The disturbing truth is that the Chinese Communist Party does not fundamentally object to the policies that led to the abuses at the residential schools. Their own policies in Xinjiang and Tibet violate the rights of minorities and are rooted in an imperative to imprint Han Chinese culture onto resistant ethnic nationalities. Just as the stated objective of the residential schools in Canada — as well as that of counterparts in the United States and Australia — was to “civilize” native peoples and help them conform to the dominant culture, so too have the CCP’s “modernization” and “poverty alleviation” efforts in Tibetan, Uyghur, and other minority areas sought to fundamentally alter the local culture in the name of Han-defined progress.
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