By GAO Tongtong

For some time now, the U.S. and other Western countries have deliberately hyped up boarding schools in Xinjiang, created a fabrication that "the autonomous region forces ethnic minority children to attend boarding schools, resulting in the separation of flesh and blood," and made groundless accusations that "schools in Xinjiang obliterate languages and cultures of ethnic minorities."

In fact, boarding education in Xinjiang is a crystallization of the Chinese government's efforts to protect the right to education for people of all ethnic groups. It is fundamentally different from Western colonial education.

Western colonial education refers to assimilative schooling imposed by Western colonizers to serve their interests. Through "brainwashing" the colonized, Western colonizers forced them to accept the reality of being colonized. Since 2021, the discovery of mass graves and remains at former indigenous residential schools in Canada has again exposed the evil deeds of Western colonial education.

Take North America as an example. To control indigenous peoples' lands and resources, colonizers in the U.S. and Canada established numerous residential schools starting in the 19th century. They forced indigenous children to attend these schools and prevented them from speaking their native languages, aggressively wiping out their identity and cultural belonging.

In contrast, Xinjiang's boarding education is fundamentally different because it is not for assimilation and does not share features of Western colonial education.

The relationship between the Chinese central government and the local Xinjiang government is internal, not colonial. Xinjiang was formally included in Chinese territory in the Han Dynasty 2000 years ago. Later dynasties in central China, some strong, some weak, kept closer or looser contact with the Western Regions, and the central authorities exercised tighter or slacker administration over Xinjiang. But all these dynasties regarded the Western Regions as part of Chinese territory and exercised the right of jurisdiction over Xinjiang. Xinjiang's boarding education system is unlike that of Western colonizers, who touted themselves as "civilized" out of a sense of superiority and oppressed indigenous peoples in the disguise of "education."

Xinjiang's boarding education is a measure of the Chinese Government to guarantee the right to education for all.

Education builds the foundation for people's well-rounded development and the development of a country or an ethnic group. Education is a right that should be enjoyed by all, and anyone should have fair access to education and the right to change their life by receiving education, regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, profession, financial status, or religious belief.

The Chinese government has shown strong support for Xinjiang's education in the past 50 years, bringing the benefits of development to people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang in a fairer way. In 2020, Xinjiang's gross enrollment rate of preschools reached 98.19 percent; its nine-year compulsory education retention rate hit 95.69 percent; its gross enrollment rate of high schools stood at 98.87 percent. The education for people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang has reached its best level in history in terms of enrollment.

The achievements are, to some extent, related to the boarding education system. Xinjiang covers an area of more than 1.66 million square kilometers, roughly one-sixth of the land territory of China. The distance between villages and towns is far, so it is inconvenient for students to go to school, and it gives parents a hard job to pick up their children to and from school. Xinjiang has built nearly 400 boarding primary and middle schools since the 1980s to enable children in remote areas to access quality education. For instance, Xuesong Middle School, a boarding school with an investment of 120 million yuan (about $16.7 million) in Akto county, Xinjiang, helped many children from remote pastoral areas in the Kunlun Mountains solve the problem of traveling long distances to get to school.

At the same time, the government fully covers the operating expenses of boarding schools. In the stage of compulsory education, students in boarding schools are free of tuition and textbook fees, like students in other schools, and enjoy other favorable policies, effectively reducing the financial burden on students' families. Therefore, the boarding school education system is an effective measure implemented in Xinjiang based on geographical considerations to provide all children with the opportunity to receive modern education.

Xinjiang respects and protects the right of students of all ethnic groups to receive education in their languages. Unswervingly advancing bilingual education, it has established and improved the universal bilingual education system from kindergarten to the end of high school and enhanced the quality of bilingual teaching.

The number of bilingual classes at the Central Primary School of Tokkuzak town, Shufu county in Kashgar, increased from 12 in the past to 15 in 2018, and the school teachers teach in both Uygur and Mandarin. It's not a rare case in Xinjiang.

In addition, boarding schools in Xinjiang also organize colorful activities for students. In 2022, a joint team of 27 media outlets from both sides of the Taiwan Strait visited the No. 1 Middle School at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains in Tekes County, Xinjiang. Footage from these media outlets showed that students of the Kazakh ethnic group in traditional costumes played Dombra, a traditional musical instrument, and students of the Mongolian ethnic group learned Mongolian embroidery at the school.

These cases confirm that students of all ethnic groups in boarding schools in Xinjiang enjoy the freedom to speak their native languages, wear their traditional clothes and carry out traditional activities.

However, the U.S. and other Western countries ignored these facts out of their ideological prejudice and geopolitical strategies. They smeared the boarding education system in Xinjiang, trying to mislead the public with the concept of colonial education.

Neglecting its deep-rooted problems in education, the U.S. spares no effort to attack Xinjiang's boarding education system in the name of the so-called "human rights." It fully reveals the country's vicious intention to destabilize Xinjiang and contain other countries' development with its hegemony.

Education is closely related to whether a family can succeed. It also decides the rise and fall of a country or an ethnic group. The world today is still facing a severe education crisis. A 2022 UNESCO report said that 244 million children and youth between 6 and 18 worldwide were still out of school. Therefore, the U.S. and other Western countries should abandon ideological prejudice and make more efforts together with other countries to ensure that their people have access to education and bring achievements of educational development to all people around the world.

The author is Research Fellow with the Institute for Communication and Borderland Governance, Jinan University.