Nipping Dissent In The Bud: After ‘Re-Education’ Camps For Adults, Now Children Under Communist Government Gaze

Having already lodged up millions of Uyghurs in what it claims are ‘re-education’ camps, China has now turned its gaze towards the children in Xinjiang, BBC has reported.

The report speaks of a rapid, large scale campaign to set up boarding schools where children are formally assessed to determine if they are in need of ‘centralised care’ in a bid to cut them off their roots. Several children have already lost one of both their parents to the some form of internment, be it prison or the education camps.

While contact with the affected people in Xinjiang is allegedly almost impossible, the report states several accounts of ethnic Uyghurs in Turkey who speak of the missing children.

Xinjiang, the south-western province of China, is home to the mostly-Muslim Uyghurs and is prone to violence with several organisations demanding freedom from Chinese rule. Reports of giant internment camps in the region were initially denied by government authorities when they started emerging about an year ago. Since then, the authorities have agreed upon their existence, but term them as ‘vocational training’ centres.

This claim is contested by international observers who claim that the camps are used to wean away the Uyghurs from their religious tendencies and force them into aligning their beliefs with the Communist government.