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China-Taliban: "The Taliban is unwilling to meet China's demands on ETIM due to ‘comradeship' from fighting the Soviet invasion together, shared religious beliefs, Pashtun traditions of protecting those seeking asylum, and social ties such as intermarriage“ - Liu Zongyi, Director of the Center for South Asia Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS), recently returned from field research in Pakistan and Afghanistan. During his visit to Kabul, which was at the invitation of the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he held several days of discussions with foreign affairs officials and scholars from Kabul University. Context: East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is regarded as a terrorist organization in China, founded by Uyghur separatists seeking to establish an independent Islamic state known as "East Turkestan" in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Hasan Mahsum founded it in the late 1990s (often cited as 1997) before being killed by Pakistani forces in 2003. The UN Security Council officially designated ETIM as a terrorist organization one year after 9/11. However, the US removed it from its list of designated terrorist organizations in 2020, citing a lack of evidence that the group is still active. China's relationship with Syria, following the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024, is also constrained by what China sees as the presence of ETIM, or Uyghur fighters, who have been integrated into the national security forces. Excerpts from Liu's interview with The Observer (Guancha), published on the 20th: Guancha News: In your exchanges with Afghan government officials, did you learn what their most pressing concerns are? Liu Zongyi: During our discussions, the issue they mentioned most frequently was their hope that China would invest in Afghanistan. Their current foreign policy is a "balanced diplomacy" with the economy at its core; they advocate that "economics is politics." They hope to use economic cooperation as a platform to drive the normalization of bilateral relations with China, Central Asia, and other countries and regions. According to them, as long as a party is willing to engage with them, they will establish normal diplomatic relations and no longer pursue past grievances, regardless of what they were. "Drug cultivation still exists. Their economy now primarily relies on two pillars: agriculture and animal husbandry, and international aid. However, aid from Western countries has been significantly reduced, while aid from the World Bank and the United Nations continues... Overall, since the Taliban returned to power, the Afghan economy has shown a steady but slow progress, but the overall level has not yet recovered to the level of the previous Ghani government in 2020." Many countries are reluctant to invest in Afghanistan. A key reason is that the United States has not yet lifted financial sanctions on the country, which makes it difficult for external capital to enter, and even if it does, it is hard to remit profits. Additionally, the local investment environment in Afghanistan is harsh, with the most prominent obstacle being the issue of security." "Security issues, especially those related to the 'East Turkestan Islamic Movement' (ETIM), have become the most difficult sticking point in our exchanges with the Afghan Taliban. They confidently state that the ETIM organization is currently completely under their control, but they have also made it clear that they are unwilling to fully satisfy China's relevant demands." "An official from the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs responsible for Chinese affairs even said to us directly: 'Look at how much money the United States and the EU give us in a year; the money you, China, have given us over the past five years ain't even scraps. Aren't you embarrassed?'" "We retorted on the spot: 'Your problems were not caused by us. What does Afghanistan's current situation have to do with us? Our provision of aid and charity is out of humanitarianism; it certainly cannot be compared to the Western powers who caused destruction in Afghanistan.'" "The Supreme Leader of Afghanistan, Hibatullah Akhundzada, resides year-round in his birthplace, Kandahar... He is surrounded by a group of theological clerics... They are extremely conservative, which is why they have introduced policies such as not allowing girls to receive an education." "The Taliban leadership currently has some issues with grasping reality 一些认知存在问题; they do not know much about the outside world, and they don't seem to want to know more... To secure EU aid, they halted oil field development cooperation with Chinese enterprises. In my view, these decisions are very short-sighted."