After becoming Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary in Xinjiang in 2016, Chen Quanguo (陳全國) oversaw a security crackdown that led to a drop in births so sharp that it shocked the world.
Some observers accused China’s leadership of committing genocide against the region’s mostly Muslim Uighur population through forced sterilization and abortion.
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) dismissed the accusations as “fake news,” saying that Xinjiang’s Uighur population had grown steadily to 12.7 million in 2018, an increase of 25 percent from 2010 — and higher than the 14 percent increase in the region’s total population.
However, newly released 2020 census figures have delivered what amounts to a slap in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ face.
The data show that in 2020, Xinjiang’s Uighur population had grown by only 16 percent since 2010, to 11.6 million, compared with a 19 percent increase in the region’s total population. Even more shocking, the Uighur population under four years old was only 36 percent the size of that aged five to nine.
The only comparable antecedent to this plunge in births was in Shandong Province in the early 1990s, where some CCP officials tried to launch a campaign to go “newborn-free in 100 days.”
By 2000, the population of five-to-nine-year-olds in Taian, a city in Shandong, was only 28 percent the size of the cohort aged 10 to 14.
In 1980, when Chinese authorities were discussing the one-child policy, there was even a creepy proposal to have a “newborn-free year” every few years.
To understand why Xinjiang’s birthrate has plummeted, it helps to review the history of population control in the region. China implemented family planning nationwide in 1973 and imposed the one-child policy in 1980.
However, for ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, family planning came later. Starting in 1989, minority urban couples in Xinjiang were allowed two children. Rural couples were allowed two as well, and they were less likely to be forced to have abortions and sterilizations.
Those “lenient” policies, combined with lagging education, led to higher fertility rates among Uighurs. For example, the national fertility rates in 1989, 2000, and 2010 were 2.3, 1.22 and 1.18 children per woman respectively, and 4.31, 2.0 and 1.84 for Uighur women.
Chen’s predecessor, Zhang Chunxian (張春賢), was keen on population control when he was CCP secretary in Hunan Province from 2005 to 2010.
Arguing that “to grasp family planning is to grasp productivity,” he launched a campaign to strengthen family planning in Hunan in 2006. The campaign swept up my cousin-in-law, who was forced to end her first pregnancy by abortion a few days before her due date because she had not applied for a birth permit in time.
In 2010, Zhang was reassigned to Xinjiang, and then-incoming Hunan governor Xu Shousheng (徐守盛) arrived with plans to launch another campaign to strengthen population control in the province.
In January 2011, I posted an open letter to the Hunan Province Government on family planning online, euphemistically criticizing Zhang and Xu.
In response, the Hunan authorities invited me to lecture on the topic in the province, and Ilham Tohti, a Uighur economist and award-winning human rights defender, joined me in calling for an end to family planning for Uighurs.
Then, on July 31, 2014, Zhang published an essay in the CCP journal Seeking Truth, saying that Xinjiang must “implement a family-planning policy that is equal for all ethnic groups,” and must “lower and stabilize fertility at a moderate level.”
I was so concerned that I in March 2015 published a peer-reviewed response in the journal Population and Society titled “The urgency of stopping population control in view of the low fertility rates of ethnic minorities.”
In the event, Zhang did not strengthen family planning in Xinjiang. Births in the region remained stable during his tenure.
However, we now know that under Chen’s rule, births plummeted from 389,695 in 2017 to 267,250 in 2018 and to 159,528 last year.
As Chinese authorities have long been notorious for mandating abortion, sterilization and intrauterine devices (IUDs), it is natural to assume that the dramatic decline in births in Xinjiang reflects such measures.
However, matters are not so simple, because there were slightly fewer abortions and IUDs in Xinjiang in 2017 to 2020 than in 2013 to 2016, and although there were 70,000 more sterilizations, that figure is still an order of magnitude smaller than the drop in births.
Given that couples in Xinjiang can legally have two or three children, it is unlikely that the authorities systematically forced abortions, ligations and IUDs on women who had only one or two children.
Why, then, was the Uighur fertility rate in 2020 only one child per woman? Most likely, it is because Chen’s brutal crackdown undermined Uighur fertility habits (under the pretext of fighting Islamic extremism) and reduced the resources for parenting, through economic recession and rising unemployment. As rural Xinjiang suffered severe cultural repression and economic deprivation, the fertility rate in 2020 fell to an unusually low level compared with the region’s urban areas.
Moreover, improved education has partly contributed to the decline in births as well, by leading more women to delay marriage and childbearing.
Chinese authorities have invested heavily to provide 15 years of free compulsory education in Xinjiang, compared with nine years nationwide. As a result, Xinjiang’s high-school gross enrollment rate increased from 69 percent in 2010 to 99 percent in 2020, while the nationwide rate rose from 83 percent to just 91 percent.
Uighurs have of course suffered from forced sterilization, but it is this forced cultural shift that appears to have had more serious consequences for the birthrate.
While the Chinese authorities have been very effective at lowering fertility rates, they have proved to be far less competent at boosting them.
The recent “two-child” and “three-child” policies have been abject failures. Looking ahead, every effort to encourage procreation in Xinjiang would fail if the region’s socioeconomic vitality continues to decline.
This failure would cause China to lose its geopolitical advantage in Central Asia, where it is in a struggle for influence with Russia. China’s rulers have heaped praise on Chen, but they have yet to recognize that his security crackdown in Xinjiang sowed the seeds of severe long-term problems.
Yi Fuxian is a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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