However, the Chinese Communist authorities claim that the decline in population growth in Xinjiang is due to strict enforcement of Family planning and changing attitudes toward Marriage. How to interpret the declining birth rate in Xinjiang? Why is the implementation of family planning policies being stepped up in Xinjiang at a Time when Communist authorities are fully liberalizing the two-child policy for Han Chinese?
File photo: A Uyghur child plays alone in the yard of his Home in Hotan, Xinjiang (AP, Sept. 20, 2018)
Xinjiang’s birth rate plummets
Population growth in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has fallen sharply since 2017, according to a statistical yearbook released by Communist authorities. Between 2017 and 2019, Xinjiang’s birth rate dropped from 15.88 per 1,000 to 8.14 per 1,000, meaning the number of newborns per 1,000 people decreased by nearly 50 percent from 15.88 in 2017 to 8.14 in 2019. Xinjiang’s natural population growth rate also dropped significantly over the same period, from 11.4‰ in 2017 to 3.69‰ in 2019, a decline of more than 67%.
Although births are declining nationwide in mainland China, the decline in Xinjiang is much greater than the national average. Birth rates in three ethnic autonomous regions – Tibet, Guangxi and Inner Mongolia – have also trended downward since 2017, but at a lower rate than the national average, while another autonomous region – the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region – has a slight increase in 2019.
Source: China Statistical Yearbook
Data from the Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook show that population growth in some areas shrank more severely than the national average, especially in some counties and cities with predominantly Uyghur populations and rural populations. For example, in Hotan region in southern Xinjiang, where the Uyghur population is 97% and the rural population is 78%, the birth rate and natural population growth rate are only 8.58‰ and 2.96‰ respectively by 2018, while the birth rate and natural population growth rate in this region were above 20‰ and 15‰ respectively before 2017.
Birth rate and natural population growth rate in Hotan region and Cele county from 2015 to 2019 (unit: ‰)
Xinjiang has not yet released statistics for 2019 for all regions. Extrapolating from the 2019 socio-economic statistical reports released by counties and cities that are still publicly available online, the population growth in Hotan Region in 2019 may not be optimistic. For example, the statistical report released by Cele County under Hotan Region shows that the county’s population growth in 2019 continued to decline from the previous year, with a birth rate of 6.54 per 1,000 and the natural population growth rate falling to a negative 0.05 per 1,000.
Uyghur Association of America President Yili Shati believes that the Chinese Communist authorities’ efforts to sterilize and abort forced Uyghur women and to arrest and sentence large numbers of Uyghurs, especially men, to prison or concentration camps are responsible for the declining birth rate among Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
“This is proof that genocide is happening.” He told Voice of America that “the Chinese Communist authorities are sitting on this allegation through the data in these yearbooks.”
Previous studies and media investigations have analyzed data and documents from Communist authorities, as well as interviews with dozens of detainees, and concluded that Communist authorities have tightened birth control over ethnic minorities such as the Uighurs in recent years through widespread and systematic forced birth control and sterilization measures, inferring that these actions are leading to some form of “genocide “.
The Chinese Communist Party denies these allegations, saying that the Uyghur population in Xinjiang maintained rapid growth between 2010 and 2018. A report by the Xinjiang Development Research Center released in early January on Tianshan.com, the official website of the CCP’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region Party Committee, said the Uyghur population in Xinjiang increased from 10,171,500 in 2010 to 12,718,400 in 2018, an increase of 25.04 percent, higher than other ethnic groups and the Han Chinese.
According to Yi Fuxian, a demographer and author of the book “The Empty Nest of the Great Nation,” the reasons for the sharp drop in the birth population in Xinjiang are multiple: “On the one hand, there are problems with China’s statistics; on the other hand, Education in Xinjiang has come later, fertility attitudes have changed, marriages have been delayed, and urbanization rates have increased rapidly; there are also what the West considers concentration camps, what the Chinese side calls re-education camps, which have led to separations that also affected some fertility.” He argues that forced abortions and sterilizations exist, but are not the main cause of the dramatic drop in population growth.
The Communist Party’s official report gives three reasons for the decline in birth rates in Xinjiang in 2018: first, the strict implementation of family planning policies, which punishes those who violate the rules by having more children and provides incentives and social security for those who practice family planning; second, changes in people’s attitudes toward marriage and childbirth, with the number of late marriages and children rising; and third, the effective curbing of religious extremist ideology.
Family Planning in Xinjiang
Like the rest of mainland China, family planning policies in Xinjiang have always been relatively lenient for ethnic minorities compared to Han Chinese: except for special circumstances, Han urban residents can have up to one child and rural residents up to two children; ethnic minority urban residents can have up to two children and rural residents up to three children.
Following China’s full abolition of the one-child policy after 2016 and the introduction of the two-child policy, Xinjiang revised its regional family planning regulations in 2017 to implement a unified “urban two-agriculture three-child” policy and require a minimum three-year interval between births, while providing for a levy on those who exceed the birth limit The “social maintenance fee” was set at three to eight times the local per capita income for the previous year, and was retroactive.
Although the new policy only differentiates between urban and rural areas, with no differentiation in ethnic identity, and does not change the number of children ethnic minority families can have, the strict enforcement of the retroactive past is feared to be aimed more at ethnic minority groups such as Uyghurs, given the generally low fertility rate among Han Chinese and their willingness to have children. The official report also says that family planning has not been properly implemented in Xinjiang in the past, especially in southern Xinjiang (i.e., the predominantly Uighur region), where some people are resistant to family planning, resulting in a “large unplanned population.
If family planning policies have not been strictly enforced in the past, how has this been done?
Some of the local government announcements still available show that since the new rules were promulgated, localities have been conducting “dragnet” checks and special treatment of illegal births since 1992, according to notices from the regional party committee and the health and Family Planning Commission. The goal of each region is roughly: to have a clearance rate of 99% or more of illegal births in previous years, to have a filing rate of at least 80%, to have a closing rate of at least 75% within the deadline, and to achieve zero out-of-policy births within a certain period of time.
From these announcements, it can be inferred that local governments at all levels have generally taken the following measures to reach the target: imposing punitive measures such as “social maintenance fees” on those found to have given birth in violation of the law; introducing long-term contraceptive and birth control measures such as the placement of birth control rings or tubal ligation among married women of childbearing age; conducting pregnancy tests and ring checks on married women of childbearing age; and providing a third child for those who have given up on having a child. In addition, the government has implemented the “one-vote veto” system, which links the assessment and promotion of party and government cadres to the implementation of family planning targets.
These means of implementing family planning targets, including rewards and punishments, up-linked births, sterilization, forced induced abortions and one-vote vetoes, have been implemented in other provinces in mainland China during the one-child policy period. But experts say the situation in Xinjiang is different.
High-pressure policies backing up
Joanne Smith Finley, an anthropologist and sinologist at Newcastle University in Britain, has done fieldwork in Xinjiang. She believes that Xinjiang’s policies can be pushed forward for implementation this time, backed up by brutal measures.
She told Voice of America, “Communist authorities have created a climate of fear and terror among the Turkic-speaking Muslim community in Xinjiang since 2017, to the point where most people do their best to self-censor or change their behavior to avoid being thrown into local ‘re-education camps’ and extrajudicial detention. I began documenting this state terror situation upon my return from Xinjiang in 2018. When people know that up to a million Uyghurs and others are detained in these camps, and know that many are there because of over-births, they are afraid to have more children or to resist the government’s coercive birth control policies.”
Timothy Grose, an expert on Xinjiang at the U.S. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, holds a similar view. He says, “Unlike the government’s previous family planning policies for the Uighurs and Kazakhs, this latest action is backed by harsh punishment. We have overwhelming evidence that couples who overstay their welcome are imprisoned, mainly in the form of ‘re-education’.”
An investigative report by the Associated Press last year, through a combing of local government documents in Xinjiang and interviews with 30 detainees and other parties, also suggested that over-birth was a reason why Muslim minorities such as Uighurs were sent to re-education camps. The report also suggests that the Chinese Communist authorities have systematically targeted ethnic minorities such as Uighurs for population control, with measures including forced sterilization, forced birth control and abortion.
Why is family planning being stepped up?
If, as officials say, the plunge in Xinjiang’s birth rate is related to the intensification of birth control, why is Xinjiang going back to its past strict enforcement of family planning at a time when China’s birth rate is declining year by year, the two-child policy is being implemented across the board, and there are calls to abolish family planning?
Official Communist Party reports say that the lack of implementation of family planning policies, especially in southern Xinjiang such as Hotan and Kashgar, has led to rapid population growth in the region. In the mainstream official discourse, excessive population growth is often seen as one of the root causes of Xinjiang’s many problems. This view is that religious influence and backward concepts of marriage and childbirth have caused excessive population growth among ethnic minorities, especially in rural areas, leading to a decline in per capita resource possession, difficulty in improving population quality, and difficulty in alleviating poverty, which in turn tends to breed extremist ideology and social discontent and affects social stability.
In a paper published in 2017, Li Xiaoxia, director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, in addition to mentioning the above factors, argued that the widening gap between the number of minority and Han Chinese populations has led to a significant mono-ethnic clustering situation, which can weaken national identity and Chinese national identity. Thus, in the official view, controlling the rapid growth of minority populations and adjusting the ethnic demographic structure is an important way to achieve long-term peace and stability in Xinjiang.
According to Joanne Smith-Finley, the CCP authorities have long been concerned about the higher growth of minority populations relative to the Han population.
While the CCP wants more families to have second children in order to reverse the declining size and gender imbalance in mainland China’s labor force, they prefer Han Chinese to have more children than ethnic minorities in order to ensure a Han Chinese majority,” she said. This is especially true in Xinjiang, where Uighurs are often automatically seen as disloyal citizens, potential separatists, extremists and terrorists.”
She said pessimistic observers might also argue that the mandatory birth control or sterilization of Muslim women in Xinjiang is also intended to ensure that the Muslim population in Xinjiang does not surge after birth restrictions are liberalized, as Communist authorities move to prepare for the full elimination of family planning.
Gross said that while it is difficult to know with certainty why the Communist authorities began to tighten implementation of family planning in Xinjiang, the timing coincides with the period when Chen Quanguo was in charge of Xinjiang. He argued that birth control policies should not be viewed in isolation, but rather in the context of a series of draconian policies targeting Muslim minorities such as the Uighurs. These policies, he says, were designed to “violently assimilate Uighurs and Kazakhs into ‘mainstream’ Chinese Culture.”
Accusations of “genocide”
Some experts and human rights advocates argue that the CCP’s population control policies in Xinjiang meet one of the definitions of genocide in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: the imposition of methods intended to prevent births within a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
It was not a sudden mass killing, but slow, gradual, and quiet,” said Joanne Smith Finley. But it is still an act and process of genocide, and that act, along with other policies of cultural destruction, will eliminate the Uyghur population in large numbers, leaving only the shell of an empty Uyghur identity. Such an act demonstrates an intent to destroy the foundation of the Uighur nation.”
The U.S. State Department said earlier this month that the Biden administration upheld the former Trump administration’s determination that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang. Last month, the Canadian Parliament and the Dutch Parliament passed motions finding that China was committing genocide against the Uighurs.
Beijing dismissed the “genocide” claim as “an outright lie.
Gross argues that it is up to lawyers and judges to decide whether the Chinese authorities’ policies of birth control in Xinjiang constitute genocide, but regardless of the determination, those actions should be called “atrocities.
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