Policing Terrorism in the Chinese Community: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

After the 9/11 incidents, global counter-terrorism efforts have focused increasingly on community policing as a proactive and preventive approach to thwarting terrorism. This article explores the developments, tensions, and prospects of counter-terrorism community policing (“CTCP”) in China. By applying the concepts of police legitimacy and social capital to the normative and operational framework of CTCP, I argue that this vital counter-terrorism endeavour is fraught with problems, for both Chinese police to procure effective civic co-operation and the local community to develop its capacity as a self-reliant player in preventing terrorism. More specifically, community co-operation in China’s CTCP is largely an obligatory process in the form of forced mobilization by local bureaucracies that does not necessarily entail trust and support from citizens based on their legitimacy judgement. My analysis on social capital building in Chinese communities further suggests that both police and citizens are unable to form deep and meaningful partnerships for counter-terrorism. While an authoritarian regime like China is reluctant to cede substantial power and authority to people in most of all aspects of policing, the public has become apathetic towards and alienated from voluntary collaboration with police in formal community affairs—a dichotomy lies between reality and ideal in China’s CTCP.

Full text

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Policing Terrorism in the Chinese Community: A
Critical Analysis
Enshen Li
TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland, Australia
Abstract
After the 9/11 incidents, global counter-terrorism efforts have focused increasingly on commu-
nity policing as a proactive and preventive approach to thwarting terrorism. This article
explores the developments, tensions, and prospects of counter-terrorism community policing
(“CTCP”) in China. By applying the concepts of police legitimacy and social capital to the nor-
mative and operational framework of CTCP, I argue that this vital counter-terrorism endeavour
is fraught with problems, for both Chinese police to procure effective civic co-operation and the
local community to develop its capacity as a self-reliant player in preventing terrorism. More
specifically, community co-operation in China’s CTCP is largely an obligatory process in the form
of forced mobilization by local bureaucracies that does not necessarily entail trust and support
from citizens based on their legitimacy judgement. My analysis on social capital building in
Chinese communities further suggests that both police and citizens are unable to form deep
and meaningful partnerships for counter-terrorism. While an authoritarian regime like China
is reluctant to cede substantial power and authority to people in most of all aspects of policing,
the public has become apathetic towards and alienated from voluntary collaboration with police
in formal community affairs—a dichotomy lies between reality and ideal in China’sCTCP.
Keywords: China; terrorism; community policing; procedural justice; social capital
1. Introduction
Given the 9/11 attacks and string of catastrophic terror strikes around the globe, terrorism
has become a primary concern for the international community.1However, the invariably
changing nature of terrorism has engendered ubiquitous discussion over the form, mani-
festation, and attributes of this anti-humanity crime in the present climate.2The classic
debate about “old terrorism”versus “new terrorism”evinces that terrorism is prone to be
characterized and construed in many different ways subject to local conditions. Notably,
supporters of the “new terrorism”theory point to a radical transformation in the charac-
ter of terrorism, which has purportedly taken hold in the post-9/11 period.3It is argued
that compared to the “traditional/old”terrorism, there has been an emerging shift in doc-
trine, strategy, motivation, and aim of terrorism attuned to the information age.4Among a
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Asian Journal of Law and Society.
1Some of the large-scale terrorist attacks against the West include the Madrid Train Bombings (2004), the
London Bombings (2005), the Sydney Martin Place Siege (2014), the Paris Gun-shooting Attacks (2015), the
Orlando Night Club Shooting (2016), the Manchester Arena Bombing (2017), and the Christchurch Mosque
Shooting (2019).
2Mahan & Griset (2008).
3Hoffman (1998), p. 200; Carter, Deutch, & Zelikow (1998), pp. 80–94; Laqueur (2000), p. 4.
4Laqueur, supra note 3, pp. 8–11.
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number of new features identified in the period of “new terrorism,”5one remarkable
development is that terrorist attacks have been increasingly carried out in the form of
indiscriminate violence aimed at causing the destruction of society at large.6While criti-
cism on “new terrorism”is acute and opponents query whether there is indeed a clear
distinction between the purported old and new paradigms of terrorism,7the recent wave
of violent atrocities across the world (e.g. the London Bombings, the Boston Marathon
Bombing, and the Sydney Café Siege) seems to signify the emergence of new tactics by
terrorists with a defined goal to inflict deadly harm on innocent civilians rather than strik-
ing out at political and symbolic targets.
More ominously, the change of targets in attacks have also coincided with a shift from
sophisticated attacks that require extensive training, planning, or co-ordination to small-
scale attacks that can be executed by individuals or small groups with casual planning and
cursory preparation.8Often undertaken by so-called “lone wolves,”9low-profile violent
attacks are trickier to identify but are no less lethal.10 Over the past decades, random
and ad hoc individual attacks have been waged in a diverse range of international com-
munities, and perpetrators have often been citizens or residents of the countries they wish
to harm.11 This distinct pattern has not only changed the contours of terrorism in the post-
9/11 era, but also exacerbated the already existing concern over the effectiveness of tra-
ditional responses to terrorism, which has simply been a reactive response to new security
threats.12
In times of uncertainty, there is an increasing popularity of the state’s endorsement of
prevention strategies. Aside from the continuing deference to conventional security meas-
ures for counter-terrorism (e.g. military tactics and law enforcement), proactive and
problem-solving policing has become the leading response towards the increasing risk of
radicalization and violent extremism.13 Subsequently, the overarching policy focuses on
the prevention of terrorism before harm occurs. To this end, community policing, which
was developed in the 1960s to concentrate on crime-prevention initiatives and relevant
community issues, is now being employed as a primary means to pre-emptively deal with
terrorism under the auspices of neighbourhood participation, co-operation, and support.14
Akin to its Western counterparts, China is not immune to terrorist violence; the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has witnessed “ethnic and religious extremism”
for more than 40 years.15 Although the notion of terrorism in the Chinese legal and
5Some common characteristics of “new terrorism”include: (1) new terrorism is more religiously driven with
mystical motivation; (2) new terrorism is associated with terrorist organizations with horizontal networks and
lacks state backers; (3) new terrorism is linked to the inclined use of mass-destruction weapons. See e.g. Hoffman,
supra note 3.
6Laqueur, supra note 3, p. 9; Kurtulus (2011), p. 478.
7E.g. Spencer contends that the “the distinction between religiously and politically motivated terrorism is
predominantly artificial ::: avoiding the creation of artificial distinctions, which ignore the evolutionary devel-
opment of terrorism throughout history, as well as accepting that there are a variety of different forms of ter-
rorism in the world at any one time.”See Spencer (2006), pp. 24–5. Field claims that “the historical evidence
demonstrates that there is significant continuity in terrorist group behaviour, suggesting that as opposed to
a wholesale revolution we have simply seen the evolution of well-established terrorist practices and behaviours
::: the shift in the nature of terrorism has been exaggerated, providing a misleading and distorted picture of
radical change.”Field (2009), p. 195.
8Spaaij (2010), pp. 854–70.
9Simon (2016).
10 Ellis (2014), pp. 211–25.
11 Friedmann & Cannon (2007), p. 4.
12 Staniforth (2014), p. 167.
13 Aziz (2014), p. 148.
14 Ibid., pp. 155–6.
15 Shan & Ping (2015), pp. 113–26.
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political context differs largely from most liberal democracies,16 violent attacks by ethnic
minorities in the form of inflicting civilian casualties have become increasingly visible and
wide-ranging on Chinese soil.17 Like the prevalence of “lone actor”attacks in the West,
most incidents in Xinjiang and some large cities (e.g. Beijing, Kunming, and
Guangzhou) were planned and initiated by individuals or a small group of people.18 As
such, the state’s response to ethno-religious violence has grown in a preventive dimension,
instituting a hybrid mechanism in which community policing, alongside a hard power
approach such as paramilitarism,19 has featured as a salient plank in the state’s
counter-terrorism strategy.20
This article aims to provide a critical analysis of counter-terrorism community policing
(“CTCP”) in urban China.21 It seeks to explore the policy orientation, legislative framework,
normative discourse, and practical dimension of this CTCP strategy by addressing three
probing questions: (1) How has China shifted, on legal and policy grounds, its counter-
terrorism preventive tactic towards a CTCP approach? (2) What are the pivotal elements
underlying the trajectory and contour of CTCP in the Chinese distinctive social and cul-
tural context? (3) Has CTCP faced inherent tensions and pitfalls, if any, that impede its
implementation at the grassroots level and what might be the contributing factors? To
answer these questions, I examine not only the law and policy of CTCP, but also the con-
cepts associated with police legitimacy and social capital to understand how socio-legal fac-
tors have affected the formation of CTCP in this culturally idiosyncratic regime. In doing
so, the article intends to fulfil a lacuna in the extant literature that almost exclusively
focuses on CTCP in Western nations that are most prone to terrorism.
This article is divided into four parts. In Section 1, I begin with a review of CTCP in the
Chinese legal and cultural milieu. In recognizing that China’s terrorism is conceptually
peculiar, I first map out the landscape of the state’s counter-terrorism legal policies
and expound on the evolution of policing tactics in the Chinese social control system that
underpin CTCP. In Sections 2and 3, I focus on police legitimacy and social capital to
unravel the problems in connection with the normative value and procedural mechanisms
of Chinese CTCP. I contend that this vital counter-terrorism component is fraught with
problems, for both police to procure civic co-operation and the community to develop
its capacity as a self-reliant player in the programme of community policing against ter-
rorism. Specifically, in Section 2, I argue that CTCP in China is principally a process of
obligation fulfilment by the mobilization of local bureaucracies that does not necessarily
entail the legitimacy judgement of citizens. Though being enlisted by neighbourhood-
based monoliths, community residents participate passively in policing with minimal
power and authority to generate genuine inputs in CTCP.22 In Section 3, my analysis on
social capital building in Chinese urban neighbourhoods suggests that this is likely to
be an inevitable corollary of Chinese community governed as a highly authoritarian soci-
ety wherein powers of social control are concentrated in the hands of legal authorities to
carry out the primary duty of “stability preservation (Weiwen)”—a long-existing political
concern that has gained paramount prominence since the 2000s. While the Chinese gov-
ernment remains reluctant to give away its social control powers, the public will become
more apathetic towards and alienated from voluntary partnerships with police in
16 China’s official definition of terrorism will be discussed in Section 2of this article.
17 Clarke (2010), pp. 543–6.
18 Hu (2015).
19 Wayne (2009), pp. 255–6.
20 Zhou (2018), pp. 75–97.
21 Given the significant heterogeneity between urban and rural society in China, this article focuses predomi-
nantly on community counter-terrorism policing in urban areas. The practices in rural areas are left in the
background.
22 Xu, Perkins, & Chow (2010), p. 260.
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community matters—a dichotomy lies between reality and ideal in Chinese CTCP. Lastly,
Section 4concludes with preliminary thoughts on whether China is able to look inwards
for possible solutions to some of the practical issues concerning this bourgeoning strategy.
2. CTCP in China: a genealogical review
2.1 Terrorism and counter-terrorism legal policy
China’s experience with terrorism has waned and waxed over the last half-century.23 The
first large wave of terrorist violence occurred in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
(where most Uyghur Muslims reside) during the 1990s. In the wake of 9/11, the Chinese
government retrospectively characterized approximately 200 violent incidents in this far-
western region as terrorist attacks engineered and launched by ethnic extremist groups
(e.g. the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM)).24 After a relatively calm period
from 2001 to 2007, the recurrence of violent incidents began to hit Xinjiang as well as
coastal regions of the country.25 Similar to what the West has experienced by the emer-
gence of “new terrorism,”the new trend of violent attacks targeted civilians and national
infrastructures as a conduit for inciting fear among the public.26 One high-profile incident,
perhaps, is the Tiananmen Square attack among many others in Kunming, Guangzhou, and
Xinjiang.27 On 28 October 2013, a group of Uyghurs drove a car loaded with explosives and
crashed into a crowd in front of Tiananmen Square’s gate tower in Beijing and it burst into
flames.28 This attack killed five people, including the attackers, and injured 38 people.29
While international critics have cast doubt on the nature of this incident being terror-
ism-related,30 the Chinese authorities categorically characterized it as a terrorist suicide
attack, depicting attackers as ethnic extremists linked to the group of ETIM.31
It is variously claimed that Chinese contemporary terrorism is the by-product of the
grievances of ethnic minority groups (mostly Uyghur Muslims) towards the state’s
long-existing oppressive ethnic and religious policies.32 Until very recently, measures cen-
tred on degrading Uyghurs by forced assimilation into Han culture and restraining reli-
gious freedom by ideological education have yet to vanish in Xinjiang.33 In response,
violence has been rendered as a moral justification for Uyghurs to voice dissenting opin-
ions given the lack of political avenues for peaceful petitions.34 The Chinese government,
however, has taken a different stance. The official perspective on terrorist threats has been
attributed to the so-called “Three Evil Forces,”which are referred to as “(violent)
23 For a detailed discussion of China’s encounter with terrorist violence, see Pantucci (2017).
24 In 2002, the State Council published the official document, “East Turkestan Terrorists Exposed,”in which
more than 200 incidents were defined as “terrorist attacks,”involving 162 casualties and 144 injuries.
Questions however have remained as to the lack of a legal definition of “terrorism”in the 1990s to characterize
these incidents and the extent to which the recorded deaths and injuries are related to the named incidents.
Clarke (2008), p. 282; Roberts (2018), p. 233.
25 Gohel (2014), p. 16.
26 Ibid.
27 Some of the major attacks include the Hotan Attacks (2011), the Kashgar Attacks (2011), the Kunming Railway
Station Incident (2014), and the Guangzhou Railway Station Incident (2014).
28 BBC (2013). However, concerns have been raised by the international community over the lack of state trans-
parency on the details and evidence of the attack regarding the identity of the attackers and the nature of the
event. Mooney (2013).
29 Ibid.
30 Some argue that they are only violent crimes in response to the state’s oppression on ethnic and religious
policies in Xinjiang. Ibid.
31 Wen (2013).
32 Bovingdon (2004); Kanat (2014); Mumford (2018), pp. 18–26.
33 Kung (2006), pp. 375–91; Greitens, Lee, & Yazici (2020), pp. 24–5.
34 Pokalova (2013), p. 292.
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terrorism, (ethnic) separatism and (religious) extremism.”35 To Beijing, terrorism is closely
interwoven with ethno-nationalist mobilization and separatism.36 Such parlance seems to
be supported by the fact that the ETIM, known as the “most militant of the ethnic Uyghur
separatist groups”by the US State Department,37 has claimed responsibility for the major-
ity of violent incidents occurring in the Chinese territory over the past decade.38 To cor-
roborate, Chinese sources have found that together with ISIS, the ETIM has recruited
Uyghur Muslims as radicalized jihadist fighters through religious propaganda and expan-
sion.39 As of 2014, it has been reported that about 300 Uyghur Muslims were either fighting
alongside ETIM/ISIS or returning to Xinjiang to plot terrorist attacks.40 Wang Zuoan, the
head of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, articulated that “the foreign use of religion to infil-
trate (China) intensifies by the day and religious extremist thought is spreading in some
areas (Xinjiang).”41 The emergence of an active home-grown terrorist insurgency repre-
sented by returning ISIS soldiers, according to Zhang Xinfeng—then director of the
Regional Anti-Terrorism Agency in the Shanghai Cooperation Group—“constitutes a major
threat to (national) and regional security.”42
Hence, China’s policies and laws in response to terrorism have grown rapidly, though in a
piecemeal fashion. Following the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government has joined the US-
spearheaded war on terror by endorsing repressive force and a paramilitary crackdown
against the indigenous insurgency.43 Several amendments have been made to some funda-
mental statutes such as the Criminal Law (CL), Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), and National
Security Law (NSL) whereby expanded powers to interrogate, detain, and control individuals
associated with terrorist acts are conferred on legal and intelligence apparatus.44 According
to Michael Clarke, the introduction of hardened counter-terrorism legislation reflects the
country’s declaration of a “war on terror,”as these laws permit Chinese authorities to
“deploy significant repressive force, in political, legal, and police/military terms, to confront
the perceived threat to Xinjiang’s security posed by Uyghur terrorism.”45
However, it was not until 2016 that the first-ever Counter-Terrorism Law (CTL) was
promulgated to systemize the rationale, scheme, and bureaucracy of the state’s
counter-terrorism architecture. In this timely legislation, a number of key issues are
explicitly addressed, albeit in rather equivocal and sweeping wording, including the legal
definition of terrorism, the boundaries of counter-terrorism law enforcement by state
35 Zhou (2017), pp. 2–3.
36 Potter (2013), p. 72.
37 Cloud & Johnson (2004).
38 Guo (2015), p. 37.
39 Campbell (2016).
40 Ibid.
41 Shepard (2017).
42 Sands (2014).
43 Clarke, supra note 17, p. 543.
44 For example, the 2001 Amendment of the Criminal Law (CL) first incorporated the offence of financing ter-
rorism by holding both individuals and units criminally liable for making funds, financial assets, and economic
resources available to those who attempt to commit or participate in terrorist acts (Art. 120). The Eighth
Amendment to the CL was passed in February 2011, which specifies terrorism-related crime as an offence that
activates special recidivism (Art. 66). In 2014, the Ninth Amendment to the CL enacted several “preparatory”
terrorist offences with the aim of preventing the occurrence of extreme terrorist activities. These offences, which
are related to a person’s general “thoughts or talk”about religious extremism, and “engagement”with the plan-
ning or preparation of any terrorist activities are prosecuted at a much earlier stage than the offences of criminal
attempt (Art. 120(2)–(3)). In the 2012 Amendment to the Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), police were granted the
abilities to carry out “technical investigation”and “secret detention”prior to trial, which were not applicable to
ordinary criminal offences (Arts 83, 148). The revised Counter-Terrorism Law (CTL) empowers Chinese police to
use a cluster of control orders over the course of investigating suspected terrorist acts upon the approval of the
chief of public security bodies above the county level (Art. 53).
45 Clarke, supra note 17, p. 543.
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institutions, and the procedure of inter-agency collaboration against terrorism.46 A par-
ticular distinguishing feature of the CTL is the inauguration of a preventive strategy in
the face of increasingly frequent events involving lone attackers from minority religious
enclaves. As articulated in Article 5 of the CTL, counter-terrorism should “prioritize pre-
vention, integrating punishment and prevention and abide by the principle of pro-
activeness and activeness.”47 To this end, a “mass line”principle, first asserted by
President Xi Jinping during his speech at the 14th Group Study of the Politburo of the
Chinese Communist Party (“the Party”) Central Committee in 2014, acquired its legal
ground and then became the underlying method to forestall terrorist menaces.
Reflecting on Xi’s affirmation that legal authorities ought to “rely upon the masses to carry
out all kinds of activities of preventing and regulating terrorism,”48 the CTL recommends
that the law enforcement establish a joint co-ordination mechanism to mobilize local res-
idential committees and private organizations as part of the counter-terrorism force,49
that intelligence authorities increase efforts to gather information with the assistance
of the public,50 and that governments at the county and village level set up voluntary
teams to work with local counter-terrorism agencies in units, villages, and communities.51
2.2 From mass line to community policing against terrorism
Patently, China’s call for a “people’s war on terror”is premised on the country’s far-
reaching political doctrine—the mass line. Thus, it is an imperative to first contextualize
the ambience and connotation of this concept and how it has been integrated into the
state’s counter-terrorism policies and initiatives. Coined and developed by Mao Zedong
throughout his lifetime of revolutionary struggle,52 the mass line is a political, organiza-
tional, and leadership method that enables the Party to combine leadership with the
masses.53 As encapsulated in many of Mao’s writings, the mass line rests on the need
for Party cadres to have close ties to the masses and be dependent on them in all matters,
whilst maintaining the relationship between “leaders and [the] led.”54 There is little won-
der then that the mass-line doctrine has guided the way in which Chinese society has been
regulated by the police since 1949.55 At the crux of this people-oriented philosophy, a har-
monious relationship between the public, social organizations, and government agencies is
underlined to advocate joint combat against crime and preservation of public order—an
agenda of “mass prevention and mass management.”56 Police, like any other organ of the
government, should carry out their practical work in the way that is necessarily “for the
masses, from the masses and to the masses.”57
During the Maoist era (1949–77) in which informal justice prevailed,58 the masses were
encouraged and empowered to partake in street-level policing in tandem with the general
social control activities by police. Residential committees (Juweihui), work units (Gongzuo
46 Zhou (2016).
47 The Counter-Terrorism Law of the People’s Republic of China (CTL) 2016, Art. 5.
48 Wei (2014).
49 The Counter-Terrorism Law of the People’s Republic of China (CTL) 2016, Art. 8.
50 Ibid., Art. 44.
51 Ibid., Art. 74.
52 Leng (1977), p. 357.
53 Young (1980), p. 227.
54 Ibid., p. 228.
55 Zhong (2009), p. 157.
56 Ibid., p. 158.
57 Wong (2001), p. 201.
58 According to Leng, informal justice focuses on socialist norms, values, and political socialization as opposed
to formal justice, which stresses regulation, application of law, and punishment enforced by a centralized and
institutionalized bureaucracy. See Leng, supra note 52, pp. 357–8.
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Danwei), and social order joint protection teams (Shehui Zhian Lianfangdui) were agents of
the civic partner, carrying out duties of resolving domestic disputes, monitoring neigh-
bourhood safety, supervising troubled residents, and disciplining minor misconduct.59
As Michael Dutton points out, these practices reflected the tradition of China being a rela-
tional society. In its early decades, China inherited the feudal “remnants”of conceiving an
individual as part of the hierarchical family and local society, with relations between his/
her members regulated by the collective norms and codes.60 To police such a collective
society, family was the basic unit of administration and subject to village pacts and mutual
supervision that served as the important means of social control.61 The household, the
workplace, and the neighbourhood organ that expanded the familial boundary conducted
actions of discipline and sanction in the local settings, and bore the duties of management
and surveillance to prevent residents from engaging in wrongdoings.62
The economic modernization in the 1980s brought this populist policing more in unison
with a Western-like ideal of community policing. This is illustrated by the advent of a wave
of new crime-control measures resembling practices utilized broadly in the democratic
policing system. Specifically, the police patrol system and a 110 emergency line (equiva-
lent to 911 in the US) were formally instituted nationwide to cast an all-encompassing net
of reactive policing in parallel with an upsurge in crime stemming from the marketiza-
tion.63 From the 1980s onwards, a policy of “Comprehensive Management of Social
Order”was adopted by the Party to underscore crime prevention in the furtherance of
grassroots policing strategies.64 Pursuant to the Decision on Strengthening
Comprehensive Management of Social Order issued in 1991 by the Standing Committee
of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council, governments at all levels were
required to establish a self-help, self-directing, and self-reliant social order organization
that was made up of local urban residents (rural villagers), work units, state-owned
employees, and students.65 One particular aim of this mandate was to mobilize wider seg-
ments of the society to be the assistants of front-line police officers on the street.
Subsequently, this became a viable solution to alleviate the pressure mounted on police
due to manpower limitations in the situation of a crime epidemic.66
As an officially sanctioned concept, community policing was becoming semantically
important at the turn of the Millennium. Irrespective of the term employed, community
policing does not connote a theoretical and substantive rupture from mass-line policing.67
In 2002, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Civil Affairs passed the Notice on
Strengthening the Construction of Community Policing, which denotes the legitimization of
community policing whilst advocating its implementation across the large and
medium-sized cities as an essential part of the country’s larger agenda to develop urban
communities.68 Viewed as a prerequisite to preserving neighbourhood safety, community
policing “is supposed to subsume the mass-line principle by urging the police to be deeply
rooted in communities and focus on tasks of regulating public order, preventing crime and
serving the masses.”69 The Decision meted out that each police officer should be assigned to
a designated beat in which his/her workplace needs to be positioned adjacent to the
59 Zhong, supra note 55, p. 159.
60 Dutton (1992), Part I.
61 Ibid.
62 Zhong, supra note 55, p. 159.
63 Wong (2002), p. 306.
64 Zhong, supra note 55, p. 160.
65 Decision on Strengthening Comprehensive Management of Social Order 1991, s. 5.
66 Scoggins & O’Brien (2016), p. 231.
67 Wong, supra note 57, p. 202; Zhong, supra note 55, p. 166.
68 Notice on Strengthening the Construction of Community Policing 2002, s. 1.
69 Ibid.
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residential committee office.70 Additionally, within each local police station, a community
officer should be chosen and then elected by local residents to sit on the residential com-
mittee, serving as the organizer and co-ordinator of neighbourhood matters related to
public security.71 To blend into the public is to “intervene at the first sign of possible trou-
ble”under the aegis of mass participation.72 This preventive policing is shored up by the
2015 Opinion on Strengthening the Construction of Social Order Prevention System, which was
enacted by the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party Committee and the
State Council. In many respects, the Opinion expanded the compass of community engage-
ment and outreach, and pinpointed the pressing social order issues that need citizenry
co-operation and assistance.73
Despite the uneven progress of community policing across China,74 the past 20 years
have witnessed this outwardly novel though long-lived approach morphing into a social
control paradigm ingrained in the country’s crime-prevention landscapes. Markedly, the
growth of community policing has tallied with the party-state’s political programmes
since the early twenty-first century. From Hu Jintao’s“Socialist Harmonious Society”
to Xi Jinping’s“Stability Maintenance”and reinvigorated “Mass Line,”75 China has
advanced various schemes to address what the Chinese polity and society lacked at various
points of history.76 Yet, preserving social order and political stability has steadfastly
remained as the highest ideal and the masses are not deemed as onlookers but accorded
responsibility for the fulfilment of these goals.77 Following Xi Jinping’s transition to power
in late 2012, terrorism has been enunciated as one of the thorniest problems that causes
social unrest, public anxiety, and political volatility.78 From the government’s perspective,
the state and its people are both victims of the “Three Evils”and should fight shoulder to
shoulder as comrades in arms against their mutual enemies.79 In particular, the 2015 revi-
sion of the NSL articulates that “all citizens of China, state authorities, armed forces, polit-
ical parties, people’s groups, enterprises, public institutions, and other social organizations
shall have the responsibility and obligation to maintain national security.”80
Against this backdrop, Beijing’s directions on engaging the populace for counter-
terrorism are neither irrational nor groundless. Rather, it is perhaps the most sensible move
for the government to embrace community (mass-line) policing and extend its reach in the
production of counter-terrorism when facing increasingly localized terrorist threats. Just
like community policing does not have a unified and co-ordinated pattern of practice,
CTCP in China operates in many forms in concert with the distinct circumstances of different
70 Decision on Strengthening Comprehensive Management of Social Order 1991, s. 5.
71 Ibid.
72 Chen (2002), p. 10.
73 For example, ss. 21 and 22 of the Opinion encouraged the local government to seek co-operation with private
security organizations and increase the number of volunteers to work with police.
74 In some developed areas, policing measures with high technology have been adopted recently. One example
is the 7 ×24 policing system in Beijing. It includes the televised conference system that allows residents to speak
to police officers on duty, an artificial-intelligence-powered dispatch system that allows the police station to keep
track of patrol information and respond to emergencies, and auto-operation surveillance cameras on main spots
in the community that allow police to observe suspicious activities. However, in developing areas, community
policing has been ill-considered with poor-quality facilities, old vehicles, and outdated equipment. See Scoggins
(2018), p. 81; Renmin (2017), p. 81.
75 It is argued that Xi’s mass-line theory differs fundamentally from Mao’s mass-line doctrine in the sense that
the former aims to curb corruption and boost Xi’s own legitimacy without actually appealing to the public inter-
ests and priorities. Tiezzi (2013).
76 Sapio et al. (2017), p. 10.
77 Chen, supra note 72, pp. 10–2.
78 Reeves (2016), pp. 827–8.
79 Tiezzi, supra note 75.
80 The National Security Law 2015, Art. 11.
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localities. To date, intelligence sharing and volunteer patrols appear to be the most fre-
quently and dependable approaches to preventing terrorism in urban society. More specifi-
cally, intelligence sharing has taken place following a number of violent incidents in 2014,
when Chinese authorities embarked on spurring the public to assist police by passing on tips
about terrorist threats.81 In almost every major city and province, the Notice on Rewarding the
Public for Tipping off Authorities to Violent Terrorist Crimes was decreed to put forth the way
citizens report suspicious individuals and activities and the reward process for “whistle-
blowers.”While a variety of means of tip-off are made available to the public (e.g. 110 hot-
line, texts, e-mails, and social media), different levels of monetary rewards are established to
encourage local residents to come forward with useful information.82 In Urumqi—the capital
of Xinjiang, for example, 200,000–1,000,000 RMB is rewarded to anyone who stops, subdues,
or arrests “criminals who are committing terrorist violence, which plays an important role
in preventing the significant loss of lives and property.”83 In the next level, 100,000–500,000
RMB is awarded to anyone who provides intelligence “directly assisting police with identi-
fying and preventing significant terrorist violence.”84 The lowest rank of reward among
Urumqi’smultilayeredbountysystemis1,000–50,000 RMB being rewarded to those who pro-
vide information on “illegal religious activities, illegal materials of religious propaganda, ille-
gal online incitement and illegal manufacturing or sale of masks and robes with signs of
religious extremism and violent terrorism.”85
In effect, intelligence sharing was legally validated by the CTL, which sets out that citizens
are obligated to report any terrorism-related intelligence to police and relevant authorities.86
Acting as the additional “ears”and “eyes”of police, local residential committees further
adhere to the mass-line doctrine through organizing delegates of communities consisting
of local cadres, neighbourhood volunteers, and retired elders to routinely join police for street
patrols. During these patrols, volunteers distribute counter-terrorism materials, such as the
Citizen’s Counter-terrorism Handbook produced by the Ministry of Public Security, in an attempt
to raise public awareness of indicators of a possible terrorist attack. In striving for these pur-
poses, Beijing, for example, has reportedly recruited a team of 100,000 people to provide a
presence in every major urban neighbourhood of the capital city.87 Atthesametime,public
members of the street-based occupation, such as cobblers, vendors, news-agency owners, and
parking administrators, are enlisted as volunteers and asked to be vigilant about “suspicious
people and things”during their daily business activities.88
It is noteworthy that while these measures are operational across major parts of urban
China, the extent and reach of CTCP in Xinjiang have remained largely unknown.
Considered as the centrality of counter-terrorism operations, Xinjiang is tightly controlled
by the local and Beijing government in its social, cultural, and political life, making it
nearly impossible to assess the extent of counter-terrorism techniques adopted in the
region. This is understandable as one can barely obtain reliable evidence on how commu-
nities are policed in a Uyghur-dominated society.89 While scattered research identifies
some specific mass-line measures in use, such as the “Three Contingents,”90 there has been
81 Tanner & Bellacqua (2016), p. 45.
82 Jing (2014).
83 The Urumqi Notice on Rewarding the Public for Tipping off Authorities to Violent Terrorist Crimes, s. 4.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 The Counter-Terrorism Law of People’s Republic of China 2016, Art. 9.
87 China News (2014).
88 BBC (2014b).
89 However, in the 2010 census of Xinjiang, Uyghurs account for 46% and Han Chinese 40% due to decades of
migration of the Han population into Xinjiang since the 1950s; see Toops (2016).
90 The “Three Contingents”approach refers to the government’s reliance upon Party cadres, teachers, and
religious figures in Xinjiang to maintain regional stability and security. See Zhou, supra note 46, p. 6.
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a steady stream of fragmentary evidence that surveillance measures are rolled out by legal
authorities as a prime tool to monitor Uyghur communities. It is reported that many cities
in Xinjiang have widely employed high-tech cameras and machines as part of social gov-
ernance aimed to “achieve ‘complete coverage without any chinks’(Quanfugai, Wufenxi)so
there are ‘no blind spots and no blank spaces’(Wumangqu, Wukongbai).”91 In Urumqi and
other regions (e.g. Kashgar), a “grid-style social management”system has been established
by local governments to divide the city into hundreds of grids monitored by a considerable
number of digital surveillance cameras in every corner.92 Across Xinjiang, smart technol-
ogies such as face-recognition entrance gates have been installed in university campuses,
train stations, work units, residential compounds, and the like.93 At the gates, scanned
facial images and fingerprints are employed to corroborate an individual’s identity with
nearly perfect accuracy and reliability.94 In addition to the frequently used identification-
verification systems, the legal requirement of installing a GPS in every vehicle and many
other supervisory tools such police checkpoints and cybersecurity watchdogs have made
Xinjiang the “world’s most heavily guarded place,”indicating that the region exists under
a stringent community–police security network.95
Despite community policing beginning to take hold in China’s counter-terrorism sys-
tem, I call into question its prospects of success. While it is impossible to measure exclu-
sively and given that empirical research is presently unfeasible, I tend to argue that the
status quo of the partnership currently operating in the Chinese urban community does
not suffice to produce the intended effect of mobilizing and engaging local residents to
prevent terrorism. In China, the barriers that derail an active and perpetual collaboration
between communities and police are not derived from concerns arising from law or police
legitimacy that, in Western jurisdictions, lead to a general distrust and unwillingness to co-
operate by residents. More likely than not, the normative predicament of community
engagement in China can be downplayed by the compliant culture of the state turning
every citizen into a dutiful member of the society and the regulatory structure of the
Chinese community in being able to enforce such citizenry obligation. That being said,
apart from passive participation by residents, a more salient issue is the incapability of
police and communities to accumulate social capital in order to promote a free-willed
and reciprocal partnership model that can more productively foil terrorism. On the
one hand, it is highly unlikely that China, as an autocratic regime, is willing to cede power
and authority to communities in exchange for greater co-operation. Hence, community
residents will almost always be informants in lieu of co-producers. On the other hand,
the economic deregulation since the 1980s has transformed Chinese urban society from
a static neighbourhood with fixed boundaries to a transient neighbourhood with a high
degree of fluidity.96 In the absence of a common identity between the local residents, there
is a lack of community cohesion and belonging, which gives rise to disincentives to vol-
untary participation in formal community affairs.97 The consequence is that community
residents are becoming visibly uninterested in engaging with police regarding social con-
trol and other community-based activities. With social capital building becoming difficult,
what can be sought for CTCP is no more than a pseudo or information-sharing partnership.
A partnership based on wider co-ordination and collaboration as desired by the CTL, there-
fore, lacks the soil to thrive in China’s modern urban communities. In what follows, I aim
91 Leibold (2020), p. 4.
92 Ibid.; Chin (2017).
93 Zenz & Leibold (2020), p. 10.
94 Ibid.
95 Free Radio Asia (2017); Finley (2019), p. 18.
96 Solinger (1995), pp. 128–30.
97 Liu et al. (2017), p. 283.
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to explicate these claims in the context of the concepts of police legitimacy and social
capital through the lens of the sociocultural dimensions of the Chinese urban community.
3. Partnering the Chinese urban community for counter-terrorism: legitimacy
or obligation?
3.1 Police legitimacy and community co-operation
Research shows that an effective and sustainable partnership between communities and
police in community policing lies in the trust and confidence shared between the police
and the community.98 In the literature of counter-terrorism policing, it is consistently con-
tended that community trust leading to voluntary co-operation amongst the target popu-
lation (mostly Muslims) hinges deeply upon their perceptions of the legitimacy of the
judgements of police.99 While the concept of legitimacy is “multidimensional in character”
and open to various interpretations,100 higher levels of perceived legitimacy are thought to
create a higher likelihood of community engagement.101 In that, procedural justice,
referred to as fair and transparent processes by which police interact with the public,
is arguably a critical precursor to police legitimacy.102 Tom Tyler, the founder of the
procedural-justice theory, conceptualizes procedural justice through four pillars: voice
—allowing people to raise concerns before the police make a decision; respect—treating
people with politeness and dignity; neutrality—decision-making is unbiased, non-discrim-
inatory, and non-racist; honesty: having best interests of communities at the heart of
police enforcement.103 Although critics have challenged the casual correlation between
procedural fairness and legitimacy,104 most concede that the procedural-justice hypothesis
is at least a “plausible explanation”for citizens to improve their perception of the police
and their participation in community policing.105
However, data-driven studies manifest that CTCP in some major Western states (e.g. the
US, the UK, and Australia) is devoid of meaningful partnerships between police and Muslim
communities largely due to the lack of legitimacy arising from counter-terrorism law
enforcement short of procedural justice.106 Despite variations of CTCP in practice across
different jurisdictions, one of the ambient concerns of Muslim communities is that the
outreach of police in the name of community policing is nothing but an extension of
the state’s punitive power that prioritizes the authorities’interests—a breach of neutrality
and honesty.107 For many Muslims, law enforcement may be perceived as “more a foe than
a friend”because the outcome of engagement and co-operation essentially paves the way
for the detention, prosecution, and conviction of suspect Muslims,108 serving the recurring
theme of retributive justice in harmony with the draconian counter-terrorism culture dur-
ing the initial years after 9/11. In the US, the UK, and Australia, it is not uncommon for
Muslim communities to have expressed a heightened sense of insecurity and vulnerability
98 Spalek & McDonald (2010), pp. 123–32. It is also noted that there is literature opposing this argument by
emphasizing the casual connection between the police and the community. See Hawdon (2008), p. 186;
Tankebe (2013), pp. 103–35.
99 Tyler, Schulhofer, & Huq (2010), pp. 365–402; Huq, Tyler, & Schulhofer (2011), pp. 728–61; Cherney & Murphy
(2013), pp. 403–21; Murphy, Madon, & Cherney (2017), pp. 544–59.
100 Beetham (1991), p. 5.
101 Tyler (2003), p. 287; Murphy, Madon, & Cherney, supra note 99, p. 555.
102 Tyler (2008), p. 238; Madon, Murphy, & Sargeant (2017), pp. 637–8; Cherney & Murphy, supra note 99, p. 404.
103 Tyler, supra note 101, p. 239.
104 Gibson (1991), pp. 631–6; Mondak (1993), pp. 599–608; Harkin (2015), pp. 594–612.
105 Gibson, supra note 104, p. 633.
106 Ibid.; Bullock & Johnson (2018), p. 883; Pickering et al. (2007), p. 110.
107 Aziz, supra note 13, p. 153.
108 Ibid., p. 151.
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to stringent measures that overly profile and flag them behind the façade of counter-
terrorism policing.109
An unpredicted but not altogether surprising observation is that community policing in
China has not embroiled itself in the deficiency of trust and support of local residents. It
has been noted that since the 2000s, incidents involving malpractices, brutality, and the
abuse of power within and beyond police duty have appeared in an endless stream, tarn-
ishing the public image of police forces in ways that had never been observed in Maoist
and reformed China.110 It is particularly embodied in a large number of wrongfully con-
victed cases involving executions of “offenders”wherein the miscarriage of justice by
police has been widely publicized by mass media, invoking public censure and outcry.111
There has been an upwards trend in so-called “mass incidents”112 in which protesters,
demonstrators, and activists frequently become engaged in fierce, if not deadly, conflicts
with police forces for persisting social injustices.113
Strikingly however, the linkage between declining police legitimacy and its supposedly
resultant distrust in police is not obvious in the Chinese policing context. Research has
established a highly consistent finding that Chinese citizens generally exhibit a supportive
attitude towards police.114 Regardless of questions of police integrity, fairness, and efficacy,
many urbanites hold the view that police are trustworthy, which encourages their com-
pliance with law enforcement.115 Also, support for community policing vis-à-vis crime pre-
vention has been observed among residents who are in either direct or indirect contact
with police.116 A national survey of 3,500 citizens in eight cities exemplifies that the vast
majority of respondents viewed police as the guarantor of neighbourhood safety and secu-
rity.117 In some way congruent to the inference drawn in the Western literature, research
finds that the public support of police is likely to be associated with the police adherence
to procedural justice that shapes legitimacy.118 Similarly, the process-based exercise of
policing in adherence to procedural fairness seems to promote public willingness to
co-operate with police in policing.119 However, despite empirical findings in criminological
studies, there has not been consideration of the cultural mutation of legitimacy and its
relevance to public engagement under the rubric of China’s indigenous socio-legal con-
texts. This prompts one to ask a more focal question—is perceived legitimacy is the only
driving force for citizenry co-operation with police in China, and how likely is it related to
other socio-legal factors entrenched in the Chinese community settings?
In the mainstream literature of police legitimacy, the postulation is that legitimacy
based on procedural justice influences public compliance with law, authority, and existing
societal arrangements by inducing a perceived obligation.120 According to Tom Tyler, obli-
gation is “the most direct extension of the concept of legitimacy.”121 However, as Justice
Tankebe persuasively argues, obligation should be avoided as being regarded a constituent
part of legitimacy because feelings of obligation to obey may result from other reasons
109 Weine, Younis, & Polutnik (2017), pp. 21–3; Cherney & Hartley (2017), pp. 753–4.
110 Sun & Wu (2010), p. 29.
111 Huang (2012), p. 1219.
112 The term “mass incidents”is a broad definition that covers a wide range of physical, verbal, or other forms
of group confrontations with local authorities that revolve around civic grievances generated by socioeconomic
injustice and the poor quality of local governance; see Tong & Lei (2011), p. 23–33.
113 Hu (2016), p. 3.
114 Wu & Sun (2009), pp. 170–91; Lai, Cao, & Zhao (2010), pp. 936–41; Sun, Hu, & Wu (2012), pp. 87–105.
115 Sun et al. (2017), p. 463; Liu & Liu (2018), p. 3549.
116 Wu, Jiang, & Lambert (2011), p. 297.
117 Sun, Hu, & Wu, supra note 114, p. 101.
118 Liu & Liu, supra note 114, pp. 3549–50.
119 Sun et al., supra note 115, pp. 471–2.
120 Tyler (2006), p. 390.
121 Tyler, supra note 101, p. 287.
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beyond legitimacy.122 Eamonn Carrabine was clear on this matter when he pointed to the
“dull compulsion”in the context of prisons as an exceptional example.123 “Dull compul-
sion”refers to the scenario wherein prisoners “fatalistically accept or pragmatically put up
with prison regimes even when the distribution of institutional power is patently illegiti-
mate.”124 This normative assumption has been usefully expanded to elucidate the confor-
mity to law and police under conditions of dictatorial or authoritarian rule where people
feel obligated to obey not just because of a perceived legitimacy, but also because of “fear, a
sense of powerless, or pragmatic acquiescence.”125 Needless to say, the obligation to obey
in illiberal regimes is philosophically distinct from that in democratic societies. If the for-
mer relates to a forced sense of obligation, then the latter centres mostly on the circum-
stances in which legitimacy generates the citizens’normative commitments to, and shared
moral values with, the police service or order.126
How, then, might civic co-operation in China be driven by an obligation derived from
perceived legitimacy or through a coercive power of the authority? While the difference is
difficult to prove statistically,127 it is reasonable to argue that Chinese citizens in urban
communities are more likely to co-operate at the behest of the authorities as opposed
to through voluntary choices. Diverging from many Western societies in which community
engagement is principally mutually interactive and driven on legitimacy, China’s public
participation in community policing for counter-terrorism is generally sought to be man-
datory and independent of judgements by citizens regarding legitimacy. In a country like
China where a despotic government dominates,128 police procedural justice and legitimacy
may elevate co-operation, but the key determinant appears to lay behind an inherent obli-
gation of ordinary citizens to state laws, superiors, authorities, and governments.129
3.2 An obligation-driven co-operation
In part, the commitment felt by citizens may be attributed to the fact that Confucianism
still has a firm grip on Chinese social culture, in which citizens tend to be beholden to
authority by being embedded in multiple hierarchical relationships.130 A more compelling
reason, perhaps, is that the obligation to obey has become incessantly impelled by the
state’s ongoing course of codification towards the regularization of ever-changing social
relations and political considerations in modern China. In this process, citizens are being
relentlessly charged with more affirmative legal responsibilities than ever to shoulder part
of the burden to uphold social management and governance.131
In the wake of 9/11, the Chinese government, with unusual speed but nominal public
debate, revised and passed a spate of laws on Counter-espionage, National Security,
National Intelligence, Counter-terrorism, Cybersecurity and Foreign NGO Management,
122 Tankebe, supra note 98, p. 124.
123 Carrabine (2006), p. 46.
124 Ibid., p. 180.
125 Tankebe, supra note 98, p. 106.
126 Tankebe (2009), p. 1279.
127 In their study on police legitimacy and compliance among Chinese youth, Liu Siyu and Liu Jianhong stress
that the obligation to obey is not empirically translated into law-abiding behaviours of respondents despite about
73% of the sample reporting a high level of feelings of obligation; see Liu & Liu, supra note 115, p. 3549.
128 Tang (2016), pp. 6–8.
129 In a study on citizens’obligation to obey law in Guangzhou, Shanhe Jiang and his colleagues discovered that
the Chinese seem more obligated to obey a law that they do not believe in than do their American counterparts;
92% of the respondents agreed with the statements: “people should obey the law even if it goes against what they
think is right”and that “I always try to follow the law even if I think that it is wrong;”see Jiang, Wu, & Wang
(2011), p. 511.
130 Zhai (2017), p. 121.
131 Trevaskes et al. (2014), pp. 6–7.
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not to mention the two instrumental pieces of legislation—the CL and the CPL. Such an
interconnected package of counter-terrorism, national security, and law-enforcement leg-
islation repeatedly obligates citizens, organizations, and companies to provide
co-operation and support for police activities that tackle terrorism.132 For example, both
the CTL and the Counter-espionage Law require that citizens honestly provide and disclose
information concerning threats to national security upon request of the authorities.133 The
National Intelligence Law (NIL) goes further by granting intelligence agencies the discre-
tion to demand “support, assistance and cooperation from concerned organs, organiza-
tions and citizens when carrying out intelligence work.”134 Furthermore, the
Cybersecurity Law mandates that network operators provide authorities with “technical
support”during national security and criminal investigations by public security or
national security organs.135 In addition, the NIL authorizes security officials to “make
inquiries of any individuals as part of their intelligence-gathering, and to examine their
reference materials and files.”136 However, individuals who are interviewed do not have
the right to “remain silent,”which has long been evidence of the lack of due process in
China’s criminal justice system since the debut of the CL in 1979.137 In fact, the refusal to
co-operate with law-enforcement agencies results in administrative penalties or criminal
prosecution.138
Locally, the Xinjiang government enacted the Regulation on De-radicalization in 2017.
The Regulation stresses that every segment of Xinjiang society should discharge an impor-
tant responsibility of deradicalization and -extremism, while “developing a strong sense of
identity tied to the Chinese ethnicity and culture, the Chinese Community Party and the
socialism with Chinese characteristics.”139 In particular, all state-owned organizations and
civil society groups, including inter alia the Communist Youth League, corporations, work
units, commercial unions, study groups, universities, and media, are tasked with counter-
ing the infiltration of extremist behaviours and speeches through proper training and
“religious, cultural and legal education.”140
These legal obligations, barely linked to entitlement, are capable of being enforced in
the community sceneries given the managerial pattern of Chinese urban neighbourhoods
being hierarchical and undemocratic. In other words, when the efforts of Western police to
boost community co-operation against terrorism meet resistance by the target community
resulting from a deficit in legitimacy and trust, community engagement in China can take
place in the form of forced participation via legal demand and collective community orga-
nization. For community residents, participation is not a natural activity of civil society.141
More often than not, it serves as a means of performing legal duties in the name of the
community’s administrative missions for social order maintenance, which is chivvied by
the residential committee located in each urban neighbourhood, acting largely as a proxy
of the local government. This is not to deny that many Chinese communities are furnished
with considerable volunteers mobilized from the local population.142 In several violent
incidents in Xinjiang (e.g. the Hotan attacks), it is evidenced that the masses voluntarily
132 Tanner (2017).
133 The Counter-Terrorism Law of People’s Republic of China 2016, Art. 51; The Counter-espionage Law 2014,
Art. 22.
134 The National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China 2017, Art. 14.
135 The Cyber Security Law of the People’s Republic of China 2016, Art. 28.
136 Ibid., Art. 16.
137 Belkin (2000), p. 16.
138 The National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China 2017, Art. 28.
139 The Regulation on De-radicalization, Chapter 5.
140 Ibid.
141 Xu (2007), p. 628.
142 Bray (2006), p. 546.
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provided law-enforcement agencies with information for investigation and actively
assisted the police with the arrest of suspects who were at large.143 However, to what
degree such public inputs represent a general form of co-operation across the entire
Chinese urban community and the willingness of residents to carry out the day-to-day
work without express or implied compulsion are doubtful. To support this argument, a
brief examination of how the urban community has evolved and is managed in 2000s
China is pertinent.
China had long been a stagnant society.144 However, with the deepening of marketiza-
tion, increasing the mobility of citizens around the country, a large number of people have
been divorced from family and work units (Danwei)—a system introduced in the 1950s in
which every citizen was bound to his/her work unit for life.145 Faced with a large influx of
people into urban areas seeking better financial opportunities, former President Jiang
Zemin stressed at the Eighth People’s Congress Meeting in 1993 that “the state ought
to promote urban community to take over the social duties and functions of the
Danwei system.”146 Following Jiang’s direction, China has incorporated the notion of “com-
munity (Shequ)”into its urban management agendas,147 which involve “community ser-
vice”in its legislative reforms, and established “community construction”as the
primary goal of municipal infrastructural development.148 Although Danwei still carries
an impact upon the life and social identity of certain groups of people (e.g. state employ-
ees), on a larger scale, community has played a more predominant role in social assistance,
safeguarding, and service for urban citizens over the last 20 years.
Despite “community”being a notoriously slippery concept in the Western lexicon,149 it
has been directly borrowed into the Chinese vocabulary of sociology. Nevertheless, the
development of community over the course of domestication in China has shown a signifi-
cant departure from their Western originator. The greatest difference between the two
cultures is that the urban community in China is an administrative organ without the req-
uisite autonomy rather than the self-reliant and self-directing institution that is generally
present in democratic societies.150 In 2000, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued the Opinion
on Promoting Urban Community Construction across the Country to set forth an official
ideal of what constitutes “a community with Chinese characteristics.”According to this
directive, community is defined as “a social biocoenosis comprised of people who live
within a specific territorial perimeter.”151 On the surface, the official definition seems
to be geographically oriented, emphasizing physical propinquity as outlined in the tradi-
tional sociological account of community.152 Yet it is more pointedly reflected in the orga-
nizational framework that the Chinese community has a political function and serves the
interests of the authorities’agendas of social control and management.
Structurally, a community is regulated by the residential committee. This committee
comprises (partially) state-sponsored individuals,153 and it operates in a way that
143 BBC (2014a).
144 Wei (2006), p. 26.
145 Derleth & Koldyk (2004), pp. 747–77.
146 Chen (2013), p. 167.
147 Tang & Sun (2017), p. 11.
148 Yan & Gao (2007), pp. 222–36; Shieh & Friedman (2008), pp. 183–95.
149 Weisberg (2003), p. 343.
150 Nicholas Rose has observed that Western communities have become more entangled with the administra-
tive and managerial practices of government agencies since the early 1990s; Rose (1999), pp. 175–6.
151 Opinion on Promoting Urban Community Construction across the Country 2000, s. 2.
152 The geographic conception of community was introduced by the Chicago School to define community over a
geographic space. From the perspective of the Chicago School, a community is a place where residents share
relationships in physical propinquity within the geographical region. See Park (1952).
153 Xu, supra note 141, p. 627.
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represents the local government and acts upon orders of the latter. In a hierarchical sys-
tem with the central government on the top, followed by the municipal and district gov-
ernments, then the street,154 the residential committee is considered as the lowest level of
agency in the governmental bureaucracy and undertakes a substantial number of basic
administrative duties.155 Operationally, the power to run a community is granted from
the top to the bottom. Given that the major role of the residential committee is confined
to the delegate of the local government, actions about community management cannot be
solely undertaken by the residential committee, but charted by the political leadership.156
Apart from service and social welfare programmes,157 the residential committee needs to
obtain approval from superior administrative agencies to carry out important community
affairs, as they are deemed to be part of the wider governmental administrative agenda.158
Therefore, other than being understood as a self-regulating agency, the residential com-
mittee acts stereotypically as the implementer of government policies under a rigid insti-
tutionalized rule-based authority. In other words, community in urban China is an
institution not formed by bonds between people, nor by geographic boundaries, but estab-
lished by administrative partition within the jurisdictional parameters of the residential
committee in any given district of the urban governments.159 As sociologists accurately
describe, Chinese urban communities resemble “an entire new level of local govern-
ment,”160 which is emblematic of “a model of authoritarian communitarianism.”161
Bearing this in mind, with communities being vertically configured and administra-
tively regulated, Chinese state authorities are less concerned with trust building and
mutual gain to foster co-operation compared to their Western counterparts. More practi-
cally, as mandatory obligations serve as a normative foundation of civic participation, the
local government and its delegate (the residential committee) are able to pay more heed to
cultivating, reproducing, and enlisting communities as helpers of police to fulfil the needs
of community policing against terrorism through a bureaucratic process of decision-
making and a politicalized model of mobilization. This pattern is more manifest when
police are integrated into communities, creating an inseparable tie between residents
and police through daily dialogue and inquiry. Since 2012, for example, Xinjiang has
adopted a policing model of “one village, one police officer.”162 Located in a village police
station, a police officer is required to live in the village for 24 hours to foster productive
communication with village residents and co-ordinate local public security.163 As of 2016,
there were approximately 8,000 police officers with more than 34,000 auxiliary police
(Fujin) assigned to neighbourhoods to maintain public safety in the countryside of
Xinjiang.164 Such a practice of policing is hailed by the Chinese government as an effective
approach to maintaining local safety, which has become popular in many urban regions
across China (e.g. Henan, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi).165 In promoting this integration strategy,
communities are merging with the police force in crime-control endeavours. Evidence
154 Ibid.
155 Bray, supra note 142, pp. 540–1.
156 Heberer (2009), p. 515.
157 It is noted that the social welfare and community-development reforms initiated in the early 2000s have
granted residential committees more discretion to organize service programmes for community residents. See
Xu, Gao, & Yan (2005), pp. 73–90.
158 Chen, Fung, & Hung (2017), pp. 41–2.
159 Bray, supra note 142, p. 534.
160 Ibid., p. 546.
161 Heberer, supra note 156, p. 493.
162 Zenz & Leibold, supra note 93, p. 9
163 Ibid.
164 Ibid.
165 Ibid.
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shows not only that the village police officer and the residential committee officer in some
communities may be the same person, but also that residents are required to conduct a
range of surveillance duties in alliance with police to identify “suspicious people and activ-
ities.”166 As such, the ability of communities to choose voluntary co-operation is oppressed
by the growing penetration of policing authorities in the community’s security matters.
When community and police have become inextricably intertwined, joint action of
policing is most likely order-driven rather than trust-generated, as the primary power
to manage community safety has shifted from residential committees to police—the
law-enforcement apparatus that represents the coercive force of the government and
state. Sociological studies on community participation in urban China have largely con-
solidated the position that participatory behaviours of local residents “do not reflect
either an interest in or a willingness to participate in democracy.”167 While community
members may become voluntary participants in community-service programmes insofar
as their individual welfare and interests are affected,168 the real driver behind civic co-
operation with the legal authorities could be a response to government mandates such
as strict laws and punitive sanctions. The lack of bottom-up advocacy in China’s social
and political ideals has long enabled the government, in one way or another, to control
and manipulate civic action for the sake of the Party’s priorities.169
This then begs the question—does co-operation rooted in obligation coincide with com-
munity policing and the producing of satisfactory outcomes in containing terrorist
threats? As discussed earlier, a widely accepted adage is that effective counter-terrorism
policing is intrinsically linked to working partnerships with local communities. However,
there has been scarce evidence-based assessment of the extent to what this partnership
should look like and its possibly deviant effects on pre-empting terrorism. Nonetheless,
researchers tend to suggest that a genuine partnership in community policing is more
effective than passive support and compulsory co-operation from citizens.170 At a mini-
mum, it should not be restricted to information and data-sharing partnerships in which
police and other security agencies “work with”communities to obtain critical intelligence
without actually “working together”to gather information through collective endeavours.
It is certainly not wrong to regard community engagement as a vehicle for critical infor-
mation because an indispensable component of any counter-terrorism tactics is intelli-
gence-gathering.171 At times, community members are more capable of identifying
abnormalities and even subtle changes in their own neighbourhoods than police.172
However, partnership models that exploit community resources for intelligence, as
Basia Spalek contends, “are intelligence-gathering mechanism rather than true partner-
ships.”173 In other words, for community policing to perform its professed function, the
partnership needs to be based on a give-and-take relationship in which community
and legal authorities reciprocate each other’s efforts in an attempt to exert a joint and
greater impact on broader security issues.174 As will be analyzed later, partnerships with
communities in urban China have suffered a serious deficiency of the social capital that is
needed to foster genuine police–community partnerships. The impeding factors arise from
both ends of the partnership; both parties are seemingly reluctant to formulate strong
166 Jiang (2019).
167 Xu, supra note 141, p. 629.
168 Ibid.
169 Woodman (2016), pp. 342–62.
170 Lyons (2002), pp. 532–3; Hanniman (2008), p. 278.
171 Brown (2007), p. 246.
172 Clarke & Newman (2007), p. 12; Lambert & Parsons (2017), p. 1054.
173 Spalek (2010), p. 796.
174 Ibid., p. 803.
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networks or other forms of social capital to develop co-productive behaviour conducive to
meaningful counter-terrorism collaboration.
4. Challenges facing police and community in CTCP: the dearth of social
capital
In the current sociological parlance, social capital is characterized as interactions between
different actors to create personal relations, networks, norms, and values that facilitate
action and co-operation for mutual benefit.175 It stresses the formation of a social structure
within which social resources and assets are leveraged to solve various problems through
civic engagement and collective action with a high degree of reciprocity and rapport.176
When members of the community, the police, and other individuals in the private and
public sectors work together to reduce crime and disorder, then social capital and com-
munity policing converge to enhance co-operation. As can be seen, social capital building
is thus achieved through a process of improving social networks that facilitate the engage-
ment of willing citizens with the police.177 The development of social capital is more
important in the realm of CTCP where efforts to encourage interactions between local res-
idents and police are regarded as central to the prevention of home-grown extremism.
Nevertheless, evidence from most Western CTCP models shows that social capital build-
ing in Muslim communities has barely occurred among and within residents and police.178
At the practical level, line officers, purposely or accidentally, have condensed community
engagement to a unilateral procedure of intelligence-gathering in relation to prospective
plots for terrorism.179 In a one-sided information-sharing partnership, the police–citizen
interface functions no more than a unilateral managerial and decision-making approach in
which citizen input is limited to the role of informants to the authorities. The major rea-
sons seemingly lie in the scarcity of allocated resources available to counter-terrorism
policing and a lack of the understanding of Islamic religious and cultural features.180 In
countries like the US, the UK, and Australia, budgetary shortfalls are present in police
departments.181 Equally worrisome, the inability of police to fully understand the fractured
nature of the Islamic society and its religious beliefs has hampered deeper connections
with the Muslim community. These communities question the idea that the governments
pre-select “spokesman/woman”to represent all Muslims in the public space.182
Notably, the major difficulties facing social capital building in Western Muslim commu-
nities tend to be less of a concern in Chinese communities. In the past two administrations
in China, CTCP has been adequately funded. During Hu Jintao’s second term as the Party’s
leader (2007–12), the total national expenditure on domestic security skyrocketed and has
continued its upward trend during Xi Jinping’s current term (2013–18).183 Official budget
figures, while sometimes opaque, indicate that US$175 billion of domestic security spend-
ing in 2016 and the number increased to US$197 billion in 2017.184 Converting the figures
to their Purchase Power Parity (PPP) counterparts, the 2017 figure is equivalent to approx-
imately US$349 billion, which was distributed mostly to sensitive minority regions
175 Coleman (1988), p. 98.
176 Pino (2001), p. 201.
177 Ibid., p. 202.
178 German (2014).
179 Cherney & Hartley, supra note 109, p. 754.
180 Diamond & Weiss (2009), pp. 13–4; Spalek (2014), pp. 825–41.
181 Schanzer et al. (2016), p. 3; Dodd (2017); Pickering et al., supra note 106, p. 64.
182 Vidino (2010), pp. 6–9.
183 Xie (2013), pp. 87–91.
184 Zenz (2018), p. 6.
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followed by large capital cities, like Beijing and Shanghai.185 More remarkably, in Xinjiang
only, PPP-adjusted per capita spending on domestic security in 2017 exceeded that of the
US by 32%.186 While official sources have already excluded the budgets on developing
security-related hardware in the community,187 it is likely that they were dwarfed by
the central government to obscure a more considerable amount of investment in grass-
roots social control and stability maintenance programmes.188
Second, the West’s CTCP may be problematic given its narrow focus on Muslim com-
munities without sufficiently addressing other threats such as far-right extremism, which
can cause inherent conflicts between the police and Muslim residents, yet China has taken
a different approach. By taking a step further, China has sought to incorporate all ethnic
groups and social classes in their CTCP system. It is undeniable that local Uyghur Muslims
in Xinjiang are under more strict control and, as such, they are considered the most
severely treated ethnic groups than anywhere elsewhere in the country.189 But the emer-
gence of extremist incidents in China’s major cities outside Xinjiang has licenced the cen-
tral government to act in an all-embracing approach to treating the entire urban society as
a hotbed of terrorism, regardless of the geographic location, religious composition, and
ethnic status of a given region. In Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities, communities of
Han Chinese—the largest ethnic group in China—are also subject to stringent security
checks and street-level counter-terrorism initiatives, though to a lesser degree than with
Xinjiang’s level of security.
So what are the different tensions in China’s CTCP that impact active and willing public
co-operation? The study of David Makin and Otwin Marenin posits six sets of variables for
establishing potent and balanced partnerships between police and community in commu-
nity policing.190 Among them, the most significant influencers is the nature of the state and
the vitality of civic society.191 It is claimed that centralized systems of government are less
prone to sharing power and authority than are democratically organized states, in which
the allocation of powers and responsibilities among different political and legal institu-
tions is commonplace.192 One could further argue that under an authoritarian and domi-
neering leadership, powers particularly with regard to social control are even less likely to
be supplied to private sectors because their concentration, which is in the hands of the
government, can presumably increase the stake in upholding social and political stabil-
ity.193 Additionally, the vitality of civic society and private groups is crucial for vibrant
partnerships. In absence of the condition that citizens are keen to join police in creating
and maintaining social order, partnerships can only emerge as state-centric entities, with
residents being rowers and steered to act for authority-defined goals and in the interests
of police.194 Subsequently, the need to safeguard citizens from security risks could be com-
promised or at least deemed secondary.195 China appears to be one of the exemplars.
185 Ibid., pp. 6, 8–9.
186 Ibid., p. 9.
187 Ibid., p. 6.
188 Potter, supra note 36, p. 73.
189 Boehm (2009), pp. 61–124.
190 Makin & Marenin (2017), p. 425.
191 Ibid.
192 Ibid.
193 Svolik (2009), pp. 477–94.
194 Makin & Marenin, supra note 190, p. 426.
195 Ibid.
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4.1 China’s hold over policing powers for “stability preservation”
Following the last nationwide “Strike Hard”campaign in 2010,196 a shift in the policing
model from “crackdown”to “stability maintenance”has taken place to tackle new chal-
lenges that plague the social order in China. During the almost two decades of Hu Jintao’s
and Xi Jinping’s ruling, a rising tide of riots, mass incidents, and citizen–authority conflicts
has propelled the government to codify national police laws, thus affording police addi-
tional powers to manage social unrest.197 Although instituted by Deng Xiaoping as a politi-
cal objective following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, stability has developed to be
the Party’s core priority on the heels of its formalization under the Hu Jintao administra-
tion. At the upper echelons of the Party, stability was a prerequisite to the construction of
a“socialist harmonious society”198—a larger political banner introduced by the then Party
leaders to chart a balanced course of state development.199 Since Xi Jinping’s transition to
power in late 2012, the official efforts to preserve stability have not been lessened, but
elevated to the point that they have become the Party’s political mantra in almost every
major aspect of social governance.200 On many occasions, the Party elites have affirmed
stability as a critical precursor of the country’s sustainable economic growth and social
advancement.201
A characteristic feature of this change is that police have been drawn from regular activ-
ities of excessive arrests, investigations, and mass sentencing rallies in “Strike Hard”cam-
paigns to take on a more managerial role in dealing with specific categories of people
deemed to be “dangerous”to social stability.202 Other than autonomy-seeking minority
groups (e.g. Uyghurs), police forces have been tasked with controlling, supervising, and mon-
itoring the so-called “focal population”—such as groups who are seen as “threatening
national security; suspected of criminal offences; inclined to criminal and violent conduct
due to the escalation of conflicts; criminals convicted of intentional crimes that have been
released and minor criminal offenders who have been freed within 5 years.”203 The scope of
the focal population has been continuously expanded to include groups that represent new
intimidations to public order and security, in accordance with the political climax of various
eras. Consistently with the rationale for prevention in community policing, the new under-
taking of policing somehow necessitates the flexible and unbridled exercise of powers by the
legal apparatus to swiftly nip those threats in the bud. In China, administrative detention
powers have been assigned to play such an important role.
At the outset, administrative detention was devised to deal particularly with minor
wrongdoings as part of the revolutionary justice system that focused primarily on “class
enemies”under the Mao’s reign.204 This mechanism served the purpose of what Mao
termed “non-antagonistic justice”—that is, contradictions among “people”that could
be resolved through education and low-level punishment.205 Through decades of legaliza-
tion and institutionalization, systemized administrative detention is seen as a routine
196 Since the 1980s, China has initiated four nationwide Strike Hard campaigns in 1983, 1996, 2001, and 2010
with a number of local anti-crime movements. In these campaigns, swift criminal proceedings and stiffer punish-
ments were the trademarks of the administration of criminal justice. Trevaskes (2006), pp. 23–41.
197 See e.g. the People’s Armed Police Law was passed in 2009 by the National People’s Congress Standing
Committee to allow the use of force on rebellions, riots, and terrorist acts (Art. 7(7)).
198 The ideal of a socialist harmonious society is predicated on “democracy and the rule of law, equity and
justice, honesty and comradeship, vitality, stability and order, as well as harmony between Man and nature.”
199 Feng (2013), p. 28.
200 Qi (2014), pp. 55–62.
201 Mai (2019).
202 See Biddulph (2015).
203 Biddulph (2007), p. 117.
204 Leng, supra note 52, p. 357.
205 Biddulph, supra note 203.
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penal power to handle minor perpetrations that are not serious enough to amount to a
criminal sanction. Situated outside the formal criminal justice system, administrative
detention operates separately from a judicial process on the de facto exclusive discretion
of police to lock up individuals under the guise of correction and rehabilitation.206 Over
time, a multipronged system of administrative detention has been established, including
Public Order Detention (Zhian Juliu) that targets a broad collection of public nuisances,
Detention for Education (Shourong Jiaoyang) and Compulsory Detoxification Detention
(Qiangzhi Jiedu) that handle prostitution and drug abuse, respectively, and Re-education
through Labour (RTL) (Laodong Jiaoyang) that deals with public-order recidivists.
Perhaps the most disputed measure among all these detention powers is RTL, namely
imprisonment with a maximum term of four years and without trial, which was exten-
sively used by police.207 First adopted in 1957, RTL was the most serious punishment in
the administrative detention hierarchy, aiming at repeat offenders, ranging from habitual
public-order offenders to recidivist prostitutes, who failed to comply with compulsory
education or treatment in previous detention periods. Over a few decades, the targets
of RTL had been multiplied to cover “minor offences”eligible for RTL penalties, turning
it into a catch-all approach to most, if not all, offences on the street.208 Prior to its repeal in
2013,209 the Chinese authorities had frequently used RTL as a handy approach to detaining,
among others, petitioners, political dissents, human rights lawyers, and adherents to
banned religious organizations (e.g. Falun Gong) as a social control mechanism that cir-
cumvents procedural requirements set forth in the CPL.210 Although RTL camps have alleg-
edly been dismantled in the past, it is believed that some are merged with drug
rehabilitation and education centres to continue imprisoning recidivist offenders,211
whereas, in other locales, RTL camps can be substituted by admonishment centres, legal
education bases, or even Black jails to intercept “abnormal activities”of the “undesirable”
population.212 In Xinjiang, recent reports indicated that similar camps termed
“Transformation through Education”have been established to compel the indoctrination
on Uyghur Muslims through compulsory legal, ideological, and patriotic education.213
According to the Measure of Implementing the CTL in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region, the education camps target those who assessed as carrying the risk of terrorism
prior to release from prison.214 The Measure stipulates that within six months before the
release of a convict, the prison ought to evaluate the person’s level of terrorist threat and
report the evaluation results to the local Intermediate Court.215 For those who were
believed to remain “radicalized,”the Intermediate Court has the power to make the “edu-
cation”order and undertake supervision in the “Transformation through Education”facil-
ities.216 According to a Xinhua interview with the chief of the Xinjiang government, the
purpose of education is to “get rid of the environment and soil that breeds terrorism and
religious extremism and stop violent terrorist activities from happening.”217
206 Peerenboom (2004), pp. 1012–25.
207 The Supplementary Regulation on Re-education through Labour (repealed) 1979, s. 3.
208 Fu (2005), p. 821.
209 The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress announced to abolish re-education through
labour and its legal documents in the end of 2013.
210 Human Rights in China (2001); Yardley (2005); Chinese Human Rights Defenders (2003), p. 3.
211 Macbean (2016), pp. 112–30.
212 Lubman (2014).
213 Clarke (2018).
214 The Measure of Implementing Counter-Terrorism Law in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, s. 41.
215 Ibid.
216 Ibid.
217 Bo (2018).
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RTL is merely the tip of the iceberg of wide-ranging powers enjoyed by legal authorities
to police Chinese society. While the remaining measures are exceedingly deployed for the
repression of “risky people,”Public Order Detention is utilized as the primary measure to
regulate those who connected with terrorism-related activities if the offence does not con-
stitute a crime. The CTL specifies that police are empowered to jail a person for 10–15 days
if he/she (1) propagates terrorism or extremism or instigates terrorist and extremist acts
or (2) makes, disperses, and illegally possesses things that propagate terrorism and
extremism or (3) forces others to wear or adorn clothes or signs that propagate terrorism
or extremism in public places or (4) provides information, capital, labour, techniques, and
venues as a means of support, assistance, and convenience to propagate terrorism and
extremism or carry out terrorist and extremist activities.218 This same power is applicable
to individuals engaged in activities that make use of extremism. Reflecting the govern-
ment’s depiction of extremism as one of the three sources of terrorism, the imprisonable
offences are fairly extensive, ranging from “forcing others to take part in religious activi-
ties, or provid[ing] financial and labor resources to religious venues and personnel”and
“obstructing law enforcement of state personnel”to “taking advantage of extremism to
wreck the implementation of the state legal system.”219
Notwithstanding the fact that China has a long historical pedigree of not recording
administrative offences in its official legal database, the use of Public Order Detention
against terrorism-connected transgressions has gained national prominence since the enact-
ment of the CTL inearly 2016. Starting from the first case of violating Article 80 of the CTL in
Ji’nan, Shandong Province,220 the Chinese police had reportedly handled hundreds of cases
involving a substantial number of citizens regarding Article 80 offences as of December
2018.221 A host of acts have triggered this police-led custodial measure, but most of the offen-
ces concern watching and distributing “extremist”videos on social media.222 In the mean-
time, individuals conducting the same offences with higher culpability are processed in the
criminal justice system under the CL,223 although the legal threshold to separate them from
equivalent administrative offences is blurry and left undefined in either the CTL or the CL.
Evidently, powers to administratively detain and control people associated with “danger-
ous behaviours”are and will be continually earmarked as police-dominated. To the govern-
ment, administrative detention is not only a lower form of penalty, but operates as a
managerial means to efficiently tackle the instigators of social turmoil. As exhibited in
the expansive employment of Public Order Detention as well as others, including the
recently abolished RTL, these past decades have witnessed an augmentation of targets han-
dled under administrative detention. Specifically, the administrative detention powers have
been geared towards the ideal of risk control and incapacitation through the restriction of
218 The Counter-Terrorism Law of People’s Republic of China 2016, Art. 80.
219 Ibid., Art. 81.
220 Dazhong (2016).
221 Data collected from the review of media reports and the police’s public WeChat platform. For example, in
Kunming (the capital city of Yunnan province) between 2016 and 2018, the local authorities filed 224 adminis-
trative cases in relation to the CTL, in which 23 individuals were detained. Renmin (2018).
222 China News (2016).
223 Art. 120(2)–(6) of the CL states that offences related to preparatory acts of terrorism carry criminal liabilities
and punishments, including (1) preparing weapons, dangerous items, and other tools to commit terrorist acts;
organizing or actively participating in training connected with terrorist acts; liaising with overseas terrorist
organizations or personnel to commit terrorist acts; and plotting or engaging in other preparations to commit
terrorist acts; (2) propagating terrorism or extremism or instigating terrorist acts by way of distributing books,
videos, audio, or other materials or lecturing or releasing information that promotes terrorism and extremism;
(3) coercing the general public to harm the operation of legally established systems of marriage, justice, educa-
tion, and social management; (4) forcing others to wear or adorn clothes or signs that propagate terrorism or
extremism in public places through violence or coercion; and (5) illegally possessing books, videos, audio, or other
items that propagate terrorism or extremism.
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personal freedom, in conjunction with punishment and education as officially prescribed in
administrative punishment law and policy.224 For the sake of maintaining stability, these
powers are too important to relinquish to be replaced by alternative practices that are per-
haps more procedurally just or to share with private sectors, being underplayed to reduce
the level of coercion through a negotiated set of specialized institutionalized actions. It is
because of the ambit and application ofadministrativedetention, which isnot scrutinized by
a court review process nor is it open to procedural checks and balances, except for the right
of the detained to apply to the same decision-maker for reconsideration.225 From a pre-
emptive perspective, the legal and procedural elasticity accords with the requirement of
community policing to proactively avert potential dangers. If the Western jurisdictions,
more or less, respect the core value of due process and legality in community policing, what
seems to be foreseeable is that the intrusiveness and oppressiveness of police powers will
resume as a defining feature of community policing and CTCP in post-2001 China, unless
there are structural reforms to the political system that shift the fundamental cultural
assumptions of a police service. Clinging to authoritarianism in policing may be inevitable
despite a befitting strategy for social control agendas in a single-party regime. The chilling
effect, however, is that it is at variance with a liberal atmosphere that benefits power sharing
between police and citizens for better co-operative outcomes in counter-terrorism. Without
the catalyst for change in the basic tenet of social control, citizens are likely to be subordi-
nated by the state’s suppressive forces and deprived of opportunities to co-produce commu-
nity safety and security. Explicably, as community residents are both the targets and the
recruits of police in CTCP, which role they ought to play in a given situation is truly subject
to the discretionary consideration of police and authorities.
4.2 The collapsing social fabric of community participation
China’s tight hold over social control is not entirely fortuitous. On the one hand, the Party
is concerned with the potential challenge to its rudimentary authority if citizens are
endowed with considerable power in the domain of policing. Therefore, the centralization
of powers has begun to take root since the early 2000s in both obvious and subtle ways,226
and this is mostly through the codification of laws and outsourcing of security services.227
In stark contrast to the mass-line justice during Maoist China in which the general public
were active partakers of the legal system, in Hu’s and Xi’s China, the initiative of citizens to
engage in social control and other policing activities has been discouraged and slowly
superseded by legal obligations to help police when needed. Popular inputs have found
dwindling room to set foot in the decision-making process of an increasingly profession-
alized but highly bureaucratized police force.228 On the other hand, the public interest in
taking part in formal community matters and the administration of local justice have argu-
ably hit the lowest point in the history of community policing. Driven by the laissez-faire
economic policy, neighbourhoods in urban China have become so anomic that the pillars
on which social relations were once built in the revolutionary period are collapsing.229
Though “anomie”has yet to be provided with a clear-cut definition by either Robert
224 Hickey et al. (2018).
225 Art. 102 of the Public Security Administration Punishment Law (Zhian Guanli Chufa Fa) allows the detained
person to apply for administrative reconsideration or to appeal to the court.
226 For a detailed discussion on the process of centralizing powers in post-reform China, see Li (2016).
227 E.g. an auxiliary police (Xiejin) system has been employed since 2004 to make up for manpower shortages in
local police forces. As contract workers under the direction of local governments, auxiliary police work on rela-
tively low salaries and are assigned with trivial assistant work to release official police from heavy workloads on
social order control. See Scoggins, supra note 74, pp. 95–6.
228 Wang & Wong (2012), pp. 42–3.
229 Cao (2007), p. 41.
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Merton who coined it or sociologists who tested this theory,230 it refers generally to a state
of disorder in society resulting from a breakdown of social values and norms. As a conse-
quence, this breakdown leads to dysfunction and such a society cannot restrain the
thought and behaviour of its members. When monetary success is ranked as more valuable
than virtue in China’s post-reform society,231 social responsibilities and cohesion have
been in an escalating decline as a result of the state’s heavy emphasis upon the rate of
success than an approved means of achieving success. In what can be described as a “gar-
gantuan”social transformation over the last 40 years, collectivism, which used to underpin
and buttress the order of the Maoist society, has been displaced by individualism, which
advocates independent actions and the spirit of individual freedom. This in turn has given
birth to a group of mobile, heterogeneous, and economically directed urban population
that transcends the frontiers of community and cannot be demarcated by Danwei, family,
or residential localities.
This structural and cultural change in Chinese society has been empirically proven to be
relevant to the voluntariness of local residents to participate in CTCP. The scholarship in
urban and community studies repeatedly uncovers a close link between the local residents’
involvement in community political and social business and the existence of community-
shared norms, unity, and mutual trust—all essential elements of community social capital.
It is held that vigorous civic participation is more viable when there are local social net-
works in which residents are mobilized to achieve common good on the basis of a collec-
tive sense of community belonging and attachment.232 In both English- and Chinese-
language literature, multiple studies have noted a social interaction in urbanized commu-
nities of big cities being “superficial”and “pragmatic,”which affirms its negative impact
on the willingness of local residents to engage in community activities.233 Based on a city-
wide household survey in Guangzhou in 2012, for example, researchers found that only
8.3% of the respondents (n=1,809) attended group activities in the community once a
week and 38% of the respondents have never participated in any activities in communal
places.234 While the findings did not specify what is attributable for this observation, it is
inferred that the major contributing factor is the lack of neighbourhood cohesion.235
Similarly, according to the data-based surveys in Beijing, Shenzhen, Ji’nan, and Wuhan,
Chinese scholars discovered that highly urbanized areas tend to produce low levels of par-
ticipatory behaviours due to reduced social networks and interpersonal relationships, of
which the cornerstone is grounded on reciprocity, collective identity, and social bonds.236
For example, it is displayed in Boyang Xu’s research conducted in Shenzhen—one of the
largest migrant cities in China—that 72% of interviewed local residents agreed that they
do not know how to participate in community management, whereas 40% of the respond-
ents showed an indifferent attitude or no interest towards community-based residential
meetings.237 In addition to the fact that residents’non-action is partially due to the pater-
nalistic and top-down nature of Chinese society,238 the investigation shows that the dete-
riorating relational web that used to connect each other to help develop the common
culture and interests in traditional society has slowly debilitated the impetus that fuels
collective action.239 It is increasingly clear that when economic liberalization removed
230 Merton (1938), pp. 672–82; Messner (1988), pp. 33–53.
231 Deng & Cordilia (1999), pp. 215–6.
232 Zhu (2015), pp. 49–50.
233 See ibid.;Xu(2009).
234 Zhu, supra note 232, p. 50.
235 Ibid., p. 52.
236 See Xu & Peng (2009); Shang (2011).
237 Xu, supra note 233, p. 2.
238 Ibid., p. 3.
239 Ibid., pp. 5–6.
24 Enshen Li
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strict restraints on population movement and subsequently brought diversity to the com-
munity in urban China, it also extracted the social substratum of popular inputs in devel-
oping the quality of community life. In terms of community policing, the public
engagement is even less promising. A questionnaire-based study on the citizens’percep-
tion of Community Corrections in Hefei, Anhui Province,240 shows that 55% of local res-
idents (n=1,000) had never heard of this neighbourhood-based justice programme despite
its inception in 2003.241 While 72% of the respondents stated that there are no Community
Corrections volunteers in their residential areas, 46% expressly opposed the idea of being a
volunteer themselves.242
By highlighting these problems of community alienation and civic inactiveness in urban
China, I am not suggesting that they are the unique phenomena in Chinese society. In fact,
Robert Putman and others have long identified the same issues in American society, where
there has been a crisis of social capital decay in the form of weakening in-person social
intercourse that leads to civic engagement.243 Perhaps, what distinguishes China from the
US is the lack of autonomous will by the Chinese neighbourhoods to rearrange and reju-
venate community forces in promoting social capital advantageous to commitment,
attachment, and democratic participation in community affairs, including policing. It is
an even more far-fetched mission when it comes to CTCP considering the community’s
role and function, which are decidedly obligation-defined and authority-monopolized.
Therefore, two resultant hurdles seem to be difficult to overcome in China’s intended
model of community policing against terrorism. First, so long as citizens are distant from
a real process of sharing powers, authorities, and responsibilities in most of all aspects of
policing, the public will stay strongly reliant upon legal authorities to combat terrorism.
Even if local residents are called upon, which is likely to happen more frequently due to
their expected performance of obligations, their participation could be shallow and inat-
tentive. Compared to the grassroots-oriented and horizontal bottom-up modes of engage-
ment, the state-manoeuvred mobilization will only result in an indolent response from a
loosely assembled population aimlessly following predetermined rules and orders from
their superiors. Voluntary and self-driven participation may arise, but is most likely trig-
gered by financial incentives or post-incident reaction to violence. Without institutional
overhauls to a rules-based social control and policing approach, citizenry co-operation is
not able to take a more innovative and creative form than patrolling and reporting as is
existent in the present-day practice of the Chinese CTCP.
Second, a more traditional or authoritarian policing model would estrange police from
the rest of the community. For the purpose of pre-empting terrorism, the distance in rank
and status between “partners”may stifle the citizens’willingness to come forward with
timely and valuable information.244 Rather than notifying early warnings or signs, local
residents are likely to report the incidents of actual lawbreaking. If democratic commu-
nity–police rapport would inspire constructive dialogue and collaboration to improve the
community’s ability of defend against terrorist threats, the relationship between the pub-
lic and legal authorities in China is likely to consolidate an “elite model”of counter-
terrorism in which state authorities take control of law-enforcement powers and the
way these powers are exercised. When the community faces danger, it is in the hands
of the government. As a result, the public would view terrorism as an increasingly remote
240 Community corrections is a penal measure that places criminals under control (Guanzhi), suspended sen-
tence (Huanxing), temporary parole (Zanyu Jianwai Zhixing), and probation (Jiashi) in the neighbourhood for pun-
ishment, education, and rehabilitation.
241 Meng (2016), p. 3.
242 Ibid.
243 See Putnam (2000); Bouffard & Mufti´c(2006), pp. 56–66.
244 Murray (2005), p. 358.
Asian Journal of Law and Society 25
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concept and, as such, quickly lose their sensitivity and vagility to potential risks looming
under their nose.
5. Concluding thoughts
In this article, I have critically discussed the developments and issues of CTCP in China.
Indeed, China’s CTCP concurs philosophically with the traditional mass-line policing that
advocates police co-operation with citizens in the prevention of crime. However, active
mass participation that permeated social control in Maoist China has become diminished
in the 2000s when powers to police are being retracted from the public to serve as an
important vehicle for law-enforcement agencies to carry out the stability imperatives.
As such, the channel for citizens to be part of community policing has been largely reduced
to legal obligations that are discharged upon the orchestrated mobilization by local admin-
istrative authorities. The state-led activation in urban neighbourhoods also demonstrates
that the political leadership has decided to pilot the course of civic participation. With the
government being more preoccupied with power control in the face of growing social
uprisings, community residents are more reluctant to make initiative contributions in
authority-dominated areas without request, invitation, or order. Thus, CTCP as currently
envisioned betrays its ideal to engage with the public to fight terrorism at all levels, par-
ticularly as citizens act merely as informants in lieu of partners to produce fecund counter-
terrorism results.
To address some of the issues in the Western CTCP, Aziz Huq proposes a rhetorical and
practical shift from community-based counter-terrorism policing to community-led counter-
terrorism policing that is predicated on two possible causal mechanisms—ideological
competition and ethnical anchoring.245 Though it lacks theoretical and experimental jus-
tifications, Huq, based on certain elements of US and UK preventive measures, suggests
that community-led counter-terrorism policing prioritizes private actors over state actors
“in tak[ing] steps to reduce the expected success rate of recruiting tactics.”246 Precisely,
ideological competition favours private action that provides alternative forms of social
solidarity and “collective political action”to win over those targeted by terrorist groups.247
It is believed that private groups, including “liberal”Muslim groups, which can offer the
dissents and vulnerability to the venue through which their political appeal is sought with-
out violent acts, are able to compete with terrorist groups in an ever-expanding ideologi-
cal market-place.248 The second assumption of ethnical anchoring tends to rely upon
individuals who have immediate social networks with potential recruits to “impose a base-
line set of ethical claims on them.”249 It lies in the anchoring effect of supportive role mod-
els from any of the potential recruits that are closely connected with terrorists in order to
downplay the influence of extremist groups, hence lessening the cause for engagement
with extremist forms of social actions.250
Though promising, embracing community-led counter-terrorism policing may come
across a number of ethnical and normative obstacles in the liberal communities, such
as a heightened burden on particular private actors and the discrepancy between what
the government intends to achieve and what private groups can possibly accomplish in
their capacity.251 This leads to the question—can community-led counter-terrorism
245 Huq (2017), p. 1039.
246 Ibid., p. 1041.
247 Ibid., p. 1044.
248 Ibid., p. 1045.
249 Ibid., pp. 1044–5.
250 Ibid., p. 1045.
251 Ibid., pp. 1048–9.
26 Enshen Li
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policing work in China? Lamentably, there are a number of grounds based on which this
innovative model is likely to be resisted by the Chinese government. First, the ideological
competition that entails the prosperity of religious and social dogmas appears incongruous
with China’s policy of ideological education. Since its founding year of 1949, China has been
devoted to execute ideological control and indoctrination as the major tool to maintain the
Party’s political clout.252 In almost every aspect of social life, citizens are exposed to ideo-
logical teachings and propagandas of the Party-state, ranging from socialist theories like
Marxism–Leninism–Maoism and Deng Xiaoping to patriotism that promotes Chinese
nationalism.253 All of these ideological education campaigns and activities seek to serve
a sole purpose—that is, to unify people’s mindsets and align them with the Party’s ideo-
logical outlook. Therefore, not only does the government dictate the course and content of
ideological education, but also non-state-authorized beliefs and practices are firmly con-
trolled to avoid challenges to the Party’s superior political position. This is particularly
exemplified in the country’s ongoing anti-religion movements and the eradication of
Falun Gong under the administration of Jiang Zemin.254 More recently, in Xinjiang, the
education system has been politically and ideologically dominated by the state, which
has been inaugurated to target Uyghur Muslims suspected of being influenced by terror-
ism and extremism.255 Incarcerated in government-managed “Transformation through
Education”camps,256 up to 1 million ethnic Uyghurs are taught the country’s common
language, legal knowledge, and vocational skills, in which they are forced to maintain fidel-
ity to the ruling Communist Party of China and “cleanse their thoughts of extremism.”257
Likewise, the ethical anchoring of “potential terrorists”in China is unlikely to be any
folk voices, but state-approved authority figures. In the West, religious or community lead-
ers could become role models for the younger generation to develop “psychological dis-
engagement”with terrorism.258 But in a highly centralized country like China, social role
models are propagandized by the government to represent the “spirit”of the Party and to
advance the expansion of national patriotic education.259 The untoward effect of this pat-
tern is that the state-shaped role models are too symbolic to generate specific restraints on
the infiltration of religious extremism, and also too remote to influence individual views
and behaviours in an impactful way. In Xinjiang particularly, while Uyghur Muslims are
placed under draconian counter-terrorism measures, the immediate social networks in
which “dangerous Uyghurs”are imbedded have already been broken with by proactive
state powers, which emphasizes surveillance, control, and regulation. Even though, in
some localities, religious leaders and elites interact with ethnic minority locals, they
are carefully chosen by the governments to disseminate the Party’s agenda of ethnic uni-
fication and social stability, functioning as tools to support the state-centric strategy for
anti-Uyghur extremism.260 If, in the West, social workers, educators, and even family mem-
bers can buffer terrorist recruitment efforts with their personal influences or charisma, in
China, state authorities are in charge of cementing ethical norms on Uyghurs in a way that
focuses on persuasive, compulsive, and punitive techniques.
Clearly, while communities are a long-term solution to terrorism, CTCP and its variant
forms are yet to become a panacea against domestic terrorist threats. It is noteworthy that
252 Guo (2013), pp. 65–72.
253 Zeng (2016), pp. 115–52.
254 Xie, Tong, & Yang (2017), p. 4.
255 The Tribune (2018).
256 “Transformation through Education”camps are officially named as “Professional Vocational Training
Institutions”in Xinjiang.
257 The Tribune, supra note 255.
258 Horgan (2009), p. 149.
259 Jeffreys (2012), pp. 9–15.
260 Famularo (2018), p. 48.
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the discussion in this article cannot fully represent the complexity and spectrum of CTCP
in different cultural and social dynamics across China. Also, the fact that this analysis is
drawn mainly on the secondary sources because of the difficulty in accessing primary
sources calls for further empirical investigation into some commonly problematic issues
of policing against terrorism in China. More systemic data-driven inquiries are not only
encouraged, but required. In any event, CTCP will not be able to wholly displace traditional
counter-terrorism approaches. Without fundamental changes in the nature of terrorism
and the normative culture of counter-terrorism law, community policing in China, as
Jytte Klausen observes, “will play at best a supporting role as part of the current expansion
of counter-terrorism efforts.”261
Acknowledgements. This research is supported by the Academy of the Social Science in Australia and the
Chinese Academy of Social Science Joint Action Scheme.
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Cite this article: Li, Enshen. Policing Terrorism in the Chinese Community: A Critical Analysis. Asian Journal of Law
and Society.https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2020.32
34 Enshen Li
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