World Uyghur Congress, 28 May 2018

China continues to use the ostensible threat of terrorism as a justification for its severe curbs on religious and cultural practices and restrictions on freedom of movement. Despite legitimate counter-terror strategies taken by governments interested in reducing violence, the terrorist threat has also been taken as a unique opportunity to quell legitimate domestic opposition under its guise.

The discourse of terror in China has been very much a recent development since the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Although there was occasional mention of the threat of terrorism in the 1990s, Uyghur protests in East Turkestan throughout the decade and the violence that often ensued was not framed by the Chinese government in such a way. Language that reflected responses to “crime,” “hooligans” and “gangs” was consistently present in state media reports. A much different picture was painted just a month later, however, as the government hurriedly began drawing tenuous links between violence in the region and global terror networks.

The government has been employing counter-terror measures as a justification for the suppression of Uyghur rights across the board. China’s ostensible campaign against the “three evil forces” (terrorism, religious extremism and separatism) has explicitly served to draw a direct line from fundamental aspects of Uyghur culture to terrorism.

In addition, China passed the “Regulation on De-extremification” which explicitly links Islam to extremism and radicalisation, bans a number of specific religious practices and expression and builds on previous efforts to reiterate that religious expression for Uyghurs is in danger of being distorted and manifested as extremism.

The result has been a broad criminalization of Uyghur life as the population itself becomes increasingly, and erroneously, synonymous with the international terror threat. The primary source of information drawn from the region remains Chinese state media—information that is then reproduced for Western audiences despite a clear lack of critical examination.