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Chinese Government Using Forced Abortion and Sterilization to Suppress Muslim Population: Report

Posters of Xi Jinping seen during a rally to support imprisoned Uyghurs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on September 25, 2019 in Hong Kong.
Posters of Xi Jinping seen during a rally to support imprisoned Uyghurs at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on September 25, 2019 in Hong Kong.
Photo: Getty Images

The Chinese government is spending millions of dollars each year implementing population control measures against the Uighurs, the country’s largest Muslim ethnic group, including mandatory IUDs, sterilization, and forced abortions, according to a story published Monday by the Associated Press.

Muslim women who have “too many” children are also being thrown into the concentration camps currently operating in China’s Xinjiang region—facilities that President Trump has reportedly endorsed, according to former National Security Advisor John Bolton who alleged as much in his explosive new book, The Room Where It Happened.

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The new AP report, which depends partially on new research by the Jamestown Foundation’s Adrian Zenz, confirms stories from Uighurs over the past few years who have experienced brutal detention and forced labor in China, but shows that population control methods are even more widespread than previously believed. Two regions comprised of predominantly Uighurs, have seen their birth rate plunge by roughly 60% since 2015, according to Zenz, who cites Chinese government planning documents from 2019.

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In yet another sign the Chinese government is systematically targeting the minority Uighur population, roughly 80% of all IUDs implanted in the country in 2018 were given to women in Xinjiang, according to Zenz. That’s a startling figure when you realize that Uighurs represent less than 2% of China’s population of 1.4 billion people.

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The oppression of the Uighurs in China accelerated in 2017 and the population control efforts by the government kicked into high gear around 2018:

Officials and armed police began pounding on doors, looking for kids and pregnant women. Minority residents were ordered to attend weekly flag-raising ceremonies, where officials threatened detention if they didn’t register all their children, according to interviews backed by attendance slips and booklets. Notices found by the AP show that local governments set up or expanded systems to reward those who report illegal births.

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Zenz has been known to obtain rare internal documents by the Chinese Communist Party from whistleblowers, though Gizmodo cannot confirm the validity of these documents for obvious reasons. But the accounts are consistent with other reports and the AP independently confirmed some of the data:

Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children - the most common reason for holding them. Time in a camp — what the government calls “education and training” — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by Zenz confirmed.

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The AP also speaking with experts who believe Zenz’s reports are plausible and go a step further to classify the current actions by the Chinese government as “genocide.”

“It’s genocide, full stop. It’s not immediate, shocking, mass-killing on the spot type genocide, but it’s slow, painful, creeping genocide,” Joanne Smith Finley, an expert at Newcastle University in the UK, told the AP.

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The Chinese government has imprisoned an estimated 800,000 to 3 million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps over recent years, and officially the U.S. State Department has condemned the practice. But John Bolton’s book tells us that Trump has endorsed China’s concentration camps when discussing them with Xi Jinping.

From an excerpt of Bolton’s book that appeared in the Wall Street Journal:

Beijing’s repression of its Uighur citizens also proceeded apace. Trump asked me at the 2018 White House Christmas dinner why we were considering sanctioning China over its treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim people who live primarily in China’s northwest Xinjiang Province.

At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.

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And all of this makes sense if you’ve been paying even a little bit of attention. The Trump regime has no real objections to concentration camps, even on American soil. Why would Trump stick his neck out for the Uighurs if he can personally gain from their exploitation?