The Chinese government is taking draconian steps to reduce birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a radical campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.
While women have talked about forced birth control before, the practice is much more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to AP research based on government statistics, state documents, and interviews with 30 former detainees, family members. and an old arrest. camp instructor The campaign for the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts call a form of “demographic genocide.”
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy tests and forces hundreds of thousands of intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion, interviews and data show. Even though IUD use and sterilization has decreased across the country, it is increasing considerably in Xinjiang.
Population control measures are backed by mass detention, both as a threat and as a punishment for non-compliance. According to the AP, having what is considered too many children is one of the main reasons people are sent to detention camps, with parents of three or more people ripped from their families unless they can pay large fines.
After Gulnar Omirzakh, a Chinese-born Kazakh, had her third child, the government ordered her to have an IUD inserted. Two years later, in January 2018, four officers in military camouflage knocked on his door anyway. Omirzakh, the penniless wife of a detained vegetable merchant, was given three days to pay a fine of $ 2,685 for having more than two children.
They warned that if she did not, she would join her husband and a million other ethnic minorities locked up in internment camps, often for having too many children.
“Preventing people from having children is wrong,” said Omirzakh, who went into great debt to raise the money and then fled to Kazakhstan. “They want to destroy us as a people.”
Birth rates in the largely Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plummeted by more than 60% between 2015 and 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. The hundreds of millions of dollars the government invests in contraceptives have transformed Xinjiang from one of China’s fastest-growing regions to one of the slowest in just a few years, according to new research obtained by the Associated Press before the publication by a scholar from China. Adrian Zenz.
“This is part of a broader control campaign to subjugate the Uighurs,” said Zenz, an independent contractor for the nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC
The Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Xinjiang government did not respond to multiple requests for comment. However, Beijing has said in the past that the new measures are intended to be fair, allowing ethnic and Chinese minorities Han the same number of children.
Under the abandoned “one child” policy in China, authorities had long encouraged, sometimes forced, contraception, sterilization, and abortion in the Han Chinese. But minorities were allowed two children, three if they came from the countryside. .
That changed under President Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades. Shortly after coming to power, the government revised the birth rules so that the Han Chinese in Xinjiang could have two or three children, as well as minorities.
While they are the same on paper, in practice, the Han Chinese largely escape abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions, and arrests for having too many children who are forced into other ethnicities, interviews, and data from Xinjiang. Some rural Muslims, such as Omirzakh, were even punished for having all three children allowed by law.
Fifteen Uighurs and Kazakhs told the AP that they knew people interned or imprisoned for having too many children. Many received years, even decades in prison.
Once in detention camps, women undergo forced IUDs and what appear to be vaccines to prevent pregnancy, interviews and data show.
A former detainee, Tursunay Ziyawudun, said she was injected until her period stopped, and she was repeatedly kicked in the lower stomach during interrogation. She is now unable to have children and often bends over in pain, bleeding from her uterus, she said. Ziyawudun said the women in her camp were forced to undergo gynecological exams and obtain an IUD, and her “teacher” told them they would face abortions if they found them pregnant.
In 2014, just over 200,000 IUDs were inserted in Xinjiang. By 2018, that increased more than 60% to almost 330,000 IUDs. At the same time, the use of the IUD was drastically reduced in other parts of China, as many women began removing the devices.
Chinese health statistics also show a sterilization boom in Xinjiang.
Budget documents obtained by Zenz show that starting in 2016, the Xinjiang government began to inject tens of millions of dollars into a contraceptive surgery program. Despite sterilization rates plummeting in the rest of the country, they increased seven-fold in Xinjiang from 2016-18, to more than 60,000 procedures.
Zumret Dawut, a Uyghur mother of three children, said that after her release from a camp in 2018, authorities forced her to be sterilized. If she did not, they told her they would send her back to camp.
“I was so angry,” she said. “I wanted another child.”
The birth control campaign is fueled by government concerns that high birth rates among Muslims lead to poverty and extremism in Xinjiang, an arid and landlocked region that has struggled in recent years with knives and bombings attributed to Islamic terrorists. Although the program adopts tactics from China’s one-child policy, the campaign in Xinjiang differs in that it is ethnically directed.
“The intention may not be to completely eliminate the Uighur population, but it will dramatically decrease their vitality, making them easier to assimilate,” said Darren Byler, an expert on Uighurs at the University of Colorado.
Some experts take it a step further.
“It is genocide, full stop,” said Uighur expert Joanne Smith Finley, who works at Newcastle University in the UK. “It is not an immediate, shocking, mass murder genocide, but it is a slow, painful and progressive genocide.”
