This section provides a description of the analytical model that is used to explain how the CCP has legitimised its approach to terrorism. This thesis examines a wide range of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments based on the social construction of the collective memory of the Century of Humiliation. These attitudes, beliefs and sentiments give order and meaning to China’s counter-terrorism policy and practice by laying out the underlying assumptions and rules for how “terrorism” should be perceived and dealt with.
The history of China as a weak and divided country is constructed as a strong motivating factor to prioritise national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity in China’s security agenda. Political elites and intellectuals envision a situation where different ethnic groups enjoy a degree of freedom on the condition that they acknowledge that the “unity” of the state must transcend the “diversity” of ethnic groups. The absolute importance of “unity” in the Chinese political discourse makes it
possible to extend state power to deal with “separatism”. Historically constructed, the concepts of both “unity” and “separatism” have been broadened. As “unity” is linked to the security of both the state and the Chinese people based on the narratives of the Century of Humiliation, the concept of “separatism” is also broadened to include peaceful separatist expression and demonstration. In this context, all those who sympathise and support the separatist claims are regarded as the “enemy”, and are labelled “hostile forces”, “three forces” and “East Turkistan forces”.
China’s counter-terrorism policy, which is embedded in such a context, reflects the overriding concerns for national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity. The anxiety about separatist ideology can be seen from the overall security discourse, the anti-terrorism legal framework, and the actors involved in its counter-terrorism policy. The differentiation between hard and soft approaches reflects Mao’s theory of “two types of contradictions” – the “contradiction between ourselves and the enemy”
should be treated with the hard approach, while the “contradiction among the people” should be treated with the soft approach.
Figure 8 Analytical model
This thesis also examines development and religious policy as part of the overall counter-terrorism approach. The former reflects Chinese officials’ and intellectuals’ perceptions of the causes of political violence, and the latter reflects the concerns for the ideological challenges posed by the Islamic revival.
This thesis also explores the use of the Mass Line approach as a framework for de- radicalisation. The recent revival of the Mass Line approach under President Xi Jinping
reflects the anxiety about the foundation of legitimacy. Seeking support from the people, both the central and local authorities initiated a series of tactics to engage people from the Uyghur community.
Furthermore, this thesis looks at two ways in which de-radicalisation is approached through education. Overall, the de-radicalisation through education reflects the CCP’s intention to treat radicalisation as the “contradiction among the people”. The CCP’s prevention and rehabilitation efforts reflect its strong propensity to maintain control in different stages of radicalisation.
This thesis also investigates how the government embeds the rationale for its counter- terrorism into the governance of Xinjiang. Various political slogans, such as “five keys” “four identifies”, and “three cannot do withouts”, reflect the government’s attempt to maintain control over all aspects of social life.
In terms of practice, this thesis examines how the government responds to the “East Turkistan forces”. The official counter-narratives on hijrat demonstrates how the state media compete with “terrorist” narratives. The case study also illustrates how the rationale for “hard and soft” approaches affects the de-radicalisation policy, with two examples of de-radicalisation propaganda.
The analysis of the framing of China’s counter-terrorism discourse relies on the frame- alignment model of Snow, Benford and others (Snow et al. 1986; Benford and Snow 2000). “Frame alignment is a necessary condition for movement participation, whatever its nature or intensity” (Snow et al. 1986, 464). According to Snow and others (1986, 464), frames help an individual or a group organise experience and guide them to act, by providing a series of assumptions based on which the events are meaningful (Snow et al. 1986, 464). When a painting is framed in a certain way, some elements of it – colours, patterns or composition – are highlighted (Kuypers 2009, 181). By making some elements more salient than others through placement, repetition, or association with culturally familiar symbols (Entman 1993, 53), frames enable individuals to filter their perceptions of certain events in particular ways (Kuypers 2009, 181). For Gamson (1989, 157), “[f]acts have no intrinsic meaning. They take on their meaning by being embedded in a frame or story line that organises them and gives them coherence, selecting certain ones to emphasise while ignoring others”. The methodology facilitates the analysis of how political elites and intellectuals situate events in the context of existing friend/enemy divisions, establish legitimacy and mobilise the public. In order to do so, some assumptions are reinforced, while others are omitted. The methodology involves identifying how counter-terrorism is framed in this way, and how this discourse demonstrates key linkages with China’s elite
constitute the discourses surrounding the counter-terrorism strategy that perpetuate the existing hierarchy within the state system.
It is important to understand the language used to examine the ways in which the government has responded to perceived and real terrorist threats and justified its counter-terrorism strategy. To identify frames, interpretive commentaries that
surround news reports are sometimes more important than the informational content (Gamson 1989, 158). Official documents are often written in a concise and succinct manner, while commentaries on the state media provide more information on the assumptions that underpin the official statements and official attitude. In addition, “Metaphors, catchphrases and other symbolic devices” are important tools to detect the underlying narratives (Gamson 1989, 158). The metaphor of “rats” is an example of how the metaphor reveals the underlying narratives and gives meaning to the political slogan about terrorism.
The methodology also highlights how the use of labels and narratives reflects the underlying friend/enemy distinction. In Jackson’s (2006, 3) words, labels are used to “describe agents or actors, behaviour, scenes, qualities or purposes within the public vocabulary”, and narratives are used to provide “coherence and consistency to the scenes, characters and themes that guide the moral conduct of a society and which provide meaning to the lives of the community’s members”. Labels and narratives together “function to select, interpret and reframe past events” (Jackson 2006, 3). As the discussion in the following chapters will demonstrate, the labels “hostile forces”, “three forces” and “East Turkistan forces” function to identify the actors and the nature of the acts. By labelling an event, the CCP is exercising its power as a defining agency to ascribe right and wrong. Linking terrorist incidents with Western supporters, the CCP exercises its power as a defining agency to ascribe right and wrong, and use the friend/enemy distinction to explain current events. The narratives of the Century of Humiliation provide coherence and consistency with the theme of unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity. The collective memory of the great loss of territory in the face of colonial and imperial powers constructed through the recount of historical events enables the CCP to justify its rationale for strengthening state control over its bordering territories. Chinese intellectuals see the cases of the colour revolution in the Middle East as evidence of the “peaceful evolution”, and the prelude to the intervention in China. These labels and narratives function to select, organise, and interpret the events and occurrences to construct and reconstruct the ways in which “terrorism” is understood in China.
In this process, the antagonist against the alleged enemy serves to highlight the imaginary boundary between friends and enemies. As Carl Schmitt (2006, 96)
observes, “[t]he political is the most intense and extreme antagonist…In its entirety, the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy
distinction”. Following his line of argument, words such as sovereignty, national unity and territorial integrity would not make complete sense without the understanding of against whom or what the unity is to be protected. As discussed in Section 2.1.1, “terrorism” is such a loaded term that the concept of the enemy in the discourse of counter-terrorism is particularly vague. As Dillon (2002, 74) pointed out, fuelled by fierce currents of nationalism and militarism, the friend/enemy distinction is being highlighted “to the point where no one can tell us what this particular terrorism is, how many terrorists there are and what resources are required to defeat them” (author’s emphasis). The contestation between the artificially reinforced identity, or “imagined communities”, using Anderson’s (2004) words, is highlighted by using these labels, and the political context from which they originated.
The frame-alignment approach provides not only a tool with which to examine the condition for movement participation (the participation in the People’s War on Terror), but also the degree of alignment (Ketelaars, Walgrave, and Wouters 2014, 504).
Ketelaars and others argue that treating it as a precondition creates the dichotomy between “aligned” and “non-aligned”, while in fact most people in real life experience a certain degree of alignment and very few are fully aligned to a particular frame. Therefore, the alignment is better treated as a spectrum (Figure 10), whereby the counter-terrorism discourse gradually changes the mindset of individuals and ingrains the friend/enemy grouping into the ways in which they respond to the terrorist attacks and counter-terrorism measures of the CCP. The phrase “People’s War on Terror” reflects the very intention to situate the war on terror in China’s political discourse, which has a tradition of mass mobilisation. The Mass Line approach provides a guideline for the engagement of community members in fighting against terrorism.
Figure 9 Spectrum of frame-alignment
As Ketelaars and others (2014, 504) point out, many individuals are only partially aligned, and they are the target of multiple competing frames. In the Chinese context,
Ordinary citizens Participants of the People’s War on Terror
non-alignment partially aligned fully aligned Counter-terrorism discourse
the frames that compete with the official discourse are proposed by the Uyghur dissidents overseas, who are calling for the independence of “East Turkistan”. When talking about this topic, individuals are constantly seeking to find their position on this spectrum (Figure 11). As the ethno-separatist discourse is beyond the scope of this thesis, only the responses that are relevant will be discussed in the following chapters.
Figure 10 Competing frames on terrorism and counter-terrorism in China
As Figure 11 shows, two major sets of frames are competing for influence among ordinary citizens. In China, the ubiquity of the CCP’s discourse is particularly salient due to the strict control over ideology. Adopting the Mass Line approach for mass mobilisation, individuals within Chinese territory are overwhelmingly affected by the official discourse. The dominance of the official discourse is further reinforced by the Great Firewall and the National Cybersecurity Strategy (National Internet Information Office 2016) which formalised the CCP’s control over its cyber sovereignty,
unequivocally highlighting the determination to “prevent, stop and punish according to law any act of treason, secession, sedition, subverting or inciting others to subvert the legitimate state power of the people's democratic dictatorship” (National Internet Information Office 2016). In this context, the CCP ensured the scale of its ounter- terrorist propaganda, despite the limited credibility of the propaganda materials, as the discussion of counter-terrorism propaganda in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 will demonstrate. As “public attention is highly selective”, people tend to “rely upon and accept information that is easily accessible” (Kuypers 2009, 181). Therefore, the monopoly of the official discourse, regardless of the quality of the propaganda materials, plays an important role in the mass mobilisation in China.
There is an overarching set of frames in China’s counter-terrorism discourse that constitutes the “master frames”. A policy document may contain only a fragment of the master frames, or the “specific collective action frames” derived from the master frames (Snow and Benford 1992, 138). Interpretations of the assumptions in the specific frames may vary in different contexts, but some basic assumptions remain the essence of all of these specific frames. The master frames in China’s counter-terrorism discourse concern the challenges to its national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity. More specifically, the master frames involve an array of assumptions about the “enemies’” intentions to weaken China by fomenting disunity among the Chinese
China’s counter-terrorism discourse ethno-separatist discourse
fully aligned partially aligned fully aligned
people. These assumptions give consistency to the behaviour of other countries, and help the CCP to interpret the Western support for separatist movements in the context of a continued friend/enemy antagonism. Specific collective action frames concern the separatist movements of the “hostile forces”, “three forces” and “East Turkistan forces”, and how the external support has sustained the problem of
terrorism in China. These narratives function as the “schemata of interpretation” that enable their users to “locate, perceive, identify, and label a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences defined in its terms” (Goffman 1974, 21).
To analyse how the master frames work, some assumptions of the master frames are summarised as follows:
• The CCP is the legitimate government for the Chinese people because it has made great efforts in achieving the independence of the Chinese nation after an arduous war against the imperialist invaders.
• National unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity are the most fundamental rights that the Chinese people are entitled to. All of the ethnic groups in China enjoy a degree of freedom and autonomy on the condition that they
acknowledge the priority of “unity” over “diversity”.
• Attempts to separate China along ethnic lines are an unacceptable infringement upon the country’s sovereignty.
• Attempts to undermine the CCP’s leadership in the name of human rights are part of the grand strategy of the “West” to “Westernise and divide” China by peaceful means. Although the “peaceful evolution” is no longer used as an official policy in the US, Western countries continue to undermine the Communist regime by promoting liberal/democratic values.
• It is difficult to eliminate terrorism in China because separatist groups such as the World Uyghur Congress receive support from Western countries. They support separatists as proxies so that they are not directly involved in the hostilities.
The above assumptions are based on the existing friend/enemy division in the Chinese political discourse. The counter-terrorism discourse reproduces and entrenches such a division. These assumptions feed into the diagnostic framing that justifies the use of extraordinary measures in dealing with the “enemies” designated by the state. The state then is able to propose a solution, such as the introduction of the Anti-Terrorism Law and mass mobilisation to engage ordinary citizens in the People’s War on
Terrorism.
It can be seen from the summary of the master frames that China’s counter-terrorism discourse prioritises national unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity. Compared
with liberal/democratic countries, the counter-terrorism discourse in China reflects the emphasis on collective interests (national unity and state security) over civil liberties and human security in China’s political context.
Although the master narratives of the ethno-separatist discourse are not the focus of this study, they help to understand the different accounts of the same topic produced by the CCP and the overseas Uyghur dissidents respectively. It would be an over- simplification to assume that the latter are a monolithic group. However, it is important to make some generalisations to understand the difference between the competing frames. The ethno-separatist discourse portrays the CCP as an extremely repressive government, a perpetrator of countless human rights violations. The separatist claims are based on a set of assumptions regarding how the CCP deprived Uyghurs of their rights to development, rights to life and rights to national self- determination.
It is worth noting that when the users reproduce the friend/enemy dichotomy by adopting the symbolic devices of a set of frames, they do not necessarily understand the entire framework, but this does not mean that they cannot apply the symbolic devices (Goffman 1974, 21). For example, the use of “hostile forces” does not always point to an actual actor that is seeking to undermine the CCP. But its vagueness does not preclude political elites or academics from using it. On the contrary, the vagueness provides the convenience the users need to attribute the blame without pointing to an actual political entity.