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Explaining Minority Conflict in China: A Theoretical Perspective

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Ethnic Identity and National Conflict in China

Abstract

The genesis of ethnic conflict and terrorism around the world has often been subjected to much scholastic scrutiny. These involve root causes issues such as poverty and unemployment, discrimination and marginalization, and/or domination encompassing majority-minority—linguistic, religious—relations. Following September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, there is now a tendency to treat the terrorist threat more as a civilizational conflict or “clash of civilizations,” one of the cultural conflicts which Samuel Huntington predicted in his now famous work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order several years ago.2 Equating contemporary terrorism with Islam has also become the predominant discourse of security debates. In The Roots of Muslim Rage, for example, Bernard Lewis wrote how “we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and governments that pursue them.”3 Use of sweeping generalizations such as “Al Qaeda spearheaded universal jihad,”4 “Islam’s inherent incompatibility with modernity,”5 the “moral and ideological crisis” that has beset “the collective Muslim mind”6 has become commonplace in the new security discourse.

There are common and constant ethnicity-oriented challenges facing multinational states, including the danger of great-nation (majority) chauvinism, the extremism of hard-core (small-state nationalism) separatists, terrorism, and the spiral of break-up linked to competing visions of national identity.

—Zhu Yuchao and Blachford Dongyan, 2006.1

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Notes

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© 2010 Rohan Gunaratna, Arabinda Acharya and Wang Pengxin

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Gunaratna, R., Acharya, A., Pengxin, W. (2010). Explaining Minority Conflict in China: A Theoretical Perspective. In: Ethnic Identity and National Conflict in China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107878_2

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