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Legitimacy of China's Counter-Terrorism Approach: The Mass Line Ethos Chi Zhang. Singapore, Palgrave MacMillan, 2022. xvii + 132pp. £44.99 (hbk), ISBN 9789811931079
The last several years has seen a spate of scholarly research on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Much of this has focused, rightly, on causes and consequences of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) decisive shift toward repression, technologically enabled mass surveillance and ideological control as the core pillars of its governance of the region.
The mass internment of Uyghurs (and other Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities) in the region since 2016 in what Beijing calls “vocational education centres” (sometimes referred to as “re-education camps”) has been explained by some scholars as an expression of a settler colonial project to transform both the region and its non-Han Chinese peoples, while others have argued that this mass repression is consistent with processes of (cultural) genocide.
Much official Chinese rhetoric surrounding its repressive turn in Xinjiang, however, has explicitly defended and justified it as a necessary response to the threat of “Islamist” inspired terrorism by Uyghurs. And it is in this context that Chi Zhang's concise Legitimacy of China's Counter-Terrorism Approach contributes significantly to the field. She makes a persuasive case that external observers must come to grips with “China's rationale and mindset” (p. 1) on counter-terrorism, rather than simply dismiss it as post-facto justification for repression.
The core argument of the book is that China's discursive framing and practice of counter-terrorism demonstrates not only “the CCP's desire to maintain regime...