Report refutes false claim of "forced boarding" in China's Xinjiang

BEIJING, April 30 (Xinhua) -- It is entirely up to students and their parents to decide whether they would choose a boarding school or not, and there is no such thing as "forced boarding," says a report refuting lies about Xinjiang released Friday.

The establishment of boarding schools in Xinjiang has nothing to do with de-radicalization, says the report, titled "Slanderer Adrian Zenz's Xinjiang-related Fallacies Versus the Truth," released by the Xinjiang Development Research Center.

As Xinjiang covers a vast land area, villages and towns are often far apart from each other, creating inconvenience for students to attend school and a heavy burden on parents to pick up their children to and from school, the report explains.

In order to solve this problem, nearly 400 primary and secondary boarding schools were built in Xinjiang as early as the 1980s, it says.

Boarding schools in Xinjiang have never restricted contact between students and their parents, says the report.