State-enforced family planning has historically been common in many countries.

Most recently, no country has curtailed the right to self-determined reproduction as extensively as China: first with the one-child policy, since its end and due to the aging of society also with the opposite political pressure to have more children.

Beijing also wants to increase the supposed “quality” of the population, as China expert Leta Hong Fincher has pointed out in her book Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.

Hinnerk Feldwisch-Drentrup

Editor in the department "Nature and Science".

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The regime exerts particular pressure on minorities such as the Uyghurs: they were previously allowed to have several children. According to reports, births are now being suppressed, for example by a large number of sterilizations and long-term contraceptives.

Many experts regard this as genocide, which France and America have already recognized as such.

The Bundestag has not yet taken a position on this.

A people as a “biological threat”

According to the UN Genocide Convention, forced birth control constitutes genocide if it is intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a group.

Even the attempt should be punished.

"If a risk is identified, action must be taken," stressed the anthropologist Adrian Zenz from the Washington Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation recently at an event organized by the Ilham Tohti Initiative, which took place in the Hessian State Representation in Berlin.

Tohti is a Uyghur economist who was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 for “separatism” and who was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the EU Parliament in 2019 for his commitment.

In the course of Beijing's "people's fight against terror" in Xinjiang, according to Zenz, the regime has changed the official discourse since 2014: Uyghurs were seen as a biological threat, the ethnic group suffered from "diseases" of the spirit that could be cured through "re-education". be.

Populous and locally concentrated minorities are seen as breeding grounds for religious extremism.

Zenz reports dramatic birthrate declines as part of the "multifaceted campaign of repression."

According to official data, the population growth of the Uyghurs in southern Xinjiang has fallen by almost a tenth within ten years and is now close to or below zero.

A region of around a million Uyghurs was reported to have "not a single child born outside of government planning."

In 2019, almost 90 percent of all women of childbearing age there were subject to long-term measures to plan and prevent births.

Since then, Beijing has not communicated any new figures, says Zenz.