Kay Ann Johnson, 73, Who Studied China’s One-Child Policy, Dies

After adopting an abandoned infant from an orphanage in China, she began researching the lives of birth parents who had been forced to give up their children.

Kay Ann Johnson, an Asian studies scholar whose adoption of an infant girl from China led her to spend years researching the impact of the country’s one-child policy on rural families, died on Aug. 14 at a hospital in Hyannis, Mass. She was 73.

Her husband, Bill Grohmann, said the cause was complications of metastatic breast cancer.

Professor Johnson, who taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., was working on an oral history of a village in North China in 1991 when she adopted a three-month-old girl, Tang Li (who became known as LiLi), from an orphanage in Wuhan, a large city in Hubei Province in Central China. She and Mr. Grohmann already had a biological son.

China was more than a decade into enforcing its one-child policy, a draconian effort by the Communist government to curb the country’s population growth. The rule required families to make painful decisions about whether or not to keep their children.

They would pay stiff fines to keep children born “out of plan”; hide them from authorities; abandon or relinquish them; or find friends and relatives who could surreptitiously adopt them. In a culture that generally values boys over girls, those decisions were even more complicated for families when the child was a girl.

“Like most adoptive parents, I wondered about the people who gave birth to my daughter and apparently left her on the streets of a big city,” Professor Johnson wrote in “China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy” (2016), a study of the fear and grief felt by desperate parents in China.

Professor Johnson wanted LiLi — whose full name is Lee Helen Tang Li Johnson — to learn about the plight of parents in China and understand how she came to be among the first of 120,000 Chinese children to be adopted internationally.

“Such understanding, I imagined,” Professor Johnson wrote, “could help mitigate feelings of bitterness against her birth parents, and above all help assuage a young child’s often unspoken worries about ‘what was wrong with me,’ ‘what did I do wrong to lose my parents,’ worries that my daughter articulated when she was only 3 years old.”

For more than 20 years, Professor Johnson focused her research on Chinese villages where birth parents found themselves in a lopsided clash with a state bent on controlling population. The policy was also applied in cities, but villagers were usually more daring about trying to resist it. Professor Johnson presented her research in often painful case studies based on interviews with birth parents who described facing the ruthless policy.

One of those parents, Jiang Lifeng, already had a son when she became pregnant. She planned to keep the child and hoped to have a daughter. She avoided detection (and possibly forced sterilization) during pregnancy tests imposed by the authorities by using a friend’s urine. She delivered a girl, Shengshi. But nine months later the infant was taken from her bedroom by seven men, presumably government representatives, and driven away in a van.

Ms. Jiang recalled that “she ‘felt the sky fall down’ on her as she staggered after them, shocked and aghast at what had just happened,” Professor Johnson wrote. Ms. Jiang somehow caught up to the van and rode with the men and Shengshi to a local birth planning office, where she and her husband, Xu Guangwen, pleaded for the girl’s return. Officials refused.

The couple were told that they could adopt her after she had been taken to an orphanage. But that, Professor Johnson said, was a lie.

“The government had taken their baby, stripped them of their parental rights, and left them heartbroken and powerless to do anything about it,” she wrote. “It had been nothing short of a kidnapping by the government, leaving them no recourse.”

In his review of “China’s Hidden Children” in Foreign Affairs magazine, Andrew J. Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University, praised Professor Johnson for debunking the myth that Chinese parents did not value girls, and for outlining the often terrible consequences of the one-child policy.

“Johnson’s extraordinary book conveys the intense suffering of ordinary people struggling to build families against the will of an implacable bureaucracy,” Mr. Nathan wrote.

Kay Ann Johnson was born on Jan. 21, 1946, in Chicago. Her father, D. Gale Johnson, was an agricultural economist and the chairman of the economics department at the University of Chicago. Her mother, Helen (Wallace) Johnson, was a homemaker who volunteered at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

Professor Johnson received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1976 she earned her Ph.D. there; her thesis was about women’s rights and family reform in China. Along the way she learned to speak Chinese fluently.

“She had a critical consciousness and always did deep research,” Edward Friedman, who was Professor Johnson’s thesis adviser at Wisconsin, said by phone. “There were other, more popular books about the subjects she wrote about, but if you want seriously sourced books, you’d go to her.”

She taught political science at the University of California, San Diego, for five years. In 1979 she joined Hampshire, where she was a professor of Asian studies and political science. For the last few years she ran Hampshire’s Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment, which gave students and faculty members the chance to do field research in China and Thailand.

Professor Johnson’s first book, “Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China” (1983), was adapted from her thesis. Her second, “Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son: Abandonment, Adoption, and Orphanage Care in China” (2004), was her first exploration of the abandonment and adoption of children in China during the government’s crackdown on overpopulation.

“China’s Hidden Children” was published in 2016, soon after China ended its one-child policy — in part to increase its labor supply — and officially announced that married couples would be allowed to have two children.

In addition to her husband and her daughter, who is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at Yale, Professor Johnson is survived by a son, Jesse Johnson; a stepdaughter, Elena Ritter; and a brother, David Johnson.

Professor Johnson’s adoption of LiLi (pronounced LEE-lee) was among the first of a Chinese infant in the United States. Shanti Fry had heard about the adoption from a friend, which led her to adopt an infant from the same orphanage as LiLi, and to become the founding president of the New England chapter of a support group, Families With Children From China.

“Kay really opened the door, and word quickly spread in the Massachusetts community that this could be a viable option,” Ms. Fry said by phone. Professor Johnson had advised her group and two agencies that subsequently arranged adoptions from China.

“I imagine Kay going to China,” said Ms. Fry, who adopted a second girl there, “figuring a way to adopt a child, forging her way through Chinese bureaucracy and then giving us the confidence to let us adopt.”

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