Chinese diplomats attempting to portray the repression of Uighur Muslims as a victory for women’s rights may have admitted to genocide, according to analysts monitoring the crackdown.
“China’s fascist government is now openly admitting and celebrating its use of concentration camps, forced labor, forced sterilizations and abortions, and other forms of torture to eliminate an ethnic and religious minority,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations National Executive Director Nihad Awad said Friday. “Leaders, nations and corporations around the world must take concrete action to end China’s genocide of Uyghur Muslims.”
Chinese officials have denied abusing Uighur Muslims, justifying their establishment of mass detention camps as a necessary counterterrorism measure. The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., extended that defense by claiming that time in the “vocational education and training centers” liberated the Uighur women from the need to rear children.
“The minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines,” the Chinese Embassy tweeted Thursday. “They are more confident and independent.”
Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent. https://t.co/lykDhByEiL
— Chinese Embassy in US (@ChineseEmbinUS) January 7, 2021
The tweet is a clumsy attempt at “repurposing progressive language” about birth control to appeal to Western women, according to a human rights expert in Washington.
“Maybe they were trying to adopt language that made it sound like they were giving Uighur women a choice about their fertility, but the reality is that couldn’t be further from the truth,” the Heritage Foundation’s Olivia Enos said. “Forced sterilization, forced abortion — these are issues that both Left and Right agree are completely, completely out of the question. So, if they thought they were making it more palatable, or trying to reach a particular audience, I think it’s going to fall on deaf ears.”
Women in Xinjiang, the traditional homeland of the Uighurs in Central Asia, have reported that Chinese authorities use forced sterilization and other penalties to cut their birthrates.
“God bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong,” Chinese-born Kazakh Gulnar Omirzakh told the Associated Press last year, recalling how Chinese authorities forced her to receive an IUD after the birth of her third child. “They want to destroy us as a people.”
Her statement exemplifies the findings in a Jamestown Foundation report authored by Adrian Zenz, a Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation fellow and one of the world’s leading scholars on the Uighur crackdown.
“Government documents bluntly mandate that birth control violations are punishable by extrajudicial internment in ‘training’ camps,” Zenz observed last year. “Documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur regions, targeting 14 and 34 percent of all married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur counties that year. This project targeted all of southern Xinjiang, and continued in 2020 with increased funding.”
The embassy’s celebration of that progress may raise the possibility that President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will declare the Uighur repression a genocide.
“One of the elements of genocide is ‘imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,’” Enos said, citing the relevant United Nations convention. “I really think that we need to see an atrocity determination coming from the U.S. saying, ‘This is genocide. This is crimes against humanity.’ And using that as a springboard for other mechanisms for holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.”
