Chinese birth control policies could reduce births of the Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in southern Xinjiang by up to a third within 20 years, according to a new report by a German researcher.
The report, shared exclusively with Reuters ahead of publication, concluded that regional policies could cut between 2.6 and 4.5 million minority births in that time. According to official Chinese statistics, there was a 48.7% decline in birth rates in ethnic minority areas of Xinjiang between 2017 and 2019.
It found the population of ethnic minorities in Uyghur-dominated southern Xinjiang would reach between 8.6-10.5 million by 2040 under the new birth prevention policies. That compares to 13.14 million projected by Chinese researchers using data pre-dating the implemented birth policies and a current population of around 9.47 million.
Birth quotas for ethnic minorities have become strictly enforced in Xinjiang since 2017, including though the separation of married couples, and the use of sterilisation procedures, intrauterine devices (IUDs) and abortions, three Uyghur people and one health official inside Xinjiang told Reuters.
Still, in Xinjiang counties where Uyghurs are the majority ethnic group, birth rates dropped 50.1% in 2019, for example, compared to a 19.7% drop in majority ethnic Han counties, according to official data compiled by Zenz.
“This (research and analysis) really shows the intent behind the Chinese government’s long-term plan for the Uyghur population,” Zenz told Reuters.
In his report, Mr Zenz writes that by 2019 Xinjiang authorities “planned to subject at least 80% of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries, referring to IUDs or sterilisations”, according to BBC.
China has detained at least a million Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang. Uyghurs suffer unlivable conditions, torture, and sexual violence inside the camps, and are subjected to institutionalized enslavement across China. Since 2017, the government has forcibly transferred Uyghur children – many of them “orphaned” as a result of losing both parents to internment or forced labor – to a network of state-run facilities in Han Chinese settings, according to Project Syndicate.
The government is simultaneously subjecting Uyghurs to systematic mass forced sterilization and coercive birth-prevention policies, destroying the group’s reproductive capacity. The Chinese state’s atrocities against the Uyghur Muslims are a clear violation of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. The research by Zenz is the first such peer reviewed analysis of the long-term population impact of Beijing’s multi-year crackdown in the western region.
However, there is insufficient evidence of intent by Beijing to destroy an ethnic population in part or full to meet the threshold for a genocide determination. Additionally, China is not party to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the top international court that prosecutes genocide and other serious crimes, and which can only bring action against states within its jurisdiction, Reuters reported.
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