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Before mass internment camps, before schools for orphaned kids, before forced labour factories, Chinese authorities came for the authors of Uighur-language school books. On how language, education and culture are at the core of China's Xinjiang crackdown: ft.com/content/485081…
Earlier this year, when I started reporting on cultural restrictions on Uighurs in Xinjiang, I heard a lot about a case of textbooks that the authorities had deemed "problematic," leading to the arrest of dozens of Uighur intellectuals. 1/
@KYalqun told me the story of his father, the essayist Yalqun Rozi, who had been jailed for 15 years over his role writing the textbooks. The charge was "made-up nonsense," Kamalturk said, because his father knew getting involve in politics was "suicide." 2/
Eset Sulaiman, a Uighur writer involved in the process who now live in the US, explained that the compilers had responded to a gov't request for better texts by using more Uighur sources in the hope of ensuring a sense of Uighur cultural identity for generations to come. 3/
@AbduwelA, who knows many of those involved and is familiar with the textbook content, suggested it was not Uighur content that led to them being considered "problematic" but the international content:"Uighurs rarely wrote about freedom. Who can write about freedom in China?" 4/
That international content, Abduveli recalls, included Martin Lurther King's I Have a Dream speech and Hungarian Poet Sándor Petőfi's National Song: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemzeti_d… (I was unable to find any copies of the textbooks. It seems that most, if not all, were destroyed.) 5/
From reporting by RFA's Shohret Hoshur, I knew that a propaganda film had been made about the case and was being shown to students, teachers and government officials at the start of the 2018 school term in Xinjiang. So I started fishing around for a copy. 6/
Online, there were only reports about study sessions of the "cautionary documentary" called The Plot Inside the Textbooks 教科书里的阴谋 and also some cookie-cutter documents on how to "review" the film during a study session. (Pictures below from one of those sessions.) 7/ 
Months in, I was lucky enough to get hold of a scratchy audio recording of the film. The person who made it did so in secret and sent it outside China at huge personal risk, so I won't share it here, but key sections follow. (If you really need a copy, let me know.) 8/
A few lines describing the crimes (in Chinese): 根据国家规定，少数民族教材中中国主流文化占百分之六十，新疆地方内容占百分之三十 ，外国文学占百分之十。在沙塔尔沙吾提的一再授意下，阿里木江买买提明，阿布都热扎克·沙依木等人擅自改变了教材比例。。。9/
其中，新疆地方内容被扩大到百分之六十，中华主流文化仅占百分之二十， 外国文学占百分之二十。而他们则打着民族文化的旗号，在这百分之六十的内容中大做文章。从小学二年级到五年级近二十万字语文教材中，“中国”仅出现了四次。通篇充斥着“突厥”、“伊斯兰”等双泛思想内容。10/
(The above section essentially says that the crime was a matter of percentages and keyword counts, as well as accusing the authors of including content about Turks and Islam. Apparently this is criminal in textbooks for young Turkic Uighurs, most of whom are Muslims...) 11/
The film of course also includes "confessions" from compilers, including lines like: 我知道教材里有大量宣扬双泛主义思想... 我还是批准将问题教材大量出版 12/
Logic is spelled out for why teaching Uighur children about their own culture is considered so heinous a crime: They are being poisoned with the wrong values: 使许多中小学维吾尔中小学生受到严重毒害，从而造成思想混乱和形成错误的价值导向及是非标准，所犯下的滔天罪行贻害无穷。13/
Towards the end, there is a rallying call to fight the "conflict without smoke" against separatism in schools: 学校作为意识形态反分裂斗争的主阵地 ，分裂与反分裂斗争是长期的、复返的、尖锐的、有时甚至是十分激烈的，是一场没有硝烟的战争。14/
(Note, China nerds, that this film is made by the anti-graft authorities. Yalqun Rozi is not a party member and the crimes listed in the film, with one or two exceptions, are not economic crimes.) 15/
To me (and of course I'm biased), this documentary is one of the clearest pieces of evidence so far that the Chinese Communist Party essentially has zero-tolerance to any form of substantive cultural promotion by Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang. 16/
An attempt to instill a basic understanding in young Uighurs of who they are and where they came from has landed dozens in camps or jail. If that is now the norm, then what will remain of Uighur culture, other than dance, dress and food, commodified for tourist consumption? ENDS
