The campaign echoes past policies in Canada, the United States and Australia that took indigenous children Online Cigarettes Store USA from their families and placed them in residential schools to forcibly assimilate them.
“The big difference in China is the scale and how systematic it is,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado who studies Uighur culture and society.
Public discussion in China of the trauma inflicted on Uighur children by separating them from their families is rare. References on social media are usually quickly censored. Instead, the state-controlled news media focuses on the party’s goals in the region, where predominantly Muslim minorities make up more than half the population of 25 million.
Visiting a kindergarten near the frontier city of Kashgar this month, Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official in Xinjiang, urged teachers to ensure children learn to “love the party, love the motherland and love the people.”Abdurahman Tohti left Xinjiang and immigrated to Turkey in 2013, leaving behind cotton Newport 100s Box farming to sell used cars in Istanbul. But when his wife and two young children returned to China for a visit a few years ago, they disappeared.
He heard that his wife was sent to prison, like many Uighurs who have traveled abroad and returned to China. His parents were detained too. The fate of his children, though, was a mystery.
Then in January, he spotted his 4-year-old son in a video on Chinese social media that had apparently been recorded Cheap Newport 100s cigarettes by a teacher. The boy seemed to be at a state-run boarding school and was speaking Chinese, a language his family did not use.
Tohti, 30, said he was excited to see the child and relieved he was safe — but also gripped by desperation.