China running boarding schools, not concentration camps, in Muslim province: Official

Dismissing international criticism about the camps and targeting of the Muslim Uyghur community, chairperson Shohrat Zakir said the camps would gradually disappear when they are no longer needed.

There’s a new name for the official “vocational training centres” in Xinjiang where hundreds of thousands of Muslims are interred to apparently learn livelihood skills and patriotism – “boarding schools”.

Governor Zakir, the region’s most senior Uighur official who ranks below Chen, said that there had not been any violent attacks in more than two years and three months since the government adopted “a series of measures” to combat terror and extremism. (Reuters file photo)

China is running “boarding schools” not concentration camps in the province, its chairperson, Shohrat Zakir said on the sidelines of the ongoing annual Parliament session in Beijing on Tuesday.

Dismissing international criticism about the camps and targeting of the Muslim Uyghur community, Zakir said the camps would gradually disappear when they are no longer needed.

“Our education and training centres have been set up according to our needs. The students that come in to learn, it’s a dynamic number that changes,” Zakir, the chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government said.

“They are the same as boarding schools,” he said.

“As a whole, the number of people in the education centres should be less and less, and if one day society no longer needs it, these education centres can gradually disappear,” he said.

Zakir did not provide the number of people at the facilities.

He added that the fight was against separatism and extremism.

“Fighting separatism and extremism is a long-term battle. We can’t relax for a moment,” he said, adding: “It does not target a certain ethnic group or religion, but targets violence and crime, separatism and extremism”.

According to Reuters, the US government has weighed sanctions against senior Chinese officials in Xinjiang, including on the Communist Party of China (CPC) boss, Chen Quanguo, who as a member of the powerful politburo is in the upper echelons of China’s leadership.

Governor Zakir, the region’s most senior Uighur official who ranks below Chen, said that there had not been any violent attacks in more than two years and three months since the government adopted “a series of measures” to combat terror and extremism.

The XUAR is China’s largest province and shares a border with several countries including India; it contains the disputed territory of Aksai Chin, administered by China but claimed by India.

The province has experienced violent unrest for several years, which Beijing says is incited and orchestrated by separatists and foreign-trained terrorists.

A massive security crackdown has been carried out in the region in the past couple of years.

Uyghur rights groups argue that the violence is a result of spontaneous outbursts of anger at Beijing’s hardline policies in the region, its efforts to force majority Han culture and language on the local Muslim communities and lack of religious freedom.

The architect of the security apparatus in Xinjiang is said to be Party secretary, Chen, who was earlier the Party chief of Tibet.

“During his (Chen) five years in Tibet, he restored stability through the construction a sophisticated network of surveillance and control. After being transferred to the XUAR in August 2016, he quickly rolled out the same securitisation strategy, accomplishing in a single year what took him five years in the TAR,” the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief wrote about him