Beijing calls it schooling. Uyghurs call it separation. In Xinjiang, the Chinese state has transformed classrooms into instruments of ideological control—erasing language, memory, and belief from the youngest minds. Under the banner of “education for poverty alleviation,” hundreds of thousands of Uyghur children are being raised not as inheritors of a culture, but as subjects of obedience.
This is not education. It is engineered amnesia.
The Classroom as a Cage
What once passed for ordinary schooling in Uyghur villages has been replaced by a system of state-run boarding institutions encircled by fences and cameras.
Human Rights Watch documented widespread separation of Uyghur children from their families without parental consent, while UN experts confirmed that these children are placed in facilities where Mandarin Chinese dominates every subject, song, and sign.
Researcher Adrian Zenz found that in several Uyghur-majority townships, government data recorded more than 400 minors with both parents in internment camps. These “orphans of policy” are swept into schools that resemble detention centres—complete with guard towers, biometric checkpoints, and ideological instruction.
The result is a generation growing up in captivity, taught to equate loyalty to the Communist Party with virtue and remembrance of their heritage with shame.
Erasing Language, Rewriting Identity
Language is the foundation of identity—and Beijing understands that better than anyone. In June 2017, the Hotan Prefecture Education Department issued a directive banning the Uyghur language at all levels of education. Uyghur writing, signage, and imagery were removed from schools; Mandarin was to be the sole medium of instruction, beginning with preschool.
Teachers face sanctions for using Uyghur even in casual conversation. The state’s aim is explicit: extinguish linguistic diversity before it reaches adulthood.
UNESCO has long affirmed that children educated in their mother tongue perform better academically and socially. China’s policy does the opposite, systematically dismantling linguistic rights guaranteed under international law. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned that such deprivation of language constitutes a direct assault on cultural identity.
By criminalising expression in Uyghur, Beijing renders an entire people linguistically orphaned—cut off from the words that once defined their prayers, songs, and names.
From Learning to Indoctrination
The educational system is calibrated to produce ideological conformity. Official records show that by early 2017 nearly half a million Uyghur children were already enrolled in state boarding schools. Since 2021, every ethnic-minority kindergarten must use “national standard language,” ensuring Mandarin immersion from the earliest age. Preschool enrolment in Xinjiang now exceeds 98 per cent—a statistic celebrated in state media as progress, but in reality a measure of how thoroughly childhood has been nationalised.
Inside these schools, curricula are infused with Party loyalty. Children sing anthems praising Xi Jinping, study “ethnic unity” lessons portraying Uyghur culture as backward, and recite slogans condemning religious belief as extremism. Surveillance cameras line the classrooms. Emotional expression is monitored; deviation from enthusiasm is treated as disloyalty.
Foreign journalists who gained brief access reported compounds surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. “They looked like prisons,” one recalled, “only smaller inmates.”
For many children, indoctrination is reinforced through punishment. Survivors describe beatings, solitary confinement, and deprivation of food for speaking Uyghur. The Kuchar brothers, detained for nearly twenty months, emerged unable to remember their mother tongue. Their father said seeing them return as strangers felt like “watching them die while still alive.”
Cultural Genocide by Bureaucracy
This educational overhaul is not random; it is administrative precision serving an ideological purpose. Government procurement documents reveal tenders for school complexes equipped with watchtowers, electric fences, and electronic attendance linked to police databases. Curricula include “patriotic transformation courses,” and bureaucrats are given quotas for institutionalising children of detained parents.
The policy’s discriminatory nature is quantifiable. While only around 14 per cent of rural Chinese elementary pupils board, that figure exceeds 79 per cent in Tibet—and continues to rise across Xinjiang. The message is unmistakable: assimilation is for minorities, autonomy for none.
Scholars of linguistics and international law warn that such deliberate destruction of a group’s language, religion, and culture constitutes cultural genocide. Beijing’s defence—framed as counter-extremism—collapses under scrutiny, since the victims are not militants but minors.
Breaking Families to Break Futures
Perhaps the most devastating consequence is familial disintegration.
Thousands of parents detained in “re-education” camps have lost contact with their children. Those living abroad face an impossible choice: remain silent to protect relatives or speak out and risk permanent separation. Passports are confiscated, exit permits withheld.
Inside Xinjiang, parental visits are restricted or denied altogether. Mothers weep outside gates they cannot cross; children inside learn to salute the flag instead of hugging their parents.
One father whose sons forgot their mother tongue after years in boarding school confessed, “It is as if the government has killed them, but kept their bodies walking.”
UN experts have warned that this state-engineered severance “inevitably undermines family and community ties, threatening the very existence of Uyghur cultural identity.”
Beijing’s Defence and the Global Response
Beijing insists that these schools are engines of “poverty reduction” and “anti-terrorism education.” Officials claim parents voluntarily enrol their children to secure better futures. Yet independent investigation reveals coercion through policy design: village schools teaching in Uyghur have been shut down, leaving no alternative but state boarding facilities.
International reactions remain muted. Occasional condemnations by UN bodies and Western parliaments have not translated into tangible action. Meanwhile, China continues to expand the network of “child welfare” institutions even as some adult camps rebrand themselves as vocational centres.
The international community’s failure to intervene normalises a grim precedent—where authoritarian regimes can weaponise childhood under the guise of modernisation.
The Silent Trauma
The psychological toll remains largely undocumented, but testimonies that emerge describe lasting trauma. Survivors recall being forced to denounce their faith, memorise Xi Jinping’s speeches, and inform on peers. Some witnessed torture; others attempted suicide.
Beyond the individual suffering lies a collective wound: an entire generation of Uyghur children growing up without the vocabulary of belonging. They will become adults fluent in Mandarin but estranged from the stories, prayers, and poems that once defined their identity.
This is how genocide perpetuates itself—not through bullets, but through syllables replaced, memories rewritten, and mothers silenced.
Education Turned Against Itself
Education should liberate minds. In Xinjiang, it imprisons them.
The transformation of classrooms into indoctrination centres exposes the logic of China’s project: control begins not with the dissident but with the child. By shaping consciousness early, Beijing ensures obedience long after the camps close.
For the Uyghur people, survival now depends on memory. Every banned lullaby sung in exile, every lesson taught in secret, every word preserved in a fading script becomes an act of defiance.
What China calls “schooling” is in truth the quietest form of violence—a war on memory waged in the alphabet of another’s tongue.