LogFAQs > #930257885

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family? Theyre in a training school set up by the government, the prescribed answer began. If pressed, officials were to tell students that their relatives were not criminals yet could not leave these schools.

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been infected by the virus of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.

Students should be grateful that the authorities had taken their relatives away, the document said.

The line that stands out most in the script, however, may be the model answer for how to respond to students who ask of their detained relatives, Did they commit a crime? The document instructed officials to acknowledge that they had not. It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts, the script said. Freedom is only possible when this virus in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.