The Communist Party’s coercive policies in Xinjiang have led to a sharp decline in fertility rates among Uighurs and other ethnic minorities, according to a report released Wednesday (May 12) by an Australian think tank, in new evidence that the government’s policies in the region may constitute genocide.
According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the Communist Party’s series of special crackdowns on “illegal births” in Xinjiang, which began in April 2017, has led to an unprecedented plunge in official fertility rates in the region. In the two years between 2017 and 2019, the birth rate in the region dropped by nearly half (48.74 percent).
This report also mentions that the regions with the largest declines in birth rates are mainly communities dominated by Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. Birth rates in counties and towns with more than 90 percent ethnic minorities in Xinjiang fell by an average of 56.5 percent, much higher than in other counties and towns.
High fines, disciplinary actions, and threats of detention are among the authorities’ methods of cracking down on “illegal births,” and family planning officials in Xinjiang have been told to “detect and deal with pregnant women who violate the policy at an early stage.
The report says that the Chinese government has imposed a mandatory family planning policy in Xinjiang not only to reduce the size of the Uighur and other ethnic groups’ populations, but also to weaken their social and political influence through “population control.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute report also mentions, “Our analysis builds on previous work and provides compelling evidence that the Chinese Communist government’s policies in Xinjiang may constitute genocide.”
According to the Associated Press, Nathan Ruser, one of the report’s authors and a researcher at the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy Studies, said such an extreme decline in birth rates is unprecedented in the 71 years since the United Nations began collecting global fertility statistics, which even surpassed the declines seen during the Syrian civil war, Rwanda and the Cambodian genocide.
According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide means “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The Convention defines five acts of genocide: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; intentionally inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in January that the Communist Party’s targeting of Muslim minorities, including Uighurs, in Xinjiang was genocide. Current Secretary of State John Blinken echoed that characterization. The State Department under Blinken explicitly called the genocide in Xinjiang in its annual Country Reports on Human Rights, released in late March.
China’s Foreign Ministry responded to the ASPI report on Thursday. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said the CCP began implementing a family planning policy in 1982, which was implemented with Han Chinese first and then ethnic minorities. The family planning policy was implemented by Xinjiang’s ethnic minorities not only 17 years later than the Han Chinese, but also remains relatively lenient compared to the mainland.
She also said that Xinjiang has not formulated and implemented a family planning policy for a single ethnic minority, so there is no question of “setting birth rate targets and indicators”.
Just the day before, representatives of more than a dozen countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as several international human rights groups, condemned the CCP’s human rights violations against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Network in Xinjiang, and urged the CCP to allow the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights unrestricted access to Xinjiang to investigate the situation.
In her opening remarks at the event, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “We will continue to stand up and speak out until the Chinese Communist government stops its crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uighurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang. We will continue to work with our allies and partners until the CCP government respects the universal human rights of all people.”
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