China adopted the War on Terror’s civilizational discourse to justify domestic repression

Evidence

The War on Terror’s language of “civilization against savagery” and “Islamic terrorism” provided Jiang and his more oppressive successors license to decimate the Uyghur people. In lockstep fashion, Chinese governmental leaders adopted the War on Terror parlance to impose their domestic crusade against Uyghur Muslims and to summarily brand an indigenous people seeking to realize their dreams of a free and sovereign East Turkistan as “terrorists.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 605

Categorization

• XREF: The civilizational ‘clash’ framing parallels the antisemitism studies’ finding that stigmatized groups get branded as symbols. Connects to Iftikhar’s global synthesis of the same rhetoric.