A new study by Adrian Zenz proves that Muslim women in Xinjiang are massively subjected to forced abortion, sterilized, and fitted with IUDs.
by Ruth Ingram
Mass sterilization can now be added to the list of crimes against humanity meted out to Uyghurs of North West China by the CCP. Astonishing figures of plummeting birthrates and draconian birth control measures in Southern Xinjiang, unveiled this week by Adrian Zenz, scholar and chronicler of Beijing’s atrocities in Xinjiang Province, in a study published by The Jamestown Foundation, prove irrefutably CCP plans to severely ravage the population of Uyghurs in their heartland.
According to Zenz’s revelations, meticulously gathered from public Chinese government websites, Southern Xinjiang’s population growth plunged an eye watering 90 per cent between 2013/4 and 2019.
Figures showing a dramatic decline in the population of not only Xinjiang generally, but also particularly Hotan and Kashgar, the heart of the Southern Uyghur homeland.
This is not only lower than Xinjiang’s overall figures, but significantly below China’s national average, where the one child policy has held sway for 40 years. Given that relaxation of this policy has allowed Uyghurs two, sometimes three children, between 2005-2015, more children were born in the areas of Hotan and Kashgar than in Xinjiang itself, and compared to the rest of China. Once the mass roundups into so-called “vocational training camps,” aka transformation through education camps, began in 2016, childbirth figures started to decline, but the sudden fall in 2018/9 was startling, and according to Zenz demanded further analysis. “Internment alone cannot account for this,” says Zenz.
Further analysis of the figures led him to the disquieting findings that in 2019, a monstrous program had been underway to sterilize vast numbers of Uyghur women in the cities of Goma and Hotan, on the furthest most southern shore of the Taklamakan Desert. He was shocked to uncover the grim fact that during this period, sterilizations were 143 times the national average. In this area, where the procedure had always been rare and far below the national rate, suddenly the graph had shot up. Zenz started to notice a spike in the data in 2016, but 2019 government figures were through the roof. “This explains the dramatic decrease in population growth in those Uyghur regions in one year between 2018-2019,” he said. “It is breathtaking.”
According to the data he uncovered, from14 to 34 per cent of all married women of childbearing age were scheduled to be sterilized in one year. “Basically, any woman with more than three children will be sterilized,” he said, adding that officials had to ensure they were complying with government orders to fulfill the plan, “or they are in big trouble.”
The ultimate goal was that 80 per cent of women would be either sterilized or fitted with an IUD, checked quarterly, with the added safeguard of bi-monthly pregnancy checks “For the government, it becomes like a faucet. It can be turned on or off,” he said wryly. The aim, he concluded, was to seize full control of population growth in Xinjiang.
These revelations have followed swiftly from a series of scandals exposing President Xi Jinping’s master plan regarding the Uyghur people. First came the leaked China Cables in November 2019 which described the internal workings of detention camps holding over a million ethnic minority Muslims. Then came the Karakax List in February this year, detailing meticulously the fate of a group of 2802 residents of Karakax, and the so-called “crimes” they had committed to warrant incarceration and “re-education. 150 of these had violated birth control policies, and others were implicated in “crimes” such as wearing long skirts, sporting “unusual” beards, or possessing Arabic calligraphy in their homes.
Uyghurs were then sent in March into the COVID-19 firing line to re-open factories in inner China and now, as reported by Bitter Winter in April and May this year, they are being sent from internment camps, in tens of thousands, to factories all over Xinjiang and inner China to make goods for western brands, in conditions tantamount to slave labor.
Xi Jinping vowed back in 2017, to eradicate poverty in China by 2020. Under the guise of his latest “poverty alleviation” drive, Uyghurs are being forcibly scooped up as never before to work for their Han masters in factories around the country, whilst simultaneously falling prey in their homeland to a stepped up a sinicization drive which has reduced their religious observance to zero, their mosques to rubble or sewing workshops, their language and literature to a quaint relic of the past, and their culture to the tourist arena.
According to Zenz, when presenting the CCP’s overarching master plan for the Uyghurs to the US Congressional Executive Commission on China in November last year, the aim is complete social control. The goal is for every single Uyghur to be monitored from the cradle to the grave, whether they be in government orphanages while their parents are in the camps, in day care while their mothers are “liberated” to work in factories, which are purposely built near an internment camp or their village; in a transformation through education camp aka internment, or re-education camp, or “released” to a factory making goods for the Western market, or in elderly care of some kind. Everyone is on a list. In the government scheme known as “fine grained poverty alleviation,” brand new villages are being built with factories on site. There will be gradually fewer villages with scattered unmonitorable housing, and every effort is made to break up not just the extended, but also the nuclear family.
Zenz’s report is another call to add to the faint voices of Uyghurs themselves, for the world to wake up and stand up to the Communist Government of China. In April 2020, exiled Uyghurs launched the Twitter “#Can you hear me?” campaign. They hold a photo of a loved one up to the camera, asking for information regarding their fate. Usually, this is met by silence from the Chinese Government, but sometimes there will be a retaliatory full feature propaganda documentary, showing the so-called disappeared allegedly relative living a prosperous and happy life. Obviously, when the film shooting ends, they will be returned to the transformation through education camps-
Zenz is disappointed that so many developing countries are being muzzled through debt diplomacy, but that even European countries or the EU itself, with no debt to China, are slow to speak out. The CCP brands those who dare to speak out as purveyors of fake news, and co-opts the major international institutions such as the UN, the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) and the WHO in its cover ups. There is, hoverer, some hope in the new Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which has immediately denounced the forced sterilization of Uyghur women.
The CCP propaganda is, on the other hand, massive, and deflecting responsibility for the Coronavirus was a final master stroke; a success story illustrating the China model to be emulated by the world, and an opportunity for China itself to turn a profit from the disastrous pandemic.
Individual stories have emerged from the internment camps of forced IUD insertions and mystery injections, some of which have rendered them sterile. Women undergo regular pregnancy checks according to Zenz, and countless women have reported forced abortions.
None of the women spoken to by Bitter Winter are surprised by the sterilization figures. “This is proof, as if we needed it, that there is a genocide going on in Xinjiang,” said Mehrigul, a Uyghur refugee living in Istanbul. “The Chinese government is determined to wipe us and our culture out,” said Aigul, also living in Turkey, who was forced to flee leaving her seven-year-old daughter behind. “I had already had three children when I was pregnant with her,” she said, distraught and fingering the only photo she still has of her little girl. “Rather than have an abortion, I fled to live with relatives in a remote village to have her. I returned with a baby and claimed she belonged to my sister,” adding that this was common practice for women who have too many children. But registration was impossible. “We could never get her registered and made legal,” she said. “She couldn’t go to school with no ID, and getting a passport would never happen,” she cried, explaining that the last she heard, her daughter had been taken away by officials and put in a CCP orphanage.
Whoever Bitter Winter has spoken to in Southern Xinjiang, stories abound of the stringent measures employed by the CCP to control births. Village women farmers are regularly herded into clinics for pregnancy checks, and they have lived with the quiet genocide of forced abortion for years. A Hotan doctor speaking to Bitter Winter anonymously, who refused to allow his illegal fourth child to be aborted, says that he lives in fear of this child being discovered. They freeze in terror at every police check when the child is with them, praying there will be no questions. He has been told that his clinic will be closed, his children taken away, and he will be sent for “re-education” were his secret to come out. He is pleased that the world might know now exactly what is happening.
Source: Bitter Winter
