State documents of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomy indicate that the Chinese authorities are going to sterilize thousands of Uyghur women. In this form of genocide, China was suspected by the authors of Foreign Policy magazine.
The material cites excerpts from the 2019 family planning budget in the Xinjiang city of Hotan and neighboring Guma county, both populated mostly by Uyghurs. According to the data that the publication extracted from the document, the state allocated money for the sterilization of 14.8 thousand women in the city and just over 8 thousand in the province, as well as the installation of 5.9 thousand contraceptive uterine spirals.
The number of sterilizations envisaged in one year is reported to be higher per capita than in the last 20 years in total. FP notes that this policy concerns precisely those regions where Uyghurs predominate. Eighty percent of all spirals installed in 2018 in China were in Xinjiang - and this despite the fact that the region's population is only 1.8 percent of the total population of China.
Since 2018, women prisoners who have left the "re-education camps" in which the Uyghurs are massively placed, have increasingly talked about some injections, after which their menstrual cycle was lost or stopped. Some reported that they were forcibly fitted with a uterine spiral or sterilized.
It is also known that from 2015 to 2018, the birth rate in regions mainly inhabited by Uyghurs fell by 84 percent, with the national average of 4.2 percent. At the same time, writes FP, the authorities are actively bringing in workers from among the representatives of the ethnic majority and encouraging inter-ethnic marriages.
These measures are part of the Chinese authorities' comprehensive approach to engaging with the Uyghur minority. In late June, activists reported that Uyghur Muslims were forced to eat pork prohibited by their religion on pain of being sent to "re-education camps".