On 16th November 2022, Uyghur Human Rights Project published a report on the measures taken by the Chinese government to promote intermarriage between Uyghur Muslims and Han Chinese ethnic groups. The means employed by the Chinese government consist of both incentivization and coercive actions underlines the report.
It is notable that Uyghur Muslims are an ethnic minority living in the Xinjiang region of China while Han Chinese is the primary ethnicity in the country. The Uyghur Human Rights Project examined Chinese state media, policy documents, testimonies of government-approved marriages, as well as accounts from women in the Uyghur community, and discovered that since 2014, the government has increased incentives and coercion to encourage interethnic marriages.
The report is titled ‘Forced Marriage of Uyghur Women: State Policies for Interethnic Marriage in East Turkistan’. Andréa J. Worden, Nuzigum Setiwaldi, Dr. Elise Anderson, Dr. Henryk Szadziewski, Louisa Greve, and Ben Carrdus are the authors of this report. According to the report, “The Chinese Party-State is actively involved in carrying out a campaign of forcefully assimilating Uyghurs into Han Chinese society by means of mixed marriages.”
The United Nations and Western countries acknowledge that Chinese practices in Xinjiang constitute or may amount to genocide or crimes against humanity, which coincides with the conclusions on forced marriage from the Washington, DC-based NGO. Britain, Canada, the European Union, and the United States have all imposed sanctions on China for its use of forced labor, prison camps, and other features of its governance in Xinjiang.
The research by UHRP is based on state-approved propaganda films, state-approved internet reports of interethnic marriages and weddings, state-approved personal online testimonies from persons in interethnic marriages, and government comments and policy directives.
The report cited that these policies took an aggressive nature from 2014. After Chinese President Xi Jinping declared a “new era” at the Xinjiang Work Forum in 2014 and praised a strategy of fostering interethnic “interaction, exchange, and blending,” interethnic rules gained traction.
Nuzigum Setiwaldi a co-author of the report said, “Uyghur-Han intermarriage has been increasing over the past several years since the Chinese state has been actively promoting intermarriage. The Chinese government always talks about how interethnic marriages promote ‘ethnic unity’ and ‘social stability,’ but these actually are euphemisms for assimilation.”
The attractions for these intermarriage include cash payments, help with housing, medical care, government jobs, and tuition waivers. On the other hand, the coercive actions
In a press statement by UHRP, Omer Kanat, UHRP Executive Director said, “This report brings to light another form of gender-based violence that demands action from concerned states, relevant UN agencies, and women’s groups. The Chinese government targets women in its ongoing genocide of the Uyghur people. Uyghur women report routine sexual violence in China’s concentration camps and prisons, and evidence of the forced sterilization was integral to the genocide adjudication of the Uyghur Tribunal.”
The UHRP requested various action steps in this regard. They demanded that analyses of gender-based violence against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples should include state-sponsored forced and incentivized marriage. Civil society, governments, and multilateral bodies should raise this form of state-sponsored forced marriage and sexual violence as well a core element of ongoing atrocity crimes. Also, UHRP urged women’s rights advocacy campaigns to call for accountability and end forced and incentivized marriages suffered by Uyghur and other Turkic women.
UHRP asked the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to thoroughly examine evidence of gender-based crimes in its 2023 country review of China and called on the Chinese government to implement measures to effectively end and prevent such state-sponsored forced marriages and sexual violence.
China did not immediately respond to the news with any comments. According to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement from last month, the human rights of individuals from various ethnic origins are now better safeguarded in Xinjiang. It also claimed that the main goal of the U.S. and some other Western nations behind their Xinjiang narrative is to restrict China.
