Australian native language school teachers: "We reported to the government that we were under Chinese pressure!"

On February 28, the Uighur Mother Tongue School in Victoria, Australia issued a statement on behalf of the school, saying that the school and the teachers working as volunteers at the school are facing various slanders and pressures from China. The statement also mentions that the cases have been reported to the Victorian State Department of Education, prompting a backlash on social media after the statement was released.

The statement said that since 2023, with the increase of Uyghurs returning home from China with visas, defamatory attacks on mother-tongue schools have increased. Some of the responses to them said that the Chinese police asked Uyghurs who returned to their hometowns to find out whether they had a history of teaching in their mother tongue schools, whether their children attended a mother tongue school or not.

Ms. Nadira, director of the Victoria Mother Tongue School, said that the slanderous attacks on the school have intensified since July-August last year. He said that among the teachers who are working as volunteers in their school, there are no teachers who have returned from China with visas. However, false information spread on social media about "Chinese police arresting those who teach in mother-tongue schools", as well as online attacks on the privacy of teachers in mother-tongue schools, have caused mental anxiety and stress to teachers working in schools. Therefore, they responded to such situations to the Education Bureau and other institutions.

 Ms. Nadira said that after they told the Uyghur community in an online statement that they had reported the situation to the Victorian State Board of Education in Melbourne, Uyghur faced mixed reactions on social media. The director of "South Australian Mother Tongue School" in Adelaide, Australia, Mrs. Sharat Teyupjan, received our interview in this regard. He said some of the school's teachers were forced to resign due to peer pressure from the Chinese government and online attacks on teachers' privacy by unknown individuals.

 According to Ms. Staroch, online attacks of defamation and threats against Uighur mother tongue schools in Australia have been going on for years. But anonymous cyber attacks on the privacy of school teachers have intensified since the Chinese government began issuing visas to Uighurs abroad.

He said four teachers from their school recently resigned due to cyber attacks and other pressures from the Chinese government so far. They also reported these situations to local education bureaus and other units.

It turns out that since the Chinese government's campaign to "tell good stories about Xinjiang" has intensified, the "trust policies" such as granting visas to some Uighurs abroad have quickly triggered a wave of "abstention from politics" in the diaspora. At the same time, due to the rumors that some Uyghurs secretly took visas to visit their homeland, various rumors about this have recently started to take place on various Internet sites.