Terrorismo cultural y control digital: las armas secretas de China contra el yihadismo

Cultural terrorism and digital control: China’s hidden instruments against jihadism

Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) extends across territories deeply eroded by jihadist terrorism. This article offers, for the first time, an analysis of China’s response to such threats, in which Beijing has developed a control architecture combining predictive surveillance, securitised infrastructure, and ideological re-education.

The regions examined represent nodes of maximum political tension, where terrorist threats, geopolitical interests, and strategic disputes converge. In these scenarios, China does not fight terrorism: it dissolves it. It does not impose a direct military presence, yet it alters the environment, shapes behaviour, and transforms discourse.

From this perspective, the article introduces the concept of cultural terrorism as a central tool of the Chinese model: a form of security that extends the concept of threat beyond physical violence to include identity-based, religious, or symbolic dissent.