Uighur women in remote Chinese province clash with family planning restrictions

A woman from the Uighurs ethnic minority group nurses a baby

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.

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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.

Uighurs in China's Xingjiang province are not bound by China's one-child policy, and can have two or three

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 to this report

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Amnesty International On-line: human rights website
China Statistical Information Network

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