On Monday (March 22) the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada joined forces to impose sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials over Chinese human rights violations against Uighurs. Recent human rights advocates and independent reports have pointed to a nearly 50 percent drop in Xinjiang‘s birth rate between 2017 and 2019, a striking statistic that suggests the Chinese government is imposing a “genocidal” policy on the Uighur population, including forced sterilization. But the Chinese government says the decline in population growth in Xinjiang is due to strict enforcement of Family planning and changing attitudes toward Marriage. How to interpret Xinjiang’s declining birth rate? Why is the family planning policy being tightened in Xinjiang at a Time when the Chinese government is fully liberalizing the two-child policy for Han Chinese?
Xinjiang’s birth rate plunges
According to a statistical yearbook released by the Chinese government, population growth in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) began to decline sharply in 2017. 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 per 1,000 in 2017 to 3.69 per 1,000 in 2019, a decline of more than 67%.
Source: China Statistical Yearbook
While China’s birth rate is declining nationwide, 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 been on a downward trend since 2017, but the rate of decline is lower than the national average, while another autonomous region – the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region – has a slight increase in birth rates in 2019.
Data from the Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook show that population growth in some areas has shrunk 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: ‰)
Source: Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook
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.
According to Uyghur American Association President Yili Shati, the Chinese government’s sterilization and abortion of forced Uyghur women, as well as the arrest and sentencing of large numbers of Uyghurs, especially men, to prison or concentration camps, are responsible for the declining birth rate of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
“This is proof that genocide is happening.” He told Voice of America that “the Chinese government is sitting on this allegation through the data in these yearbooks.”
Previous studies and media investigations have analyzed Chinese government data and documents, as well as interviews with dozens of detainees, to argue that Chinese 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 “.
China denies the allegations, saying the Uighur 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 Communist Party of China Xinjiang Autonomous Region, 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.
China’s official report gives three reasons for the decline in Xinjiang’s birth rate in 2018: first, strict enforcement of family planning policies, with penalties for violating regulations on having more children and incentives and social security for those practicing family planning; second, changes in the population’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
Family planning policies in Xinjiang, like elsewhere in China, 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 vetoes, have been implemented in other Chinese provinces 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 England, has done fieldwork in Xinjiang. She believes that Xinjiang’s policies can be pushed through this time, backed by brutal measures.
She told Voice of America, “The Chinese government has created a climate of fear and terror among the Turkic-speaking Muslim community in Xinjiang since 2017, to the point where most people will 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 suggested that the Chinese government has systematically targeted ethnic minorities such as Uighurs for population control, including forced sterilization, forced birth control and abortion.
China denies the claims. China has described the “re-education camps” as educational vocational and technical centers designed to de-extremist and help lift the region out of poverty. Officials in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region said at a press conference in late January that people in Xinjiang voluntarily decide whether and what kind of contraception to use in the family planning process, and that there is no question of forced sterilization.
Why is family planning being strengthened?
If, as officials say, the plunge in Xinjiang’s birth rate is linked to the strengthening of family planning, why is Xinjiang going back in time to strictly enforce family planning at a time when China’s birth rate is declining year after year, the two-child policy is being implemented across the board, and there are calls to abolish family planning?
Official Chinese reports say that the lack of implementation of family planning policies, especially in southern Xinjiang such as Hotan and Kashgar, has led to excessive 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 China’s declining labor force and gender imbalance, they prefer Han Chinese to have more children than ethnic minorities in order to ensure a Han majority,” she said. This is especially true in Xinjiang, where Uighurs are often automatically seen as disloyal citizens, potential separatists, extremists and terrorists.”
Pessimistic observers might also argue that the mandatory birth control or sterilization of Muslim women in Xinjiang, as Chinese authorities move to prepare for the complete elimination of family planning, is also intended to ensure that there is no surge in the Muslim population in Xinjiang after birth restrictions are liberalized, she said.
Gross said that while it is difficult to know exactly why the Chinese authorities began to tighten implementation of family planning in Xinjiang, the timing coincides with the period when Chen Guo 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 China’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 that found 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 Chinese government policies such as birth control in Xinjiang constitute genocide, but regardless of the determination, those actions should be called “atrocities.
Recent Comments