China’s Soft War on Terror

<p>This book explores how the Chinese government reasserts its control and management of public spaces as part of its overall counter-terrorism strategy.</p><p>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.</p><p>This book will be of interest to students of critical terrorism studies Chinese studies human geography and security studies.</p>