‘TASERS, SHOES, TEAR GAS AND TEXTBOOKS’

Xinjiang education centres’ shopping list raises question of their nature

ON state television, the vocational education centre in China’s far west looked like a modern school, where happy students studied Mandarin, brushed up their job skills and pursued hobbies, such as sports and folk dance.

But earlier this year, one of the local government departments in charge of such facilities in Xinjiang’s Hotan prefecture made several purchases that had little to do with education: 2,768 police batons, 550 electric cattle prods, 1,367 pairs of handcuffs and 2,792 cans of pepper spray.

The shopping list was among more than 1,000 procurement requests made by local governments in the Xinjiang region since early 2017 related to the ranging from tenders and budgets to official work reports — shows the centres are run more like jails than schools.

Thousands of guards, equipped with tear gas, Tasers, stun guns and spiked clubs, keep tight control over “students” in facilities ringed with razor wire and infrared cameras, according to the documents.

The centres should “teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a p r i s o n“, s a i d o n e d o c u m e n t , quoting Xinjiang’s party secretary Chen Quanguo.

To build new, better Chinese citizens, another document argued, the centres must first “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins”.

At the end of 2017, “higher authorities” issued directions to standardise the facilities’ operations. New “vocational education and training service management bureaus” were set up, headed by officials experienced in running prisons and detention centres, according to local government websites.

Students would be tested on their knowledge of Mandarin and propaganda on a weekly, monthly and “seasonal” basis, and write regular “self-criticisms”, one bureau wrote in a memo.

They would spend their days “shouting slogans, singing red songs and memorising the Three Character Classic”, it said, referring to an ancient Confucian text.

Their files lodged in a centralised database, students were sorted into categories based on their offences and levels of accomplishment.

Criminals who had completed a prison sentence were released directly into the centres, under the principle of “putting untrustworthy people in a trustworthy place”.

Students who performed well would be allowed to call their families or even visit them in special rooms at the centres.

Officials were ordered to regularly visit students’ families at home to give them “anti-extremism” lessons and check for signs of anger that could harden into opposition to the Communist Party.

While China has rejected estimates that upwards of one million are held in the centres, tender documents hint at huge numbers.

In a one-month period in early 2018, Hotan county’s vocational education bureau, which oversees at least one centre, ordered 194,000 Chinese language practice books.

And 11,310 pairs of shoes.