Following years of state-sanctioned repression and disciplining in the name of countering so-called terrorism, violence re-emerged in Xinjiang in the summer of 2008 with a vehicle-ramming attack in Kashgar against a police border patrol, which signalled a new wave of violent conflict. The dozens of violent incidents reported in the region and elsewhere in China between 2008 and 2017 could, at first glance, be read as a tactical rationale that supports China’s response to a terrorist threat posed by Uyghur militants connected to a larger, global jihadist movement. This, according to Chinese officials, was a national threat any state would have been forced to react to by deploying emergency policies such as preventive counter-terrorism. However, the interpretation of contemporary Uyghur-related violent unrest as ‘terrorism’ fails to provide an accurate account of historical events and leaves much to be desired in the pursuit of a critical, facts-based diagnosis.

First, most of the Uyghur-related violent incidents represented by the Chinese government as terrorism are not premeditated, political, or indiscriminate as dominant scholarly definitions of ‘terrorism’ would suggest. China uses the category of terrorism to describe incidents that range from spontaneous clashes erupting during the course of religious curbs to rioting episodes, such as the July 2009 riots in Ürümchi. However, upon closer inspection, these instances follow a broader pattern of ‘build-up, outbreak and escalation’ of public disorder characteristic of ethnic riots. Chinese officials also frame those involved—whether it be protesters, rioters, or attackers—as ‘terrorists’ even if they are not part of a social movement with an articulated political agenda aimed at changing the functional principles of the system. Instead, these people labelled “terrorists” are often disgruntled individuals voicing their religious, cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic grievances. Their goal is not to launch a rebel uprising in order to trample China’s ‘legal order’, as the government claimed after the Ürümchi riots, but to voice long-standing grievances related to ethnic discrimination, forced Uyghur labor and migration, inter-ethnic mistrust, and government denial. All of these were present in the Shaoguan incident that triggered the Ürümchi protests, which China blamed on terrorism. Meanwhile, other episodes construed as terrorism by the Chinese authorities failed to target civilians or apply violence indiscriminately, both definitional markers commonly attributed to terrorism. The lack of markers that would categorize these incidents as terrorism does not excuse the use of violence, or make it more (or less) legitimate. However, it does place these incidents into a different analytical category from planned, indiscriminate acts of violence used to terrorize a population in pursuit of a political agenda, or, put simply, terrorism. In this context, naming violence in Xinjiang as terrorism obscures rather than clarifies the root causes and dynamics of violent tension between the Chinese state and the Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities of the region.