China Is Separating Muslim Kids From Families, Parents Detained: Report

In the name of fighting religious extremism, China is allegedly separating Muslim children from their families in the Xinjiang region and sending parents to detention camps.

According to BBC research, hundreds of children are separated from parents and are sent to state-run care centers or boarding schools with no contacts with parents.

The parents in detention camps do not know the whereabouts of missing children.

According to the report, China’s aim is to delink the young generation from their roots and is making a massive push to the school system and dormitories to enroll these ethnic children. These "boarding schools" also have primacy in teaching Chinese and use of ethnic language is a taboo.

The plight of Xinjiang Muslims in China

Reports of China’s crackdown in Muslim minority regions had been pervasive. Uighurs are the largest Muslim ethnic group in China and they have more in common with Central Asian neighbors than the domestic Han Chinese people. They speak the Turkish language.

Reports suggest that as many as 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims are in detention centers or re-education camps. However, Beijing is denying it.

The BBC research said a whole township lost more than 400 children with both parents in education camps or prisons.

It says China’s dual objective in Xinjiang is--- to change the identity of adults and detach children from their ethnic roots.

Given the high Chinese surveillance in Xinjiang, it is hard for foreign journalists to gather any direct testimony. That is why the BBC team harnessed the evidence from Turkey where thousands of Chinese Uighurs are housed.

“I don't know who is looking after them,” one mother wailed pointing to a picture of her three young daughters and said she has lost all contacts.

Another mother flaunts a photo of three sons and a daughter, and is in tears when she says “I heard that they are in an orphanage.”

The interviews with parents and grandparents elicited details of the disappearance of more than 90 children in Xinjiang.

Chinese authorities claim they are educating Uighurs in “vocational training centers” to fight violent religious extremism.

But evidence shows the detained people are not terrorists but are ordinary ones professing their faith such as praying or wearing a veil.

Uighurs lodged in Turkey are afraid to go back as they will end up in detention camps. One mother asks. “Why does the world keep silent when knowing these facts ?”

Forced school enrolment

The BBC report sheds more light on what is happening to children as well as thousands of others.

Dr. Adrian Zenz, a German researcher who exposed China's mass detentions of adult Muslims in Xinjiang now reports that an unprecedented school expansion drive is happening in Xinjiang area.

His study found campuses getting enlarged and new dormitories being built to ensure full-time care for a large number of children. At the same more detention camps are also being built for adults.

The surprising fact is that Xinjiang's pre-school enrolment zoomed from below national average to China’s highest in the last couple of years.

The Chinese Government has also stepped up propaganda hailing the virtues of boarding schools as key to maintain “social stability and peace” with the “school substituting as parents.”

Zenz says the hidden agenda is “sustained cultural re-engineering of minority societies.”

There also an effort to wipe out the use of Uighur and other local languages in school premises. Hard punishments fall on students and teachers if they speak anything other than Chinese in school.

However, Xu Guixiang, a senior official with Xinjiang's Propaganda Department denies the state is housing large numbers of children who are parentless.

Schools as isolation camps

Xinjiang schools where children have been forcibly enrolled, look like highly secured, “hard isolation” centers with tighter monitoring measures.

The schools carry full-time surveillance systems, perimeter alarms and electric fences with higher security spending than adult detention camps.

Zeng asserts that keeping parents and children apart is a clear indication that China’s Xinjiang government is raising a new generation that is cut off from original roots, language, and religious beliefs. It is nothing but outright ethnic cleansing.

Phone surveillance

Meanwhile, a joint investigation by the Guardian and the New York Times found that China’s crackdown in Xinjiang has been extended to tourists visiting the region. China's border guards are allegedly installing a surveillance app to the phones of visitors to Xinjiang, said the report.