Part IV has focused on Table 3-6, I want to add more data analysis by other tables and also to give some background discussion on the forced sterilization, which is something one can easily relate to genocide.
Xinjiang Has Been Playing A Catchup Game
The Uyghurs growth rates compare favorably with other minorities & far higher than Hans: Using the numbers in Table 3-8 that contains historical growth by ethnicities, I have calculated the growth rates for the other minorities (excluding Uyghurs) combined and also for the Hans. The other minorities have had a population growth rate of 4.72% from 2010 to 2018, when the Uyghurs were growing at 14.82%. If you think this difference of 10.1% is big, wait for this: from 2015 to 2018 the other minorities had a negative growth rate of -0.13%, while the Uyghurs were growing 3.32%. Meanwhile, the Hans had negative growth rates during both the period of 2010 to 2018 (-5.59%) and of 2015 to 2018 (-8.64%).
One thing is clear, due to the long history of the affirmative action, Xinjiang’s population growth rates had long been significantly higher than the national average, while within Xinjiang the Uyghurs had a higher RNI than everyone else. When the one-child policy and the affirmative action were in place, the government had been lenient to the Uyghur, especially in the rural areas. But when the whole country opened up for two children per family in 2017 — effectively eliminated or stopped the special birth privilege for the Uyghur and all minorities — the autonomous region found it easier to enforce the same population control quota to everyone so the region can pay a catchup game to the nation. The big RNI drop for the Uyghur occurred exactly because their historical rates had been higher than everyone else, making them an easy target for the new enforcement actions.
If we really want to find the genocide evidences from the official documents, we don’t need to go too far, as the key document was right there, open to the public for everyone to see, leaving little room for secrecy or conspiracy. It was the revised and updated birth control /family planning regulations by the Standing Committee of Xinjiang People’s Congress on July 28, 2017, like I indicated in Part IV.
Facts of Forced Sterilization
To anyone in the west not familiar with the history of birth control policies in China, the forced sterilization is something perhaps the hardest to live with.
The third major finding from the Zenz report: “Documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilization in rural Uyghur regions, targeting 14 and 34 percent of all married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur counties that year. This project targeted all of southern Xinjiang, and continued in 2020 with increased funding. This campaign likely aims to sterilize rural minority women with three or more children, as well as some with two children—equivalent to at least 20 percent of all childbearing-age women. Budget figures indicate that this project had sufficient funding for performing hundreds of thousands of tubal ligation sterilization procedures in 2019 and 2020, with least one region receiving additional central government funding. In 2018, a Uyghur prefecture openly set a goal of leading its rural populations to accept widespread sterilization surgery.”
I think the key here is not whether forced sterilization — even at a mass scale — happened or not. China never denied the use of that means for birth control. But again, citing my own words from last part, no genocide if no selective killing. For meeting the criterion of “genocide” we have the burden of proof that forced sterilization only applies to the Uyghurs. In other words, if the Uyghurs were singled out for the procedure, we would have a smoking gun straight from Xinjiang.
But the simple fact or common knowledge in China is that anyone, if violated the one-child policy, would be punished. In fact, the bar for penalty is lower for Han -Chinese than for Uyghurs and other minorities. Visit this Wikipedia page for details how the government enforced the policy. In a famous phrase summarized by a former Minister of Health: 一胎上环，二胎绝育, meaning “women were required to have a contraceptive intrauterine device (IUD) surgically installed after having a first child, and to be sterilized by tubal ligation after having a second child.” If you are an Uyghur then it would be IUD after the second child and tubal ligation after the third child. According to the same Wikipedia, “From 1980 to 2014, 324 million Chinese women were fitted with IUDs in this way and 108 million were sterilized.” Yes, it is draconian; and yes, it violated human rights, but I doubt if anyone could make it qualified for genocide.
One may argue however that putting the Uyghurs in the training or internment centers constitutes violation of human rights, because the centers only take in Uyghurs. This is a valid point but let us take a look at the penalties received by Han-Chinese in violation of birth control. Again the same Wikipedia page says that “Women who refused these procedures – which many resented – could lose their government employment and their children could lose access to education or health services and have any privileges revoked.” Financial penalty is also serious, “in the form of the “social child-raising fee”, sometimes called a “family planning fine” in the West, which was collected as a fraction of either the annual disposable income of city dwellers or of the annual cash income of peasants, in the year of the child’s birth.”
I know people in the west will have a hard time to believe this, but Chinese see things differently: Compared with a temporary stay in a centralized facility — with foods and beds provided for free —most Chinese would say the financial penalties are harsher. I am not defending the practice of putting people in the facility without good causes or legal procedures, just want to bring this different perspective for consideration.
It actually reminds me of my years in China, when I was in a state owned farm when Mao was still alive. That farm used to be a place holding former prisoners who had served up their times in prisons but did not want to go back to their hometowns (being a prisoner was a big taboo for himself and also for his entire family back then). So the farm provided alternative jobs and living places for these people. Being a young kid at that time, I liked to talk to these ex-prisoners and I still remember to this day that many of them told me they entered the prisons several times. Why? Because during the Great Chinese Famine following Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward and the People’s Commune campaigns, many people (one estimate put it at 30+ million), especially in the countryside, died of hungry. By being in the prison at least they could survive by growing rice and foods to feed themselves. Many of them had purposely committed some petty crimes after being released, just to get themselves into jails and then the farm again.
The point I want to make is that people’s preferences change greatly by circumstances.
Unusual Incidents of Birth Control Operations
The fourth finding in Zenz was “By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries (IUDs or sterilizations), with actual shares likely being much higher. In 2018, 80 percent of all new IUD placements in China were performed in Xinjiang, despite the fact that the region only makes up 1.8 percent of the nation’s population.”
A Xinjiang scholar, Lin, Fangfei, cited by this report by CGTN (China Global TV Network) with an eye-catching title of “Six Lies in Adrian Zenz’s Xinjiang Report of ‘Genocide'” published on September 14, 2020, called this finding Lie #4, “Lin found out that according to the official data published by the National Health Commission, in 2018, the new surgeries of IUD placement nationwide was 3,774,318 and for Xinjiang it was 328,475. Thus the new surgeries in Xinjiang only accounted for 8.7 percent of the national total. The 80-percent claim is another outright lie.”
I wanted to confirm which side was right so I was happy when I spot this GitHub site in the US with several years of Health Statistic Yearbooks uploaded by someone name Wang Haisheng, which could be 王海生 in Chinese. A nice feature of the yearbooks is that they all listed not only current year but years before, providing another means to check the consistency of the annual figures. I have looked them through and the numbers were good and agreed with each other. This matters as there is a slight possibility for China to change the figures lately given the criticism on Xinjiang policies. But if the figures were there long before the genocide accusation, that would add credibility.
These figures confirm that Lin was right and Zenz seemed to got the numbers wrong: in 2018, the total IUD placement surgeries in China was indeed 3,774,318 cases (see the bottom row of Table 1). As for Xinjiang, the number of IUDs in 2018 was 328,475 according to Table 8-8-2 of China Health & Hygiene Statistical Yearbook 2019. However, Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook 2019, which is online and open to public, has another Table 3-10 for family planning statistics and it gave us a much smaller number of IUD surgeries: 203,629 in 2018. I am not sure which figure, 328,475 (8.7% of the national total) from the Healthy & Hygiene Statistical Yearbook 2019, or 203,629 (5.4% of the national total) from the Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook 2019, is right.
Either way, it seems Zenz’s number was off by a lot. Why it is so is not clear, perhaps misplaced the decimal point and took 8.7% to 80%? Anyway, this apparently has impacted the conclusion. Had zenz been right, that would be a huge anomaly, and we have every right to be suspicious for special penalty for the Uyghurs only.
Population Growth Target As A Smoking Gun?
Lin also called the Zenz finding that “one Uyghur region set an unprecedented near-zero population growth target: a mere 1.05 per mille” another big lie, as the same document cited by Zenz actually shows a population growth target of 1.05%, which translates into 1.05 per mille, and Lin says “is not much different from Kizilsu’s natural population growth rate of 11.45%.”
This website (in Chinese) actually showed a visual evidence of a screenshot, not very clear or high quality, of the original document page from the Health & Hygiene Commission in Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang. The image looked like the targeted RNI in that prefecture should be smaller than 1.05%, and the targeted birth rate smaller than 1.55%. If so then the percentage figures become 10.5 per mille and 15.5 per mille, respectively.
Perhaps Zenz misread the percentage sign and treated that as 1.05 per thousand or mille? This would have to be answered by Zenz. I don’t want to prejudge anyone but if Lin was right, it would be embarrassing for Zenz to make such a low but crucial mistake. Based on simple logic, I would say that one region is unlikely to drop the natural growth rate from 11.45 per mille to near zero in just two years (from 2018 to 2020), unless the death rate is extremely high.
It is fair to say that the accusation of China committed genocide has a weak base, with evidences from the Zenz report mostly speculations, proxies and faulty guesses. This does not deny the value of the report itself, because raising questions and asking for confirmations are how we make progress in learning. At the minimum, it helps urge China to realize how important it is to keep its policies transparent and to have efficient conversations with the world.