Demographic repression in Xinjiang: China's forced sterilisation of Uyghur women

10 February 2021

Disturbing Chinese government statistics show that birth rates in the Xinjiang districts of “Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60 per cent from 2015 to 2018 … compared to just 4.2 per cent nationwide”, an unprecedented drop that points to something sinister — coercive population control. Since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has imprisoned more than one million Muslims who populate the Xinjiang region in a government crackdown on a group the CCP claims is a national security threat. A majority of those Muslims are Uyghurs, a predominantly Turkish speaking ethnic minority China has repressed for more than a decade.

The repression has escalated since 2017 and includes the forced labour and ‘re-education’ of 11 million Uyghurs residing in Xinjiang. However, more disturbing are the reports of the mass sterilisation of Uyghur women that, along with corresponding birth statistics, show that China is undertaking demographic repression of the Uyghur minority. China’s involuntary birth control measures and draconian punishment for childbirth cannot continue. The international community should denounce these atrocities, persuade China to abandon its maltreatment of Uyghur women through a series of diplomatic responses, and hold global actors accountable for complicity.

The Xinjiang region has endured a long history of warring factions and imperial occupation before it came under Qing dynasty rule in the mid-18th century. It has remained part of China ever since. Although Uyghurs comprise the largest minority group living in the region, Xinjiang is also home to 13 native non-Uyghur groups, making it a mixing pot of ethnicities. Current unrest can be traced back to the 1950s when state-sponsored migration of Han Chinese, the country’s ethnic majority, exacerbated tensions with the Uyghurs, who view the migration as a threat to their way of life. Further issues that escalated tensions in the last two decades include government policies promoting Chinese cultural assimilation, suppression of religious expression, and harsh separatism responses. The Uyghur kickback has come in many forms. Clashes with police, widespread public unrest, and several terrorist attacks perpetrated by extremist groups in 2014 preceded the Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang. Fergus Shiel and Sasha Chavkin, members of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, explain China’s response to their inquiry regarding the Uyghur repression:

“China says that the crackdown is necessary to prevent terrorism and root out Islamic extremism. The action is part of a larger campaign by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to promote Han nationalism as a unifying force … and to suppress any ethnic, cultural, or religious identities that might compete for popular loyalty with the Chinese Communist Party”

China’s primary suppression technique is reportedly through re-education camps, which are nothing more than detention centres where Uyghur men and women are often held without charge. Detainees are forced to assimilate, denounce Islam, and learn a vocation before being sent to forced labour sites around China. Over 1 million Uyghur are estimated to have been confined since 2017, the most extensive detention of any religious group since World War II.

Repression through coercive birth prevention

In 2017 China noted its concern with the growing disparity in population between the Han and Uyghur and worried that the Uyghur growth rate would exacerbate ethnic segregation. CCP officials argued it “weakens national identity” and falsely claimed “Uyghur population growth is in turn linked to religious extremism”. In response, China stiffened its enforcement of the national two-child per family planning policy and incorporated severe punishment for Uyghur women caught having additional children. Before 2017, Uyghurs caught violating the family planning policy did not receive judicial punishment, only fines. These fines “also apply to Han Chinese”, however, since the CCP crackdown, enforcement changes mean “only minorities are sent to the detention camps if they cannot pay”. CCP officials enforce these measures through targeted surveillance of Uyghur families and offer rewards for information about illegally born children. Those draconian measures led to thousands of Uyghur women extrajudicially imprisoned since 2018.

Human rights groups monitoring the situation in Xinjiang began receiving reports in 2019 from witness testimony that Chinese authorities had been administering unknown “injections to women in detention, forcibly implanting intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) before internment, [and] coercing women to accept surgical sterilisation…”. These shocking reports came after Chinese authorities enacted a new policy in 2019 that changed population planning from controlling growth to eradicating it. China planned to force sterilise a large percentage of childbearing aged women in southern Xinjiang. A witness recounts that officials declared “women aged 19 to 59 were expected to have intrauterine devices fitted or undergo sterilisation” regardless of how many children they had. CCP officials verified compliance through invasive quarterly IUD checks and bimonthly pregnancy tests. If a woman tested positive for pregnancy, officials forced the mother to undergo an abortion.

For women detained for breaking the CCP’s family planning policy, the nightmare continues in confinement. The BBC News recently obtained accounts from Uyghur women formerly incarcerated where they recount distressing claims of systematic rape, sexual abuse, and torture. Verifying these claims is difficult due to the secrecy inside the CCP internment camps, but women from different facilities have told similar stories in the past few years. These allegations present a horrifying picture of daily life for detained Uyghur women who are subjected to sexual violence with no hope of escape.

China has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and only recently admitted the detention camps exist, although they insist the re-education centres are entirely voluntary. CCP officials acknowledged the declining Xinjiang birth rate but attributed it to “the comprehensive implementation of the family planning policy” and even claimed re-education camps promoted feminism. A CCP report stated, “the minds of Uygur women were emancipated, and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines”. Notwithstanding China’s defiant claims of no wrongdoing, the systematic forced sterilisation of Uyghur women is a clear and brutal violation of human rights and amounts to demographic repression.

The world responds

In Xinjiang, the heightened crackdown that began in 2017 prompted a formal expression of concern by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in August 2018. The US Assistant Secretary of Defense Randall Schriver followed in 2019 by criticising China’s conduct as “unbecoming”. Like-minded countries echoed the UN and US’ stern rebuke; however, as political science scholars Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Myunghee Lee, and Emir Yazici note, the world was divided in its response.

*Artist, Jeremy Deller marks World Human Rights Day 2020 with UK-wide billboard campaign. Image credit: David MacSweeney*

Twenty-two countries wrote a letter to the US Human Rights Council in the summer of 2019, calling on China to end is detention and repression of minorities in Xinjiang. Thirty-seven countries countered “in defence and support of the PRC's ‘counterterrorism, deradicalisation, and vocational training’ policies”. Furthermore, in December 2020, Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy organisation, sent a letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), demanding the IOC require China to address human rights concerns before the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games.

The CCP has often defended its actions by citing the unrest in the mid-2010s that killed hundreds of people as a reason to invoke the UN’s Global Counterterrorism Strategy to quell violent extremism. However, no matter how justified the response to violence may be, invoking counterterrorism does not give China the vindication to commit mass atrocities. Indeed, the UN’s strategy emphasises the need to uphold human rights, the opposite of China’s actions against Uyghur women and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

Options for international action

Multilateral targeted sanctions

Several countries and international bodies have considered action. For example, in December 2020, the European Parliament “adopted a resolution that strongly condemns [the actions of] China”. However, condemnation is not enough. The US has levied targeted sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against CCP officials and organisations linked to Xinjiang human rights abuses. The US response is a good start, but as Dr George A. Lopez, Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies at Notre Dame University, argues, unilateral sanctions are not effective in the age of globalisation because they can be bypassed. His extensive experience in monitoring and implementing UN sanctions in the mid-2010s has shown that “multilateral support and cooperation are essential”. Significant targeted sanctions by the European Union and select Commonwealth of Nations members may pressure China to address its human rights abuses. Even so, it is unclear whether sanctions will seriously affect China’s repression tactics, especially if the UN remains passive. Still, if used in conjunction with other diplomatic tools, sanctions can be part of a comprehensive package to pressure China to act.

Import limitations on goods linked to Xinjiang

Some of the most effective measures target the Chinese economy and the global supply chain. Several options exist, and one recommendation is for the US Congress to “pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was introduced in March last year [2020] and passed by the House of Representatives”. It has yet to reach the Senate floor, but if passed, it would “block imports from the [Xinjiang] region unless proof can be shown that they are not linked to forced labour” or Uyghurs in detention facilities. That would be a significant blow to the estimated millions of dollars in Chines trade that originates from forced labour in Xinjiang.

Likewise, global companies must be held accountable for their business in Xinjiang and should conduct immediate inquiries into their supply chain, “including robust and independent social audits and inspections”. Companies such as Nike, Adidas, and Apple work with Xinjiang suppliers, as do many apparel companies. A significant portion of the world’s cotton supply is grown there, much of it under forced labour. Chinese companies known to use forced labour from Uyghur re-educated detainees should be blacklisted and global companies banned from conducting business with them. If companies in the US do not comply, Customs and Borders Protection (CBP) has the authority under the US Tariff Act of 1930 to “seize goods produced by forced labour anywhere in the supply chain”. Furthermore, governments should impose penalties against companies and prosecute executives found circumventing sanctions and import bans.

Diplomatic pressure

China has positioned itself on the UN Human Rights Council after the election to that body in October 2020. Its influence has caused the council to be reticent to denounce Uyghur repression. However, China is susceptible to other means of diplomatic pressure, especially trade-related. The Belt and Road Initiative, a Chinese global infrastructure development strategy unveiled in 2013, provides diplomatic opportunity. The World Bank estimates the trade corridor will increase potential foreign (FDI) by almost 70 per cent for the nearly seventy countries and organisations it affects. There lies enormous opportunity for international diplomatic pressure on China by including human rights abuses against Uyghur women in trade negotiations.

Amy Lehr and Mariefaye Bechrakis, researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explain that “establishing human rights as the linchpin to bilateral relations produced an important shift in Soviet attitudes”. The Chinese and former Soviet Union economies are incomparable, but the diplomacy concept is. China sees its economy as its primary projection of power, so degrading that power through actions designed to affect trade can provide enormous leverage for negotiations. Forcing China to abolish its demographic repression of the Uyghurs should be part of any trade or diplomatic talks the US and international partners engage in. Moreover, countries should use UN venues to repeatedly demand “China comply with its national and international obligations to respect human rights, including freedom of religion, and allow UN human rights monitors access to detention centres”.

Concluding thoughts

These policy recommendations provide multiple tools for the international community to collectively pressure China to address its abuses. The change will not happen overnight, and governments should prepare to engage China over the long-term to ensure compliance. Policy instruments like sanctions, diplomatic pressure, import bans, and UN monitoring, imposed in synchrony, provide the best options for protecting the Uyghur. The seriousness of the actions the CCP has taken against repressing Uyghur population growth through coercive birth control requires a calculated international response. Merely condemning these actions are not enough, and the UN and other international bodies must decide how to address them. The collective message must be clear: human rights abuses are unethical and will not be tolerated, especially under the guise of counterterrorism.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Michael Brodka is a US Army intelligence officer and writes about foreign policy and regional security issues in Central and Northeast Asia. He holds an MPS in Security and Safety Leadership from George Washington University and is an MPS in Applied Intelligence candidate at Georgetown University.

The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Department of Defense. Image credit: Flickr/T Chu.