Mass Detention and Forced Assimilation of Uyghur Children in China1
By Magnus Fiskesjö and Rukiye Turdush
One of history’s largest operations to confiscate children to force-assimilate them, is currently under way in China’s colonized territories. Organized by the Chinese government, this massive campaign forms part of a set of measures targeting twelve to fifteen million ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic ethnicities who live in East Turkistan. This is a new, massive campaign launched in 2017, but it has roots in China’s settler-colonialist policies since 1949, and before. 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.
1 This article was co-written by the authors in conjunction with the symposium on “Uyghur Children in China’s Genocide,” which they organized at Cornell University, Oct. 27, 2023. A full video recording of the symposium is available here: https://www.cornell.edu/video/uyghur-children-symposium-2023
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