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Uighur
women in remote Chinese province clash with family planning
restrictions
From: Mavlan
Yasin <MYasin@UniversalCare.com>
November 14,
2000/XINJIANG PROVINCE, China (CNN) -- Despite China's
relaxed stand on birth
control, women who are Muslim Uighurs, an ethnic minority
group in China's Xingjiang province, are unhappy with family
planning restrictions.
Most Chinese families are supposed to have one child -- a
policy introduced in the 1970s to limit the nation's
population growth. But that is not the
case for the Uighurs, who are allowed by the government to
have two or three children.
Like women across China, Uighur women receive regular
check-ups to make sure their intra-uterine birth control
devices are firmly in place. Any unplanned pregnancies are
terminated.
However, government family planning policies in Xinjiang
have clashed with Islamic beliefs.
"When I started doing family planning work, some people
couldn't accept it," said family planning official Amina
Barat. "They said children are a gift
from Allah." Resistance to policies may also be an issue of
ethnic survival. Since the communist revolution, ethnic
Chinese have grown from 5 percent to 37 percent of
Xinjiang's total population.
"There is a growing resentment to all kinds of issues and
migration is one of the largest," said Dru Gladney from the
East-West Center, a U.S.-sponsored education and research
organization. "Uighurs feel that China is trying to
assimilate the region, integrate the
region through immigration," he said.
Xinjiang has been under Chinese control since its conquest
by the Manchus in the 18th century, but until the
establishment of the People's Republic in
1949 its links with Beijing were very loose. A vast,
partially uninhabited region on China's western fringe once
known as East Turkestan, Xingjiang has
been the scene of unrest in recent years. Human Rights
groups have reported incidents of forced abortions and
violence in Xinjiang's countryside. But officials in the
area insist nothing like
that has ever happened there. In a new 92-page report
released in 1999, Amnesty International documented a
pattern of what the organization claimed are arbitrary and
summary executions, torture, arbitrary detention and unfair
political trials in Xinjiang. The abuses, the group
alleged, are committed mainly against the
Uighurs. In Shamalbag Village, family planning officials
point to positive examples,
such as Razigul Tevekkul, a 36-year-old mother of two who
says having fewer children gives her more time to run a
sewing business. "When you have really large families, the
level of children's health care and education is much
lower, " she said. "Having fewer but better births will make
our people more successful." CNN Beijing Bureau Chief
Rebecca MacKinnon contributed
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