9/11 Special: Ten Years Later: Is China America's Antiterrorism Ally?

Soon after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the Bush administration turned to China looking for collaboration 1 in its counterterrorism campaign. Ten years later, the two countries' joint 2 antiterrorism efforts are still largely restrained in strategic dialogues.

As Su Yi reports, analysts 3 say it's because the two nations have different strategic concerns and different understandings of global terrorism, although the gap now seems to be getting narrower.

 

The FBI set up an office inside the U.S. embassy in Beijing one year after 9/11. A handful of staffers under a Chinese-American director are responsible for sharing information with their Chinese counterparts.

Also after the attacks that killed nearly three-thousand people, the U.S. opened the gate for the export of key antiterrorism equipment and technology to China. Its security personnel were seen on the streets of Beijing during the 2008 Olympics.

Melvyn Leffler is a history professor at the University of Virginia.

"What strikes me about the Bush administration after 9/11 is, I think, there was a much more pronounced effort to try to collaborate 4 and cooperate and work out differences with China. To some extent, they were quite successful in doing that."

Despite the two countries' repeated promises to deepen antiterrorism cooperation and support each other's efforts, they have actually done something together in the War on Terror.

International relations experts such as Zhang Yao from the Shanghai Institute of International Studies say this comes as no surprise because the two countries face different terrorist threats.

Wang Wei is Director of the Antiterrorism Department at China's Ministry 5 of Public Security. He says in general, the terrorist threat to China is not as prominent as it is in the United States. Most of the known terrorist groups are active in China's northwestern Xinjiang autonomous 6 region, which have limited links to international terrorist groups. But these groups are incapable 7 of posing any threat to the United States and its troops in Afghanistan.

Moreover, America's basic foreign policy on emerging powers, including China, did not have any fundamental changes after 9/11.

History professor Melvyn Leffler again:

"Yes, the policies and priorities of the Bush administration did shift, the administration did embrace a war on terror, but the most fundamental elements actually coincided and were consistent with many long-term trends in the history of American foreign policy."

More fundamentally, as international relations expert Zhang Yao says, perhaps the only commonalities that China and the U.S. share in the antiterrorism campaign are some broad principals.

"The two countries differ on what terrorism is, who should be labeled terrorists, and what approach is the most effective to fight against terrorism."

One Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said ahead of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that development and improving people's livelihoods 8 are the ways to root out terrorism.

Coincidently, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton also said the U.S. is now combining diplomacy 9, development and necessary military action to achieve its antiterrorism goals.

As the United States has started to hand over security responsibilities in Afghanistan and the War on Terror is expected to take a back seat in the 2012 presidential election, China and the U.S. may find more common ground on counterterrorism campaigns in the future.

For CRI, I'm Su Yi.