‘Our souls are dead’: how I survived a Chinese ‘re-education’ camp for Uyghurs

Upon reading Charlotte Goodburn’s arcticle and learning about the discriminatory practices used in China’s state school system, I wanted to further explore this country’s educational practices. I came across an article about a much more intense form of minority discrimination, which the Chinese government has coined the “re-education” of Uyghurs. 

The Uyghur population is a minority group from the Xinjiang region annexed in 1955 (Haitiwaji & Morgat, 2021). Since then, the Uyghurs have been discriminated against based on views of the Han majority (Haitiwaji & Morgat, 2021). To control the Uyghur population, the Han-run Chinese government has created “re-education” programs. This article details one woman’s experience in this “program,” which should be reclassified as a “camp.”

Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a member of the Uyghur minority, fled to France with her family in 2006. Ten years later, Haitiwaji was called and asked to return to China to sign certain documents. Upon returning, she was imprisoned for five months and then moved to a re-education “school” in the Baijiantan district. While there, she was forced to do unimaginable things:

We were ordered to deny who we were. To spit on our own traditions, our beliefs. […] I was held in Baijiantan for two years. During that time, everyone around me […] tried to make me believe […] that [Uyghurs] are terrorists.

(Haitiwaji & Morgat, 2021)

Learning about these “re-education” camps is horrifying, especially because this has all happened within the past six years. Although not as extreme, the contents of Goodburn’s article mirror a similar phenomenon for migrant children in Beijing. These children are discriminated against simply because of their rural background. The hukou system from the 1950s has continued to create “a ‘caste-like system of social stratification’ between urbanites and rural peasants,” (Goodburn, 2009, p.495) excluding migrant children from state schools. This discrimination “is fundamental to shaping the lives, and particularly the educational experiences, of migrant children in urban areas” (Goodburn, 2009, p.496), which connects to the Uyghur population’s experiences.

References:

Goodburn, C. (2009). Learning from migrant education: A case study of the schooling of rural
migrant children in Beijing. International Journal of Educational Development, 20(5),
495-504.

Haitiwaji, G. & Morgat, R. (2021, January 2021). ‘Our soles are dead’: how I survived a Chinese
‘re-education’ camp for Uyghurs. The Guardian.