{"id":1011,"date":"2021-12-24T17:16:09","date_gmt":"2021-12-24T14:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/?p=1011"},"modified":"2021-12-24T17:16:10","modified_gmt":"2021-12-24T14:16:10","slug":"uyghurs-see-assimilation-as-china-touts-investment-in-xinjiang-preschools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/uyghurs-see-assimilation-as-china-touts-investment-in-xinjiang-preschools\/","title":{"rendered":"UYGHURS SEE ASSIMILATION AS CHINA TOUTS INVESTMENT IN XINJIANG PRESCHOOLS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

RFA<\/a>. 21 December 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Below is an article published by RFA<\/a>. Photo:AP.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When China announced this month that it has spent some $63 million in recent years to build or renovate kindergartens in Xinjiang, raising the restive region\u2019s preschool enrollment rate to 98%, Uyghurs saw more reason for concern than for gratitude, analysts from the ethnic minority said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The figures, announced at Dec. 9 news conference in the regional capital Urumqi, in Uyghur eyes are seen as a sign of Beijing\u2019s intensified drive to assimilate the 12 million Uyghurs, replacing their Turkic native language with Chinese and \u201cSinicizing\u201d children at an ever earlier age, exiled Uyghurs said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn recent years, Xinjiang has continuously increased investment in education and carried out educational projects to benefit the residents. Free three-year preschool education covers all rural areas of the region,\u201d the official Xinhua news agency quoted an official named Hellat as saying after unveiling the figures. The official did not give an annual breakdown on school spending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China faces intensifying criticism and sanctions from Western countries over its increasingly repressive policies in the Xinjiang region, Hong Kong, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. Beijing vehemently rejects the criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Chinese government has attempted to evade criticism by announcing that they are allocating hundreds of millions of yuan for this, and saying that they\u2019re doing good things,\u201d said Qelbinur Sidik, who taught at an elementary school in Urumqi for more than 30 years before emigrating to the Netherlands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut in reality, their intent is very clearly and openly to eliminate the identities of our Uyghur children,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August, the Chinese Communist Party issued a directive extending compulsory Mandarin language teaching to preschoolers across the country. Mandarin would supplant minority languages like Uyghur, Mongolian, Tibetan, as well regional Chinese tongues like Sichuanese and Cantonese, as the medium of instruction for children of all ages across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The harder line on ethnic minorities is driven by President Xi Jinping, who told the Central Conference on Ethnic Affairs in Beijing in August that ethnic minority groups must put the interests of the nation first and share a sense of community with the Chinese nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[We] should actively and steadily address the ideological issues that involve ethnic factors, and continue to eradicate poisonous thoughts of ethnic separatism and religious extremism,\u201d Xi was quoted as saying by Xinhua.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous RFA reports have documented Chinese government policies to reduce or eliminate culture and language education in schools in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, causing friction with local communities and prompting protests against the moves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Bilingual education\u2019 policy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The government\u2019s latest action is an acceleration of a long-standing plan by the Chinese government to Sinicize later generations of Uyghurs, Asiye Abdulehed, a Uyghur activist and analyst in the Netherlands, told RFA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the 1950s to the 1980s, this process took the form of establishing Chinese-language classes in elementary and secondary schools and later morphed into \u201cbilingual education\u201d after the 1990s, when the \u201cXinjiang class\u201d boarding school programs were established, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLooking at it now, we can see that these were entirely Sinicized schools under the name of \u2018bilingual education,\u2019\u201d Asiye said. \u201cChildren were separated from their parents and housed in boarding schools.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said the campaign to assimilate Uyghurs at younger ages gathered steam in the form of \u201cspreading national-language education\u201d following the start of a mass detention and internment campaign in 2017 that has seen up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities incarcerated in a network of detention camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we look at what undergirds all of these policies, we can see one commonality, which is that as part of these policies, \u2018bilingual education\u2019 for many years has been and continues to be undertaken with the purpose of separating Uyghurs from their roots, or in other words, of committing genocide, of erasing this people from history,\u201d Asiye said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholars as well as previous RFA reporting have found that thousands of Uyghur children whose parents have been detained have been sent to camps, boarding schools, and orphanages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey have used pleasant-sounding names,\u201d said Qelbinur, who taught Chinese in the camp system for two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor example, they took children away from their homes to boarding schools and orphanages that they called things like \u2018home schools.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Officials there keep the doors locked to ensure that the children are brought up in ways that are creating \u201cabnormalities\u201d in their psychology, Qelbinur said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a sense of separateness, withdrawnness, timidity, and fear in these children,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause they\u2019ve been separated from the warmth and love of their family home, their education, love for their native language, ability to speak their language, and their cultural knowledge, they simply have no way to know about their national identity,\u201d Qelbinur said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn their school education, their ethnic identity is completely eliminated. It\u2019s a very distressing fate,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018An experiment to eliminate Uyghurs\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its Dec. 9 ruling that China\u2019s policies toward Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity, the Uyghur Tribunal in London listed treatment of children and language education among evidence it weighed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChildren as young as a few months were separated from their families and placed in orphanages or state-run boarding schools. In some cases the parents of these children did not know if their children were alive or dead,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe use of the Uyghur language has been punished. Children from an early age have been denied education in their native language and have been punished for the use of it,\u201d read the ruling, which is not binding but has been used as the basis for a lawsuit against China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, the Chinese government made significant investments in education to assimilate Uyghurs, said Erkin Sidick, a Uyghur intellectual and NASA engineer based in California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Chinese government would never just invest 500 million yuan in Uyghur schools in the countryside [because] there are no actual Uyghur schools left [there],\u201d he said.The children are born Uyghurs, but everything in their lives starts in preschool, beginning with the language, which is Chinese,\u201d Erkin said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe can understand the investments the [Chinese government] has made as money spent for an experiment to assimilate Uyghurs, to eliminate them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RFA. 21 December 2021 Below is an article published by RFA. Photo:AP. When China announced this month that it has spent some $63 million in recent years to build or renovate kindergartens in Xinjiang, raising the restive region\u2019s preschool enrollment rate to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1012,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions\/1012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dukva.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}