The Great Hall of the People, the very center of the state, witnessed two silent tributes this week from China's most powerful people to victims of a shocking terrorist attack.

On Wednesday morning, at the opening meeting of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's legislature, around 3,000 deputies lowered their heads and stood in silence for a minute for the dead in the killing spree at a railway station in the southwestern city of Kunming.

Last time the NPC paid silent tribute at its annual session was in March 1997 for Deng Xiaoping, the prominent Chinese leader who passed away in February of the same year...Behind such respect to life of ordinary people is the Chinese government's people-oriented governance approach, a gradual, but visible, change in recent years.

In his debut speech as general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee in November 2012, Xi Jinping told media "to meet their (the people's) desire for a happy life is our mission."

As for China's fight against terrorism, those moments of silence may endow it with more strength.

Any country under the rule of law and any individual with conscience will not tolerate such an act, he said.

"We should see through the ugly nature of terrorists. They are anti-humanity and sociopathic."

The people in Xinjiang support the Party and the government's efforts to fight terrorists and safeguard stability, he said.

Terrorists are common enemies to all people, including every ethnic group in Xinjiang, he said.

"They do not represent any ethnic group, and their activities are not about ethnic or religious issues," he said. "The battle against them is life-or-death."

In related news a popular online shopping website in China on Monday banned sales of t-shirts that closely resemble the one worn by one of the attackers in the rampage.

The advertisement on Taobao, the consumer-to-consumer retail platform of the Alibaba Group, first emerged after police over the weekend displayed on television a black t-shirt bearing designs that they had taken from a terrorist shot dead in the wake of the attack.

The advert on the virtual store explicitly touted for pre-sale of the t-shirts and clearly related it to the terrorist attack.

“Taobao will never tolerate such commodities. [We] resolutely oppose to any anti-humanity conduct such as this,” the online shopping website said in a statement on Monday.

The virtual store had already been permanently closed and all orders had been scrapped, it added.

The online community has widely applauded Taobao's action. Many voiced support and condemned the vendors for lacking conscience. “You asked for it,” many of them said on the internet.