Reproductive Restrictions
Since the beginning of China’s one-child policy in the 1980s, minority groups were partially exempt and allowed to have two children if they were urban-based, or up to four if they lived in a rural area. Violations were punished with a fine, or a “social maintenance fee”.
In 2017, in addition to mass detentions, re-education and growing cultural repression, Xinjiang government documents began outlining plans to “severely attack behaviours that violate family planning [policies].” By early 2018 this had taken shape as official government directives: families who were “stubborn” and “refuse to pay fines” would be subjected to “education and training”. Some regions specifically mandated that birth control violations that “came about due to the influence of extreme religious thinking” were to be “dealt with severely”, that those unable to pay were now to be “dealt with through coercive measures”, and that women violating their birth quota were to “both adopt birth control measures with long-term effectiveness and be subjected to vocational skills education and training”.
The crackdown has led to an unprecedented and precipitous drop in official birth-rates in Xinjiang since 2017. The birth-rate across the region fell by nearly half (48.74 percent) in the two years between 2017 and 2019. An official document from 2019 outlined a plan to subject at least 80% of childbearing-age women in four minority prefectures in Xinjiang to “birth control measures with long-term effectiveness”. This was to be verified through quarterly IUD checks , along with monthly family visits and bi-monthly pregnancy tests. Statistics show that in 2018, Xinjiang performed 963 net added IUD placements per 100,000 of the population, compared to a national average figure of 21.5.
“Zero birth control violation incidents”, a term that was not routinely used elsewhere in China nor in Xinjiang prior to 2018, became a standard family planning target for government officials. A family planning work report from one county stated in 2018 that achieving “zero” violations required government units on all levels to sign solemn pledges promising to achieve that goal. The following year, government records for Hotan Prefecture, a region with a population of 2.53 million, outlined plans to have no more than exactly 21 birth control policy violations.
By 2020, Kizilsu Prefecture, a region dominated by Uyghurs and Kazakhs, had set its target birth rate for the year at a mere 1%, to be achieved through “family planning work”, far below its 2018 and 2019 natural population growth rates of 17% and 8%. A BBC investigation in February 2021 issued further eyewitness accounts of mass rape, torture and forced sterilisation in the camps.