Opinion | Why China is becoming a target of jihadist hatred, like the US

Name: Indonesian and Malaysian Muslims protest in support of Uygurs in China
Uploaded: 2020-09-13T21:45:17.000Z
Duration: 1 min 45 s
Description: Indonesian and Malaysian Muslims protest in support of Uygurs in China

As US influence fades and China rises, jihadists are seizing on Beijing’s suppression of Uygurs in Xinjiang, ‘imperialist’ belt and road ambitions, and plans to build more military bases in an effort to find a new villain to help justify their existence

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Indonesian Muslim hardliners protest against Chinese treatment of Uygurs in front of the Chinese consulate in Surabaya, East Java, last December. Photo: AFP

Mohammed Sinan Siyech

Published: 5:45am, 14 Sep 2020Updated: 4:06pm, 14 Sep 2020

In the last week of August, Indonesian authorities foiled a terrorist plot by Jemaah Islamiah, an al-Qaeda ally, to attack properties where ethnic Chinese Indonesians lived. The reason for the planned attack was supposedly the spread of communism by the ethnic Chinese communities, a narrative that turned out to be fake.

Anti-communist sentiment in Indonesia has a long history, but the failed attack cast a spotlight on anti-China sentiment. This shares ingredients with jihadist sentiment against the United States, seen as the “far enemy” since the 1990s after it installed military bases in Saudi Arabia. The recent attempted attack in Indonesia represents a larger trend in which China may also become a “far enemy” for jihadist groups.

The concept of “far” and “near” enemies was posited by Egyptian ideologue Mohammed al Faraj, who argued that jihadist groups should focus on repressive regimes in their own countries, mostly in the Middle East, instead of attacking the US. He classified America as the “far enemy” for interfering in Middle East domestic policies and across the broader Muslim world, exploiting resources and creating conflict and strife, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While most jihadist groups in the 1990s focused on the local enemy, Egyptian group Gama Islamiya broke ranks and attacked New York’s World Trade Centre in 1993. Soon, al-Qaeda began hitting American targets. The turning point was the installation of US military bases in Saudi Arabia, which Osama bin Laden considered a domination of Islam.

Over the decades, many al-Qaeda attacks were aimed at the US and later, parts of western Europe, from the September 11 attack and the July 7 bombings in London to the Spain bombings. From the mid-2010s, Islamic State (IS) perpetrated other attacks across Europe such as in Nice, Brussels and Paris. Most recently, the rhetoric against the West has been replaced, to some extent, with rhetoric against China.

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Indonesian and Malaysian Muslims protest in support of Uygurs in China

Many factors explain this. For one, like the US in the mid-20th century, China has become a powerful state engaged with different nations, sometimes in less-than-scrupulous ways.