[In most of China, women are being
urged to have more babies, to shore up a falling birthrate. But in Xinjiang,
they are being forced to have fewer.]
By Amy Qin
It was no use. The workers
threatened to take her to the police if she continued resisting, she said. She
gave in and went to a government clinic where a doctor, using metal forceps,
inserted an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. She wept through the
procedure.
“I felt like I was no longer a
normal woman,” Ms. Sedik said, choking up as she described the 2017 ordeal.
“Like I was missing something.”
Across much of China, the
authorities are encouraging
women to have more children, as they try to stave off a demographic
crisis from a declining birthrate. But in the far western region of
Xinjiang, they are forcing them to have fewer, as they tighten their grip on
Muslim ethnic minorities.
It is part of a vast and repressive
social re-engineering campaign by a Communist Party determined to eliminate any
perceived challenge to its rule, in this case, ethnic separatism. Over the past
few years, the party, under its top leader, Xi Jinping, has moved aggressively
to subdue Uyghurs and other Central Asian minorities in Xinjiang, putting
hundreds of thousands into internment
camps and prisons.
The authorities have placed the region under tight
surveillance, sent residents to work
in factories and placed children in boarding
schools.
By targeting Muslim women, the
authorities are going even further, attempting to orchestrate a demographic
shift that will affect the population for generations. Birthrates in the region
have already plunged in recent years, as the use of invasive birth control
procedures has risen, findings that were previously documented by a researcher, Adrian Zenz,
with The Associated Press.
While the authorities have said the
procedures are voluntary, interviews with more than a dozen Uyghurs, Kazakhs
and other Muslim women and men from Xinjiang, as well as a review of official
statistics, government notices and reports in the state-run media, depict a
coercive effort by the Chinese Communist Party to control the
community’s reproductive rights. The authorities pressured women to use IUDs or
get sterilized. As they recuperated at home, government officials were sent to
live with them to watch for signs of discontent; one woman described having to
endure her minder’s groping.
If they had too many children or
refused contraceptive procedures, they faced steep fines or, worse, detention
in an internment camp. In the camps, the women were at risk of even more abuse. Some
former detainees say they were made to take drugs that stopped their menstrual
cycles. One woman said she had been raped in a camp.
To rights advocates and Western
officials, the government’s repression in Xinjiang is tantamount to crimes against humanity and genocide, in large part because of the efforts to stem the
population growth of Muslim minorities. The Trump administration in January was
the first government to declare
the crackdown a genocide, with reproductive oppression as a leading reason;
the Biden administration affirmed the label in March.
Ms. Sedik’s experience, reported
in The Guardian and elsewhere, helped form the basis for
the decision by the United States government. “It was one of the most detailed
and compelling first-person accounts we had,” Kelley E. Currie, a former United
States ambassador who was involved in the government’s discussions. “It helped
to put a face on the horrifying statistics we were seeing.”
Beijing has accused its critics of
pushing an anti-China agenda.
The recent declines in the region’s
birthrates, the government has said, were the result of the authorities’ fully
enforcing longstanding birth restrictions. The sterilizations and contraceptive
procedures, it said, freed women from backward attitudes about procreation and
religion.
“Whether to have birth control or
what contraceptive method they choose are completely their own wishes,” Xu
Guixiang, a Xinjiang government spokesman, said at a news conference in
March. “No one nor any agency shall interfere.”
To women in Xinjiang, the orders
from the government were clear: They didn’t have a choice.
Last year, a community worker in
Urumqi, the regional capital, where Ms. Sedik had lived, sent messages saying
women between 18 and 59 had to submit to pregnancy and birth control
inspections.
“If you fight with us at the door
and if you refuse to cooperate with us, you will be taken to the police
station,” the worker wrote, according to screenshots of the WeChat messages
that Ms. Sedik shared with The Times.
“Do not gamble with your life,” one
message read, “don’t even try.”
‘I lost all hope in myself’
All her life, Ms. Sedik, an ethnic
Uzbek, had thought of herself as a model citizen.
After she graduated from college,
she married and threw herself into her work, teaching Chinese to Uyghur
elementary school students. Mindful of the rules, Ms. Sedik didn’t get pregnant
until she had gotten approval from her employer. She had only one child, a
daughter, in 1993.
Ms. Sedik could have had two
children. The rules at the time allowed ethnic minorities to have slightly
bigger families than those of the majority Han Chinese ethnic group,
particularly in the countryside. The government even awarded Ms. Sedik a
certificate of honor for staying within the limits.
Then, in 2017, everything changed.
As the government corralled Uyghurs
and Kazakhs into mass internment camps, it moved in tandem to ramp up
enforcement of birth controls. Sterilization rates in Xinjiang surged by almost
sixfold from 2015 to 2018, to just over 60,000 procedures, even as they
plummeted around the country, according to calculations by Mr. Zenz.
The campaign in Xinjiang is at odds
with a broader push by the government since 2015 to encourage
births, including by providing tax subsidies and free IUD
removals. But from 2015 to 2018, Xinjiang’s share of the country’s total
new IUD insertions increased, even as use of the devices fell nationwide.
The contraception campaign appeared
to work.
Birthrates in minority-dominated
counties in the region plummeted from 2015 to 2018, based on Mr. Zenz’s
calculations. Several of these counties have stopped publishing population
data, but Mr. Zenz calculated that the birthrates in minority areas probably
continued to fall in 2019 by just over 50 percent from 2018, based on figures
from other counties.
The sharp drop in birthrates in the
region was “shocking” and clearly in part a result of the campaign to tighten
enforcement of birth control policies, said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology
and expert in Chinese population policies at University of California, Irvine.
But other factors could include a fall in the number of women of childbearing
age, later marriages and postponed births, he said.
As the government pushes back
against growing criticism, it has withheld some key statistics, including annually
published county-level data on birthrates and birth control use for 2019. Other
official data for the region as a whole showed a steep drop in IUD insertions
and sterilizations that year, though the number of sterilizations was still
mostly higher than before the campaign began.
In Beijing’s depiction, the
campaign is a victory for the region's Muslim women.
“In the process of
deradicalization, some women’s minds have also been liberated,” a January report by a Xinjiang
government research center read. “They have avoided the pain of being trapped
by extremism and being turned into reproductive tools.”
Women like Ms. Sedik, who had
obeyed the rules, were not spared. After the IUD procedure, Ms. Sedik suffered
from heavy bleeding and headaches. She later had the device secretly removed,
then reinserted. In 2019, she decided to be sterilized.
“The government had become so
strict, and I could no longer take the IUD,’” said Ms. Sedik, who now lives in the
Netherlands after fleeing China in 2019. “I lost all hope in myself.”
‘The women of Xinjiang are in
danger’
The penalties for not obeying the
government were steep. A Han Chinese woman who violated the birth regulations
would face a fine, while a Uyghur or Kazakh woman would face
possible detention.
When Gulnar Omirzakh had her third
child in 2015, officials in her northern village registered the birth. But
three years later, they said she had violated birth limits and owed $2,700 in
fines.
Officials said they would detain
Ms. Omirzakh and her two daughters if she did not pay.
She borrowed money from her
relatives. Later, she fled to Kazakhstan.
“The women of Xinjiang are in
danger,” Ms. Omirzakh said in a telephone interview. “The government wants to
replace our people.”
The threat of detention was real.
Three women told The Times they had
met other detainees in internment camps who had been locked up for violating
birth restrictions.
Dina Nurdybay, a Kazakh woman, said
she helped one woman write a letter to the authorities in which she blamed
herself for being ignorant and having too many children.
Such accounts are corroborated by a
137-page government document leaked
last year from Karakax County, in southwestern Xinjiang, which
revealed that one of the most common reasons cited for detention was violating
birth planning policies.
Those who refused to terminate
illegal pregnancies or pay fines would be referred to the internment camps,
according to one government
notice from a county in Ili, unearthed by Mr. Zenz, the researcher.
Once women disappeared into the
region’s internment camps — facilities operated
under secrecy — many were subjected to interrogations. For some, the
ordeal was worse.
Tursunay Ziyawudun was detained in
a camp in Ili Prefecture for 10 months for traveling to Kazakhstan. She said
that on three occasions, she was taken to a dark cell where two to three masked
men raped her and used electric batons to forcibly penetrate her.
“You become their toy,” Ms.
Ziyawudun said in a telephone interview from the United States, where
she now lives, as she broke down sobbing. “You just want to die at the time,
but unfortunately you don’t.”
Gulbahar Jalilova, the third former
detainee, said in an interview that she had been beaten in a camp and that a
guard exposed himself during an interrogation and wanted her to perform oral
sex.
The three former detainees, along
with two others who spoke to The Times, also described being regularly forced
to take unidentified pills or receive injections of medication that caused
nausea and fatigue. Eventually, a few of them said, they stopped menstruating.
The former detainees’ accounts
could not be independently verified because tight restrictions in Xinjiang make
unfettered access to the camps impossible. The Chinese government has
forcefully denied all allegations of abuse in the facilities.
“The sexual assault and torture
cannot exist,” said Mr. Xu, the regional spokesman, at a news briefing in
February.
Beijing has sought to undermine the
credibility of the women who have spoken out, accusing them of lying and of
poor morals, all while claiming to be a champion of women’s rights.
‘We are all Chinese’
Even in their homes, the women did
not feel safe. Uninvited Chinese Communist Party cadres would show up and had
to be let in.
The party sends out more than a
million workers to regularly visit, and sometimes stay in, the homes of
Muslims, as part of a campaign called “Pair Up and Become Family.” To many
Uyghurs, the cadres were little different from spies.
The cadres were tasked with
reporting on whether the families they visited showed signs of “extremist
behavior.” For women, this included any resentment they might have felt about
state-mandated contraceptive procedures.
When the party cadres came to stay
in 2018, Zumret Dawut had just been forcibly sterilized.
Four Han cadres visited her in
Urumqi, bringing yogurt and eggs to help with the recovery, she recalled. They
were also armed with questions: Did she have any issues with the sterilization
operation? Was she dissatisfied with the government’s policy?
“I was so scared that if I said the
wrong thing they would send me back to the camps,” said Ms. Dawut, a mother of
three. “So I just told them, ‘We are all Chinese people and we have to do what
the Chinese law says.”
But the officials’ unwelcome gaze
settled also on Ms. Dawut’s 11-year-old daughter, she said. One cadre, a
19-year-old man who was assigned to watch the child, would sometimes call Ms.
Dawut and suggest taking her daughter to his home. She was able to rebuff him
with excuses that the child was sick, she said.
Other women reported having to fend
off advances even in the company of their husbands.
Ms. Sedik, the Uzbek teacher, was
still recovering from a sterilization procedure when her “relative” — her
husband’s boss — showed up.
She was expected to cook, clean and
entertain him even though she was in pain from the operation. Worse, he would
ask to hold her hand or to kiss and hug her, she said.
Mostly, Ms. Sedik agreed to his
requests, terrified that if she refused, he would tell the government that she
was an extremist. She rejected him only once: when he asked to sleep with her.
It went on like this every month or
so for two years — until she left the country.
“He would say, ‘Don’t you like me?
Don’t you love me?’” she recalled. “‘If you refuse me, you are refusing the
government.’”
“I felt so humiliated, oppressed
and angry,” she said. “But there was nothing I could do.”
