Recently, the US State Department released its terrorism report 2013, which suggested that China’s cooperation with the US on counterterrorism issues “remained marginal.” That conclusion was quickly rejected in Beijing.
There was a reason to the swift refutation. About the same time, an explosion at a railway station in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, left two attackers and a civilian dead and almost 80 wounded. It had been preceded by another attack in March at a railway station in Kunming in which almost 30 were killed and 140 wounded. More recently, half a dozen people were wounded in another knife attack in the Guangzhou Railway Station.
According to China’s first National Security Blue Book, terrorist activities are spreading to more regions and most attacks were due to religious extremists in 2013.
From Washington to Brussels, religious extremists in China are seen as peace-loving freedom fighters, whose legitimate quest for democracy has been suppressed by Beijing, which nurtures violence.
Yet, the inconvenient truth is that Washington is funding organizations and causes that seek to spread destabilization in China – and that, like Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s, could eventually turn terror against America.
The rise and decline of US-Chinese counterterrorism
US-Chinese military-to-military contacts were initiated after President Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao in 1972 and the normalization of the bilateral ties in the Carter era. The US-Chinese alliance – including US arms sales to China –aimed to contain the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the modus operandi of bilateral cooperation dissolved.
By the early 1990s, the Clinton Administration reengaged the top Chinese leadership, including the military. But despite renewed military exchanges with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), political fluctuations affected military contacts, which were marred by the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, and NATO’s mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in 1999.
Just months after President George W. Bush first arrived in office in 2001, Washington and Beijing found each other in a bilateral row, due to the EP-3/F-8 aircraft collision crisis and US arms sales to Taiwan. In turn, the counterterrorist concerns moved to a new level after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which were strongly condemned by China’s President Jiang Zemin. Despite Beijing’s “unconditional support” in the struggle against terrorism, Secretary of State Colin Powell indicated that bilateral discussions would cover intelligence-sharing, not military cooperation.
The Bush Administration did make a concerted effort to enlist China’s support in the counterterrorism struggle against Al Qaeda and its regional clones. However, as the White House moved from postwar multilateralism to preemptive unilateralism, that a historical window of opportunity for closer US-Chinese counterterrorism was missed.
In the Obama era, Washington’s counterterrorism efforts with China have been constrained by similar centrifugal objectives: a stated quest to expand cooperation, but policy obstacles against coordination. In late February 2014, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the Army chief of staff, said that the US Army was seeking to begin a formal dialogue with the PLA before the year-end.
US officials see the bilateral ties between the two militaries as too weak, in the light of the US pivot to Asia since 2011, territorial disputes in East and South China Seas, China’s military modernization, and China’s concerns over US military expansion in the region and the scope of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) activities.
Despite rising threats, counterterrorism has not played a central role in recent efforts to re-ignite US-Chinese cooperation.