| Abstract [eng] |
When it comes to countering terrorism, there have been several situations rather questioning China’s reputation: allegations of possible human rights violations have been levelled at its internal policies towards the Uighur Muslim ethnic minority, as well as extradition, extrajudicial execution and other actions towards peaceful pro-independence minorities within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Although historically the starting point of China’s fight against terrorism has been the ‘global war on terror’ campaign launched by the United States, the above situations demonstrate the emergence of the new notion on China’s side. It is true that China has not yet proposed a specific or grandiose plan for the global fight against terrorism, but the discourse on it can nevertheless be found in its proposed international initiatives. This paper seeks to analyze that discourse in two initiatives of different purpose, both proposed by Xi Jinping himself: the economic cooperation-oriented Belt and Road Initiative and the recent Global Security Initiative, and, to complement the discourse, the little-studied White Papers, which express the state’s official position on a range of issues to foreign audiences. The discourse analysis is carried out through a qualitative approach by collecting empirical data from the publicly available official website of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the official website of the State Council Information Office and the Belt and Road Portal. Three theoretical approaches are used to conduct the interpretivist research: the theory of securitization, which provides an understanding of how specific problems are socially constructed as threats to security, with an emphasis on speech acts; the theory of macro-securitization, which goes beyond the traditional state level and focuses on the systemic level, thus emphasizing the importance of structural factors such as the power of the state, the geopolitical dynamics, the economic system, the cultural norms etc., as important to the practice and the discourse of security. Therefore, macro-challenges usually require a collective response at the global level. Finally, as all this implies that security is a subjective concept, the study also draws on strategic narratives to understand how it is constructed. These allow us to see how China securitizes global terrorism and what messages it strategically uses to do so. The study reveals that, however, even though it has moved away from the paradigm of the ‘global war on terror’, the Chinese discourse remains highly abstract, with a poorly developed notion of what constitutes countering terrorism. Instead, it contains more strategic talk about giving aid to developing countries, in order to sway them to China’s side and build its image as a responsible leader. At the same time, while the ‘global’ turn in China’s foreign policy is indeed evident, the principle of ‘non-interference’ in countering terrorism paradoxically remains. In the end, it could be said that by securitizing global terrorism China is in fact seeking to promote the idea of a multi-polar system, according to which there can be no single dominant power in the international arena. |
