16 01 2025

Orphanage-style boarding schools for Muslim Uyghur children, whose parents were detained by Xinjiang authorities in internment camps since 2017, continue to operate and expand in certain regions.

This development persists despite the Chinese government’s claims that the so-called “re-education camps,” where an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs have been detained, have been shut down.

While the Chinese government maintains that these “re-education centers” were actually “vocational training centers” designed to fight terrorism and extremism by re-educating individuals with suspected radical views, and teaching them Mandarin Chinese, human rights groups, as well as Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims who were detained, have claimed that the facilities were, in fact, detention camps. These camps were used for forced political indoctrination and abuse of detainees.

After mass detentions began around eight years ago, authorities established “Little Angels” schools to house and indoctrinate children whose parents had been detained or imprisoned. Special police officers were assigned to collect these children, working alongside teachers to monitor their psychological and ideological development, while keeping detailed records.

In September 2018, Radio Free Asia reported that nearly 3,000 children from Keriye County, whose parents had been sent to political re-education camps, were being held in two Little Angels schools, according to Uyghur sources.

The mass incarceration of Muslim Uyghurs led to around 500,000 Uyghur children being placed in state-run boarding schools, orphanages, and other institutions under the control of the Chinese government, as detailed in a 2021 report by the Washington-based Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy. The forced transfer of children from one group to another was listed as one of the five acts qualifying as genocide in the report.

The information was delivered in an article from RADIO FREE ASIA

https://www.rfa.org/english/uyghur/2025/01/16/children-boarding-schools