China ‘alters census data to show Uighurs thriving’

Beijing sought to refute allegations of genocide against its Uighur population by altering census numbers.

Picture: AFP

Beijing sought to refute allegations of genocide against its Uighur population by issuing new census numbers claiming that its Muslim minority grew by 16 per cent in a decade.

The official statistics indicate that between 2010 and 2020 the Uighur population of Xinjiang, a province in the far west of China, rose to 11.6 million and that the numbers rose each year.

Critics are sceptical because the authorities had earlier revised Uighur numbers down by hundreds of thousands between 2011 and 2018. Beijing said the revisions were normal practice but critics accused it of trying to cover up real demographic declines.

The official 2020 Uighur population of 11,624,257 and official 2019 population of 11,560,000 are lower than previously reported figures from 2017 and 2018. They now show year-to-year increases after the authorities reduced the 2017 and 2018 tallies by 245,000 and 178,600, respectively.

“The revisions conveniently ensure that there is no reported negative Uighur population growth for any given year,” tweeted Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Beijing has come under mounting pressure from the West over its alleged human rights violations against the Uighur people. In the name of fighting terrorism, separatism and religious extremism, Beijing has detained as many as one million Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang in “re-education centres”.

The mass detention and reports of forced sterilisation have led human rights groups to denounce Beijing for a form of “demographic genocide”.

The Communist Party is anxious about any type of organised religion for fear that it might threaten its power.

Human rights groups are also accusing China of fudging population numbers in Xinjiang by overwhelming the region with ethnic Han people. The latest census figures show that the Han population rose by nearly 25 per cent in a decade to reach 10.9 million, or 42 per cent of the region’s total population, mostly driven by migration. There were 5.7 million Han there in 1990, or about 38 per cent of the region’s population.

“That really confirms the strategy of Beijing to ‘optimise’, in their words, the population structure of Xinjiang,” James Leibold, a professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne who specialises in ethnic conflict in contemporary China, told the South China Morning Post.

Deng Xijun, China’s ambassador to the ASEAN economic union, tweeted: “Growth rate of total population, Uyghurs & all ethnic groups as a whole saw good increase, most of which turned out to be higher than national average.”

Global Times, a party-run newspaper, said the census refuted “the hype, rumours and vicious slander with detailed information and fact-based explanations”.

THE TIMES