In 2018, when journalists like myself started reporting that China was putting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in internment camps, experts said we shouldn’t call it genocide — yet.

Though they said the camp system’s forced indoctrination and family separation may amount to cultural genocide, there wasn’t enough evidence to show that China’s actions met the United Nations’ definition of demographic genocide. Besides, advocates were having a hard enough time convincing the world that China was detaining a million people in camps without trial.

That’s changed. China’s persecution of the Uyghurs — a mostly Muslim ethnic minority that Beijing paints as a separatist and terrorist threat — is now well established. Several survivors have reported enduring torture in the camps. We’ve also learned that China transfers many of the detainees to factories across the country to perform forced labor. There’s evidence that this forced labor has leached into the global supply chain for products we all use, from companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The new report says that the Chinese government’s actions have violated “each and every act” prohibited by the UN Genocide Convention, namely: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, forcibly transferring children to another group, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

Evidence that China is breaching that last prohibition has come in recent months from Uyghur testimonies as well as the Chinese government’s own statistics about Xinjiang, the northwestern region where Uyghurs are concentrated.

Adrian Zenz, a leading China scholar and senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC, added that the “natural population growth decline, which started in 2016/17, is even more shocking when you differentiate minority counties in Xinjiang from counties with a predominantly Han population.”

In a report released last summer, Zenz showed — using data from the Xinjiang Statistical Yearbooks — that between 2015 and 2018, population growth in the largely Uyghur areas of Kashgar and Hotan fell by a staggering 84 percent.

This wasn’t only because China was splitting up Uyghur couples by sending some individuals to the camps. It was also slashing the Uyghur birthrate with the use of policies like mass sterilization and forced IUD implantation.

In 2014, a little over 200,000 IUDs were inserted in Xinjiang. That number rose to almost 330,000 IUDs by 2018 — a rise of more than 60 percent.

Read the full article about China’s genocide against the Uyghurs by Sigal Samuel at Vox.