Australian think tank: Xinjiang’s fertility rate plunged nearly 50 percent, the most in recent genocide

The seventh national census data of the Communist Party of China has been questioned both at home and abroad. The official census data claim that the Han population has grown by less than 5 percent over the past decade, while the population of various ethnic minorities has grown by more than 10 percent. Overseas ethnic minority human rights organizations believe the authorities have substituted Han Chinese status for that of ethnic minorities. And a day after the Communist Party released demographic data from the new census, a new report from an Australian think tank found that the fertility rate in Xinjiang has plummeted by nearly 50 percent in recent years. This dramatic decline in fertility rates surpasses that of any genocidal region in recent times.

A new report released May 12 by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), an Australian think tank, found that fertility rates in China’s Xinjiang region declined by the most in recent human history between 2017 and 2019, surpassing fertility declines during the Syrian civil war, Rwanda and the Cambodian genocide.

Using publicly available data from the Chinese Communist government, this institute tallied national birth rate data from 2011 to 2019, then analyzed trends across ethnic groups and spatial regions within the Xinjiang Autonomous Region before and after the Chinese Communist government began its massive crackdown there in 2016.

The study found that Xinjiang’s birth rate has fallen sharply since April 2017, after the CCP implemented a series of strong birth control measures in the region, reducing the birth rate by nearly half, or about 48.74 percent, between 2017 and 2019.

Further analysis by investigators found that the areas where fertility rates plummeted were mainly in communities dominated by Uyghurs and ethnic minorities. Between 2017 and 18, the birth rate in local counties fell by an average of 43.7 percent; however, in towns with more than 90 percent ethnic minorities, the birth rate fell by an average of 56.5 percent.

Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy Research and one of the report’s co-authors, said this extreme decline in fertility is unprecedented since the United Nations began collecting global fertility data 71 years ago.

Where are the children of Xinjiang going? According to the report, the Chinese Communist government shifted its fertility control policy for ethnic minorities from “incentives and encouragement” to a more coercive and intrusive fertility policy in 2017, including severe punishment, disciplinary action or detention for “violating the policy. Threats.

The report also notes that while Beijing claims that China’s fertility policy is “non-discriminatory,” analysis of the data reveals that the policy is discriminatory. While the Chinese government has imposed birth controls in Xinjiang to reduce the birth rate of Uighurs and other minorities, the Communist Party is encouraging easing of the policy elsewhere.

The report also echoes the accounts of many survivors of Xinjiang’s concentration camps (so-called re-education camps) and a report published last June by German scholar Adrian Zenz. At the time, he reported that the Communist government was forcing Uighur women to be sterilized to curb the growth of the minority population in Xinjiang.

Beth Van Schaack, a scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice, told a hearing of the U.S. Congressional Committee on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) on December 12 that “China has used its control of international organizations in recent years to retell the narrative, using so-called ‘re-education camps ‘, ‘boarding schools,’ and other names to embellish the facts about the concentration camps and the separation of minority families.”

Vanscheck said, “We must emphasize that genocide is not limited to mass killings, it takes other forms of destroying a race, such as limiting the ability to reproduce, breaking up children and families, and causing the group to be unable to live and pass on coherently as a group …… What happened in Xinjiang is good example of this.”

On January 19, 2021, the U.S. Department of State officially defined the Communist authorities’ atrocities in Xinjiang as “genocide and crimes against humanity”; this designation was continued by the Biden administration after the transition of power.

Chinese Communist Party Officials Say Population Growth of Ethnic Minorities Far Higher than Han Chinese, Questioning Falsehoods

On the other hand, on May 11, the Chinese Communist Party released data from the seventh national census, claiming that the Han population grew by less than 5 percent over the past decade, while the population of ethnic minorities grew by more than 10 percent.

In response, Dirichati, a spokesman for the German-based World Uyghur Congress, questioned this. He said the birth rate of the Uighur ethnic group in Xinjiang has dropped significantly in the past two years.

“The Chinese Communist government is hiding the planned destruction of the Uighur ethnic group by claiming that the population of ethnic minorities is growing faster than that of the Han Chinese. According to statistics previously published by the Chinese Communist government, the local population began to decline sharply in 2017. the local birth rate fell from 15.88 percent to 8.14 percent between 2017 and 2019

The natural population growth rate of Xinjiang’s Uyghur ethnic group has also fallen sharply in the past two years, Dirishati said.

Dirishati: “The natural growth rate of the population fell from 11.4 percent in 2017 to 3.69 percent in 2019. The decline is more than 67%. The Chinese government’s planned population control measures targeting the Uighur ethnic group include forced sterilization and abortion.”

Speaking to Radio Free Asia, Serkjian, founder of the Kazakh human rights organization Atajulte Volunteers, said, “The so-called claim that the birth rate of ethnic minorities is twice as high as that of Han Chinese is unfounded. First, the Chinese Communist Party has been implementing a strict family planning policy in Xinjiang, encouraging and forcing party members and public officials to have only one child or to marry late and have children later. Second, since the mass arrests of Kazakhs and Uyghurs in Xinjiang since 2017, almost no children have been born in the whole Xinjiang in these five years, and it is certain that the birth rate of Kazakhs and Uyghurs in Xinjiang is almost zero in these years. So many maternal and child health centers have been converted into concentration camps, which we have evidence of.”

Selkjian denounced the Communist government’s announcement of minority birth rates as a “falsification.

For example, he said, “It’s a falsification. Many Han Chinese were deliberately made to change their identities to Kazakhs, Uighurs, and to pretend to be real Xinjiang people, so that they could pass for the real thing. Let these fake Xinjiang people become officials and deprive Xinjiang people of their right to autonomy.”

The Kazakhs and Uighurs who have been impersonated by Han Chinese have filled the Xinjiang population vacuum that has emerged in recent years, as a result of the ethnic cleansing policy, Sailor Kegian said.