Break Their Roots: Evidence for China’s Parent-Child Separation Campaign in Xinjiang
July 01, 2019Government documents provide clear evidence that there are large numbers of children with one or both parents in some form of internment. These documents specifically refer to “couples where both partners are detained in re-education” (夫妻双方被收教), or “couples where both partners are in vocational training center” (夫妻双方在教培中心).
From early 2018, the state began to issue urgent directives on how to deal with the virtually orphaned children of single or “double-detained” parents, be it through special care institutions or the regular education system. Local governments began to require schools to provide one-on-one “psychological counseling” and to proactively scan the state of mind of students with parents in detention in order to preempt trouble . . . Other evidence shows that schools have developed “emergency response plans” that include dealing with students with detained parents in a timely and effective manner in order to prevent violent incidents.
Government data shows that just in one particular township . . . well over 400 minors have both parents in some form of internment, with many others having one parent interned. Children whose parents are in prison, detention, re-education or “training” are classified into a special needs category that is eligible for state subsidies and for receiving “centralized care.” This “care” can take place in public boarding schools or in special children’s shelters.
The young teacher wrote that these Uyghur children were in an extremely pitiful state, wearing thin clothes despite freezing December weather. The classroom was filled with an unbearable stench because the children neither washed nor changed their clothes.
In addition, the government has issued propaganda pieces that argue that the children of detained parents derive significant benefits from this separation, that both parents and children need to “study”, or that the “left-behind children” of parents who “work” are “happily growing up under the loving care of the Party and the government.”
“The combined available evidence tells a story of the state’s dramatic race against time to create a vast and multi-layered care system that enables it to provide full-time or near full-time care for all children from a very young age (in several instances for infants that are only a few months old). In some Uyghur majority population regions in southern Xinjiang, preschool enrolment more than quadrupled in recent years, exceeding the average national enrolment growth rate by over 12 times.”