2.1 Terrorism and counter-terrorism legal policy

China’s experience with terrorism has waned and waxed over the last half-century.Footnote 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)).Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁵ Similar to what the West has experienced by the emergence of “new terrorism,” the new trend of violent attacks targeted civilians and national infrastructures as a conduit for inciting fear among the public.Footnote ²⁶ One high-profile incident, perhaps, is the Tiananmen Square attack among many others in Kunming, Guangzhou, and Xinjiang.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁸ This attack killed five people, including the attackers, and injured 38 people.Footnote ²⁹ While international critics have cast doubt on the nature of this incident being terrorism-related,Footnote ³⁰ the Chinese authorities categorically characterized it as a terrorist suicide attack, depicting attackers as ethnic extremists linked to the group of ETIM.Footnote 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.Footnote ³² Until very recently, measures centred on degrading Uyghurs by forced assimilation into Han culture and restraining religious freedom by ideological education have yet to vanish in Xinjiang.Footnote ³³ In response, violence has been rendered as a moral justification for Uyghurs to voice dissenting opinions given the lack of political avenues for peaceful petitions.Footnote 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) terrorism, (ethnic) separatism and (religious) extremism.”Footnote ³⁵ To Beijing, terrorism is closely interwoven with ethno-nationalist mobilization and separatism.Footnote 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,Footnote ³⁷ has claimed responsibility for the majority of violent incidents occurring in the Chinese territory over the past decade.Footnote ³⁸ To corroborate, Chinese sources have found that together with ISIS, the ETIM has recruited Uyghur Muslims as radicalized jihadist fighters through religious propaganda and expansion.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴⁰ Wang Zuoan, the head of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, articulated that “the foreign use of religion to infiltrate (China) intensifies by the day and religious extremist thought is spreading in some areas (Xinjiang).”Footnote ⁴¹ The emergence of an active home-grown terrorist insurgency represented 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴³ Several amendments have been made to some fundamental 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 institutions, and the procedure of inter-agency collaboration against terrorism.Footnote ⁴⁶ A particular 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 prevention, integrating punishment and prevention and abide by the principle of pro-activeness and activeness.”Footnote 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,”Footnote ⁴⁸ the CTL recommends that the law enforcement establish a joint co-ordination mechanism to mobilize local residential committees and private organizations as part of the counter-terrorism force,Footnote ⁴⁹ that intelligence authorities increase efforts to gather information with the assistance of the public,Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote ⁵² the mass line is a political, organizational, and leadership method that enables the Party to combine leadership with the masses.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵⁴ There is little wonder then that the mass-line doctrine has guided the way in which Chinese society has been regulated by the police since 1949.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the crux of this people-oriented philosophy, a harmonious 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵⁷

During the Maoist era (1949–77) in which informal justice prevailed,Footnote 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 Danwei), and social order joint protection teams (Shehui Zhian Lianfangdui) were agents of the civic partner, carrying out duties of resolving domestic disputes, monitoring neighbourhood safety, supervising troubled residents, and disciplining minor misconduct.Footnote ⁵⁹ As Michael Dutton points out, these practices reflected the tradition of China being a relational 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 (equivalent 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 marketization.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁶⁵ One particular aim of this mandate was to mobilize wider segments 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 residential committee office.Footnote ⁷⁰ Additionally, within each local police station, a community officer should be chosen and then elected by local residents to sit on the residential committee, serving as the organizer and co-ordinator of neighbourhood matters related to public security.Footnote ⁷¹ To blend into the public is to “intervene at the first sign of possible trouble” under the aegis of mass participation.Footnote 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 engagement and outreach, and pinpointed the pressing social order issues that need citizenry co-operation and assistance.Footnote ⁷³

Despite the uneven progress of community policing across China,Footnote 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,”Footnote ⁷⁵ China has advanced various schemes to address what the Chinese polity and society lacked at various points of history.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷⁹ In particular, the 2015 revision of the NSL articulates that “all citizens of China, state authorities, armed forces, political parties, people’s groups, enterprises, public institutions, and other social organizations shall have the responsibility and obligation to maintain national security.”Footnote 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 localities. To date, intelligence sharing and volunteer patrols appear to be the most frequently and dependable approaches to preventing terrorism in urban society. More specifically, 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.Footnote 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 hotline, texts, e-mails, and social media), different levels of monetary rewards are established to encourage local residents to come forward with useful information.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁸³ In the next level, 100,000–500,000 RMB is awarded to anyone who provides intelligence “directly assisting police with identifying and preventing significant terrorist violence.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The lowest rank of reward among Urumqi’s multilayered bounty system is 1,000–50,000 RMB being rewarded to those who provide information on “illegal religious activities, illegal materials of religious propaganda, illegal online incitement and illegal manufacturing or sale of masks and robes with signs of religious extremism and violent terrorism.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 purposes, 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.Footnote ⁸⁷ At the same time, 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.Footnote 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 communities are policed in a Uyghur-dominated society.Footnote ⁸⁹ While scattered research identifies some specific mass-line measures in use, such as the “Three Contingents,”Footnote ⁹⁰ there has been 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 governance aimed to “achieve ‘complete coverage without any chinks’ (Quanfugai, Wufenxi) so there are ‘no blind spots and no blank spaces’ (Wumangqu, Wukongbai).”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁹² Across Xinjiang, smart technologies such as face-recognition entrance gates have been installed in university campuses, train stations, work units, residential compounds, and the like.Footnote ⁹³ At the gates, scanned facial images and fingerprints are employed to corroborate an individual’s identity with nearly perfect accuracy and reliability.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁹⁵

Despite community policing beginning to take hold in China’s counter-terrorism system, I call into question its prospects of success. While it is impossible to measure exclusively 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.Footnote 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 voluntary participation in formal community affairs.Footnote ⁹⁷ The consequence is that community residents are becoming visibly uninterested in engaging with police regarding social control 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, therefore, lacks the soil to thrive in China’s modern urban communities. In what follows, I aim 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.

3.1 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.Footnote ⁹⁸ In the literature of counter-terrorism policing, it is consistently contended that community trust leading to voluntary co-operation amongst the target population (mostly Muslims) hinges deeply upon their perceptions of the legitimacy of the judgements of police.Footnote ⁹⁹ While the concept of legitimacy is “multidimensional in character” and open to various interpretations,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ higher levels of perceived legitimacy are thought to create a higher likelihood of community engagement.Footnote 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.Footnote 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-discriminatory, and non-racist; honesty: having best interests of communities at the heart of police enforcement.Footnote ¹⁰³ Although critics have challenged the casual correlation between procedural fairness and legitimacy,Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ serving the recurring theme of retributive justice in harmony with the draconian counter-terrorism culture during 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 to stringent measures that overly profile and flag them behind the façade of counter-terrorism policing.Footnote 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, tarnishing the public image of police forces in ways that had never been observed in Maoist and reformed China.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is particularly embodied in a large number of wrongfully convicted cases involving executions of “offenders” wherein the miscarriage of justice by police has been widely publicized by mass media, invoking public censure and outcry.Footnote ¹¹¹ There has been an upwards trend in so-called “mass incidents”Footnote ¹¹² in which protesters, demonstrators, and activists frequently become engaged in fierce, if not deadly, conflicts with police forces for persisting social injustices.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Regardless of questions of police integrity, fairness, and efficacy, many urbanites hold the view that police are trustworthy, which encourages their compliance with law enforcement.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Also, support for community policing vis-à-vis crime prevention has been observed among residents who are in either direct or indirect contact with police.Footnote 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 security.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 contexts. 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.Footnote ¹²⁰ According to Tom Tyler, obligation is “the most direct extension of the concept of legitimacy.”Footnote 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 beyond legitimacy.Footnote ¹²² Eamonn Carrabine was clear on this matter when he pointed to the “dull compulsion” in the context of prisons as an exceptional example.Footnote ¹²³ “Dull compulsion” refers to the scenario wherein prisoners “fatalistically accept or pragmatically put up with prison regimes even when the distribution of institutional power is patently illegitimate.”Footnote ¹²⁴ This normative assumption has been usefully expanded to elucidate the conformity 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.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Needless to say, the obligation to obey in illiberal regimes is philosophically distinct from that in democratic societies. If the former relates to a forced sense of obligation, then the latter centres mostly on the circumstances in which legitimacy generates the citizens’ normative commitments to, and shared moral values with, the police service or order.Footnote 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,Footnote 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 mandatory and independent of judgements by citizens regarding legitimacy. In a country like China where a despotic government dominates,Footnote ¹²⁸ police procedural justice and legitimacy may elevate co-operation, but the key determinant appears to lay behind an inherent obligation of ordinary citizens to state laws, superiors, authorities, and governments.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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, 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 legislation repeatedly obligates citizens, organizations, and companies to provide co-operation and support for police activities that tackle terrorism.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹³³ The National Intelligence Law (NIL) goes further by granting intelligence agencies the discretion to demand “support, assistance and cooperation from concerned organs, organizations and citizens when carrying out intelligence work.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ¹³⁷ In fact, the refusal to co-operate with law-enforcement agencies results in administrative penalties or criminal prosecution.Footnote 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 important 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.”Footnote 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 countering the infiltration of extremist behaviours and speeches through proper training and “religious, cultural and legal education.”Footnote 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 organization. For community residents, participation is not a natural activity of civil society.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁴² In several violent incidents in Xinjiang (e.g. the Hotan attacks), it is evidenced that the masses voluntarily provided law-enforcement agencies with information for investigation and actively assisted the police with the arrest of suspects who were at large.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ However, with the deepening of marketization, 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Following Jiang’s direction, China has incorporated the notion of “community (Shequ)” into its urban management agendas,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ which involve “community service” in its legislative reforms, and established “community construction” as the primary goal of municipal infrastructural development.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Although Danwei still carries an impact upon the life and social identity of certain groups of people (e.g. state employees), 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,Footnote 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 significant 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 requisite autonomy rather than the self-reliant and self-directing institution that is generally present in democratic societies.Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ On the surface, the official definition seems to be geographically oriented, emphasizing physical propinquity as outlined in the traditional sociological account of community.Footnote ¹⁵² Yet it is more pointedly reflected in the organizational 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,Footnote ¹⁵³ and it operates in a way that represents the local government and acts upon orders of the latter. In a hierarchical system with the central government on the top, followed by the municipal and district governments, then the street,Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Apart from service and social welfare programmes,Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Therefore, other than being understood as a self-regulating agency, the residential committee acts stereotypically as the implementer of government policies under a rigid institutionalized rule-based authority. In other words, community in urban China is an institution not formed by bonds between people, nor by geographic boundaries, but established by administrative partition within the jurisdictional parameters of the residential committee in any given district of the urban governments.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ As sociologists accurately describe, Chinese urban communities resemble “an entire new level of local government,”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ which is emblematic of “a model of authoritarian communitarianism.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

Bearing this in mind, with communities being vertically configured and administratively regulated, Chinese state authorities are less concerned with trust building and mutual gain to foster co-operation compared to their Western counterparts. More practically, 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote ¹⁶⁵ In promoting this integration strategy, communities are merging with the police force in crime-control endeavours. Evidence 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 activities.”Footnote 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 consolidated the position that participatory behaviours of local residents “do not reflect either an interest in or a willingness to participate in democracy.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ While community members may become voluntary participants in community-service programmes insofar as their individual welfare and interests are affected,Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

This then begs the question—does co-operation rooted in obligation coincide with community 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.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ At a minimum, 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 information because an indispensable component of any counter-terrorism tactics is intelligence-gathering.Footnote ¹⁷¹ At times, community members are more capable of identifying abnormalities and even subtle changes in their own neighbourhoods than police.Footnote ¹⁷² However, partnership models that exploit community resources for intelligence, as Basia Spalek contends, “are intelligence-gathering mechanism rather than true partnerships.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 networks or other forms of social capital to develop co-productive behaviour conducive to meaningful counter-terrorism collaboration.

4.1 China’s hold over policing powers for “stability preservation”

Following the last nationwide “Strike Hard” campaign in 2010,Footnote ¹⁹⁶ a shift in the policing model from “crackdown” to “stability maintenance” has taken place to tackle new challenges 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 additional powers to manage social unrest.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Although instituted by Deng Xiaoping as a political 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 administration. At the upper echelons of the Party, stability was a prerequisite to the construction of a “socialist harmonious society”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ —a larger political banner introduced by the then Party leaders to chart a balanced course of state development.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁰⁰ On many occasions, the Party elites have affirmed stability as a critical precursor of the country’s sustainable economic growth and social advancement.Footnote ²⁰¹

A characteristic feature of this change is that police have been drawn from regular activities of excessive arrests, investigations, and mass sentencing rallies in “Strike Hard” campaigns to take on a more managerial role in dealing with specific categories of people deemed to be “dangerous” to social stability.Footnote ²⁰² Other than autonomy-seeking minority groups (e.g. Uyghurs), police forces have been tasked with controlling, supervising, and monitoring 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.”Footnote 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 undertaking 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Through decades of legalization and institutionalization, systemized administrative detention is seen as a routine 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.Footnote 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 extensively used by police.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Prior to its repeal in 2013,Footnote 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 circumvents procedural requirements set forth in the CPL.Footnote ²¹⁰ Although RTL camps have allegedly been dismantled in the past, it is believed that some are merged with drug rehabilitation and education centres to continue imprisoning recidivist offenders,Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²¹⁵ For those who were believed to remain “radicalized,” the Intermediate Court has the power to make the “education” order and undertake supervision in the “Transformation through Education” facilities.Footnote 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.”Footnote ²¹⁷

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 constitute 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.Footnote ²¹⁸ This same power is applicable to individuals engaged in activities that make use of extremism. Reflecting the government’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 activities, 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.”Footnote 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 enactment of the CTL in early 2016. Starting from the first case of violating Article 80 of the CTL in Ji’nan, Shandong Province,Footnote ²²⁰ the Chinese police had reportedly handled hundreds of cases involving a substantial number of citizens regarding Article 80 offences as of December 2018.Footnote ²²¹ A host of acts have triggered this police-led custodial measure, but most of the offences concern watching and distributing “extremist” videos on social media.Footnote ²²² In the meantime, individuals conducting the same offences with higher culpability are processed in the criminal justice system under the CL,Footnote 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 “dangerous behaviours” are and will be continually earmarked as police-dominated. To the government, 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 handled under administrative detention. Specifically, the administrative detention powers have been geared towards the ideal of risk control and incapacitation through the restriction of personal freedom, in conjunction with punishment and education as officially prescribed in administrative punishment law and policy.Footnote ²²⁴ For the sake of maintaining stability, these powers are too important to relinquish to be replaced by alternative practices that are perhaps 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 of administrative detention, which is not 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.Footnote 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 subordinated by the state’s suppressive forces and deprived of opportunities to co-produce community 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,Footnote ²²⁶ and this is mostly through the codification of laws and outsourcing of security services.Footnote 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 professionalized but highly bureaucratized police force.Footnote ²²⁸ On the other hand, the public interest in taking part in formal community matters and the administration of local justice have arguably 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.Footnote ²²⁹ Though “anomie” has yet to be provided with a clear-cut definition by either Robert Merton who coined it or sociologists who tested this theory,Footnote ²³⁰ it refers generally to a state of disorder in society resulting from a breakdown of social values and norms. As a consequence, 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,Footnote 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 “gargantuan” 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 networks in which residents are mobilized to achieve common good on the basis of a collective sense of community belonging and attachment.Footnote ²³² In both English- and Chinese-language literature, multiple studies have noted a social interaction in urbanized communities of big cities being “superficial” and “pragmatic,” which affirms its negative impact on the willingness of local residents to engage in community activities.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 participatory behaviours due to reduced social networks and interpersonal relationships, of which the cornerstone is grounded on reciprocity, collective identity, and social bonds.Footnote 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 respondents showed an indifferent attitude or no interest towards community-based residential meetings.Footnote ²³⁷ In addition to the fact that residents’ non-action is partially due to the paternalistic and top-down nature of Chinese society,Footnote ²³⁸ the investigation shows that the deteriorating 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.Footnote ²³⁹ It is increasingly clear that when economic liberalization removed strict restraints on population movement and subsequently brought diversity to the community in urban China, it also extracted the social substratum of popular inputs in developing the quality of community life. In terms of community policing, the public engagement is even less promising. A questionnaire-based study on the citizens’ perception of Community Corrections in Hefei, Anhui Province,Footnote ²⁴⁰ shows that 55% of local residents (n = 1,000) had never heard of this neighbourhood-based justice programme despite its inception in 2003.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁴³ Perhaps, what distinguishes China from the US is the lack of autonomous will by the Chinese neighbourhoods to rearrange and rejuvenate 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 inattentive. Compared to the grassroots-oriented and horizontal bottom-up modes of engagement, 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 triggered 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.Footnote ²⁴⁴ Rather than notifying early warnings or signs, local residents are likely to report the incidents of actual lawbreaking. If democratic community–police rapport would inspire constructive dialogue and collaboration to improve the community’s ability of defend against terrorist threats, the relationship between the public 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 concept and, as such, quickly lose their sensitivity and vagility to potential risks looming under their nose.