This book explores how Chinese border provinces have become actors in international relations. Through an analysis of the international actorness — the inherent characteristics of a subnational entity as an international player — of Yunnan and two other geographically peripheral provinces, Guangdong and Guangxi, the domestic, economic and legislative circumstances that motivated these provinces to conduct transboundary engagements is determined. The study is based on an extensive field study including interviews with those involved in the implementation of Yunnan’s foreign agenda, representatives from province-owned enterprises, universities and think tanks, and officials and experts from the countries neighbouring Yunnan. Acknowledging the role of external geopolitics, the authors analyse the efforts of these border provinces to incentivise neighbouring countries to cooperate with them on areas of trade, investment and non-traditional security. Yao Song and Tianyang Liu also observe how border provinces have leveraged their paradiplomatic strengths to affect China’s foreign relations with neighbouring countries. This volume will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduates in political science, international relations, and diplomacy as well as geography, Southeast Asian politics, political economy, Chinese periphery diplomacy, and non-federal paradiplomacy.

This book explores how the Chinese government reasserts its control and management of public spaces as part of its overall counter-terrorism strategy. The work focuses primarily on the banal and alternative forms that China’s ‘war on terror’ takes: the everyday, non-military, socio-economic and spatio-material. It presents three different cases of control associated with the state’s effort to manage material, social and digital public spaces as remedies to terrorism and ethnic unrest in China: the redevelopment project of Kashgar—the ‘home’ of Uyghur culture—from 2001 to 2017; the forging of local partnerships with potential agents (i.e. the local cadres and imams in Xinjiang) as part of the process of implementing counter-terrorism policies; and an online campaign about international terrorism that appeared on Sina Weibo. Using securitization theory as a theoretical framework, the book establishes links between human geography and critical security studies and advances the understanding of non-confrontational forms of resistance in China. It also focuses attention on the binary relationship between the securitizing agency of the state and the counter-securitization agency of ‘terrorists’, while also exploring the manner in which other societal forces interact with these processes. This book will be of interest to students of critical terrorism studies, Chinese studies, human geography, and security studies.

This book explores how the Chinese government reasserts its control and management of public spaces as part of its overall counter-terrorism strategy. The work focuses primarily on the banal and alternative forms that China's 'war on terror' takes: the everyday, non-military, socio-economic and spatio-material. It presents three different cases of control associated with the state's effort to manage material, social and digital public spaces as remedies to terrorism and ethnic unrest in China: the redevelopment project of Kashgar-the 'home' of Uyghur culture-from 2001 to 2017; the forging of local partnerships with potential agents (i.e. the local cadres and imams in Xinjiang) as part of the process of implementing counter-terrorism policies; and an online campaign about international terrorism that appeared on Sina Weibo. Using securitization theory as a theoretical framework, the book establishes links between human geography and critical security studies and advances the understanding of non-confrontational forms of resistance in China. It also focuses attention on the binary relationship between the securitizing agency of the state and the counter-securitization agency of 'terrorists', while also exploring the manner in which other societal forces interact with these processes. This book will be of interest to students of critical terrorism studies, Chinese studies, human geography, and security studies.