gloss, however. Some of the signs were printed solely in Chinese, often with English translation but no Uighur script.

    The uniformed guards performing the body searches, on the other hand, did not discriminate. They were attentive to the point of  being clinical, and there was no attempt to separate men from women, Uighur from Han Chinese. In a first for me in China, my shoes were ordered off. I felt a pinch on both ankles, a series of potches on the bum, an abrupt tug on the belt…and finally, I was done.

    “We’re stricter than before, so much stricter,” mused a chatty young CAA officer posted at the gate to my plane. That much I can tell, I said, readjusting my jeans. The officer was adamant that reported attack on March 7 was true. As proof - again, by some backward twist of logic - he explained the new security measures were a direct response to it. So, I questioned, that meant that the Uighur assailants had walked down one of these very gangways with soda cans of gasoline, right? He didn’t say much more.

    In Beijing, you can still buy a bottled or canned beverage once beyond the securty checks. Not so in Urumqi. At the sit-down cafe areas, the cheapest drink was a four-dollar glass mug of Lipton tea.

    It’s worth noting that the service aboard flights to Xinjiang and other far-western provinces, home to the majority of China’s Muslims, caters to them in some ways but not others. The meals they hand out are generally Halal, as on my plane into Khotan. A Uighur man sitting across from me asked for one extra snack pack to take for his teenage son, who he said “really likes the airplane food”; the Chinese stewardess gave him two. He did not expect that the boxes she brought would contain ham sandwiches. Catching a whiff of the ham, the man rolled his eyes and groaned in his stilted Mandarin, “I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

    Another taboo moment came a few days later, on the plane back from Khotan to Urumqi. I was seated at a diagonal from an observant older gentleman dressed in simple two-piece outfit with a skullcap and a mid-length beard. The whole trip he sat calmly in his seat, his feet crossed, his arms folded, and his eyes transfixed by one of the racier in-flight video programs I’ve ever come across in this country. First came Taiwanese pop music videos pulsing with noir love scenes, followed by a slo-mo montage of South American models. They pulled rubber cocktail dresses tight across their bodies as water bounced off their bodies, a signature move.

    The airport in Khotan, expanded for civilian service in 2002, is still a tiny facility with a single waiting hall. On the drive into town, you pass nearby police, paramilitary and army installations that brood over the city. Uighurs still make up over 90 percent of the population of the prefecture as a whole, but the Uighur proportion of passenger traffic is significantly smaller at the airport. You see a mix of local entrepreneurs, employees of government companies and agencies, and the odd foreign tourist or trader. Here, unlike most other airports around China, you cannot even step foot inside without a plane ticket.

    At the check-in counter, passengers have to wait for checked bags to pass X-ray inspection before they’re permitted to move on to the security check themselves. On my way out of Khotan, an officer spotted something that looked suspicious in my backpack, and asked me to come around behind the counter to open it. The item in question was just a flash disk. “If anything or anyone looks irregular, we check,” he stated. I asked if I looked suspicious. “We are dui wu bu dui ren,” he said in an officious tone, meaning, “We look at the goods, not the individual.” There would be no racial profiling here.

    At its most hectic, only two commercial flights depart Khotan airport a day. Still, there was a backup at security. The Han officer checking ID's was meticulous. He deals with fewer passengers a day than almost anyone in his position in China, he told me, yet he’s as busy as any of them. He contended that airport security in Khotan, scene of a rash of Uighur separatist violence in the late 1990’s, had been this tough for years. Other reporters were told that lately it had gotten tougher .

    The shortfall of Uighur-language signage was still bugging me. If authorities were convinced that Uighur splittists were plotting destruction, why not put them on watch in their own language?

    In Khotan - where despite rising pressures to use official dialect in schools and official affairs, most Uighurs still don’t speak much Chinese - I asked the Han woman at the check-in counter why some security provisions weren’t posted in Uighur script. “Because we don’t have that here,” she said blankly. The reflexive answer is, to this day, one of Chinese officialdom’s more annoying habits. Switching flights in Urumqi, I put the question once more to a another Han staffer at check-in. “You’re right. There should be more Uighur,” said she said, to my surprise. “I’ll pass on your recommendation.” I doubt she did, but still.

    I returned from Urumqi to Beijing on China Southern Airlines flight. It was the evening equivalent of the morning trip that, exactly one month earlier, was forced to make emergency landing in Lanzhou. We were served a Halal Chinese meal of cold duck, rolls, and a salad of carrots, celery and boiled peanuts, which actually wasn’t half-bad. It also made me very thirsty. Later, I made for the bathroom at the back of the plane. I took my digital pocket camera with me, not thinking that anyone would really notice.

    Inside, on the door, I found the big ubiquitous airlines sticker noting in both Chinese and English: “No smoking in lavatory.” A smaller notice had been tacked on above it: “SMOKE DETECTOR INSTALLED IN LAVATORY.” And above that, slapped up last with scotch tape, was a third notice: “STRICTLY PROHIBITED TO MANGLE THE SMOKE DETECTOR.” I started snapping pictures, but there was turbulence, and I'm no photographer, so it took a minute or two to take a clear shot.

    A stewardness was in my face when I opened the door, just about to knock. She’d been seated directly across from the lavatory, keeping stern watch over the customers using the facilities. After a little small talk, though, she let down her guard a bit.

    What exactly had occurred on the morning of March 7? The stewardess, whose surname was Wu, repeated the official line. The young Uighur woman had carried a can or cans filled with gasoline to the bathroom. “She tried to light it but just couldn’t get it lit,” said Ms. Wu.

    In the weeks following the March 7 incident, Xinhua said the Uighur girl confessed to a "terrorist" attempt. The talk around Beijing, which remains unconfirmed, is that she was carrying a Pakistani passport.

    Ms. Wu knew nothing of this. She claimed not to know anything more outside of what she’d read in state media. To me this seemed strange, considering that colleagues of hers on the same route had supposedly overpowered the plotters. The female flight attendant who sniffed the gasoline received a reward of $17,000, the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan Daily had reported in late March. The flight crew was a awared $57,000 in all.

    Before returning to my seat, I asked Ms. Wu whether she thought the blanket ban on liquids was excessive. “This period of time is the most risky we’ve ever faced, because of the Olympics. So we have to take whatever safety measures are necessary,” she said, summing up with a typically Chinese phrase: “This is the way when there is no other way.”