In an effort to justify the human rights violations the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been carrying out for years against the Uyghur Muslim minority communities in Xinjiang, China is now claiming that these ethnic minority groups are growing more rapidly than the Han population. This has become their justification for the CCP's genocidal policies in Xinjiang Province, where women are being sterilized and children are being sent to state-run schools in an attempt to erase their culture.
"The growth rate of population of ethnic groups excluding Han is significantly higher than that of Han ethnic group over the last decade," the state-run China Daily claimed. However, Radio Free Asia reported that the Han population accounts for up to 91.1% of China's total population, with a growth rate of about 4.9%. According to 2020 census figures, the growth rate of the population from other ethnic groups-the mere 8.9%- is at about 10.3%.
The CCP insists through state-run media, however, that the Han population is growing slower than other ethnic groups such as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, justifying their mass incarceration, as well as "forced sterilization, organized rape, and forced marriage of Uyghur women."
World Uyghur Congress exile group spokesman Dilxat Raxit reported that birth rates among Uyghurs made a sharp turn downwards because of the CCP's human rights violations against the community, including the incarceration of more than 1.8 million Uyghurs in what the communist state calls "re-education camps."
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that the sharp drop rate of births in Xinjiang is "the most extreme over a two-year period globally since 1950" and is more than double the rate of declina during Cambodia's Khmer Rouge genocide between 1975 and 1979.
"The Chinese government is using its claim that ethnic minority groups are growing more quickly than the Han Chinese to mask its plans to eradicate the Uyghur ethnic group," Raxit argued. But it seems the Uyghur population growth rate isn't the only thing that China is spreading lies about.
According to Nikkei Asia, the Chinese government said on Thursday that their population continued an upward trend in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused more deaths than births in several regional Chinese states. The Chinese National Bureau of Statistics released a "single sentence statement" on its official website, saying, "According to understanding, the population of our country has continued to increase, while specific numbers will be published in the Seventh National Population Census Bulletin."
However, they did not show any statistics to support their claim.
Experts believe that the CCP's announcement is to undermine the recent Financial Times report that showed how China is experiencing its first population decline since the Great Leap Forward, described as "a disastrous socio-economic program five decades ago that led to the deaths of millions by famine and other forms of unnatural deaths under Chairman Mao Zedong's rule."
The revelatory FT report showed that China's total population in 2020 was about less than 1.4 billion, but it was reported to be more than 1.4 billion in 2019. In addition, China saw 14.65 million births in 2019, but registration of births in 2020 declined by 15% in 2020.
