Ethnic Uyghurs from Turkey who went to study in China's Xinjiang's Province have recalled physical and mental torment during their stay there.
Two ethnically Uyghur children say that their heads were shaved and that the class monitor and teachers frequently hit them, locked them up in dark rooms and forced them to hold stress positions as punishment for perceived transgressions, according to National Public Radio.
By the time they were able to return home to Turkey in December 2019, they had become malnourished and traumatized. They had also forgotten how to speak their mother tongues, Uyghur and Turkish. (The children were being raised in Turkey but were forcibly sent to boarding schools during a family visit to China, as noted by National Public Radio.
Meanwhile, since 2017 authorities in China's Xinjiang have rounded up hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority group, and sent them to detention centres where they are taught Mandarin Chinese and Chinese political ideology.
Further, camp detainees have reported being forced to work in factories during their detention or after they are released. The children of those detained or arrested are often sent to state boarding schools, even when relatives are willing to take them in.
Experts say this is part of Chinese authorities' efforts to mould 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," he added.
These family separations have contributed to a slow erasure of the Uyghur language and culture in China, experts say one of the reasons officials in the US, Canada, France, the Netherlands and other countries have declared that China's policies in Xinjiang amount to genocide, as analyzed by National Public Radio.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government closely guards information about Xinjiang's treatment of ethnic minorities by refusing to issue Uyghurs passports, arresting those who leak documents or give interviews to journalists and threatening loved ones who remain in China.
Also, Chinese authorities had been disproportionately arresting Uyghurs for years following deadly ethnic violence between the minority group and Han people in Xinjiang in 2009. Sporadic terrorist attacks in the region also picked up, violence that Beijing blamed on Uyghur separatist fighters and that authorities used to justify tightening scrutiny of Uyghur residents.
Further, Xinjiang quickly began constructing a sprawling network of detention camps and started expanding existing prisons. At least hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other historically Muslim ethnic minorities were sent to such "transformation through education" camps to study Chinese political ideology and the Chinese language, despite having no criminal record. In some of these facilities, Uyghurs also reported being mentally and physically tortured and the women sterilized.
China has placed more central control over education after regional authorities blamed seditious textbooks and faulty curricula for radicalizing Uyghur students toward violent extremism. Last April, a Xinjiang court sentenced to death one of the region's former top education officials whereas Uyghurs and researchers say the accusation about radicalization in schools is false, as noted by National Public Radio.
( With inputs from ANI )
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