Recently, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) released a report revealing the CCP’s coercive birth control of Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The report also reveals evidence of the CCP’s genocidal policies in Xinjiang, according to the Chinese-American author.
Helen Raleigh, a Chinese-American immigrant author, entrepreneur, and CFA, and a senior contributor to The Federalist, recently wrote an analysis of the ASPI report on “The CCP’s Coercive Campaign to Reduce the Birth Rate of Xinjiang’s Indigenous Population. China’s own demographic data reveal disturbing evidence of genocide,” she said.
These evidence of the CCP’s coercive birth control is chilling, Raleigh said. A key statistic shows birth rates plunging by more than 50 percent in the 2019-2020 period in areas populated by Uighurs and other ethnic minorities.
Communist China wants total control over Uyghurs
The ASPI report shows that “the Chinese Communist Party has long implemented government-led population controls in the name of family planning.”
Between 1979 and 2015, the CCP implemented a “one-child” policy that limited each Chinese couple to one child. The policy was brutally enforced, including forced abortions, sterilizations and hefty fines, which were standard penalties for couples who violated the government’s rules. But the Communist Party’s family planning policy primarily targeted Han Chinese, allowing China’s ethnic minority couples to have more than one child during this period.
In 2015, Raleigh writes, the Communist Party began trying to address the demographic challenge by relaxing the “one-child” policy, allowing Chinese couples to have two children. Ironically, however, the Communist government is now encouraging Han Chinese women to have more children, while adopting a very different policy for ethnic minorities, particularly Uighur Muslims living in Xinjiang.
She said that CCP leaders have long feared that Xinjiang’s geographic location and the Uighurs’ cultural and ethnic ties to Russia and Central Asia would make it a point of infiltration for foreign powers. As a result, CCP leader Xi Jinping has demanded that the Uighurs must be under the full control of the central government.
The ASPI report indicates that the CCP considers changing the ethnic composition of the population in the Xinjiang region to be a priority to combat what the CCP claims is “terrorism” and to maintain what it considers “stability. As a result, the CCP has sought to attract Han Chinese to Xinjiang and has imposed strict “family planning” on the Uighurs to control the population growth of Uighur Muslims and other minorities in the region.
The Communist Party’s brutal “family planning” policy has caused the birth rate in Xinjiang to plummet.
Since 2017, the Communist government has instructed local family planning officials in Xinjiang to launch a series of “crackdowns” to reduce so-called “illegal births” among Uighur Muslim and other ethnic minority families in the region. Officials warned that anyone who goes against the central government’s family planning policy guidelines must be “punished, and punished firmly. …… There must be no tolerance and no soft enforcement.”
In the article, Rowley cites the tactics used by local Communist Party officials throughout the “crackdown,” including urging “violators” to turn themselves in; setting up a hotline and offering a 500 yuan ($75) reward for reporting illegal births; and making monthly visits to women of childbearing age to make sure they are not in trouble. Visiting women of childbearing age to ensure they are not pregnant; and “encouraging” women of childbearing age to take “long-term birth control measures,” such as intrauterine devices (IUDs), tubal ligations, sterilization rings, and other forms of birth control. Officials will award these “long-term birth control” women as “trustworthy citizens.
One of the enforcement tools often used by local officials is the imposition of hefty fines on families who “illegally overpopulate” their homes, and ASPI researchers found that in Chabchal County, where nearly 70 percent of the population is Uighur, local officials collected nearly $1 million for 629 “illegal births” in a four-month period at the end of 2017. ” cases collected nearly $1 million in fines. As a result, the county’s birth rate dropped by 50 percent from 2017 to 2019.
ASPI researchers also learned that many Uyghurs and other minorities are detained in re-education camps for violating family planning regulations or failing to pay related fines. For example, in Tsumu County, where Uighur Muslims and other minorities make up about 73 percent of the population, local officials were given explicit instructions to arrest women who had more than two children and send them to reeducation-through-labor camps, even if they had paid the fines.
Raleigh writes that the Communist Party’s brutal “family planning” campaign in Xinjiang has been very effective. Based on publicly available demographic data from China, the ASPI researchers found that in 29 predominantly ethnic minority counties in Xinjiang, the 2019-2020 birth rate dropped 58.5 percent from the 2011-2015 baseline average. “In those counties with more than 90 percent minority populations, the decline in birth rates was even greater, falling 66.3 percent over the 2019-2020 period.”
U.S. government has moral responsibility to act
Nathan Ruser, ASPI researcher and co-author of the report, noted that Xinjiang’s birth rate has declined at an unprecedented rate since the United Nations began collecting population data more than 70 years ago. Even countries that have experienced genocide, such as Rwanda and Cambodia, or brutal civil wars, such as Syria, have not experienced birth rate declines as severe as those in Xinjiang.
While Communist officials suppress minority births, Communist policy advisors have urged the leadership to “raise the fertility rate” and “strongly encourage childbirth” to address China’s looming demographic crisis of a shrinking labor force and aging population. The CCP leadership appears to have heeded this advice. However, the treatment of Uighur mothers in Xinjiang has not improved.
ASPI’s report shows that Communist Party officials and government media are oblivious to the ironic embarrassment of the stark contrast between the strict controls on births to ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and the Communist Party’s increasingly lenient population policies for the rest of China.
The United Nations defines “genocide” as any act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including “the imposition of measures designed to prevent the internal reproduction of that group “. Under this definition, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo characterized the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights violations in Xinjiang as “genocide. Current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken agreed with the “genocide” designation during his Senate confirmation hearings.
President Biden has often talked about reasserting American values on the world stage, Rowley said. What he needs now is action. Evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against the Uighurs is piling up, including the latest display of this report.
“As the leader of the free world, Biden has a tremendous moral responsibility to oppose such atrocities and to lead other nations in holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.” she wrote at the end of the article.
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