With 1 to 3 million people incarcerated in some form of mass internment, many Uyghur children have been deprived of one or both parents. Countless families have been coercively separated, in some cases there were relatives or extended families to take care of the children, but the regime forcibly sent thousands of children to de facto orphanages anyway; in many other cases, where given the regime’s large-scale mass internment drive not only the parents but also the extended families have been sent away to the mass internment camps, as a result, the younger children would end up in “child welfare guidance centres”, while older children may end up in state-run vocational schools, according to locals in Ürümchi and Kashgar (Feng 2018b). When Associated Press journalists visited one kindergarten with “a walled enclosure lined with barbed wire” in Khotan where one of their Uyghur informants’ four children were believed to be kept, they were prevented from doing their job of investigating, and were ordered to delete any photos taken by armed police (Wang & Kang 2018).
The Kashgar local government states in an official document43 that children who attend the 4th grade and above with parent(s) taken to the internment camps must go to boarding schools at the first opportunity, including the scenario in which one parent is still at home. It also states that government officials must follow up on parent(s) or custodians and do the necessary persuasion work, and guide them so that they themselves take the initiative to send their children to boarding schools. The guideline also necessitates regular varied “educational” activities/instillation: in elementary schools, students must be instilled with e.g. core values in socialism, gratitude education (i.e. be grateful to your country), serve-your-country contents; in junior high, students must be instilled with for example 75 signs of religious extremism; in high schools, students must be instilled with for example legal education. One boarding school The Associated Press visited in 2018, the No. 4 High School in Peyziwat county (伽师县), was installed with barbed wire around its school complex and dormitory buildings (Wang & Kang 2018). “The educational goals are secondary to the political goals. They aim to dissolve loyalties to ethnic identity… toward a national identity” said professor Timothy Grose to The Associated Press (ibid.).
Drawing on a wide range of sources, from official documents and reports, Chinese state media articles, to government policy directives, Zenz (2019c) presents compelling evidence arguing for the existence of large-scale state-directed various types of “intergenerational separation” (i.e. family separation). Anticipating a large number of children would be left uncared for after interning their parents in its mass internment drive, the Chinese regime established a parallel massive network of state-care and boarding school facilities44 capable of accommodating children of almost all age groups. These state-run facilities are fortified with various security measures, in which Uyghur children are exposed to intensive Mandarin and Han-culture education, a systematic state-directed accelerated assimilation, which has been highly praised by the state propaganda whereby the children are the beneficiaries of family separation. The regime also has a comprehensive contingency plan regarding the socio-economic and psychological impacts of family separation, while the public schools are required to follow up on the children of the interned, staving off potential incidents. Moreover, relatives and family members are under the state’s watchful eye. Some documents show that many children under state care have one or both parents incarcerated in some form of mass internment.
By May 2019, there had already been at least tens of thousands of Uyghur children in state-run boarding schools, while they can be held under “state care” on weekdays even after the internment camps release their parent(s), meaning that the Chinese state has more time to indoctrinate and sinicize the children than their parents have to pass down what constitutes as Uyghur identity: The Uyghur Language, Uyghur culture and traditions, and the Islamic faith. “This is almost certainly not coincidental, but a deliberate part of “breaking roots” and changing Turkic minority societies through coercive social re-engineering”, which as its long-term objective, the Chinese regime is on course to carry out “a targeted cultural genocide” (Zenz 2019c).
Source: “The persecution of Uyghurs in East Turkistan” Authors: Erkin Kâinat; Adrian Zenz; Adiljan Abdurihim Link: https://www.utjd.org/register/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/the_persecution_of_uyghurs_hard_copy.pdf
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