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China will place emphasis on eugenics by encouraging a certain type of women to have more babies in its new five year plan.
Eugenics is the study of how to manage reproduction within a human population to increase desirable heritable characteristics.
Among the Chinese Communist Party’s goals listed in its policy blueprint for the years 2021-2025 is to “optimize its birth policy” and “improve the quality of the population.”
“I am actually very worried,” Columbia professor Leta Hong Fincher told a panel of China experts in a virtual event hosted by the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS) on Nov. 13.
“What caught my eye was that they actually use specific language saying that China needs to ‘upgrade population quality,’ ” she said.
Fincher said that the Chinese government’s plans to control reproduction were part of the regime’s goals to maintain internal security. They would do this by encouraging growth of the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China.
At the same time, the government would systematically limit births of an ethnic minority, the Uyghur Muslims.
“We see it happening in Xinjiang with the forced sterilization of particularly Uyghur Muslim women. And the language in the plan suggests to me that the government is going to continue with that,” she said.
“You have seen a huge reduction in birth rates in Xinjiang and, on the flip side, the government is also trying to coopt and persuade Han Chinese women who are college-educated into having more babies.”
The government of China’s Xinjiang autonomous region has acknowledged that birth rates fell by nearly a third in 2018. Much of the fall was attributed to “better implementation of family planning policy.”
In Xinjiang, an estimated one million Uyghurs have been detained in re-education camps.
Inside the camps, they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uyghurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.
The final version of the latest Chinese five-year plan will not be passed until the National People’s Congress meets in March 2021.
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