| Abstract
|
:
|
Among the most prominent and least understood of campaigns in which the Chinese state is engaged is its war against terrorism. With links to the international jihad, an indigenous insurgency threatened the government's grip on a massive swath of northwestern China known as Xinjiang, the "new frontier" and the war's primary theater. Riots, bombings, ambushes, and assassinations rocked the region under separatist and Islamist banners. One thousand of China's Uyghurs, the land's once predominant ethnic "minority," trained in Afghanistan's camps specifically to return home and wage a new jihad, a new fight against the Chinese government. China acted early and forcefully, preventing the nascent insurgency from gaining momentum and escalating into what could have become China's Chechnya, Gaza, or Iraq. China responded brutally, yet the counterinsurgency's effectiveness increased as the brutality was reduced. Though greatly diminished in frequency, torture and summary executions reportedly persist; explicitly, these are symptoms of an un-free political system and are not the tactics which achieved success. While the Chinese campaign was brutal, the campaign's effectiveness was due to social policies which reached deeply into society's grass-roots and reshaped it from the bottom up. Society in Xinjiang today increasingly rejects insurgency as the path forward, quietly looking to a future tied to a changing Chinese state. The approaches to counterterrorism (CT) and counterinsurgency (COIN) can be viewed as a spectrum of tactics, with Top-down and Bottom-up poles. The ideal-type Top-down approach focuses only on killing or capturing the individual terrorist leaders, and perhaps the terrorist cadres as well. Alternately, the ideal-type Bottom-up approach addresses socio-political root causes, running the gamut from addressing and countering specific radical ideologies to altering social-structural pathways to joining the jihad (global or more localized). Both types of tactics have important and unique effects upon an insurgency, ranging from stop-gap measures to durable political solutions. Real-world CT and COIN campaigns are often a mix of both Top-down and Bottom-up tactics. This dissertation investigates China's CT and COIN efforts, highlighting the efficacy of a society-centric approach.
|