The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly imposed forced birth control, sterilizations, and even abortions upon its Uighur population in a race-based effort to cut the minority Muslim population in the country.
An analysis by the Associated Press found that Beijing is imposing “draconian measures to slash birth rates” among Uighur Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities “as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population” while the Chinese government “encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.”
The investigation, citing Chinese government records and interviews with more than two dozen former detainees and family members, found that forced birth control “is far more widespread and systematic than previously known.” The report cited experts who called the Chinese effort in Xinjiang a type of “demographic genocide.”
Since 2017, as many as 2 million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities have been moved into reeducation and detention camps, often referred to as concentration camps, in the western Xinjiang province of China. There, Uighurs are allegedly put through rigorous “deradicalization” programs and are mocked and tortured by Chinese guards. But the camps are just one part of wide-scale surveillance and oppression inflicted upon China’s Uighur population.
“The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang,” the Associated Press concluded. “The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps … with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.”
This report came a week after White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien delivered a lengthy speech condemning the Chinese Communist Party as the would-be successor to other repressive communist regimes.
“Let us be clear, the Chinese Communist Party is a Marxist-Leninist organization. The Party General Secretary Xi Jinping sees himself as Josef Stalin’s successor,” O’Brien said. “As interpreted and practiced by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, communism is a totalitarian ideology. Under communism, individuals are merely a means to be used toward the achievement of the ends of the collective nation-state. Thus, individuals can be easily sacrificed for the nation-state’s goals. Individuals do not have inherent value under Marxism-Leninism. They exist to serve the state — the state does not exist to serve them.”
The Associated Press report described a “climate of terror around having children” revealed in their interviews with Uighurs due to the Chinese government’s pervasive and authoritarian birth control and abortion campaign. The analysis pointed to Uighur region birth rates dropping over 60% between 2015 and 2018 and noted that birth rates fell 24% in the Xinjiang region in 2019 — far different than the 4.2% drop across China as a whole, the vast majority of whom are Han Chinese.
The Chinese government’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the Associated Press story as “fabricated” and “fake news.”
China scholar Adrian Zenz told the Associated Press that “this kind of drop is unprecedented” and “there’s a ruthlessness to it” as he described it as “part of a wider control campaign to subjugate the Uighurs.”
Zenz, an expert on China’s Uighur regions who works for the Washington, D.C.-based Eurasia-focused Jamestown Foundation, released a 32-page report on Monday titled Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang, in which he described the Chinese government’s extensive and successful efforts to forcibly change the fast-growing Uighur regions into among the slowest in all of China.
“Intrauterine contraceptive devices, sterilizations, and forced family separations: since a sweeping crackdown starting in late 2016 transformed Xinjiang into a draconian police state, witness accounts of intrusive state interference into reproductive autonomy have become ubiquitous,” Zenz wrote. “While state control over reproduction has long been a common part of the birth control regime in the People’s Republic of China, the situation in Xinjiang has become especially severe following a policy of mass internment initiated in early 2017 by officials of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.”
Zenz concluded that “these findings provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” He pointed specifically to Section D of Article II of that United Nations agreement, which states that genocide “means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” including “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
The Commerce Department imposed sanctions on Chinese companies “complicit” in the repression of Uighurs in May, and earlier this month, President Trump signed a law that enshrines human rights for Uighurs in U.S. policies toward China and requires the president to levy sanctions against Chinese party leaders in Xinjiang.
