Forced Sterilization of Uyghur Women
The Chinese Communist Party does not only want to remove Uyghurs’ cultural, religious, and linguistic identity, but they also want to eradicate them completely. German Anthropologist Adrian Zenz says that as China loosens reproduction restrictions on the Han Chinese population, the opposite occurs for the Turkic Muslim minorities of East Turkistan.
Women are either involuntarily sterilized or are forced to have intrauterine contraception devices (IUD). “Starting in 2018, a growing number of female former internment camp detainees testified that they were given injections that coincided with changes in or cessation of their menstrual cycles. Others reported that they were forcibly fitted with IUDs prior to internment or subjected to sterilization surgeries” [1]. Chinese measures to circumvent high numbers of child births were so successful that in 2018 some Uyghur counties had more deaths than births, according to Zenz. While Uyghurs are subjected to such treatment, the Chinese government actively tries to boost the birth rate of the Han Chinese population. People may get tax breaks or have their childbirth subsidized.
Chinese government created a project called “Free Technical Family Planning Services to Farmers and Pastoralists” where they provide free birth control surgeries. “The project’s explicit aim is to reduce these regions’ 2020 birth and population growth rates by “at least” 0.4 percentage points below the 2016 level. The free “birth control surgeries” include IUD placements, abortions, and sterilizations” [2].
Beijing going beyond to provide help to Han Chinese to have more children while suppressing the Uyghur people’s reproduction says enough about what kind of government they really are. Despite what they may claim, the CCP does not respect the minorities in China, and uses genocidal tools like forced sterilization to wipe out any group that is not the Han Chinese.
References
[1] Zenz, Adrian. n.d. “Uighurs in Xinjiang Targeted by Potentially Genocidal Sterilization Plans, Chinese Documents Show.” Accessed July 7, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/china-documents-uighur-genocidal-sterilization-xinjiang.
[2] Ibid.