China's Soft War on Terror

Space-Making Processes of Securitization

Tianyang Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000508277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores how the Chinese government reasserts its control and management of public spaces as part of its overall counter-terrorism strategy.

The work focuses primarily on the banal and alternative forms that China's 'war on terror' takes: the everyday, non-military, socio-economic and spatio-material. It presents three different cases of control associated with the state's effort to manage material, social and digital public spaces as remedies to terrorism and ethnic unrest in China: the redevelopment project of Kashgar—the 'home' of Uyghur culture—from 2001 to 2017; the forging of local partnerships with potential agents (i.e. the local cadres and imams in Xinjiang) as part of the process of implementing counter-terrorism policies; and an online campaign about international terrorism that appeared on Sina Weibo. Using securitization theory as a theoretical framework, the book establishes links between human geography and critical security studies and advances the understanding of non-confrontational forms of resistance in China. It also focuses attention on the binary relationship between the securitizing agency of the state and the counter-securitization agency of 'terrorists', while also exploring the manner in which other societal forces interact with these processes.

This book will be of interest to students of critical terrorism studies, Chinese studies, human geography, and security studies.

1IntroductionA study on non-terrorists

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167136-1

Security is omnipresent in everyday life, ranging from apparent trivialities of safety to more significant and global issues of transnational crime, natural disasters, nuclear proliferation and terrorism. The actors whose lives we explore in this book, such as the Old Town residents, the street officers, Internet users, the imams, the planners and so on, are not terrorists. We will come to understand their emotions, their memories, their moments of joy and sadness, hope and fear. We have to swallow their worlds. The worlds of these people, who are not—or not yet—terrorists, have been delineated and defined by China’s war on terror. Concomitantly, they have defined China’s war on terror. This is a study on terrorism through the eyes of ‘non-terrorists’.

A ‘non-terrorist’ is not just a woman or a man, but everything that has been marginalized by, or excised from, the dominant approach of terrorism studies as a subject to be investigated, but at the same time can define, to a large extent, the ways the contemporary war on terrorism operates. Non-terrorist worlds are precarious, often fleeting and indeterminate; they describe a space–time, and emerge from amidst the differential mobilities of sensing subjects, and their ‘force fields’ (Stewart 2011). They are conditioned, but they are also conditioning: subject to deliberate political engineering. This requires us to adopt a multidisciplinary agenda to go beyond the limitations of discipline-specific inquiry on security, and to seek external corrections to their own literature gaps. Scholars of critical, theory-attuned security have argued for a wider understanding of security-referent objects that consider the environment, ethnicity, immigration, cyberspace, celestial bodies and identity as equally important to analyses as national security.

In this book, security is defined not only as a ‘thick’ property of particular entities like the state, human individuals and communities, but also as a ‘thin’ property that denotes a particular kind of social relationship between a referent and a particular harm. Security is viewed in this book as: (1) a dynamic, institutional, discursive process and a performative practice, and (2) an instrument or ‘a set of power-infused discourses and practices that fully participate in neoliberal processes of creating, consolidating, and advancing a particular socio-political order’ (Bourbeau 2015, p. 14). Moving beyond national security paradigms that prioritize state- and military-centered understandings of security, this book provides a critique of the category of ‘security’ as a field of discourse and praxis.

Although the idea of human security is crucial to a critical perspective of security, it might not be a radical departure from the (neo)realist understanding of security. The applications of human security in either academic discussions or development/humanitarian projects might reproduce and legitimize neoliberal forms of governance and produce a ‘new orthodoxy’ of control (Christie 2010). The idea of sustainable development is ‘securitized’ in the human security framework as a bulwark against conflict (Duffield 2005, 2007). A recent and stark example is the war on terror, in which the discourse on human security has been deeply invested in serving the purpose of the powerful states such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France and China. This book moves beyond the traditional human security framework and pursues a critique of the dominant reasoning in existing critical security/terrorism studies. With the emerging development-security nexus, this book attempts to embrace a trans- or multi-scalar, critical (in)security analysis, which addresses security in terms of not only civil conflict but also everyday injustice, and reconsiders the issue of development by exploring both institutional strategies/policies and the everyday lives of people living in developing world context. Lemanski (2012), then, has called for the rescaling of the human security agenda within the context of the Southern city, to consider all scales (not just the global or local) in determining human (in)security, the highly normalized insecurity as part of ongoing daily life, and the informal and formal coping mechanisms employed by citizens themselves. These critical perspectives and approaches helped us put forward a pluralist agenda for theoretical and methodological construction of security in a way that questions and depoliticizes the predominant framework taken that has been granted in ‘traditional’ or ‘orthodox’ security studies.

The worlds of non-terrorists in the war on terror

Which of the non-terrorists’ worlds are we exploring in this book? The home spaces, the bureaucratic and religious spaces, the civic and digital public spaces. Public space is one of the central targets that state and nonstate powers compete for control. Two visions of the politics of public space compete with each other. The Habermasian concept of public sphere is a normative arena, ‘free from all coercion or the intrusion of force’ (Montage 2000, p. 135), in which ‘the public’ is organized and represented (Mitchell 1995, p. 116). It considers that public space, comprising the sites of state politics and market forces, is an artifact given by the powerful, which exists prior to people’s participation, and that it has set the ground rules according to which people should behave (Lee 2009, p. 40). As such, people can only be passive actors in the public space: they earn certain qualifications in society, enter into the already existing public space and play by its rules (Lee 2009, p. 40). Public space is doomed to shrink when the powerful institutions in society act to transform real public space into ‘pseudo public space’ that is subject to surveillance and policing (Mitchell 1995, p. 115).

Public space is not a fixed space. I consider public space to be more open-ended, flexible, performative and processual; it is not defined narrowly by topographical distinctions between public and private spheres. Public space is a situated, amorphous and contingent construct that expresses an infinite range of possibilities of inhabiting social realms beyond the domestic and the private (Massey 2005). Public spaces can be understood as the public sector expressed in physical terms, including not only parks, squares and streets but also a diverse range of other facilities as the collective provision for common social needs, such as churches, mosques, marketplaces, as well as public libraries (Brown 1990). As Paddisons and Sharp (2007, p. 89) stated, ‘where daily life is conducted around the home, the neighborhood and its local public spaces are inevitably arenas for social interaction, real or imagined’. The gated community and the digitally monitored private life of citizens have become a naturalized component of postindustrial urban life. The boundary between private and public spaces has been substantially blurred.

The other vision is the Arendtian concept of public space, which emphasizes the role of human agency in constructing the public space. In contrast to the Habermas concept, Arendt’s public space exists not in the ‘natural order’, but in people acting together, by which power can be generated that, in turn, gives rise to and safeguards the public space (Arendt 1998, p. 200). For Arendt, the public space can only be enacted and maintained through the intersubjective performance of different views. Public space is therefore not occasioned solely by monolithic representations of the state and otherness; it is a dense field of practices and discourses where varying modes of inhabitation are contingent not only on top-down, structural forces, but also on grassroots agency, innovation, contestation and interaction. Where fear and violence—experienced and committed by both the state and insurgent groups—preclude the political action that creates and sustains the public space, totalitarianism prevails.

The term ‘public space’ in this research comprises both the Habermasian public sphere and the Arendtian public space, in that it is considered to result from the imbrication of state political projects and diverse forms of local contestation and negotiation, and an ongoing process of re-making that reshapes the dynamic relationship of state and local participation. Thus, I consider the making of public space from two parallel processes: by the manipulation of powerful institutions and by the negotiations, representations and resistances of various seemingly powerless actors at the local level. Terrorism and antiterrorism together can affect spatial structures and their boundaries—like the distinction between public and private spaces—and, consequently generate a new quotidian normalcy (Williams 2003, p. 275). Techniques of controlling and monitoring movement and actions within spaces involve, for example, the searching for, arresting, detaining and questioning of suspicious persons, and the installation of a nation-wide tracking and notification system (Williams 2003, p. 284). The erosion of civil liberties and privacy in the name of public safety modifies the public expectations for certain rights to be respected, and potentially produces the condition that normalizes state oppression. Moreover, local negotiation and resistance also play an equally important role in shaping the public sphere in counterterrorism. Therefore, the public space is not merely the a priori outcome of sovereign power and bureaucratic technologies, but is also an a posteriori indication of the instability where multiple forms of power that abound, compete and overlap there to perform a plurality of identities and, in turn, provoke various forms of anxiety for those who are governed and those who seek to govern.

Notably, this book draws attention to the public space in terms of not only its physical but also its virtual forms. Print media has long been a crucial element in the making of the public sphere. In the epoch of digital media, cyberspace, such as the Internet and social media platforms, is envisioned as a new, democratic public sphere in which peer-to-peer exchanges and many-to-many forums enable large numbers of citizens to deliberate on a broad range of public issues and express their informed, thoughtful views in ways that reflect and influence public opinion as well as urge, if not compel, cooperation by political decision-makers. Social media has become a significant lens to discover and examine the ways in which security issues are accepted in local contexts in terms of the subjective experiences of and the localized responses to the dominant discourse on security.

The China questions

For many societies beyond the West, terrorism and public spaces may be a ‘travelling’ (Said 1982) idea, due to postcolonial processes that have resulted in complex translation between Western ideas and indigenous textures of socialites and cultures, giving the notion of security fluid and indeterminate local expressions and repercussions. However, civilizations such as China do have an indigenous conception of space, safety and security lying between the state, the society and the private household. The study of geo-historically varying conceptions of terrorism and, more importantly, how they have been re-invented and re-worked through the global circulation of Western modernity, holds the promise of enriching academic concepts and discourses in security theory. This research is based on fieldwork in China. In this context, I focus primarily on China’s war on terror in banal and alternative forms: the everyday, nonmilitary, socioeconomic and spatio-material. I ask: ‘how does the Chinese government reassert its control and management of public spaces as alternative (socioeconomic and sociocultural) forms of counter-terrorism?’ And what are the implications of these implementations, in terms of people’s subjective experiences of (in)security and citizen-led localized responses? Taking into account these questions, my purpose is:

1. Overall, to explore how the Chinese government conceives counter-terrorism as spanning not only ‘hard’ power elements of security governance but also inter-woven socio-economic and socio-cultural domains, and to understand the implications of the social practices of China’s counter-terrorism.
2. More specifically, to demonstrate how everyday spaces are manipulated as a socioeconomic and sociocultural tool in the Chinese government’s effort to reassert its control of society to the overall strategy of counterterrorism.
3. From the aspect of domination-resistance dynamics, to uncover people’s subjective experiences of China’s counterterrorism at a local scale, and the citizen-led local response, including both the informal and formal coping mechanisms employed by citizens themselves, some of which might be used to avoid their resistance efforts being detected by the authorities.
4. From the aspect of localization, to understand China’s experience of securitization in counterterrorism, and the local responses to the globalized ‘war on terror’ narrative in China.

I argue that everyday spaces have been used as the interwoven socioeconomic and sociocultural tools of securitization in China’s effort to control its society, but the process of space-making of securitization has produced certain sociopolitical consequences that, in turn, have reshaped the way in which securitization has been interpreted, concretized and spatialized in China’s contexts of counterterrorism. Following the new strategies of counterterrorism that invite social participation, local citizens, being motivated by their own survival and interests, have sought to negotiate—react to and capitalize on—the processes of implementing security-driven development policies in local societies, which have ultimately challenged the ability of the state to rule and thus led to unpredicted and unintended social outcomes and political stakes. In addition, some elements of the securitization of Islamic terrorism have been utilized by local netizens in China to create a counter-discourse that has disrupted, delayed or reversed the global discourse of the war on terror.

Research site and methods

This book focuses on two interrelated processes: the Chinese state’s effort to control public spaces from a macro and top-down perspective, and the localized, everyday response of people living in the state-manipulated environment to the state’s action of control. Terrorism and counterterrorism in China are the contexts in which I observed these dynamic processes of control and resistance. The design and implementation of the ‘control mechanisms’ in terms of both security and development policies entangled with the overall counterterrorism strategy in China was the analytical focus of this book. It also paid particular attention to various forms of social performances in local communities that negotiated with or challenged to the state policy. Therefore, not only the state’s use of language to exercise power and domination, but also the utilization of material space and the local action of reinterpretation were included as crucial dimensions of my exploration.

My exploration is embedded in the context of China’s Open Door and Reform era, and specifically focused on developments in Xinjiang, China between 2001 and 2017. The first case study (Chapter 3) on Kashgar’s Old Town focuses on the redevelopment period from 2001 to 2017; the second case study (Chapter 4) covers deliberation between different social groups at grassroots society of Xinjiang after 2009 Urumqi’s riot; and the third case study (Chapter 5) on Chinese netizens’ responses to international terrorism is based on the collection of online opinions from 2011 to 2016. These three case studies altogether exhibit how the contemporary Chinese state attempts to reconfigure public spaces through its anti-terrorism strategies and discourses, and how these attempts are, in turn, negotiated and challenged by local cadres, residents and netizens.

Xinjiang and terrorism in China

My exploration focuses on counter-terrorism in China and Xinjiang province in particular. Between 2013 and 2014, a series of incidents drew renewed focus on terrorism in China. Two timely issues have become particularly emblematic: the Tiananmen Square terror attack in 2013 and the Kunming attack in 2014. A suicide car attack blamed on Uighur separatists that killed five people at Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate in November 2013 challenged the view that terrorist activity was rare outside the Xinjiang region in China, and then raised alarm that militants may have been aiming to strike at targets throughout the country. In addition to the Tiananmen Square terror were three other high-profile terrorist incidents that dominated domestic and international media in the second half of 2013: a bomb detonation at the Beijing Airport, a bombing outside the Communist Party headquarters in Shanxi Province and an attack on a police station in Xinjiang. In 2014, the terrorist attack in China reappeared more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) to the southeast, in Kunming, with a significantly higher number...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• 1 Introduction: A study on non-terrorists
• 2 Between a counter-terrorist and a novelist
• 3 The home front
• 4 The ambiguous spaces of bureaucracy, worship and de-radicalization
• 5 The digital spaces of learning to fear
• 6 Conclusions
• Appendix
• References
• Index