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China’s Campaign to Systematically Reduce Minorities

By Mark Bennett, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been conducting a large scale campaign to reduce the Muslim population of the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the far western region of Xinjiang, even though the CCP encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children. Individual women have warned the world about forced birth control, yet the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously realized. This information is based on government statistics, state documents, and interviews with various sources such as ex-detainees, family members, and a former detention camp instructor. Some experts are calling this “demographic genocide” and have denounced the campaign over the past four years.

The CCP orchestrates these population control measures by mass detention, as a threat and as a punishment, for failure to comply. Police, without any legal due process, can unexpectedly raid homes, terrify parents as they search for hidden children. A major reason people can be sent to detention camps is that the parents have had three or more children. The police can return and take their children away, but also levy and enforce huge fines. The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization, and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews, and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang. bAs an example, after Gulnar Omirzakh, a Chinese-born Kazakh, had her third child, the government required her to get an IUD inserted. Two years later, in January 2018, four officials in military uniforms visited her door. They gave Omirzakh, a wife of a detained vegetable trader, three days to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children. Otherwise, if she didn’t pay the fine, they told her she would join her husband and a million other ethnic minorities locked up in internment camps. Why? For having too many children.

In reality, the state’s birth control campaign creates a climate of terror for having children! Statistics show birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide. According to Chinese officials, however, the new measures are meant to be fair, allowing both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities the same number of children. Interestingly enough, for decades, China had one of the most extensive systems of minority entitlements in the world, with Uighurs and others getting more points on college entrance exams, hiring quotas for government posts, and laxer birth control restrictions. Under China’s now-abandoned ‘one-child’ policy, the authorities had long encouraged, often forced, contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion on Han Chinese. But minorities were allowed two children — three if they came from the countryside. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in half a century, has cut back those benefits.

In 2014, soon after Xi visited Xinjiang, the region’s top official said it was time to make “equal family planning policies” for all ethnicities and “reduce and stabilize birth rates.” In the following years, the government declared that instead of just one child, the Han Chinese could have two, and three in Xinjiang’s rural areas, just like minorities. But while equal on paper, in practice the Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions, and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having the three children allowed by the law.

So what happened with Omirzakh? After the officials had threatened to lock her up, Omirzakh called every relative and friend she knew. Hours before the deadline, she was able to put together enough money to pay the fine from the sale of her sister’s cow, and incur high-interest loans. In addition to the fine she paid, for the next year, Omirzakh was required to attend classes with the wives of other detainees who had too many children. She and her children lived with two local party officials sent especially to spy on them. When her husband was finally released, they fled for Kazakhstan with just a few bundles of blankets and clothes.