China Must Not Blame ISIS for Its Terrorism Problem 

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Source: Reuters
Last September, an attack in Xinjiang left 50 coal miners, mostly Han Chinese, dead. A year earlier, 29 civilians were killed in a terrorist attack in a Kunming train station. While no groups stepped forward to claim responsibility in either incident, Chinese news agencies quickly attributed the violence to Uighur separatists from Xinjiang.
 
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, as it is officially known, is home to many different ethnic minorities, including the Hui, Kazakh, and Kirgiz people. The largest group is the Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic minority whose appearance, language, and culture differ greatly from the Han, Xinjiang’s second largest ethnic group. The most notable difference between them is that most Uighur people are Muslim, while the Han generally practice Chinese folk religions or are areligious.
 
Violence is not new to Xinjiang. Ürümqi bus bombings in February 1997, for example, killed nine. Earlier that year, the government executed 30 suspected separatists. Since then, China has developed a hardline policy against separatism in Xinjiang. Much of its attention has been focused on the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), an Islamist terrorist group based in Xinjiang that seeks the independence of the region from China and the establishment of a Central Asian Islamic State.
 
TIP, which is also known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), has been put under greater scrutiny in recent years given its supposed connections to ISIS. A video released by ISIS last July, in fact, “[called] on China’s Uighurs to take up arms and join the Islamic State.” There are reportedly 300 Chinese nationals “fighting alongside ISIS.”
 
Naturally, Beijing has become concerned of the potential relationship between ISIS and Uighur terrorist groups. In a speech at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in 2014, President Xi Jinping declared that China “should make concerted efforts to crack down on the ‘three evil forces’ of terrorism, extremism and separatism.” This year, one Chinese defense official added, “The real question is whose side will [the Uighurs] be on,” illustrating concerns about the growing number of ISIS recruits from China.
 
To combat ISIS, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for the creation of a “united front to combat terrorism" following the Paris attacks. He added that "China is also a victim of terrorism, and cracking down on ETIM should become an important part of [this effort].” The United States currently designates ETIM has a terrorist organization, as does China’s neighbors, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan.
 
In the name of fighting terrorism in Xinjiang, China has enacted several measures, including the banning of displaying religious symbols, wearing burqas in public in the capital city of Urumqi, and worshipping in public in many parts of the region. Children are banned from religious instruction “in mosques or other institutions.” As Amnesty International describes in its “China Report,” Uighurs stand to face continued discrimination and increased security crackdown.
 
Essentially, these policies aim to ease the differences between Uighurs and the Han people. Tensions between these two groups have been high for decades, largely in part to economic disparities. The northern part of the region is inhabited by mostly Han, while the south mostly Uighurs. The north, which the government has encouraged Han Chinese to settle, is more developed and thus has more employment opportunities than the south.
 
China links Uighur separatism to ISIS to justify its hardline stance, and as worries of connections between ISIS and Uighur terrorist groups grow, it is likely that China will also increase its crackdowns. As Gary Sands writes, it often portrays Uighur riots, many over lack of economic opportunities or religious freedom, as “premeditated terror attacks”. China has also linked many attacks in Xinjiang to other “international jihadi groups.”
 
Additionally, China has sought sympathy for its situation in Xinjiang by calling out other countries for their supposed “double standards.” Hua Chunying, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson stated last December, “We cannot understand why terrorism, when taking place in other countries, is regarded as terrorism but ethnic and religious issues, when taking place in China.”
 
However, while China has spoken out about threats from ETIM, it has not provided much evidence to illustrate the threat it poses. Much of the details concerning Uighur attacks are also obscure, given China’s tight control over the media.
 
China’s connection of ISIS to Xinjiang separatism ultimately frames much of the unrest in Xinjiang as a religious issue. While this is certainly part of it, this view oversimplifies complex social and economic problems. This view also encourages China to continue its various bans of religious freedoms. The irony is that it is precisely these policies that reinforce ISIS ideologies and allow the terrorist group to recruit new people.
 
To put it in other words, because China fears a connection between ISIS and Uighur terrorist groups, it responds by cracking down on these groups through arrests and restrictions of religious freedoms, all of which creates unrest and resentment that inspires extremism.
 
At the end of the day, ISIS is a very real threat -- as attacks in Paris, Jakarta, and the Middle East have illustrated. But China must not fall under the trap of blaming ISIS for its problems in Xinjiang. It is right for China to note the role of religion in Xinjiang’s conflicts, but it must understand that simply nullifying religious differences is not a tenable solution. It must also acknowledge the other social and economic issues at play, such as employment access, civil rights, and discrimination.
 
Only when China’s acknowledge that ISIS and “terrorism” in Xinjiang are two very different issues requiring their own strategies can it hope to adequately respond to them.

Alex Melnik is a sophomore at the University of Southern California.