On 16 Mar 2021, Adrian Zenz wrote a short thread on the 2021 Xinjiang Health Commission Report (archive), with the following commentary:

Given the “I couldn't have summarized it much better” in the 3rd tweet, juxtaposed against the obviously edited screenshot of the graph in the 1st tweet, Zenz is explicitly stating to the reader that he sees no other plausible “main takeaways” of the health commission report. In this reply, he doubles down on his interpretation of the Xinjiang government's family planning policies as being a form of sinister social control“. HY dug into (Twitter thread) the underlying report to demonstrate that his “takeaways” are cherry-picked, and meant with snark.

1. When Zenz mentions “tubal ligation” (输卵管结扎术) and “intrauterine device placements” (IUDs; 宫内节育器放置术), it is mentioned at the end of a paragraph in the commission report. Within the same tweet, the mention of “strict policies” is mentioned at the beginning of the same paragraph.

In HY's judgment, given that the paragraph as a whole contains 532 words, it is quite revealing what Zenz chooses to place emphasis on. In particular, he fails to mention anywhere in the thread why women would voluntarily would accept those birth control measures.

• Rural village couples who voluntarily adhere to a two-child limit (including adoptions) are eligible for a “Family Planning Honourable Parents' Certificate” (计划生育父母光荣证), which is supposed to trigger a local government monetary award of no less than 3000 RMB (~US$462). Note that the limit established by the Xinjiang regional government in 2017 is 2 children for urban couples and 3 children for rural couples, regardless of ethnicity.
• In recent years, Xinjiang has advanced far in multiple areas of reproductive science and health services, including birth control and contraception.
• An example of the above services is given as follows: across the entirety of Xinjiang, there have been 9,788 distribution points of free family planning medical devices (distributing 17 types annually), and residents can use a mobile app to obtain information on these distribution points at the prefecture, county, and township level.
• Zenz, in a way, is gaslighting the reader by implying that birth control measures, particularly IUDs, which can be physically painful, come from nowhere: what comes after the mention of tubal ligations (输卵管结扎术) and IUDs (宫内节育器放置术) within the report, which Zenz did not touch upon, is that the cost of such measures would be covered by the government.

1. As to Zenz's cultural summary of Uyghur women “one after another striving to be women of the new era”, it is a literal but partial translation of the last sentence in the report. One can only wonder why he ignored the part in the middle of said sentence on “equality of the sexes” (男女平等观念). In HY's opinion, Zenz's inclusion of the “love their country” (爱国) part is meant to instil in the reader's mind the thought that all of these policies are infused with or purely “political indoctrination”.

Again, Zenz flies over important context that establishes what constitutes “confident and independent” women “of the new era”:

• Minority youth, for a number of reasons [that are obviously beyond the scope of the report], had gradually been abandoning the “early marriage, early birthing” (早育早婚) practise, marrying at older ages, while focusing more on personal development.
• As an example, in Yengisar County (英吉沙县), in 2015, a rural village saw 102 opposite-sex couples marry, none of whom were considered “early marriage”. In fact, 47 of them married “late”, an increased proportion from 2014, where about 22.2% of couples married “late”.
• Once many rural young women 'leave' their family, they not only increase their income, but also break the "marry → birth → farmwork" (结婚-生育-务农) cycle.
• With these changes in custom, divorce has steadily declined (as did re-marriages). Per official statistics, the number of divorces across all of Xinjiang declined from 74,979 in 2015 to 51,223 in 2017 and 47,919 in 2018, a 13.9% annualised drop. Similarly, re-marriages (再婚) Xinjiang-wide, declined from 195,008 in 2015 to 150,628 in 2017 to 115,831 in 2018, or an annualised drop of 15.9%.

As an addendum, in 1981, nationally (across all provinces of mainland China), the highest mean birth-rate (children birthed among birthing mothers only) by ethnic group was 5.84 for Tibetans / 5.59 Uyghurs (!), 1989 was 4.65 Uyghur; 3.80 Tibetan, 2000 was 3.195 Kazakh; 3.156 Uyghur; 2.755 Tibetan.

Here, HY analyses cherry picking and mistranslations from Timothy Grose (Twitter thread) and illustrates the difficulties of simply grabbing words from signs without addressing the context.

Timothy Grose presents several images intended to show the existence of detention centres. This is directed originally at Roderic Day.

Note the 看守所 on the sign behind the officers, highlighted by HY.

HY comments: “Further down in the Dec thread, there is a reference to terminology including 看守所. When looking at the photos Grose posted, I had to do a double take, because the separate term 监管支队 is mentioned first, and only in a storified passage later is 看守所 mentioned. ¹⁾”

As HY points out, “First, what is the relationship between 监管支队 and 看守所? This isn't clear-cut, one Zhihu says says it can be assigned to BOTH 拘留所 and 看守所; this edu site says it cannot? (拘留所 = lockup)“
“Regardless, what is the purpose of a 看守所? No, it is NOT exterior to legal frameworks ²⁾, but it CAN hold suspects for far longer than 15 days.”

(Red section highlighted:
Yellow section highlighted: )

HY: “Referring back to 2nd tweet, the passage claims the Jiangsu officer was in the Aksu Central Detention Centre (阿克苏中心看守所). The problem is, are the 480 detentions from the prefecture (阿克苏地区, 2015 pop 2.5M) or the county-level city (阿克苏市, 2020 pop 695K)?”
“I managed to find an original case record link in Uqturpan County (乌什县) Prosecutor's Office mentioning the 阿克苏中心看守所.³⁾

“Apparently, someone was sent to the “central detention centre”, suggesting it possibly holds suspects from across the entire prefecture, which I am inclined to believe from the “中心” designation, not something like “阿克苏市看守所” if it only handled Aksu City.”