On Sept. 4, the official Chinese government Twitter account that Muslims and other minorities in China were the targets of a sterilization campaign. In June, the that the campaign was backed up by detentions and hefty fines.
"Over the past 40 years, the population in grew from 5.55 million to 12 million,” China’s tweet said. “From 2010 to 2018, the population of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang increased by 22%. Is there any kind of 'forced sterilization’?”
Likewise, claimed recent research by Xinjiang Development Research Center showed that between 2010 and 2018, the Uighur population had the region’s highest birthrate at “about 12 newborns per 1,000 people.”
Both claims are misleading.
Leaked internal Chinese government documents, known as the “,” showed the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party was targeting Uighurs. The that of 484 people detained in camps in the Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were for exceeding official birth quotas, “the most common reason for holding them.”
The AP investigation came on the eve of a report by German scholar Adrian Zenz, an expert on China’s re-education camps for Muslims in Xinjiang. Writing in Foreign Policy in July, Zenz said the 2019 family planning budgets of two counties in Xinjiang, Hotan and Guma, had targets to sterilize “approximately 14 and 34 percent of women between 18 and 49—in a single year.”
Documents from Xinjiang’s Health Commission, , indicated the counties were part of a wider project targeting all southern minority regions of Xinjiang’s in 2019 and 2020.
The sterilization rate in Xinjiang was seven times the national average in 2018, Zenz wrote. The plan had the banal title “Free Technical Family Planning Services to Farmers and Pastoralists.”
Zenz is listed as a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an educational organization in Washington, D.C., that says it is dedicated to both commemorating and “pursuing the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes.”
Experts estimate that the Chinese government began detaining Uighurs in reeducation camps in Xinjiang in 2014, around the same time China blamed Uighur separatist groups for a series of terrorist attacks in the country. In response to the attacks, authorities began a "year-long campaign against terrorism," increasing security and conducting more military drills in the Xinjiang region, as .
But in 2017, these efforts – around the same time evidence of such camps began to be reported internationally. As Polygraph.info , The New York Times’ “” and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ “” revealed China had an internal procedure for “dealing” with the Uighurs.
In the China Daily article, Mutalif Roz, the director of Xinjiang’s health commission, dismissed worries that local authorities were forcing women to undergo procedures to curb birthrates. “In Xinjiang, illegal medical practices like late pregnancy induced labor, compulsory birth control and forced pregnancy tests are banned,” he said.
But news organizations interviews with Uighur women who’d been detained for re-education and said they were forced to have abortions or had contraceptive devices forcibly implanted. Some also said they received injections that either stopped menstruation or caused unusual bleeding, . Women beyond childbearing age were also targets, as Qelbinur Sidik, who had a forced sterilization at the age of 50, :
Sterilizations began to increase in Xinjiang in 2016 while dropping nationwide, Zenz . Between 2016 and 2018, the number of sterilizations in the region increased from 28.5 per 100,000 people to 243 per 100,000. That compares with a national rate of 32.8 in 2018.
Between 2017 and 2018, the birthrate of Uighurs in Xinjiang dropped from 15.9 per 1,000 people to 10.7, according to the Xinjiang Statistical Yearbooks, .
U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary Scott Busby in December 2018 that “since April 2017, Chinese authorities have detained at least 800,000, and possibly more than 2 million, Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities in internment camps for indefinite periods of time.”
The Chinese government , claiming that it has established “vocational education and training centers in accordance with the law to prevent the breeding and spread of terrorism and religious extremism.”