An Overview of Adoption in China in the 1990s

Copyright © by Amy Klatzkin

In September, 1998 a small delegation representing the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages (FCO)—a nonprofit organization founded by Families with Children from China/New England to help orphanage children in China—traveled to Hubei province as the guests of the provincial Civil Affairs Bureau to monitor the use of funds provided by the foundation. Amy Klatzkin wrote this article as part of a series on the group’s visit to six orphanages around the province.

The current Chinese adoption law, which will be superseded in April 1999 by new and more lenient regulations, was passed at the end of 1991. In its wake a limited number of orphanages in China opened to international adoption, most for the first time. The law’s restrictions applied equally to Mainland Chinese and foreigners: to adopt a healthy infant from an orphanage, the parent or parents had to be over 35 and childless. Parents with children by birth or adoption were required to adopt “special needs” children (although this regulation was not always enforced, particularly for foreigners). Beginning in April, both Chinese and foreigners over age 30 will be permitted to adopt healthy infants even if they have children already, and things will be different then.

Why the tough regulations up to now? Like many social policy decisions in China, the 1991 adoption law was largely an instrument of population planning. The law was crafted to keep adoption from being used as a way around birth restrictions. At the same time, international adoption was seen as a way to curb an increasingly dire situation in the nation’s orphanages, where rising rates of abandonment—mostly of healthy infant girls—was causing severe and dangerous overcrowding of under- funded, ill-equipped social welfare institutions.

The population planning regulations in effect through most of this decade do not reduce to a simple one-child policy. Urban Han Chinese are indeed restricted to one child, as are rural Chinese in very densely populated areas, such as rural Sichuan. But in most of rural China, where 80 percent of the people live, the policy most of this decade has been “one son/two children.” In other words, if the first child is a boy, that’s it, but if it’s a girl, couples are permitted to try again after a set waiting period, often four years. In a few places the policy allows two children, well spaced, regardless of the gender of the first.

When one son/two children was introduced, most observers expected abandonments to decrease. In fact, they rose precipitously, mainly because this slightly more lenient policy was implemented much more vigorously and consistently in rural areas than the policy of the mid 1980s had been. Under these circumstances, the pressure on second-born girls appeared to be much higher than it ever was on first- born girls. Why? Because, it appears, Chinese people these days want to have a daughter.

According to research by Kay Johnson and her Chinese colleagues, abandoned baby girls are rarely first-born. If the first child is a girl, her parents almost always keep her. But they need a son. China has no social safety net—no unemployment insurance, no social security. Traditionally a son supports his parents in their old age. Without a son, peasants face destitution in later life. Also, in this still highly patrilineal culture, the family line dies out without a son to carry it on to the next generation. So if the second child is also a girl—or the third or even the fourth, if the family is able to pay the escalating penalties for over-quota births—she is the one who is abandoned.

It is likely that tens of thousands of foundlings in China are adopted—informally and illegally— before they ever enter the social welfare system. They’re found on the doorsteps of childless couples or brought home by Chinese families who then raise them as their own. If these de facto adoptive parents are caught by the authorities, they are often fined for the adoption just as if they had had an over-quota birth. They also often find it difficult to get legal household registration for their child, which may make it difficult later for the child to attend school or receive other benefits. In some cases, neither the child’s birth nor her adoption is ever recorded, so that officially the child doesn’t exist.

Of the foundlings that enter the welfare system, again the majority of those that get families are adopted in China by Chinese. International adoption has also been increasing. About 13,000 Chinese children have been adopted by Americans since 1992, and about the same number have been adopted collectively by Canadians (especially Québecois) and Europeans (Scandinavians, Dutch, Spanish, British).

Since the “Dying Rooms” scandal and subsequent Human Rights Watch campaign in 1995–96, very few foreigners have been permitted inside Chinese orphanages. That appears to be loosening up in some places, particularly in major cities that have been doing international adoptions for a long time. But it really was extraordinary that our small delegation from the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages was permitted into six orphanages in a week, five of them in small or rural municipalities. We were the first foreigners ever to visit several of these orphanages, one of which has never done international adoptions, and we were also the first to be permitted into one of the flooded counties outside Wuhan, even though we had among us a photojournalist—the lowest of the low in the eyes of Chinese adoption officials since the “Dying Rooms,” in which a team of British journalists posing as tourists aired worldwide a film that strongly implied all Chinese orphanages were little more than extermination camps for abandoned baby girls.

The extraordinary access we had, photojournalist and all, was built on trust. We brought with us the 1998 donations to the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages from North American adoptive parents, who were giving back to China’s welfare system without demanding anything in return, giving back because of the invaluable gifts we had received—our children, who once lived in these welfare centers and now fill our lives with joy and wonder and love.

This article is reprinted from the San Francisco Bay Area FCC newsletter (winter 1999). Amy Klatzkin is editor of A Passage to the Heart: Writings from Families with Children from China. Thanks to Kay Johnson and her Chinese colleagues, whose pioneering research on abandonment and adoption in China has begun to lift the veil surrounding our children’s origins and the circumstances that may have led to their arrival in the welfare system. This overview is based largely on Kay Johnson, Huang Banghan, and Wang Liyao, “Infant Abandonment and Adoption in China,” Population and Development Review 24, no. 3 (Fall 1998).