‘You Will Go to a Worse Place Than This’: Muslim Uighurs Conscripted into China’s Communist Schools, Report Reveals
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – China’s Communist thought transformation camps were recently exposed in a BBC report that toured one of the facilities where more than a million Uighur Muslims have been imprisoned.
“Students” of the “school” were bright and peppy for the cameras, saying the uniformed academy for adults where students practice Mandarin by rote till 8 pm and write devotional lyrics to the Communist Party of China was completely voluntary.
One Uighur woman who had escaped to Kazakhstan for asylum told a different story to BBC reporter John Sudworth, however.
“If any of you speak out, you will go to a worse place than this,” she had reportedly been told by officials before another, similar tour by Western media.
The school’s curriculum, into which one Uighur Muslim woman was conscripted for as little as having WhatsApp on her phone, teaches a 2 to 4 month course on “how to make a bed,” and apparently intends to drill “religious extremist” thoughts out of the heads of the predominantly Muslim ethnic group of China’s western Xinjiang region.
An officer from the Xinjiang Foreign Affairs Office told reporters that the inmates or students had been adjudged “pre-criminals” by Chinese jurisprudence, which now seeks to punish crime before it happens in a philosophy reminiscent of the movie “Minority Report.”
“Some people before they commit murder already show they’re capable of killing,” Zhang Zhisheng, the Xinjiang official, told the BBC. “Should we wait for them to commit the crime? Or should we prevent it from happening?”
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), in its annual report for 2019 released in April, highlighted the Chinese detention of between 800,000 and 2 million ethnic Uighur Muslims, noting that in the commission’s first-ever report in 2000 Uighurs were still being “imprisoned for their religious belief, association or practice.”