While hundreds of thousands of adults are being detained in giant camps, China has launched a rapid, large-scale campaign to build boarding schools for children. According to the data gathered by BBC which is the most comprehensive evidence to date about what is happening to children in the region, in one township alone more than 400 children have lost not just one but both parents to some form of internment, either in the camps or in prison.
The research is based on publicly available documents and backed up by dozens of interviews with family members overseas.
Records show that alongside the efforts to transform the identity of Xinjiang’s adults, a parallel campaign is being launched to systematically remove children from their roots.
Dozens of people clutching photographs of children, amidst tears, told that they don’t have any clue where their children are and who is looking after them.
In 60 separate interviews, parents and other relatives give details of the disappearance in Xinjiang of more than 100 Uighurs children. Uighurs are the members of Xinjiang’s largest, predominantly Muslim ethnic group. Thousands have come to Turkey to study or to do business, to visit family, or to escape China’s birth control limits and the increasing religious repression.
Over the past three years, China began detaining hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities in giant camps saying the Uighurs are being educated in “vocational training centres” in order to combat violent religious extremism. However, evidence shows that many are being detained for simply expressing their faith – praying or wearing a veil – or for having overseas connections to places like Turkey. Their phone contact has been severed and even speaking to relatives overseas is now too dangerous for those in Xinjiang. A man whose wife has been detained back home, told that he fears some of his eight children may now be in the care of the Chinese state.