An unpublished study by Adrian Zenz, a German scholar on Xinjiang, suggests that China’s birth control policies in the Xinjiang region could reduce the population of ethnic minorities such as the Uighurs by 2.6 million to 4.5 million people over 20 years, Reuters reports exclusively.
The report notes that the Chinese policies described here include forced birth control targeting Muslim minorities such as the Uighurs, the transfer of laborers to other regions, and the illegal detention of millions of innocent people from ethnic minorities such as the Uighurs.
Zheng disclosed in his report that under this series of Chinese government policies, the minority population of the predominantly Uighur population in southern Xinjiang is projected to be between 8.6 million and 10.5 million by 2040. But Chinese researchers, using the current population of 9.5 million as a base estimate before the Chinese government implemented these policies, estimated that the local minority population was expected to reach 13.1 million. There is a difference of at least 2.6 million people between the two estimates.
At the same time, Zheng also estimates that the Han population in southern Xinjiang will rise from the current 8.4 percent to 25 percent.
The study has recently been peer-reviewed and will be published in the Central Asian Survey, a quarterly academic journal.
But China’s foreign ministry, in response to a Reuters inquiry, said that the so-called “genocide” in Xinjiang was purely unfounded, and that such claims only reflected the ulterior motives of U.S. and Western anti-China forces.
Zheng Guoyen also published a study last year accusing the Chinese government of forcing Uighur women in Xinjiang to undergo birth control in order to curb the population growth of the ethnic minority, and of forcing large numbers of Uighurs to provide labor in the cotton industry or to migrate to other regions. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian has also accused Zheng of being behind the evil anti-China forces.
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