Xinjiang Reports High Rate of Population Increase

February 28, 2006

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has one of the highest rates of population increase among Chinese provinces, according to information from a January 23 work meeting on the population and environment reported January 24 on Tianshan Net. While the birth rate and natural rate of increase have held steady in the past five years, the population continues to grow by about 300,000 people annually, the article reported. The article noted that the floating and migrant populations, among other groups, will maintain a relatively fast rate of increase.

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has one of the highest rates of population increase among Chinese provinces, according to information from a January 23 work meeting on the population and environment reported January 24 on Tianshan Net. While the birth rate and natural rate of increase have held steady in the past five years, the population continues to grow by about 300,000 people annually, the article reported. The article noted that the floating and migrant populations, among other groups, will maintain a relatively fast rate of increase.

The ethnic composition of the XUAR has shifted in the past half century. A 1953 government census found that Han Chinese constituted 6 percent of the XUAR's population of 4.87 million, while Uighurs made up 75 percent. The 2000 census listed the Han population at 40.57 percent and Uighurs at 45.21 percent of a total population of 18.46 million. The XUAR Regulation on Population and Family Planning allows non-Han couples to have more children than Han couples, and the Tianshan article notes that many rural non-Han groups have relatively high birth rates. Nonetheless, Han migration has contributed most to the region's population growth. (For more information and statistics, see Stanley Toops's 2004 East-West Center Washington Working Paper Demographics and Development in Xinjiang after 1949. See also the section on "In-migration and economic marginalization in East Turkistan" in the Uyghur Human Rights Project 2005 report Uyghurs and Human Rights: The 50th Anniversary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.)

The government provides incentives for Han Chinese residing elsewhere in China to migrate to the XUAR. The government argues that an influx of Han workers is necessary to ensure stability and to compensate for low numbers of skilled non-Han ethnic minorities, but it continues to send skilled non-Han graduates to jobs outside the XUAR.

For more information see the section on Rights Violations in Xinjiang in the 2005 CECC Annual Report.