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China boasts Uyghur Muslim women are 'no longer baby-making machines' amid forced birth control allegations

Over the years, the communist government has engaged in detention and re-education of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region and activists have termed this as 'genocide'

The Chinese Embassy in the US on Thursday, January 7, boasted on Twitter citing a recent study that claims that re-educating the Uyghur women made them believe that they were “no longer baby-making machines”. Over the years, the communist government of China has engaged in detention and re-education of Uyghur Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region of north-western China. Human rights activists and groups have slammed the Chinese regime accusing it of engaging in mass human rights abuses in connection to that program.

In November 2019, BBC reported that leaked documents revealed that China systematically “brainwashed” hundreds of thousands of Muslims in high-security prison camps despite Beijing consistently claiming that camps in Xinjiang offered voluntary education and training. BBC Panorama saw official documents that showed how the inmates were detained, indoctrinated and also punished. China dismissed the documents calling them fake.

China’s treatment of Uyghurs came under attack from the West as recently as December 2020 when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of curtailing the Uyghurs' religious freedom. Speaking in an interview with ‘Wake Up America’, Pompeo hit out at Beijing over its treatment meted out to a million Uyghurs and compared it with the Nazi’s ethnic cleansing of the Jews in the 1930s.

The Chinese embassy, in its tweet, tried to show that not all is wrong with the Uyghurs. In the social media post, it cited a China Daily report that spoke about the Xinjiang Development Research Center allegedly finding that "in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines".

Speaking more about the report’s findings, the embassy said the women were trying to be “more confident and independent”.

"The report on population change in Xinjiang published by the Xinjiang Development Research Center said extremism had incited people to resist family planning and its eradication had given Uygur women more autonomy when deciding whether to have children," the report by China Daily, which is owned by the Communist Party, added. The Daily report also cited the study to say a growing number of people in southern Xinjiang were showing an inclination to marry and have children later in life as they are learning more about the benefits of fewer but better births, and attributed this change more to personal choice than government policy.

China taking draconian measures to control birth: AP

The report, however, failed to convince many. It was only in June last year that the Associated Press came up with a report saying that the Chinese government was taking inhuman measures such as forced birth controls among Uyghurs and other minorities to curb its Muslim population while encouraging some of the country’s Han majority to bear more children.

As per an AP probe based on the statistics presented by the Chinese government, state documents and interviews with several ex-detainees and others, the practice of enforcing birth control is more widespread and systematic than previously known even as women spoke out individually about forced birth control. "The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of 'demographic genocide'," the AP report added. 

AP further said that the Chinese state regularly put minority women under pregnancy checks and made them undergo sterilization and abortion. It said while the use of intrauterine devices and sterilizations fell nationwide, it was going up sharply in Xinjiang. It added that the population control measures are supported by mass detention — both as a threat and punishment for those who failed to comply. AP found that people were sent to detention camps mainly because of having too many children. Parents with three or more children were taken away from their families until they paid heavy fines. Police raids are also reported to take place in search of hidden children, leaving families in deep fear.

In October end last year, Radio Free Asia reported that Chinese men asked to monitor homes of Uyghur women whose husbands are sent to prison camps are sent to sleep with them under what is called the ‘Pair Up and Become Family’ program.

Also in July-August last year, a video clip seeking 100 Uyghur women to “urgently” sign up for marrying Chinese men was found circulating on social media and Uyghur human rights activists called it an attempt by the Communist Party to Sinicize other ethnic groups located in the Xinjiang region.