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ABSTRACT
China has declared a war on terrorism in Xinjiang, identifying violence in the region as a top security threat. However, what nowadays is officially constructed as ‘terrorism’ was framed as ‘counter-revolution’ in the past. Informed by the concept of macrosecuritization and the agenda of critical terrorism studies, this article examines the changing nature of Chinese state framing of violence in Xinjiang. Through a comparative analysis of the discursive construction of the Baren (1990) and Maralbeshi (2013) violent incidents, I find that the terror lexicon has replaced old narratives of counter-revolution to legitimize a sustained crackdown under a novel geopolitical context. The construction of violence in Xinjiang as terrorism, I argue, is contingent, limited and unstable. It marginalizes factors other than an extremist or separatist agency in the incubation of the violence, in particular the frictions created by the crackdown with which the Chinese government is trying to placate the unrest.
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Acknowledgments
This article is based on a paper presented at the Annual Nawruz Workshop at Newcastle University 20–21 March 2017 and the Hallsworth Conference on China and the Changing Global Order, hosted by the University of Manchester and jointly sponsored by the University of Warwick, 23–24 March the same year. I thank participants at both events for their insightful remarks on the paper. I also want to thank Joanne Smith Finley and Alexandra Homolar for their interest and constructive comments on earlier drafts of the article, as well as Madeleine Reeves and the three anonymous reviewers of Central Asian Survey for their useful suggestions to improve the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Author's account based on monitoring the Chinese state media and unofficial reports from Western media and other organizations such as Radio Free Asia.
2 Narratives of these types of events can be found, in order of mentioning, in Xinhua (Citation2008); Yinan and Xiaoxun (Citation2009); Oriental Daily (Citation2013); RFA (Citation2013a, Citation2013b); Boehler (Citation2015); Qiu (Citation2013); RFA (Citation2014b); Xinhua (Citation2014); and Cui (Citation2014a).
3 Shorthand for yanli daji yanzhong xingshi fanzui (strike hard at serious crime); see Trevaskes (Citation2008, 397).