‘Like losing a child’: what is the cost of China’s sudden ban on international adoptions?

Families who spent years in limbo have had their hopes dashed, and some analysts fear disabled children may never get to enjoy family life

China’s abrupt decision to ban international adoptions last month appears to have crushed the dreams of hundreds of foreign families and possibly ended the last chance many Chinese children would have had of a family life.

“You’re losing a kid even though you didn’t give birth to them and you haven’t even met them,” said Kathy Rice, one of the affected would-be parents. “But they’ve been part of our family all this time and all of a sudden we’re losing them.”

Rice had been waiting for five years to adopt Ruby, a teenager with Down’s syndrome, and bring her home to Michigan.

By 2019, when Ruby was 13, Rice had finished most of the paperwork and had the adoption approved provisionally. Had the process stayed on track, she would have met Ruby in Qingdao on the east coast of China and taken her back to America in time for her 14th birthday – but then the pandemic struck.

As is common in such cases, Rice never met the child in person nor did she make direct contact with her or even with the staff in the care institution.

All contacts were through an agency, which would sometimes send pictures and videos of the girl and pass on gifts Rice sent to her.

Beijing has offered no clear explanation for its decision to overturn the three-decade-old foreign adoption programme, which was deeply entwined with the strict enforcement of the one-child policy that ran between 1979 and 2015.

But observers suggest that factors such as strained US-China relations, demographic shifts and growing public hostility may also be at play.

They also warn that children with disabilities and illnesses may have lost their last chance of a family life because their chances of being adopted domestically are extremely low.

The first foreign adoptions began in the 1980s as China began opening up to the outside world. More than 160,000 Chinese children have been adopted across the world since the process was formalised in 1992, according to China’s Children International, an organisation for adoptees founded in the US.

This century alone, more than 82,000 children were adopted by American families – according to the US State Department – more than any other country.

China suspended all foreign adoptions in 2020 after Covid hit. Though it later resumed processing applications for children who had already been authorised to travel abroad, just 16 were adopted by American families in the 12 months to September 2023, according to US statistics.

Kathy Rice had waited five years to adopt. Photo: Kathy Rice

“Every year we waited patiently because that’s what China’s message had always been: ‘be patient, give us time, be patient’,” said Rice, 61.

“We always have that little ray of hope at the end of the tunnel: I wait a couple more months; they’ll change their minds … Pretty soon, we’ll get to go.”

During the pandemic, Rice had to keep updating the paperwork and keep paying “a lot of extra fees”, and “so we waited and waited and the kids are getting older”, she said.

“I’m also getting older … They never gave us any inclination that the adoptions were going to close.”

In early September, the Chinese foreign ministry said that in future only blood relatives living abroad would be allowed to adopt Chinese children. That same day, Ruby turned 18, rendering her ineligible for adoption.

Beijing has told US diplomats in China it “will not continue to process cases at any stage” other than cases covered by an exception clause, according to a report by the Associated Press.

“It’s hard to understand why that decision would be made and unfortunately, no real rationale has been given,” said Ryan Hanlon, president of the National Council For Adoption, a US non-profit organisation.

The shift may have been driven by Beijing’s “over-securitisation”, according to Huang Yanzhong, a professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

“The increasing lack of mutual trust between China and Western countries has transformed some previously harmless matters into national security issues,” he said. “China may fear that [foreign adoptions] could be seen as a vulnerability.”

Chinese adopted children return from the US to trace their roots

Chinese adopted children return from the US to trace their roots

A children’s welfare specialist speaking on condition of anonymity said that many in China, including some officials and child welfare staff, opposed international adoptions in the belief that sending children – particularly disabled or sick ones abroad – could harm the country’s image and reputation.

“I believe this concern is more about national dignity rather than the dignity of the children,” they said.

China is currently struggling with the impact of a rapidly ageing society and declining working age population, but Huang said banning foreign adoptions would do little to solve these problems because the numbers involved were negligible compared with the overall size of the population.

The Chinese public has also become increasingly hostile to the process because many believe the Americans have “ulterior motives” for adopting children, according to Luo Xin, who runs a programme that has helped over a hundred American families who adopted Chinese children with special needs.

“This viewpoint was less pronounced when I started [the programme] four years ago, but it now has many supporters,” said Luo, who moved to New Jersey as an adult.

“They accused the Americans of collecting Chinese genes, using children as labour, sex slavery, or training them as spies.”

Cosette Eisenhauer-Epp, who was born in Guangdong and adopted by a family in Texas in 2002, said she was worried that the change would make it harder for Chinese adoptees to go back to China.

“Is it going to be harder for Chinese adoptees to go back to China? Will we no longer talk about the children from the one-child policy? … It just feels like we’re forgotten.”

But Eisenhauer-Epp, the co-founder of the advocacy network Navigating Adoption, also said many adoptees struggled with feelings of abandonment and missing a piece of their identity and she felt glad children would grow up in their birth culture without “feeling forced to assimilate”.

In one of the few official comments about the adoptions, foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the decision was “in line with the spirit of relevant international conventions”.

Huang said she was referring to the Hague Convention, which established the fundamental principle of prioritising domestic adoption to prevent child trafficking and exploitation.

There have been some notorious cases of the system being abused. The child welfare specialist said one motive for the ban was the controversy of the practice of childcare institutions seeking “donations” – typically of around US$3,000 to US$5,000 per child adopted.

Brian Stuy, an adoptive father who founded Research-China, an adoptee assistance organisation, has previously said the surge in demand for adoptions in the early 2000s had seen orphanages using both legal and illegal means to increase the number of children available for adoption.

China officially ends adoption scheme for foreign families amid population crunch

China officially ends adoption scheme for foreign families amid population crunch

His group, which aims to uncover the true story of all Chinese adoptees, has published evidence dating back to the early 2000s on its website of children being trafficked into the system with false documents, as well as being kidnapped or their families coerced into giving them up.

In recent years, the number of children being given up for adoption has also fallen, according to various official measures, although no precise statistics are available.

Tong Xiaojun, an associate professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences specialising in child protection, attributed the shift to years of economic growth, changing attitudes towards gender and the end of the one-child policy in 2015.

The strict enforcement of the policy, coupled with families’ traditional preference for boys, had meant that many of the children being abandoned in the 1980s and 90s were girls.

But Huang said these trends did not fully explain the ending of international adoptions – which complemented China’s own domestic adoptions system.

Over the past decade or so, increasing numbers of those adopted had disabilities or long-term medical conditions, accounting for around 95 per cent of international adoptions between 2014 and 2018, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Many involved in the process have warned that ending international adoptions means such children will now lose the opportunity of being cared for within a family.

Luo said she had worked with an organisation supporting blind and visually impaired children that had placed 157 of them with foreign families in the past two decades – while only one had been adopted domestically and 117 were still on the waiting list.

Map of childhood village leads abducted man in China to find his biological family 33 years later

Map of childhood village leads abducted man in China to find his biological family 33 years later

She said that family care could sometimes be “life-saving” while children in Chinese welfare institutions often only received basic levels of care.

“I know that some children [matched with foreign parents], who had conditions such as heart disease and leukaemia, were waiting for treatment after being taken home, but during those five years, they passed away,” she said.

All 300 or so US families affected by the ban had been waiting to adopt older children or those with special needs, according to Hanlon from the National Council For Adoption, who said “there were no families interested in adopting them” in China.

Huang said allowing foreign families to adopt children with special needs would better serve their needs while also protecting China’s national interests and projecting a more open and humane image internationally.

Tong, from the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, made a similar point, saying: “It shuts the door, particularly for children unlikely to be adopted domestically, including those with disabilities, illnesses, or stigmatised diseases like hepatitis B, HIV, or syphilis, preventing them from entering a family and [denying them] the opportunity for dignified, healthy growth.”

She also argued that foreign families typically adopted to support children’s development, while those in China were often looking for someone to care for them in the future or continue the family line.

Those like Ruby who miss out on adoption typically spent their lives in welfare institutions and missed their chance at a family life, she added.

According to Tong, many Chinese people lack understanding about adoption, believing that children in domestic welfare institutions are better cared for by the state and do not recognise that “every child deserves a family”.