The Chinese Embassy in the United States on January 7 said that the detention of Uighur women in internment camps has abolished their role as "baby-making machines" because of its forced family planning policy, Middle East Eye reported.
The Chinese Embassy in the US tweeted citing a study by the Xinjiang Development Research Center alleging that the "eradication of religious extremism in Xinjiang has emancipated the minds of Uighur women and promoted gender equality and reproductive health."
The embassy then boasted about how indoctrination campaigns have stopped Uighur women's role as "baby-making machines" and made them "more confident and independent."
The tweet also included a link to an article published by China's state-run mouthpiece the China Daily, which claimed the drop in the birthrate among the Uighur population in Xinjiang was due to the eradication of religious extremism.
The article cited a report by the state-operated Xinjiang Development Research Center as alleging that extremism had "incited people to resist family planning and the elimination of extremism had given Uighur women more autonomy in choosing whether to have offspring."
The article completely rejected that the drastic drop in population growth was due to forced sterilization.
In June 20202, German scholar Adrian Zenz released a report based on official Chinese statistical data with minority women on the ground in Xinjiang. He discovered that the natural population growth rate in Xinjiang dropped by 84 percent between 2015 and 2018.
Zenz said that the drop in population growth "is unprecedented, there's a ruthlessness to it."
In his report, Zenz cites accounts from Uyghur women in Xinjiang who were given free surgical sterilization and threatened with internment if they refused to undergo the procedure. Many women describe receiving unknown drugs that resulted in sterilization, while others were forcibly fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices if they had passed birth quotas.
Netizens used the tweet to highlight reports of forced labour, sterilisations and organ-harvesting that have taken place in internment camps.
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