Ben Emmerson
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The self-fulfilling prophecy and the ‘People’s War on Terror,’ 2013–2016
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Chapter 5 demonstrates how the first decade of China’s branding of Uyghurs as a terrorist threat had led to a self-fulfilling prophecy of Uyghur militancy both in China and abroad. This process was largely initiated by China’s labeling of Uyghurs as a ‘dangerous’ population following the 2009 Urumqi riots, but it was also reinforced by several acts of Uyghur-led violence in 2013–2014, which increasingly looked like actual terrorist attacks, in Beijing, Kunming, and Urumqi. As a result, the state increasingly targeted Uyghur cultural and religious behavior as signs of extremism, and many rural Uyghurs, especially in the south of the region, were subjected to constant pressure from authorities, elevating the conflict between rural Uyghurs and the police to an all-out war. This situation also led to a mass exodus of Uyghurs from China, leaving Turkey riddled with undocumented Uyghur refugees. It would be with these refugees that a nascent Uyghur extremist group in Syria would succeed in building an actual army of Uyghur militants, the first of its kind since the 1940s and a development that only intensified the state’s aggressive approach to Uyghurs inside China as a source of extremism and a terrorist threat.

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