China fights back on Xinjiang narrative

Parents waiting for their children from a school in Hotan, in China's Xinjiang province. - ST/ANN

BEIJING: Chinese state media outlets have come out in full-throated condemnation of the latest foreign reporting on detentions in Xinjiang, as Beijing tries to wrest control of the media narrative on its policy to build re-education camps, which it calls vocational training centres, in its far-western region.

Both its English and Chinese-language outlets ran prominent stories over the weekend to rebut a New York Times article last Saturday (Dec 28) that said the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had placed nearly half a million children from the region into boarding schools to "assimilate and indoctrinate" them from an early age".