Uyghur Language and Boarding Schools in Kashgar, Mandarin Classrooms and Children Raised by the State

Mahmud al-Kashgari, born near Kashgar in the 11th century, wrote the first great dictionary of the Turkic languages and drew the first known map of the Turkic world. He's said to be buried at Opal, about 50 km south-west of the city, in a tomb the Chinese state lists as a national monument. For years a seven-metre statue of him stood there.

It's gone. Satellite images show it was removed some time after November 2019. In 2024 local officials confirmed to Radio Free Asia that it had been demolished. A few months before it came down, a Han professor at Xinjiang University had published an article questioning whether Kashgari was really Uyghur at all.

The monument at Opal in 2015, before it was taken down. Photo: Zossolino, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The language he recorded has been leaving Kashgar's classrooms in the same years.

Mandarin only, from preschool up

In June 2017 officials in Hotan, next door to Kashgar prefecture, banned Uyghur in schools up to secondary level, including on signs and in writing on campus, with severe punishment for "two-faced" teachers who broke the rule. In October 2017 a regional order told schools to lock away Uyghur and Kazakh textbooks. By June 2018 the target was full Chinese-medium teaching for 2.94 million children in grades one to nine.

Then the state went after the people who had written the old Uyghur textbooks. Those books had been approved by the government and used in Xinjiang's schools for about 13 years. In April 2021 a court said they contained separatism and extremism and blamed them for inspiring the 2009 Urumqi riots. Sattar Sawut, the former head of the region's education department, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve. Others got life. The chief editor, Yalqun Rozi, got 15 years. The Han and Hui members of the same editorial boards weren't charged.

The goalposts moved, as one historian put it, and Uyghurs who had done what the state asked went to prison for it.

Kashgar built schools faster than it had children

Government documents analysed by the researcher Adrian Zenz in 2019 show what Kashgar prefecture did next. It had planned 490 new or expanded preschools by 2020. By autumn 2017 it had built 1,152, helped by 767.6 million yuan in central subsidies. In 2016 to 2018 Kashgar admitted between 56 and 84 per cent more children into primary school than it graduated out. From grade four up, boarding became close to compulsory.

In May 2018 the prefecture set aside 60 million yuan a year for children "in difficulty" because their parents were in prison, in custody or in "re-education". That line, in an official budget, admits what Beijing denies elsewhere: the camps left children without parents, and the state took them in.

In Kargilik county in April 2018, 2,000 rural children were moved into a single boarding middle school with room for more than 5,000, on a site about six times the floor area of an average Chinese middle school. Bids for more big boarding schools went out across the prefecture's counties that year. Kargilik is the same county whose Grand Mosque was knocked down the same year.

The state as parent

Beijing calls this bilingual education and poverty relief. Boarding schools give rural children better teachers, it says, children go home at weekends, relatives care for those who need it, and there is no orphan problem. A Xinjiang spokesman told the BBC he had never seen such a case. The BBC had just found one township with more than 400 children who had both parents interned.

In September 2023 three UN special rapporteurs said boarding schools in Xinjiang had grown exponentially, that teaching was almost entirely in Mandarin, that teachers were sanctioned for using Uyghur outside language class, and that the result was forced assimilation.

A child taken into a Mandarin boarding school at nine, while her father sits in a prison, will grow up speaking the state's language, eating the state's food and learning the state's version of who she is. That's the plan, in writing. It doesn't need a camp.

Kashgari wrote his dictionary so the Turkic languages would be remembered. Kashgar's schools are teaching children to forget.