Uighur pickpocket gang

This is, another untold story, of the modern China (I have previously addressed the other untold story: the Wenzhou people).

Any normal Chinese who lives in any of the major cities in China would tell you that such thing is an open secret, an inconvenient truth for the Chinese.

The Uighur are heartless enough to abduct their own kids of 5~10 years old, unanimously ethnically Uighur from the Southern Tarim Basin, smuggle them to the rest of China in the number of hundred and thousand, and force them to become the little pickpockets on the street. I remember 10 years ago while I was still in China the Uighur pickpocket gangs were already widely spread and deeply rooted all over big cities in China, stretching from the hard-core cold-winter Harbin to the subtropical-never-snow Guangzhou. The little kids are usually mistreated, physically abused by the adults so that they could timidly obey to the adults, who usually stay in the shadow to remote control their theft on the street. It’s  an open secret because nobody would want to be bothered with such sensitive issues. People usually chose to ignore them as they are clearly minority on the street, not to mention the pickpockets are usually little kids. Police would never want to make a big deal out of it either. The news media has never (in my memory, never) mentioned the existence of such problems in my city, Changsha, at that time, even though they were everywhere and everyone knew about them. To them, minority crime is always a hot issue that no one would like to touch. At the same time, it has been an incontrovertibly inconvenient truth in China for years. As far as I know, the polices did try to get the kids on the street. But since they were minorities and underage children, they would be soon freed. And the adults are usually off the hook because it’s difficult to get them with solid evidence. Every time the police put the kids on the train to Xinjiang those adults would simply bring them back to other provinces again. It goes on and on, never ending…

I have written an article about my personal experience with the Uighur pickpocket gang many years ago. As much as I am not a big fan of the rabbit-style fertility and religious fanaticism of the Muslim Uighur, I very much sympathize with the misfortune of those children. Today I heard a piece of very inspiring news: 1,332 Xinjiang children rescued from criminals. It seems that Chinese government is gaining confident in bringing the issue out of water to all and publicly admitting its existence and addressing it determinedly subsequently. I remember there was rumor back then that the highly organized Uighur pickpocket gang was somehow related to the Uighur separatists. The profit from such petty crimes must be very lucrative. Oh well, there is every reason to stop them from doing so. Enough said. Just one last suggestion. Instead of giving those kids back to the ignorant Uighur parents who have excessive kids to be abducted and little money to feed them, it’s better to put them for adoption. That’d be a good start to sinicize the Turks.