Eset Sulaiman | Radio Free Asia
[caption id="attachment_4017" align="alignleft" width="300"] Id Kah mosque in Kashgar (Kashi) in the Xinjiang Uygur region in China (Colegota, Wikimedia)[/caption]
Ethnic Uyghur students at a top university in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region are being closely checked for their political and religious views by student informers who report to “political guides” embedded in the university staff, a former school administrator says.
“Student spies are hidden in every classroom, dormitory, and lecture hall,” a former staff member in the president’s office of Xinjiang Normal University told RFA’s Uyghur Service.
“They record students’ debates, arguments, and discussions of sensitive subjects, and sometimes they raise certain topics themselves just to draw out students’ comments and opinions,” RFA’s source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Though the school, which is located in the regional capital Urumqi, educates both ethnic Uyghurs and Han Chinese, informers are increasingly being drawn from the Uyghur student population because university authorities are more interested in the political views of this group, he said.
“Each year, dozens of Uyghur students become the subjects of student spies’ secret reports, with some accused of religious extremism and others labeled as ‘separatists’ or ‘ethnic nationalists,” he said.
Student informers submit their reports to “political guides” who are assigned to each department of the school and operate under the supervision of the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s university branch, the source said, adding that the “guides” also teach political courses at the school.
The student spies are later employed as “guides” themselves, or are sent to their home prefectures after graduating with special recommendations from the Party for promotion in any job they take, the source said.