On January 19, the outgoing administration of U.S. President Donald Trump China’s actions against Uighurs and other minorities in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region genocide.
“After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that the PRC [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uighurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.
President Joe Biden’s incoming pick for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, agreed with Pompeo’s assessment. “That’s my judgment as well,” he told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) during a confirmation hearing the same day.
When asked about the U.S. declaration during a January 20 press conference, China’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying accused Pompeo of spreading “venomous lies” and “ludicrous fabrications.”
“Crimes against humanity and genocide are clearly defined in international law. ‘China committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang’ is a completely false allegation and a malicious farce fabricated and hyped up by certain anti-China, anti-communist forces, with Pompeo being a fanatical pioneer,” Hua said.
“Such a thing only exists in the ugly political conspiracies of Pompeo and his like. It has never happened, is not happening and will never happen in China!”
Hua’s claim that evidence of genocide is fabricated is false.
Despite concerted efforts to block outside access to the region, significant evidence has surfaced that China is pursuing population control policies against Uighur Muslims that may fit the legal definition of genocide. And China’s attempts to deflect criticism of its policies in Xinjiang have themselves courted controversy.
As Polygraph.info on January 7, the Twitter account of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., tweeted a link to a Chinese government-backed study on demographic changes in Xinjiang.
The tweet repeated the assertion that Xinjiang’s birthrate had decreased because Uighur women had been “emancipated.” It also said the promotion of “gender equality and reproductive health” meant Uighur women were no longer “baby-making machines.”
After Twitter deleted the tweet for violating its rules, the company took the additional step on January 20 of locking China’s U.S. Embassy out of its Twitter account. In a CNBC, a Twitter spokesperson said the company had taken additional action “for violating our policy against dehumanization.”
The study referenced in the embassy’s tweet attempted to counter the work of Adrian Zenz, one of the world’s foremost scholars on the People’s Republic of China who has written extensively about the Uighur’s plight.
Zenz is the author of a research paper, “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uighur Birthrates in Xinjiang.”
Zenz analyzed Chinese government documents and concluded that “natural population growth in Xinjiang has declined dramatically,” despite official claims to the contrary.
He linked the population decline to sweeping Chinese government campaign to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other ethnic minorities that has included the use of pregnancy checks, forced intrauterine devices, sterilization, abortions and extrajudicial internment for birth control violations.
Zenz argues his findings “provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria cited in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — imposing measures intended to prevent births within the [targeted] group’.”
“The case for demographic genocide and the atrocity is of course based on dramatic [population] declines starting in 2017, draconian sterilization targets for 2019, plus punishing birth control violations with internment, a policy that started in 2018,” Zenz Polygraph.info. “Also, a near-zero birth rate target for Kizilsu prefecture for 2020.”
Leaked Chinese government documents have revealed a 2019 plan to sterilize 14% and 34%, respectively, of married women of childbearing age in two Uighur counties. That project, targeting all of southern Xinjiang — where Uighurs are largely concentrated — continued into 2020 with increased funding.
this birth control policy is part of a greater drive by Beijing to forcibly assimilate the Uighurs.
To that end, the Chinese government maintains a of detention facilities, where as many as 3 million Uighurs and other minorities have been held and reportedly subjected to