China faced no real terrorist threat before launching its crackdown.
Evidence
Al-Qaeda did not materially concern Jiang, and China’s national security was not threatened by it or any other transnational terror network. There was no imminent foreign “Islamist” threat on Chinese soil, only an indigenous Muslim population in the northwest who made that land their home long before the founding of the People’s Republic of China. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 601
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- QUESTION: Worth verifying independently — the claim that China had no proven Al-Qaeda presence in 2001 is a strong falsifiable assertion.
Related
- China faced no genuine terror threat before adopting the War on Terror framework (similarity 0.94)
- China adopted the War on Terror to justify crushing the Uyghurs (similarity 0.79)