In the global fight against terrorism since 9/11, China and the United States have adopted starkly different policy paths and achieved different results. So far, however, people's attention to the counter-terrorism issue has mainly focused on the global war of the United States on terrorism, while little attention has been paid to China's experience and achievements in the field of counter-terrorism, and there are even misunderstandings, distortions and prejudices regarding the Chinese experience.After the 9/11 incident, the United States has staged a fight against terrorism mainly by way of "military war". On the one hand, it combines international anti-terrorism with the expansion of its global hegemony, and carries out a large-scale "preemptive" anti-terrorism war on a global scale at any cost. On the other hand, it only devotes limited resources to defensive anti-terrorism at home.

On the surface of it, this counter-terrorism strategy has produced enormous results, but it has failed to achieve the anticipated effect and is not commensurate with the huge counter-terrorism input. According to estimates made by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, as of the full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, the United States had put as much as $2.26 trillion into the war on terrorism in Afghanistan after 9/11, and 2,442 U.S. soldiers had been killed. If the killed soldiers of U.S. allies, defense contractors, Afghan military police and civilians are also included, the death toll caused by the war on terrorism has exceeded 170,000.

However, this protracted war on terrorism has not only failed to completely eliminate the threat of transnational terrorist forces such as Al Qaida and the Islamic State, but also accelerated the decline of the hegemony and international reputation of the United States to a certain extent. It forced the U.S. military to make a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. In the United States, although strict preventive counter-terrorism measures have reduced the threat of imported terrorism to the country, factors such as the polarization between the rich and the poor, ethnic conflicts, and the "demonstrative effect" brought about by the war on terrorism are giving birth to a new wave of "lone wolf-type" indigenous terrorism.

After the 9/11 incident, China once wavered on which should take the higher priority between "counter-terrorism" and "development". However, in the subsequent fight against terrorism, China injected large amounts of resources into the field of social and economic development and poverty alleviation in key regions, hoping to eliminate the social soil breeding terrorism through economic growth and comprehensive governance. For example, according to data released by the Xinjiang Department of Finance, the subsidy transfer payment from the central government to Xinjiang in the 2014-2019 period alone increased from RMB200.7 billion (US$32.7 billion) to RMB332.69 billion (US$48.2 billion), with an average annual growth of 10.6%. In the same period, the proportion of the central government’s transfer payment in Xinjiang's general public budgetary expenditure also rose from 60.5% to 62.6%.

The huge input of resources has led to "frogleap" social and economic development and a sharp drop in unemployment and poverty rates in Xinjiang. To a large extent, this has helped to eliminate the social hotbed of terrorism. Affected by the "demonstrative effect" of transnational terrorist activities after 9/11 and the rapid spread of separatism and religious extremism ideas driven by fast-developing information and new media technologies, violent terrorist activities in China had two waves of retaliatory rebound in 2007-2008 and 2013-2014 respectively, and then began to decrease gradually.

After 2015, no large-scale organized terrorist incident like the morning market bombing in Urumqi in 2014 has occurred in China. Unfortunately, due to the malicious vilification and hype by some Western media and politicians, China's achievements in the fight against terrorism in recent years have not only been deliberately ignored, but also been maliciously distorted into a so-called "human rights issue".

In fact, compared with the military war strategy against terrorism pursued the United States which focuses on overseas counter-terrorism and emphasizes "pre-emptive strikes", China has explored a counter-terrorism path that is more suitable for its national conditions, which we might call "the Chinese experience". This practice mainly consists of three aspects:

Firstly, eradicating the social soil that breeds terrorism by implementing development strategies such as developing the economy, improving people's livelihood, and eliminating poverty. In recent years, some regions with relatively high incidence of terrorist activities in China are also regions with high incidence of deep poverty arising from geographical, transportation, natural environment and other factors. Generally speaking, extreme poverty is often accompanied by backward education, large-scale unemployment, and organized violent crimes, which in turn provide potential opportunities for the breeding of radical nationalism, terrorism, and extreme religious ideas. Taking Xinjiang as an example, the impoverished population in southern Xinjiang reached 2.677 million in 2013, accounting for 95% of the total impoverished population in Xinjiang. As of the end of 2019, the impoverished population in the four prefectures of southern Xinjiang had fallen to 166,000, and the poverty rate had also fallen from 29.1% to 2.2%. The opportunities brought by economic development have given many once unemployed and idle young people new hope for life, and gradually taken them away from various extremist ideas.

Secondly, defusing the ideology that breeds terrorism through preventive measures in education, culture and other fields. After China implemented a reform and opening-up policy in 1978, there has been intensified penetration of overseas separatism, radical religious ideas, and extremist activities into the country, producing an effect of resonance with the existing ethnic contradictions and the social polarization between the rich and the poor in the country under the market economy. In response to this dangerous tendency, the Chinese government has promptly launched a "de-extremization" policy. This policy includes not only national identity education for school students, but also Internet governance, legal and vocational education for general social groups, as well as cross-ethnic intersection and cultural dialogues. Such systematic educational efforts rather than punitive measures have effectively reversed the bad social atmosphere and social ecology in many places, creating the conditions for promoting modern social governance. For example, in some parts of southern Xinjiang a few years ago, some girls who went out wearing fashionable clothes could face humiliation or even beatings from some extremists. Today, these things have become completely unimaginable and unacceptable to local people.

Thirdly, proactively mobilizing the masses to deter terrorists and eradicate their hiding places through the "people's war". Although terrorists are only a tiny minority in society, they could often achieve their illegal demands by inciting, kidnapping and hijacking other people. In its fight against terrorism, China attaches great importance to mobilizing the masses. In the summer of 2017, tens of thousands of local people from nine towns in Moyu County of Hotan Prefecture in southern Xinjiang spontaneously participated in the hunt for the Abdul Rehman terrorist group.

Since the spring of this year, the unexpected outbreak of conflict between Russia and Ukraine has attracted the attention of the international community, further marginalizing the fight against terrorism since 9/11. However, one vicious terrorist case after another flaring up around the world continues to remind us that terrorism is not far away from us yet, and the international fight against terrorism still has a long way to go. While China's counter-terrorism policy is far from perfect and it may not be necessarily possible for other countries to imitate the Chinese experience, it nevertheless does have helped China to effectively contain the terrorist threat it faces. In this regard, one should not only abandon prejudices against the Chinese experience and treat it fairly, but also conduct more in-depth research on it.

Source: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences