Beijing: “Quick, someone get Adrian Zenz on the phone! To investigate and see if ‘genocide’ is taking place in the U.S.” Readers were joking in the comment sections of several Western media outlets in response to reports covering the declining birth rate in the U.S. A drop in birth rates was in fact one of Zenz’s main reasons underpinning his claim that “genocide” occurred in China’s Xinjiang region.
According to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on May 5, the number of births in the country in 2020 fell by 4 percent from the previous year, hitting a new record low since 1979. In fact, since 2007, the U.S. has remained below the fertility replacement level, meaning on a daily average there are more people leaving this world than coming into it. In 2019, the website of the American Embassy in China published an article in standard Chinese explaining that the decline in birth rates, in an attempt to rationalize the phenomenon, “is common all over the world, especially in developed countries.”
However, this “common phenomenon” in the specific case of Xinjiang has been taken on to serve as criminal evidence of the alleged “genocide” committed by the Communist Party of China (CPC) against the Uygurs. Zenz formulated this as the core of his argument against China when he found from public data that the birth rate in Xinjiang had been falling.
Zenz claimed that the CPC had confined Uygur women who violated the fertility policy to “concentration camps” and forced them to undergo sterilization. The absurdity of such an argument is that in this digital era, human rights abuse on such a grand scale cannot fly under the radar, and Zenz each and every time has only one and the same group of alleged victims to call to the stand.
So what happened in Xinjiang to cause this drop in the birth rate?
One of the more direct underlying reasons is the rise in employment opportunities for Uygur women in recent years. In order to forge an accurate reference framework here, one must bear in mind the region’s geographical divide. South Xinjiang, with a majority Uygur population, has been a relatively poor region in China. Early marriage and childbearing have been common in the area due to its limited transport, lagging economic development and lower education levels—compared to those in other regions.
In order to achieve its poverty alleviation goals, the government has encouraged women from poverty-stricken areas to obtain employment in cities. In 2017 alone, state-owned enterprises in Xinjiang created more than 10,000 jobs in the Kashgar and Hotan regions. The move attracted many young Uygur women. For these women who might otherwise get married and give birth at a very early age, the choice of working outside the home has opened up a host of new horizons. Nevertheless, often when these young women set out to seek employment outside their hometowns, they are met with resistance from senior generations who do not support their choice to venture outside into the workplace.
– The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
