Children have fun in an alley at Qianjin Village in Kashgar, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Aug. 18, 2019.File photo:Xinhua

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab's claims that China violated the human rights of its Uygur minority in the Northwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region are complete smears and the so-called "forced sterilization" is "utter nonsense," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a press briefing on Monday.

Wang said that China has reiterated its stance on Xinjiang many times, as the Xinjiang-related issues are not about human rights, religion or ethnicity, but about counter-terrorism and anti-separatism. 

The so-called "forced sterilization"  mentioned by UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and related reports are utter nonsense, the spokesperson said. The fact is that for the past 40 years, the Uygur population in Xinjiang has increased from 5.55 million to 11.65 million, accounting for 46.8 percent of the total population in the region. 

The so-called "forced sterilization" reports were first circulated in June by the Associated Press and German scholar Adrian Zenz, who has been exposed as a far-right fundamentalist Christian "led by God" against China.

A Global Times investigation into Zenz's report showed that it was filled with flawed statistics, incorrect calculation methods, misleading figures and untrustworthy interviewees.