During a November 16 news conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian was asked about comments made by Canada's Ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae, there is no question that aspects of what China is doing to repress Uighurs in Xinjiang fit the legal definition of genocide.
Zhao dismissed this comparison with a claim of robust population growth in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, home to the Uighur Muslim minority.
“The population of the Uighurs in Xinjiang rose from 10.17 million to 12.72 million, an increase of 2.55 million or 25%, which is about twice the increase of the whole Xinjiang population, which stood at 14%,” he said.
He further claimed that the growth rate of the Uighurs in Xinjiang was 12.5 times higher than that for the ethnic Han population, and 18 times higher than the population growth rate for Canada.
“I would like to ask this ambassador, if his logic is plausible in finding out who best fits the label of genocide, it seems that it is not the Uyghurs who are persecuted, but rather the people of Canada, am I right? You can see how ridiculous the ambassador's statement is,” Zhao said. “A piece of advice for him: Do some homework before crafting a publicity stunt, so as not to make a fool of himself.”
Zhao’s comments are misleading. There is significant evidence that China is pursuing a policy of “demographic genocide” against Uighurs.
“The 25% increase is some strange non-public figure,” Adrian Zenz, who is one of the world’s foremost scholars on the People’s Republic of China and has written extensively about the Uighur situation, told Polygraph.info.
“Actual Uighur population growth [for] 2010 to 2018 from statistical Xinjiang yearbooks was lower,” Zenz said. “The figure they cite has no publicly verifiable source.”
As Zenz previously noted in his , “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang,” Uighur regions are apparently concealing data related to population growth, “indicating [the issue’s] increasing sensitivity.”
The source of Zhao’s statistics notwithstanding, his choice of timeline is telling. Many of China’s allegedly repressive policies, including mass incarceration, forced sterilization and other acts that critics allege amount to cultural genocide, were initiated or ramped up in the wake of the May 2014 .
After those attacks, which left 43 dead and over 90 wounded in the capital of Xinjiang, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed “absolutely no mercy” in his response to violent extremism in the country.
Drawing from official data, that natural population growth rates dropped across all Chinese minority regions in 2015 — the same year the Communist Party government began citing a link between population growth and “religious extremism.”
According to Zenz, in 2010, nine of the top 10 Chinese counties with the highest natural population growth rates were Uighur or Kyrgyz, with birth rates around five times the national average.
However, natural population growth in Xinjiang dropped by 84% in the two largest Uighur prefectures — Hotan and Kashgar — between 2015 and 2018. It further dropped in several minority regions in 2019.
In 2017, the growth rates in Hotan and Kashgar fell to the same level of the average in minority counties, despite having long exceeded them.
Zenz that in 2020, officials in Kizilsu Prefecture, a “region dominated by Uighurs and Kazakhs,” set an “unprecedented near-zero birth rate target” of 1.05 per thousand. By contrast, the natural growth rate was 19.66% in 2018 and 8.18% in 2019.
“I think they opted for 2010 to 2018 in order to capture maximum Uighur population increase versus Han, given that around 2010 and in the early 2010s, Uighur birth rates were very high,” Zenz told Polygraph.info.
Chinese Government officials have correlated these drops to strict family planning policies.
Zenz’s research found that pregnancy checks, forced intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortions were being employed in a sweeping campaign to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other ethnic minorities.
Citing official Chinese government documents, he revealed a 2019 plan to sterilize 14%-34% of all Uighur women of child-bearing age in two Uighur counties that year. That project, targeting all of southern Xinjiang, continued into 2020 with increased funding.
Having too many children “is a major reason” people are sent to the country’s sprawling network of detention camps, where as many as have been locked up, Zenz wrote.