China’s Soft War on Terror: Space-Making Processes of Securitisation

This book explores how the Chinese government reasserts its control and management of public spaces as part of its overall counter-terrorism strategy.
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.
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