Thread by @drStuartGilmour

This figure shows the number of births that were “lost” in Japan due to falling birthrates since 2010. Nearly 1 million over just 10 years! Shocking! But no outcry from western thinktanks. Let’s discuss attributing sinister motives to good policy in @adrianzenz 's latest work

2/ here is the report, it’s a preprint and also accepted at the journal Central Asian Survey. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

First, let’s discuss authorship. I don't think @adrianzenz reads Chinese, so how is he finding/translating these articles? He is the only author on this paper, but there must be another. Is there, Adrian? How are you finding and translating these articles?

Second, let’s discuss funding. SSRN health science preprints require a statement about who funded the paper, but there is no such statement. Central Asian Survey (where it’s accepted) requires a funding statement. We know it's funded - why is there no funding statement?

Third, let’s discuss literature review. Zenz cites Chinese scholars in his report but gives us no information about how he selected references. Which journal databases did he search, with what terms, over what time period? How did he screen articles?

Without a clear methodology for article search and screening this is just a curated set of opinions, not a reflection of real “discourses” (his word) about population control in China.

On page 8 Zenz claims that there is a “repeated theme” of “national security”. How did he identify this theme? He has not done a systematic review of the literature, and he has performed no thematic analysis. There are methods for this kind of research, and he hasn’t used any.

Now let’s discuss data. The paper has no Methods section so we cannot learn what Zenz has done, but must infer it from reported data. There are lots of tricks with the data.

For example on page 3 he reports a sample of 63 counties, but only mentions in a footnote that many of the counties’ data is actually the prefecture’s data. This information is meaningless.

Again he ignores natural variation and carefully selects baselines. He says growth rates in 4 southern prefectures fell by 73% from 2015 to 2018. But growth rates in these prefectures vary by up +100/-50% every year. What does it mean to say they fell 73% in 3 years?

For example Aksu had a single peak in 2015 – otherwise rates have been declining since 2013 and probably longer. I have challenged Zenz and @Nrg8000 on this before and they say nothing because they know they’re running a con.

Also I pointed out to @Nrg8000 before that the Xinjiang Yearbooks don’t agree with county websites. The data in the yearbooks varies much more than that on websites. Kashgar city growth rate in 2018 is 3.96 on their website; it’s 6.93 in the Yearbook. Why?

Back to variation: This ignorance of variation is telling. Zenz reports that Bachu has an “expected” death rate of 5 – 7 per 1000. How did he get this? The long-term average is nearly 10.

Incidentally, as an example of his ignorance on this issue, on page 17 Zenz calls Pakistan “a Muslim country without family planning”. Actually Pakistan signed up to the FP2020 initiative in 2012, and does have a lot of family planning. familyplanning2020.org/pakistan

I have referenced Muslim nations’ family planning before. Let’s explore Pakistan’s. In Pakistan, 35.7% of women are sterilized. Pakistan averted 3.6 million unintended pregnancies since 2016 and prevented >1 million unsafe abortions. @adrianzenz: Is this genocide?

Finally let’s discuss Zenz’s population model. I don’t know what he did, because there is no methods section in this paper, but it appears that he projected the population forward to 2040 using data from the Xinjiang Yearbooks. This is bad.

This is bad because the Yearbook only provides very broad population data which creates huge errors. Furthermore Zenz uses the 2017 data, but there is so much variation that he would get a completely different result if he used a different year’s data.

The correct approach would be to model over the 2012 – 2018 period and calibrate the model to get the best growth, birth and death rates. An even better approach would be to not engage in such a speculative process with the limited available data.

(Incidentally why do all these reports start in 2012 ...?)

If Zenz wants to study demography in China he should find some Chinese collaborators and do it properly. In the meantime, he could share his excel files so we can see how shoddily he has modeled this data.

It’s not possible to say more than this about the paper because it is poorly written and has no clear methods. It is obviously weak and speculative and should not have been published. Again, it is also malicious.

I said before that it is very dangerous to present the benefits of birth control strategies as genocide. Here Zenz has gone further and pretends that the averted births are somehow a form of genocide. Is every country in Asia conducting genocide on its own people?

Finally, I want to talk about what Zenz’s implicit assumptions about Uyghur and Muslim women. We saw recently that births in China fell 18% this year. Zenz doesn’t care about that at all! theguardian.com/world/2021/feb…

Nobody is worried that non-Uyghur Chinese women are being forced to this. It’s only Uyghur women. Why does Zenz think Pakistan has no family planning and Uyghur women are being forced to use family planning?

Western reporters believe the Muslim world wants women barefoot and pregnant, and that given autonomy the women of the Muslim world would not choose anything else. This is a racist assumption that has been proven wrong across Asia. But this is what animates these reports. /end