The current campaign affects many hundreds of thousands of individual children, who are held in dedicated schools and orphanages, and force-isolated from their family, siblings, language, and culture. The use of their mother tongue is forbidden. Reportedly, beatings and torture punishing lapses are ubiquitous. Recent testimonies suggest the children are de-culturized and permanently lose their mother tongue as quickly as within less than two years.
In this paper, we present and evaluate the available information on the campaign affecting children. We build on several different sources: Eyewitness account and testimonies; Chinese social media where guards post images and video; Chinese official statements justifying and detailing government actions and institutions, and more. We also contextualize this current program as part of the wider forced-assimilation program (the erasure of cultural and religious heritage, and so on) affecting the whole of society of Uyghur and other Turkic people in East Turkistan the concurrent larger shift towards de-recognition and erasure of them; and in the distinctively settler-colonial setting of China’s Western peripheries.
In this paper, we present and evaluate the available information on the campaign affecting children. We build on several different sources: Eyewitness account and testimonies; Chinese social media where guards post images and video; Chinese official statements justifying and detailing government actions and institutions, and more. We also contextualize this current program as part of the wider forced-assimilation program (the erasure of cultural and religious heritage, and so on) affecting the whole of society of Uyghur and other Turkic people in East Turkistan the concurrent larger shift towards de-recognition and erasure of them; and in the distinctively settler-colonial setting of China’s Western peripheries.
