Press "Enter" to skip to content

Uyghur teachers caught spreading religious extremism

By Leng Shumei in Global Times, Apr 17, 2017 at  23:03hrs
A top education official from Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has warned teachers to abide by political rules, after catching Uyghur teachers spreading religious extremism.

The three forces of terrorism, separatism and extremism have been spreading extreme thoughts in the region, targeting Uyghur teachers and students and aiming to infiltrate the education system, Perhat Azim, head of Xinjiang’s Education Department, said in an article published on the Xinjiang Daily on Sunday.

Perhat noted they have identified Uyghur teachers who have violated political principles and rules and are “two-faced,” stressing that the fight against separatism in the education system is long-term and complicated, which requires every teacher to observe discipline and firmly resist the three forces.

“Two-faced” teachers refer to those who pretend to support national unity but secretly spread separatism and extremism. Xinjiang’s education system is vital, where extremist and anti-extremist forces have been clashing for a long time,” Xu Jianying, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times, adding that two-faced people is a concept frequently mentioned in Xinjiang’s stability safeguard work.

In February, Xinjiang Party chief Chen Quanguo urged regional officials to take a firm stand and vowed to punish two-faced people severely based on laws and disciplines.

A report published by Zhongguo Jijian Jiancha Bao, a newspaper run by the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection of the Communist Party of China in January 2016, said probes revealed that some officials in Xinjiang were two-faced during the fight against the three forces, some of whom even supported, participated in and secretly organized extreme activists.http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1042911.shtml

Ilham Tohti, a former Uyghur professor at the Minzu University of China, was given a life sentence in September 2014 for separatist activities.

The court said his lectures on the website Uyghur Online contained separatist thought, coerced ethnic students to work for the website and built a criminal syndicate.

Comments are closed.