Report says US making up lies to defame Xinjiang

The United States has repeatedly fabricated lies about China "violating the human rights of ethnic minorities" to realize ulterior political purposes, experts from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region said in a research report published on Monday.

Some Western scholars have conducted a lot of activities disguised as academic research that disregard the reality in Xinjiang, the report said.

Written by Zuliyati Simayi and Zhang Yaxi from the School of Marxism at Xinjiang University, it analyzes US interference in Xinjiang affairs under the pretext of human rights protection.

In June, German scholar Adrian Zenz published a report through the US-based Jamestown Foundation that claimed Xinjiang was using forced sterilization and coercive family planning against Uygurs and other ethnic minorities in an attempt to limit their populations. The report has been frequently cited by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and some Western media.

Pompeo described Zenz's report as "shocking" and "disturbing" in June, saying its findings were consistent with decades of Communist Party of China practices "that demonstrate an utter disregard for the sanctity of human life and basic human dignity".

In their report, the two Xinjiang experts said Zenz's report was filled with distorted facts, unverified information and data from unknown sources and was an attempt to defame Xinjiang.

They questioned the credibility of Zenz's argument that the Chinese government intends to "reduce the Uygur population in Xinjiang", saying it had not decreased from 2010 to 2018, as Zenz said, but had showed an upward trend.

They cited statistics released by the region's statistical bureau that showed the Uygur population in Xinjiang grew from 10.17 million in 2010 to 12.72 million in 2018, an increase of 25 percent.

During the same period, the total population of Xinjiang rose from 21.82 million to 24.87 million, an increase of 14 percent. The Han population in the region increased by 2 percent, from 8.83 million to 9.01 million, they said.

The report said Zenz's contention that "the natural population growth in Xinjiang has declined dramatically since 2015" is not consistent with official statistics.

Statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics and the Xinjiang Statistical Bureau showed the region's natural population growth rate remained stable at about 11 newborns per 1,000 people from 2015 to 2017.

Although the natural population growth rate in Xinjiang dropped to 6.13 newborns per 1,000 people in 2018, it was still relatively high compared with the national average level. There was no dramatic decline, as claimed by Zenz, and the figure in 2018 was in a reasonable range, the report said.

Statistics show that in three of the four prefectures in southern Xinjiang where ethnic minorities comprise most of the population, the natural growth rates in the Kizilsu Kirghiz autonomous prefecture and Kashgar and Aksu prefectures in 2018 were all higher than the figures mentioned in Zenz's report, it said.

Zenz claimed the Kizilsu Kirghiz autonomous prefecture set an unprecedented near-zero population growth target for 2020, about 1.05 newborns per 1,000 people, compared with 11.45 per thousand in 2018.

But the Xinjiang experts' report, citing an official document, said the growth rate target for the prefecture last year was 10.5 newborns per 1,000 people.

"In order to make the lies in his report appear authentic, Zenz has adopted such methods as arbitrarily tampering with data, confusing measurement units, using ambiguous concepts and being vague about sources," it said.

"He never indicated the name and source of the government documents he mentioned in his report," they added.

Click to see the full report.