Reports have surfaced that more than a million Uighurs in Xinjiang, a far west province of China, are being sterilized in what has been termed as an emerging “genocide”.
An AP report claims that a million Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority, who have been detained under the “re-education” programme, an Orwellian term for arrest, are being actively sterilized.
Women are subjected to forced pregnancy prevention shots and after being released found out in medical check-ups that they were sterile.
Birthrates in some Uighur areas of Xinjiang have fallen by 60 per cent from 2015 to 2018. While the national birthraate is 4.2 per cent in 2019, in Xinjiang it had fallen by 24 per cent.
In recent years, China has relaxed its one-child policy and is even encouraging families from the Han Chinese majority to have more children.
Meanwhile, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo in a statement called Beijing’s practices to “demonstrate an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity.”
Joanne Smith Finley, who works at Newcastle University in the UK, told the AP “It’s genocide. Full stop.
There is call worldwide to punish dozens of multinational companies that benefit from the alleged forced labour of Uighurs in China.
