> National birth rates where 13 in 2016 vs 9.3 in Beijing demonstrating it’s a poor fit for national trends.
Yes, it's harder to avoid the government's wrath if you live right under their eyes in the capital, so national policies are more likely to be enforced in Beijing than elsewhere.
> In terms of IUD rates. 324 million IUD’s over 34 years vs a current population of 1.4 billion don’t on their own get 60% drop in birth rates.
Did you do the math on that? 1.4 billion population total corresponds to roughly 700 million women; adding 324 million IUDs and 107 million tubal ligations amounts to 431 million sterilizations, about 62% of all Chinese women.
Of course it's not just the sterilizations that cause a drop in birth rates, but also having to pay a fine per "superfluous" child, not qualifying for government benefits, the rising cost of living making raising a child more expensive etc. It's no wonder that many women would choose to have no or fewer children under these circumstances, especially if they know other women who can tell them exactly what it's like.
> Further, it isn’t like Xinjinang was completely outside of the national trends and suddenly caught up,
I do think they were outside national trends in terms of percentage of women sterilized and "caught up" by sterilizing women en masse even when they gave birth years ago; while those sterilizations would have happened routinely after childbirth in Beijing.
I guess we'll see whether birth rates in Xinjiang will continue to drop below even the level of Beijing, stagnate at the current level or bounce back slightly once the figures for 2020 are published (but then there's the pandemic as a confounder...)