A demographic crisis looms over China – the consequence of a policy decision gone wrong. China’s Communist Party’s (CCP) long-term policy decision to slow population growth is now set to unleash an era of negative growth as the size of the population continues to contract. The policy did not fail completely – it did slow population growth but the collateral damage was substantial. A consequential decline in birth rates and an increase in life expectancy has led China to have a large aging population. This impacts China’s labor force participate rate, and affects its economic growth. If China is to maintain the current population levels, every woman in China must have at least 2.1 children. This is also commonly referred to as the replacement level fertility, but China’s current fertility level stands at 1.6 children per woman.

A distressed Beijing is now wanting to mitigate the impact of its long standing ‘one-child policy’ and in its characteristic authoritarian style is encouraging women to have more children, be it through tax subsidies or free IUD removals. But the biggest caveat to this reversal in policy, is that it only applies to women who are neither Muslim nor from another ethnic minority. 

To be Muslim in China is one thing, but to be a Muslim woman in China is quite another. In the Muslim dominated community of Xinjiang, women are to be fitted with contraceptive devices – brutally subjected to forceful insertion of intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortions. So while the rest of China is seeing the government aggressively assert its expectation on women to have more children, in Xinjiang, an unabated crackdown on Muslim women is ongoing. An Associated Press investigation reveals that Muslim women and those from other ethnic minorities are threatened with police raids, pregnancy checks, abortions and exorbitant fines to deter them from having more children than Beijing wants them to have. Should any woman from an ethnic minority resist this indiscriminate and systematic crackdown on births among ethnic populations, they are locked up in internment camps.

The Karakax list, the infamous document leak from Xinjiang, reveals details of 311 people who were interned and displays with spectacular clarity that the state assigns guilt – either presumably or through association and holds hostage not only individuals but entire family circles to prescribed behaviors around child birth. Close to 74.3% of those at the internment camps receive a release verdict after they complete a one-year re-education period.  After release, they are forced into community control or what the document calls industrial park employment. A disturbing report by the New York Times also reveals that many women at the internment camps face sexual abuse or are forced to intake medicines that impact their long-term physical and mental well-being. Detailed accounts obtained by the BBCfurther confirm systematic rape and torture at the camps.

In 2019, a campaign of mass female sterilization was planned in rural Uyghur counties, targeting 14% and 34% of all married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur counties, respectively. The project continued through 2020 with increased funding to target all of Southern Xinjiang, and intent on sterilizing at least 20% of all rural minority women that are of childbearing-age. An ambitious budget was set aside, sufficiently funded to perform hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures. 

Xinjiang makes up 1.8% of China’s total population – yet in 2018, 80% of all net added IUD placements, that is placements minus removals, were performed in Xinjiang. By 2019, nearly 80% of women of child bearing age in four of the minority prefectures in rural South Xinjiang had been subjected to intrusive birth prevention surgeries, with actual numbers unclear. Furthermore, the Communist Party tasks nearly a million workers to visit and at times stay in the homes of Muslim women – act as government spies, to report back signs of extremist behavior that is mostly judged through any resentment displayed by women about the contraceptive procedures they would have undergone. 

As a result of such practices, the birth rates in the Uighur dominant regions of Hotan and Kashgar have fallen by 60% from 2015 to 2018, while in Xinjiang region in particular, the birth rates fell by 24% in 2019. Such systematic, persistent and forced birth control measures on Muslim women and those from other ethnic backgrounds, qualify as demographic genocide,  given that such acts stand in contempt of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, where Section D of Article 2, calls out “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the targeted group”.

Many Uyghur and Kazakh women, having escaped China have shared their personal accounts of resistancedespite the backlash by the Chinese State security against them and their families. In recounting the violations of their autonomy, be it sexual, medical or forced labor, they have awakened the international community to the horrific ethnic violence systematically unleased on women from minority groups by the Chinese State. This led 39 countries, spearheaded by Germany to sign a declaration expressing their concern over the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, with Germany’s UN ambassador, urging China to allow UN Human Rights observers “immediate, meaningful and unfettered access” to Xinjiang. In response, China refuted the allegations, calling them “groundless” and labeling the declaration as a tactic to provoke confrontation among UN member states. In light of continued pressure from Western diplomats, Beijing also threatened with blocking the renewal of peacekeeping missions for some countries. 

An independent study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute suspects more than 380 detention facilities, where, according to the United Nations, more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim Turkic speaking residents have been held. But China insists that the camps are vocational training centers set up as measures to counter the threat of extremism and positions its actions as a legitimate move to fight terrorism and separatism. In reality, the camps ensure the systematic repression of any potential ethnic separatism that could threaten China’s territorial integrity and population, and could possibly challenge President Xi Jinping’s rule. In 2020 alone, Beijing invested nearly $37 million into programs focused on forced sterilizations and IUD plantations. 

A series of speeches found in over 400 pages of leaked internal Chinese documents, reveal that President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on ethnic minorities is a carefully curated ethnic cleansing, that places security over human rights, and imposes dictatorial power over people. Arbitrary detention, anti-extremism laws and sinicizing religion or in other words conforming religious practices to adapt to the party’s doctrine and the Han-Chinese society’s customs, are some of the many widely used tools for repressing the people of Xinjiang. Post the 9/11 attacks on the United States, China now justifies it actions under the pretext of fighting the Global War on Terror. 

China has also been preventing a Uyghur diaspora from coalescing into a force and has been pressurizing governments to repatriate Uyghurs back to China. Thailand, Egypt and Vietnam are some of the countries that have sent expatriate Uyghurs back to China. Chinese officials have also begun to interrogate and detain Uyghurs in foreign countries. According to documents released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), China has institutionalized a process by which it instructs its officials to collect information on Uyghurs living abroad and arrests them on reentry into China. 

As of October 2021, 43 UN member states have released a cross-regional joint statement expressing deep concern over the situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, citing “widespread and systematic human rights violations, including reports documenting torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, forced sterilization, sexual and gender-based violence, and forced separation of children”. In response, China orchestrated a pro-China statement, and at the third committee of the United Nations General Assembly, Cuba delivered a joint statement, supported by 62 countries “opposing unfounded allegations against China out of political motivation and based on disinformation”, and called such a declaration, “an interference in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of human rights”. No details of the countries that endorsed the pro-China statement have been shared till date.

Meanwhile, crimes against humanity continue to mount in Xinjiang. This raises the existential question whether condemnation, even if led by the United Nations, and ratified by a substantial number of UN member states, will ever deter China from continuing its demographic genocide. The issue of accountability sits at the center of sweeping human rights abuses, that cooperation and multilateralism have in so far failed to resolve. Academicians, journalists and human rights organizations have presented a tidal wave of evidence in support of action against China; foreign governments have held unsuccessful bilateral dialogues with Beijing; foreign firms stand complicit in the abuse in the face of inaction – yet we look for hope in Magnitsky Act sanctions, tightening trade regulations, in establishing an impartial and independent United Nations mechanism to monitor, analyze and report on the human rights abuses in China. 

Hope notwithstanding, it may be realistic to ask – Will China’s reign of impunity ever reach an end?