Videos circulating on social media show Chinese men from mainland provinces quickly obtaining marriage certificates with Uyghur women through government-supported matchmaking agencies. This represents a new wave of state-encouraged intermarriage.
Chinese men openly promote “marrying beautiful Uyghur girls” on platforms like Douyin and WeChat, causing serious concern among Uyghurs abroad.
Zumrat Dawut, a camp survivor, confirms such matchmaking companies now operate in most East Turkistan cities. Recent months have seen a marked increase in Uyghur-Chinese marriages, with some previously married Uyghur women recruiting others.
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A Mekit-based company called “Hot Love,” the only government-approved matchmaking service there, revealed they receive state support and financial incentives (40,000 yuan) for arranging Uyghur-Chinese marriages. They exclusively match Uyghur women with mainland Chinese men.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project’s 2022 report identified this as systematic government policy promoting forced intermarriage as part of cultural genocide.
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Why would they get married if they didn’t want to?
The Chinese government mixes a range of financial and education incentives with coercive measures such as threats to families to promote intermarriage between majority Han Chinese and ethnic minority Uyghurs in the occupied Xinjiang region.
As a report from 2002 says:
In December 2021, the Uyghur Tribunal convened in London found that “Uyghur women have been coerced into marrying Han men with refusal running them the risk of imprisonment for themselves or their families […]
[As one example, there is also the so-called] “Becoming Family” (结对认亲 – jie dui renqin) program.79 Under this program, mostly Han cadres stay in Uyghur homes to monitor the conduct of families and promote assimilation.80 Many Uyghur men are absent from their households on account of having been detained. As a result, these “relatives” – including men – have sometimes slept in the family bed, with consequences including sexual harassment and rape.81 Indeed, two Uyghur survivors living outside China, Zumrat Dawut, who was detained in an internment camp, and Qelbinur Sidiq, who was forced to teach in two camps, have said that “Uyghur girls and women have been sexually assaulted in their homes” as a result of the Becoming Family policy.
Source: Forced Marriage of Uyghur Women: State Policies for Interethnic Marriages in East Turkistan
