by Sally Acharya, American Weekly, Jan. 31, 2006
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Andrew
Scobell analyzed China’s perspective on terrorism. Photo by Jeff
Watts |
When Andrew Scobell lectures, the audience is usually quite a bit different from the jeans-clad, twenty-something graduate students that made up the bulk of his listeners at AU last week. He’s more often speaking to the colonels and lieutenant colonels who attend the U.S. Army War College as they prepare to move even higher in the ranks.
Scobell is a civilian China expert at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, a think tank whose scholars teach seminars and develop policy recommendations for the army’s senior leadership. He shared his views in the lecture “Terrorism and Chinese National Security” at the Center for Asian Studies’ Washington Asia Forum.
Whereas the United States had tended to take “homeland security” for granted, the Chinese government has long focused a great deal of effort on internal security—which is, in many ways, “synonymous with maintaining Communist party rule.”
As a result, when terrorism is discussed in China, the focus tends to be on internal security. China, he said, does not see itself as a target in a global sense. Osama bin Laden has not been known to openly criticize China. But it is in China’s interest to “play up the threat,” he said, particularly to justify crackdowns on domestic activists who are perceived as threatening national power.
Beijing, he said, is alarmed about crime and disaffection that has accompanied the increased freedom of market forces. The “regime’s worst nightmare” is coordinated worker unrest in the heartland, particularly since explosives are widely used in industry and agriculture, are widely attainable, and have been used in incidents involving disgruntled workers.
There has also been increasing concern raised in China about ethnic separatists in the far West, particularly among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, a Turkic Muslim ethnic group whose vast homeland borders such volatile areas as Afghanistan and the Kashmir regions of India and Pakistan. China has claimed that more than 200 attacks were carried out by Uyghur terrorists between 1990 and 2001, and while the numbers are “probably exaggerated,” Scobell said, there have reportedly been links between some separatist organizations and Islamist terrorists. More than a dozen Uyghur Chinese citizens detained by U.S. troops in conflict zones are still being held at Guantanamo Bay, and their legal status remains uncertain.
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