China’s instrumentalization of terrorism

Passengers ride a subway in Beijing, 2008, amid purported threats that Turkistan Islamic Party might target buses, trains and planes during the Olympics. Greg Baker / Press Association. All rights reserved.China’s long-simmering problem with Uyghur separatism and terrorism in the Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region has been increasingly connected to the broader
regional and global dynamics of contemporary jihadism. While this has been
driven by developing connections between small numbers of Uyghur militants with
global and regional jihadist movements, it has also been precipitated by
Beijing’s instrumentalization of terrorism in both the realms of domestic and
foreign policy.

Domestically, the intense securitization of Xinjiang and the Uyghur issue
over the past two years has provided significant ballast for Beijing’s focus on
ensuring state or regime security. In the foreign policy context, the rise of
ISIS to prominence, combined with increasing incidences of terrorism within or
directly linked to Xinjiang, has permitted Beijing both to justify its
hard-line repression of dissent in Xinjiang and assert its commitment to global
efforts to combat terrorism.

China and ISIS

In 2013, China’s then Middle East envoy Wu Sike claimed
that hundreds of Uyghurs were travelling to Syria, usually via Turkey to fight
with various anti-Assad groups, including ISIS. Li Shaoxian, vice-president of
the Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) in
Beijing, amplified these claims earlier this year, claiming
that “many hundreds or thousands” of Uyghurs may be fighting with ISIS. The
Chinese media has also been replete with reported ‘confessions’
of alleged Uyghur returnee militants detailing their recruitment and training
by ISIS.

The view that the threat of ISIS to China extends beyond the issue of Uyghur
militants has been lent credence by the caliphate’s own propaganda efforts. In
2014, ISIS’ leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, argued that China was on a par with
states such as Israel, India and the US as an ‘oppressor’ of Muslims, while the
release of a Mandarin-language propaganda video in August 2015 confirmed
for some the group’s desire to actively target China and target its
recruitment beyond Uyghurs to the Hui (ethnically Chinese Muslims). That such
this was not mere bluster was brought
home to many Chinese, and the leadership in Beijing, with ISIS’ execution
of a Chinese citizen, Fang Lizhi, in Iraq in November 2015.

However on available open source evidence, official assertions of the scale
of ISIS recruitment of Uyghurs are difficult to corroborate. While for instance
it is clear that the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a group China has
previously blamed for attacks in Xinjiang, has a small presence in Syria, it is
in fact aligned
with Al Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al Nusra, rather than ISIS. And the
alignment of the Uyghur presence to Jabhat al Nusra is significant as it reflects
the ties established between Uyghur militants and Al Qaeda and associated
groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), during the Taliban’s
ascendancy in Afghanistan.

Uyghur terrorism and national
security

But accurately reflecting such nuances is arguably not a core concern for
China’s official narrative. Rather, Beijing is focused on cementing a
“discourse of danger” around Xinjiang and the Uyghur for deployment both
externally and domestically.

Beijing has long claimed that Uyghur separatism and opposition has been
inspired and supported from external sources with, for instance, Beijing directing such charges
during the Cold War at the largely secular Uyghur nationalist, “pan-Turkist”
exiles based in Turkey and the Soviet Central Asian republics. However the 9/11
attacks transformed this narrative, with Beijing appropriating the lexicon of
the ‘war on terror’ to label Uyghur opposition as manifestations of “religious
extremism” linked to the influence of regional and transnational jihadist
organizations such as Al Qaeda in order to generate
diplomatic capital for the ongoing repression of Uyghur autonomist
aspirations.

By framing China’s “Uyghur” problem through the discourse of the ‘war on
terror’, “imbued with the fear of an evil and irrational Other”. Beijing has
furthered a “perception of disorder and chaos” in the region that requires the more
forceful intrusion of the state’s security apparatus.

After the inter-ethnic riots in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in July 2009
Beijing has rapidly
increased Xinjiang’s counter-terrorism budget from an annual budget of 1.54
billion yuan (approximately $241 million) in 2009 to some 6 billion yuan
(approximately $938 million) in 2014. A major component of this increased
spending on public security in Xinjiang has included investment in the
extension of China’s electronic surveillance system, “Skynet,” into the
region. Authorities have “installed high-definition video surveillance cameras
on public buses and at bus stops; on roads and in alleys; in markets and
shopping centers; and in schools” that police monitor “constantly, searching
for actionable intelligence”.

Perhaps the most potent symbols yet of Beijing’s instrumentalization of
terrorism have come with the establishment of China’s National Security
Commission (NSC) in 2014 and the passing of the country’s first
counter-terrorism legislation on 27 December 2015. The establishment of the NSC
and the identification of 11 broad areas of focus for the commission – ranging
from “political” to “ecological” security – reflects President Xi’s effort to
articulate a “holistic” approach to national
security that encompasses traditional and non-traditional threats to
security.

Significantly, of the 11 areas of security concern identified, “political”
and “homeland” security top the bill. Prominent Chinese analyst Shen Dingli
has noted here that “political security has been long phrased as institutional
security or ideological security” while “homeland security…refers to
anti-terror related security, which is different from national defense against
foreign aggression”.

Here, then, ‘national security’ becomes synonymous with state or regime
security. This, as David Lampton has argued, betrays the intensification
of the long-standing linkage between ‘external and internal security in Chinese
thinking’ under President Xi’s leadership.

China’s new counter-terrorism legislation meanwhile provides a legal basis
for the country’s various security organs, including in the People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) and People’s Armed Police (PAP), to identify and suppress
individuals or groups deemed to be “terrorists”. It requires internet providers
and technology companies to provide technical assistance and information,
including encryption keys, during counter-terror operations. 

The new law has
been hailed by some Chinese commentators as an “unambiguous legal document”
that “conforms to the new developments in the global fight against terrorism”
and as
a tool to “help fight terrorism at home and help maintain global security”.
From this perspective China is simply following in the footsteps of many other
states in establishing a clear legal basis for the counter-terrorism activities
of its national security agencies.

The law formalises counter-terrorism as a national
security priority for Beijing through the establishment of a “national
leading institution for counter-terrorism efforts” and provides a legal basis
for the country’s various counter-terrorism organs, such as the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) and People’s Armed Police (PAP), to identify and suppress
individuals or groups deemed to be “terrorists”. It also requires
internet providers to provide technical assistance and information,
including encryption keys, during counter-terror operations, and includes a
provision by which the PLA or PAP may seek approval from the Central Military
Commission (CMC) to engage in counter-terrorism operations abroad.

State security ascendant

While official pronouncements may thus stress that the law’s primary purpose
is to strengthen Beijing’s ability to ensure the security and safety of the
country’s citizenry and interests both at home and abroad, a closer examination
suggests that ensuring the security of the state lies at its heart.

Since coming to power President Xi Jinping has expended a considerable
amount of energy on two core domestic security issues: Xinjiang and wenwei or “stability maintenance”
campaigns. The former has been driven by nationally and internationally
prominent terrorist attacks by Uyghur militants such as the March 2014 Kunming
railway station attack and
the latter by rising numbers of violent incidents by “ordinary” Han Chinese
related to personal gripes, local political grievances or corruption.

The new law’s definition of “terrorism” as “propositions and actions that
create social panic, endanger public safety, violate person and property, or
coerce national organs or international organizations, through methods such
violence, destruction, intimidation, so as to achieve their political,
ideological, or other objectives” would appear to be broad enough to apply
to events as distinct as the March 2014 Kunming attack and the series of mail
bomb attacks in Liucheng County in Guangxi in September 2015 that killed 10
people. Yet, these acts, in contrast to those in Kunming, have been labelled
“criminal” rather than “terrorist” in nature by the authorities.

Under Xi Jinping, the threat of terrorism in Xinjiang has been
instrumentalized nation-wide to assist the CCP’s efforts to maintain
“stability”. The “mobilization of the Uyghur terror threat”, as Tom Cliff has
recently argued, is “not simply about preventing terror attacks on Han
civilians—it is primarily about rapidly or even pre-emptively ‘harmonising’
potentially unstable elements of the Han population itself. People feel less
uncomfortable when they are told that the police on the streets are there to
protect them from dangerous “others,” rather than to protect the state from
them or other Han”. Under President Xi two of the CCP’s core
interests – the security of the one-party state and “stability” in Xinjiang –
have thus increasingly intersected.