China: Genocide By IUD

CHINA

Genocide By IUD

China is sterilizing hundreds of thousands of Uighur women to reduce its Muslim population even as it is encouraging women of the Han majority to bear more children, an Associated Press investigation found.

Officials have subjected hundreds of thousands of these women to pregnancy checks, forced use of intrauterine devices, birth control pills, shots to prevent pregnancy, sterilization and abortion over the past four years.

“Performance targets…Target 1: target population for intrauterine contraception device placement 524 people…Target 2: [target] population for sterilizations 14,872 people.”

Those quotes come from official Chinese documents that detailed plans to sterilize as much as a third of women from Uighur and other minority groups between the ages of 18 and 49 in the far-western province of Xinjiang, where a large Uighur community resides, according to Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, writing in Foreign Policy. He said China was perpetrating demographic genocide, a cultural extermination combined with a campaign of “ethno-racial supremacy.”

It began in 2017, when there was an unprecedented crackdown on the minority group, with hundreds of thousands thrown into prisons and camps for “signs of religious extremism” such as traveling abroad, praying or using foreign social media, the AP wrote in previous articles. Authorities launched “dragnet-style” investigations to root out parents with too many children, even those who gave birth decades ago.

One former teacher drafted to work as an instructor at a detention camp told the AP: It started with flag-raising assemblies at her compound at the beginning of 2017, where officials made Uighur residents recite “anti-terror” lessons. They chanted, “If we have too many children, we’re religious extremists…That means we have to go to the training centers.”

In some areas, women were ordered to take gynecology exams after the ceremonies, they told the news outlet. In others, officials outfitted special rooms with ultrasound scanners for pregnancy tests.

Fast-forward three years: Currently, the Chinese government is using the mass detention in internment camps both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply, the AP wrote. “Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.”

The campaign is working: Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60 percent from 2015 to 2018, the latest figures available, the AP wrote. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24 percent last year – compared to just 4.2 percent nationwide. In some Uighur counties, 2018 saw more deaths than births. In others, they have either leveled off to almost zero or the data is being withheld, Foreign Policy wrote.

Meanwhile, state-sponsored hackers have been secretly implanting malware into the Uighur population’s smartphones, collecting location data as well as DNA, voiceprints, facial scans and other personal data to transform Xinjiang into a virtual police state, the New York Times wrote. And China didn’t stop collecting or using the data at its borders: It followed the Uighurs into exile in 15 other countries.

The communist authorities also arrested and imprisoned hundreds of imams over the past few years, robbing the community of its leaders as the Chinese state prepared stricter measures, Voice of America reported.

In response to the allegations by the AP, the New York Times, Foreign Policy and other outlets, China said they are “fabricated” and “fake news”: They stress that the government treats all ethnicities equally and protects the legal rights of minorities. Chinese officials have said in the past that the new measures are merely meant to be fair, allowing both Han Chinese and ethnic minorities the same number of children, the AP wrote.

President Donald Trump recently signed the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which would punish violations of human rights with sanctions, CNN explained. American officials have also cautioned US companies against working with Chinese businesses that might rely on Uighur forced labor or other abuses, reported Politico.

Even so, writing in the Guardian, Uighur expert Sean Roberts of George Washington University argued that the US has always tacitly – or possibly even explicitly – sanctioned China’s persecution of the Uighurs. China’s ongoing campaign against the Uighurs, Roberts wrote, “has never been a response to a terrorist threat, real or imagined – but a narrative of Islamist terrorism founded in the US-led ‘war on terror’ that has always served as its convenient justification.”

In the New Republic, the urgency of the group’s plight led editors to use the headline, “Uighur Lives Matter.” The conservative National Review thought more than sanctions were necessary to stop what was going on in concentration camps deep in China’s interior.

“Never again” used to mean something. Maybe it will again.