Believe Uyghur Women
“EVERYONE knows about her inferior character. She’s lazy and likes comfort, her private life is chaotic, her neighbors say that she committed adultery while in China.’’ This is how the Chinese government responds to allegations brought forth by Uyghur women. Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Webin discounted the “lies and rumors” of a survivor’s testimony by claiming that she had syphilis. Chinese foreign officials deploy sexist tropes to attack the character of women who have, at personal risk, shared testimony of experiencing rape and forced sterilization at the hands of the Chinese government.
Reporting from Chinese State Media reports insists that Uyghurs have strategically picked women to be their spokespeople, because their so-called lies are much more likely to be believed. They claim, “The separatist organizations usually choose females, as women and their tears would touch readers and arouse sympathy. Under these circumstances, the facts would be put aside.” Uyghur Women, according to this trope, are hysterical, too easily swayed by their emotions to be truly believed. But what if the reason Uyghur women are leading the charge against the CCP is that the CCP is targeting them in their genocidal campaigns?
Gulbakhar Jalilova, a concentration camp survivor, calls it “The War Against Uyghur Women.” In May 2017, Jalilova was placed into a cell in a camp, and her head was shaved., She was raped and forcibly sterilized. Jalilova is still traumatized by the memory of the screams of the 20 other women. She recounts stories of other women who experienced similar horrors in the camps.
Tursunay Ziawudun would watch as Uyghur women were taken from their cells each night to be gang raped by masked Chinese men. Ziawudun was gang-raped on 3 occasions, and was also tortured by having an electric rod forced up her genital tract. She was also subject to state-injected sterilization.
These tragic stories are consistent and corroborated. Uyghur women inside China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang are tortured, raped, and sterilized. The forced sterilization of Uyghur women alone constitutes genocide, not to mention the destruction of Uyghur culture, the forced separation of Uyghur children from their families, and the installation of Chinese officers in Uyghur homes, which is inevitably to result in sexual assault.
In response to these stories and evidence, the CCP has waged a mass victim-shaming campaign. Not only do they call Uyghur women hysterical adulterers — they also force the family to publicly denounce or assault the victims. Of Zumrat Dawut, who was forcibly sterilized by the CCP, CGTN put a camera on her brother to say “she has always uttered lies since childhood”.
The #Metoo era reminds us how momentous it is for survivors of sexual violence to come forward with deeply personal and painful stories. For all these years, stories went untold because of the shame and ostracization that sexual assault survivors experience. That shame is compounded when your family is pressured to denounce you as well. But Uyghur women are brave and courageous, and like Anita Hill or Christine Blasey Ford, they refuse to be silenced in the face of power as well as authoritarianism.
China has long waged a war against women. Through the one-child policy, it created stark population imbalances between cherished male children and neglected female children. But what the CCP is doing to the Uyghurs is something different, an explicit Genocide, etched on the battered bodies of Uyghur Women.
The specific targeting of women during Genocide is not unusual. During the Holocaust, mothers and their young children were often separated for extermination. More than half of the Jews killed in Auschwitz were women. During the Rwanda genocide, 250,000 Tutsi women were raped by Hutu militia, with 25% of those women contracting HIV/AIDS. During the recent Rohingya genocide, accounts from the UN detailed the rape of women, as they were tied by their hair and hands to trees. Rape is used as a tactical weapon to instill fear and inflict humiliation, and acts as a physical invasion of the bloodline and family of ethnic minorities.
In the face of the campaign against their people and their character, Uyghur women have emerged as some of the leading voices speaking out for their people. Activists like Rushan Abbas are leading this battle, and stand in good company on the page’s of history, alongside bold freedom fighters like Hannah Szenes and Razia Sultana.
The rhetorical fight they wage is difficult. The CCP enlists warped rhetoric to paper over its gendered crimes. In a now infamous tweet, the Chinese embassy in the US tweeted: “[I]n the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uyghur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines. They are more confident and independent.” The disgusting contortion of feminism here, to claim that genocidal forced sterilization is actually women’s emancipation, clarifies the CCP’s attitude towards Uyghur women.
Uyghur women do not need to be emancipated from their reproductive capabilities. Western feminists might fight for availability of abortion and contraception in our respective countries, but we cannot turn our heads when a government forces these methods on unwanting victims. Uyghur women need to be emancipated from the state violence controlling their reproduction, restricting their freedom, and inflicting other forms of violence. They need to be emancipated from a smear campaign that relies on misogynistic stereotypes to attack brave voices. They need to be emancipated from the CCP, who is waging a one-sided war against them, where Uyghur women’s bodies are the battlefield.
THE GENOCIDE against Uyghur women, and the systematic invocation of sexist bigotry to belittle their testimony, is the situation that stands before us today. This International Women’s day, the choice before us is simple. We can decide to listen to Uyghur women, champion their reproductive rights and full freedoms, and reject misogynistic tropes that excuse the violence perpetrated against them. Or, we can allow the horrifying violence to continue, either by tacitly agreeing with the CCP’s claims, or through maintaining apathy towards a glaring injustice. .
What will it be? Will we believe Uyghur women?
