Questions of ‘comprehensive security’ collaborations will kick off the annual meeting of US and Chinese leaders<\/p>\n
What the Chinese government calls \u201cterrorism,\u201d the U.S. government has often called Beijing\u2019s pretext for a sweeping crackdown on an embattled minority group\u2019s religious and cultural freedoms. <\/p>\n
Whatever China\u2019s problem with its predominantly Muslim ethnic Uighur minority is, Chinese leaders are likely to discuss it Wednesday, at the launch of an annual dialogue with U.S. counterparts in Beijing.<\/p>\n
A series of armed attacks<\/a>, which China alleges were perpetrated by ethnic Uighurs, have killed scores of China\u2019s majority Han population in recent months.<\/p>\n In one of the most high-profile incidents in October 2013, a driver later identified by police as a Uighur member of a \u201cterrorist\u201d organization rammed a truck into a bridge in front of the Tiananmen Gate \u2014 the symbolic core of China\u2019s ruling Communist Party.<\/p>\n Uighur rights advocates say that information about the attacks is almost entirely from China’s state-run media, and that state security forces have cleaned up the sites of all attacks within 24 hours. Some academics have even asserted that the alleged armed groups behind the attacks are a fabrication of the Chinese state<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, Beijing\u2019s crackdown has taken many forms: renewed bans<\/a> on fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, banning outdoor kebabs<\/a>, which Uighur rights advocates say are a means of ridding Beijing of Uighur migrant laborers, and the detention of a prominent scholar<\/a> who called for Uighur-Han understanding. The Han are the largest ethnic group in China.<\/p>\n Special operations conducted since May have detained 400 people believed to be complicit in separatist violence, reportedly crushing 40 \u201cterrorist groups,\u201d Chinese state media Legal Daily revealed in a report on Tuesday<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is likely to form one significant backdrop to Wednesday\u2019s China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, where Chinese and U.S. leaders will kick off an attempt to collaborate on a \u201ccomprehensive security strategy,\u201d according to a release from China\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. <\/p>\n The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. declined to comment to Al Jazeera on the agenda for the dialogue beyond the Ministry of Foreign Affairs\u2019 statement.<\/p>\n Uighurs are not the only perceived threat to China’s national security. China sees assaults on its national sovereignty in the territorial disputes with Japan over the Diaoyu-Senakaku Islands and the decades-long war of words and ships with neighboring Southeast Asian nations for the oil and gas rich South China Sea<\/a>.<\/p>\n The United States has consistently supported China\u2019s adversaries in those disputes. And the U.S. stance on the Uighurs has generally been that China has used so-called counterterrorism measures as a pretext to violently pacify separatists in an economically important region.<\/p>\n The U.S. State Department has on numerous occasions suggested that counterterrorism measures have in fact been motivated by attempts to quell unrest in the region.<\/p>\n \u201cXinjiang authorities continued to use counter terrorism as a pretext for religious repression of Uighur Muslims, according to human rights nongovernmental organizations,\u201d the State Department said in a 2006 release. \u201cBecause the Xinjiang Government regularly fails to distinguish carefully among those involved in peaceful activities in support of independence, ‘illegal’ religious activities, and violent terrorism, it is often difficult to determine whether particular raids, detentions, arrests, or judicial punishments targeted those seeking to worship, those peacefully seeking political goals, or those engaged in violence.\u201d<\/p>\n But Washington’s tone may be changing.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a growing awareness of the lethality and willingness to see where Chinese are going with this,\u201d said Adam Segal, an expert on national security issues in China and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n