The Chinese regime is perpetrating the cultural genocide of a generation by weaponizing education. The state of the matter after ten years of persecution.
by Abdulhakim Idris
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the active Uyghur genocide, consisting of President Xi Jinping’s “People’s War on Terror,” and there is no sign of it stopping in the near future. The Chinese government has detained over one million Uyghurs (a quite conservative evaluation) in re-education camps, but the horrors extend beyond the camps, to the children left behind. These children are being forcibly assimilated into Han Chinese culture through a vast network of state-run boarding schools. This essay delves into how these institutions serve as tools of cultural genocide, stripping Uyghur children of their language, religion, and identity.
The plight of the Uyghur and Kazakh people is not a sudden eruption but a consequence of a long history of oppression and marginalization. Uyghurs, predominantly Muslim Turkic people, have historically faced systematic assimilation and genocide in their homeland, East Turkistan, which the Chinese regime calls Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Their struggle for cultural and religious autonomy has been met with relentless suppression by the racist, nationalistic Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In 2014, this simmering tension took a drastic turn. Under the guise of combating “religious extremism,” the People’s Republic of China (PRC) initiated an intensified crackdown in East Turkistan. The region, rich in cultural diversity, was subjected to an increasingly pervasive and intrusive surveillance system. This campaign, ostensibly targeting terrorism, was in reality a thinly veiled attempt to control and assimilate the Uyghur population.
The Uyghur region is not only a cultural and religious battleground but also a territory of significant economic interest. It is rich in natural resources, including oil, gas, and minerals, making it a strategic asset for the PRC’s “Belt and Road Initiative.” Beijing has heavily invested in infrastructure projects in the region, but these developments have disproportionately benefited the Han Chinese population while further marginalizing the Uyghurs.
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A policy of assimilation
The economic exploitation extends to forced labor. Many Uyghurs who are not detained in camps are subjected to forced labor in factories across the PRC. These factories are often linked to global supply chains, implicating international corporations in the human rights abuses occurring in East Turkistan. The Chinese government justifies this as part of its “poverty alleviation” program, but in reality, it is a form of modern-day slavery designed to further control and assimilate the Uyghur population.
In this calculated strategy of cultural genocide, the Chinese state has weaponized education. The Chinese government’s assimilation process starts with detaining parents under arbitrary claims, placing them in detainment camps and leaving children defenseless and vulnerable. Children whose parents are detained, in prison, or undergoing re-education or “training,” are classified into a special needs category, making them eligible for state care, which typically means placement in orphanages or boarding schools.
At the epicenter of the PRC’s brutal repression of Uyghurs lies a particularly insidious tactic: the systematic separation of Uyghur children from their families. This abhorrent practice serves as a cornerstone of China’s campaign to erase Uyghur cultural identity and enforce a homogeneous Han Chinese ideology.
Since 2017, the CCP has intensified its crackdown on the Uyghurs. Under the guise of combating extremism, the Chinese government has implemented a series of draconian measures aimed at eradicating Uyghur culture. These measures include mass detentions, forced labor, and sterilizations. The United States and several other countries have labeled these actions as genocide, while the United Nations has indicated they can amount to crimes against humanity.
As the Chinese government detains Uyghur adults, their children are sent to state-run boarding schools. These institutions are designed to sever the children from their cultural roots and indoctrinate them into Han Chinese culture. According to reports, more than half a million Uyghur children have been placed in these schools, where they are taught to speak Mandarin exclusively and are subjected to a curriculum that glorifies the Chinese state while denigrating their native culture.
The Kuchar brothers
Aysu and Lütfullah Kuchar, two Uyghur children, were forced to spent nearly twenty months in a state boarding school. They were forcibly separated from their family and subjected to physical and emotional abuse. Their heads were shaved, and they were frequently beaten and locked in dark rooms as punishment. By the time they returned home, they had forgotten how to speak Uyghur, their mother tongue. “That was the heaviest moment in my life. Standing in front of my two Chinese-speaking children, I felt as if they had killed me,” their father lamented. By the time they were able to return to their parents to Türkiye in December 2019, they had become malnourished and traumatized.
Another victim, Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur woman who survived the concentration camps, tearfully recounted the torture she endured. Her children were taken from her and placed in a boarding school. When she was finally allowed to reconnect with them, she found that one of her children had died due to an operation performed without her consent.
NPR, or National Public Radio in the US, published the Kuchars’ story and was able to identify the school Lütfullah was sent to. It had been previously called the Urumqi Folk Art School and is located in the densely populated, predominantly Uyghur neighborhood of Sandunbei in the region’s capital, Urumqi. The school is among at least 1,300 boarding schools set up across the Uyghur region, according to the Ministry for Education documents. XUAR local governments have been scrubbing their websites of all references to the boarding schools, but an official education report from 2017—the year before the Kuchar children were sent to the school—says nearly half a million children had already been enrolled by the start of that year.
In these boarding schools, the use of the Uyghur language is strictly prohibited. Classroom instruction is conducted almost exclusively in Mandarin, and teachers can be punished for using Uyghur outside specific language classes. This policy aims to erode the children’s fluency in their native language, thereby severing their connection to their cultural and religious identities.
Reports have documented numerous instances of physical and emotional abuse in these schools. Children are often beaten, locked in dark rooms, and forced to hold stress positions for extended periods. These punitive measures are designed to break the children’s spirit and make them more pliable to assimilation efforts.
The systematic separation of Uyghur children from their families and their forced assimilation into Han Chinese culture constitutes a form of cultural genocide. By eradicating the Uyghur language, religion, and customs, the CCP aims to eliminate any sense of Uyghur identity. This policy not only affects the current generation but also ensures that future generations will grow up devoid of their cultural heritage.
The psychological toll on these children is immense. Separated from their families and subjected to constant abuse and indoctrination, many of these children suffer from severe trauma. They grow up feeling alienated from their cultural roots and are often unable to communicate with their parents and grandparents, who remain fluent in Uyghur.
The boarding schools in East Turkistan are not merely educational institutions; they are tools of cultural genocide. By forcibly assimilating Uyghur children into Han Chinese culture, the Chinese government aims to erase the Uyghur identity from the face of the earth. The stories of Aysu, Lütfullah, and Mihrigul are harrowing reminders of the human cost of this genocidal campaign. As the world watches, it is imperative to continue documenting these atrocities and advocating for the rights of the Uyghur people.
A systematic campaign
According to expert Adrian Zenz and BBC, children of detained parents in boarding schools were penalized for failing to speak Mandarin Chinese and prevented from practicing their religion. In a paper published in the “Journal of Political Risk,” Zenz calls the effort a “systematic campaign of social re-engineering and cultural genocide.” Human Rights Watch said that the children detained at child welfare facilities and boarding schools were held without parental consent or access. “The New York Times” reported that approximately 497,800 elementary and junior high school students were enrolled in these boarding schools. These sources also reported that students are only allowed to see family members once every two weeks and that they are forbidden from speaking the Uyghur language.
Furthermore, UN experts expressed grave concern over allegations of a significant expansion of the state-run boarding school system, which fails to provide education in the children’s mother tongue and forcibly separates Uyghur and other minority Muslim children from their families and communities, leading to their forced assimilation. “We are deeply concerned that boarding schools in Xinjiang are teaching almost exclusively in the official language with little or no use of Uyghur as medium of instruction and that the separation of mainly Uyghur and other minority children from their families could lead to their forced assimilation into the majority Mandarin language and the adoption of Han cultural practices,” the UN experts said. They stressed the discriminatory nature of the policy and the violation of minorities’ right to an education without discrimination, to family life, and to cultural rights.
The experts received information about large-scale removal of children, mainly Uyghur, from their families, including very young children whose parents are in exile or “interned”/detained. These children are treated as “orphans” by State authorities and placed in full-time boarding schools, pre-schools, or orphanages where the language used is almost exclusively Mandarin, the standard official Chinese language, or “Putonghua.”
“Uyghur and other minority children in highly regulated and controlled boarding institutions may have little interaction with their parents, extended family or communities for much of their youth,” the experts said. “This will inevitably lead to a loss of connection with their families and communities and undermine their ties to their cultural, religious and linguistic identities,” they added.
Molding minors
The UN experts were also informed of the exponential increase in the number of boarding schools for Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Turkic Muslim children in recent years, and the closure of local schools where education through the medium of Uyghur and other ethnic groups languages could be provided. “The massive scale of the allegations raises extremely serious concerns of violations of basic human rights,” they said. Experts note this is part of Chinese authorities’ efforts to mold minority children into speaking and acting like the country’s dominant Han ethnic group.
“This ideological impulse of trying to assimilate non-Han people corresponded with this punitive approach of putting adults in camps, and therefore lots of young children ended up in boarding kindergartens and boarding schools or orphanages,” says James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University who studies Chinese and Central Asian history. “It really is an effort to try to make everyone Chinese and see themselves as Chinese and have a single cultural background.”
China rejects the widespread accusations of wrongful discrimination against Uyghurs and other minorities in the region—but Uyghurs, rights advocates, and reporters have documented numerous accounts of systematic abuse.
China claims it is expanding the number of boarding schools allegedly to improve educational access, especially in remote rural communities. But Uyghur families say such schools are also institutions where children with both parents detained or imprisoned are sent, against family wishes. “My relatives would rather take care of the children themselves, but they are forced to send the kids to boarding schools,” says Mukerrem Mahmud, a Uyghur student in Türkiye.
