| Back to
main page for this title. Excerpt from Chapter 7
Chinese Orphanages Today, 2003
Twelve years ago this week, I left for China to adopt my daughter, Tang Li,
then a three-month-old infant at the Wuhan Orphanage. As I reminisce about that
March 1991 trip amid the drumbeats of a new war against Iraq, I recall
ironically that twelve years ago I was waiting anxiously for adoption papers
caught up in a U.S. bureaucracy preoccupied with the first U.S.-Iraq war. In mid
February I had made a tearful call to my local Congressman’s office, telling
staffers that the orphanage had recently rushed my daughter-to-be to intensive
care with a severe case of pneumonia, a life-threatening condition in an infant
who was barely two months old at the time. I needed their help to get the FBI to
clear my fingerprints, a routine task suddenly pushed aside as the FBI processed
security checks of Arab Americans and Iraqis in the United States. A week later,
a wonderful woman from the Immigration and Naturalization Service called to tell
me she was processing my papers on an emergency basis and would send them out
within a few days. I booked my flight and left at the beginning of March,
spending the next five weeks nervously navigating and cajoling several Chinese
bureaucracies and the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou. There was no well-worn path
through this process, as there is today. My stomach churned and my pulse raced
every day until I passed the last U.S. immigration officer at JFK airport in New
York on April 12, 1991, fearful at every turn that someone or something would
wrest my wonderful daughter from my arms. I finally exhaled when I stepped out
the door of the international arrival terminal, and my four–year-son, for whom
my heart had ached for five weeks, ran into my arms, kissed me, and then turned
to his new sister in my arms with a huge smile of welcome. My husband, camera at
the ready, miraculously captured the moment.
That adoption trip was the most emotionally intense five weeks I had ever
spent in China. Becoming the parent of a child from China not only changed my
personal relationship to the country, long the focus of my professional
energies, but shifted the focus of my intellectual interests as well. Having
glimpsed the issue of infant abandonment and orphanage care in China at that
time, I left with many more questions than answers and felt I had a great deal
to learn about these problems. This awareness marked the beginning of twelve
years of research to understand the conditions that surrounded my daughter’s
birth, her abandonment, and the abandonment and fate of tens of thousands of
others like her.
This volume brings together the articles that grew out of this research. As I
learned more, some of my initial ideas were challenged and shifted while others
were confirmed. My focus also shifted from orphanage care and the causes and
patterns of abandonment to adoption within China. Ironically, while pursuing the
study of female infant abandonment--a profound manifestation of persistent son
preference under pressures of the one-child policy--I learned about the
increasing and in some ways equally profound desire for daughters. I began with
the assumption that abandonment was all too often tantamount to female
infanticide; that many, perhaps most, abandoned babies died on the roads and in
the fields where they were left; and that only those children lucky enough to be
found and taken to an orphanage were likely to survive. I learned that many, if
not most, abandoned female infants were found and immediately adopted, often by
families who were particularly happy to have the opportunity to bring a daughter
into their lives. Such children not only survived, but also avoided the risks of
orphanage life. Many more abandoned children were adopted in this way than
through the orphanage system. I saw the desire for daughters in the heavy price
that some parents were willing to pay for the privilege of raising an adopted
daughter, the birthchild of strangers. As a parent I was moved and humbled by
their devotion. This finding flew in the face of images of Chinese culture,
especially patriarchal peasant culture, held by many Westerners (including my
younger self) as well as urban Chinese.
Over these twelve years, not only did some of my ideas change, but some of
the conditions I described in my earlier writings changed as well. Perhaps the
most dramatic change over this period has been in the conditions of the
orphanages that house some of China’s abandoned children. This is where my
adoption experience and my writing on abandonment began. The conditions of
Chinese orphanages became the subject of an international human rights campaign
during the mid 1990s, partly drawing on what I had written in the early 1990s.
It is an issue that I wish to revisit here, bringing this book full circle.
|
|
The International Media Scandal
A few years after China opened a small number of orphanages
to international adoption, Western human rights groups loudly criticized the
inadequate care provided to the growing numbers of abandoned children in China’s
state-run social welfare institutions. A documentary called The Dying Rooms:
China’s Darkest Secret launched this campaign on Britain’s Channel 4 in July
1995, followed in January 1996 by the publication of a report by Human Rights
Watch (HRW) titled Death by Default: Fatal Neglect in China’s State
Orphanages. Many of the charges were correct: mortality rates were high,
staffing was inadequate, and funding was too low to cover the minimal physical
needs of the state’s wards. HRW attributed this dire situation not to welfare
system failures in a poor country but to an intentional government policy to
weed out the weak within the orphanage system, keeping the numbers down and
expenses low at a time of escalating abandonment. HRW even suspected that some
orphanages were set up to facilitate the speedy death of abandoned babies.1
HRW’s accusation elevated the problems of
Chinese orphanages to the highest level of state-directed human rights abuses,
far above mere welfare failure and neglect. Failure and neglect in a state
welfare system, although serious, is a charge one could level against all too
many governments, including, for example, the United States for tolerating
homelessness in the world’s richest country.
HRW’s politically sensational claim against the
Chinese government was false. But China was indeed in the midst of a welfare
crisis of huge proportions, one that was not well known even in China, even
within parts of the government, because the root cause of increasing infant
abandonment--the government’s own sacrosanct one-child policy--was so
politically sensitive that the true dimensions of the problem had to be hidden.
Local civil affairs officials responsible for the care of abandoned children (a
truly disenfranchised constituency) were fully aware of the problems they
confronted, but were unable to call attention to the grossly inadequate
conditions under which they labored and were forbidden to make public appeals
for aid. The marginal status of welfare organizations, operating as part of a
state monopoly, left this segment of the government bureaucracy almost as
powerless and voiceless as their constituencies, without effective means to
redress the state’s inadequate funding of a collapsing system.2 State
monopoly and politically induced silence were disastrous for the orphanage
system and the children who lived there.
The inevitable outcome of systemic neglect of
heavily burdened orphanages--inadequate care and unnecessarily high mortality
rates among abandoned children--warranted severe criticism. More open discussion
and critical publicity might even have helped draw official attention to the
problems of politically weak welfare institutions and their wards. Yet even
before Human Rights Watch launched its media campaign against the Chinese
government, at least some government officials had begun to listen to the pleas
of besieged local civil affairs officials, and efforts to improve the dire
conditions within orphanages were beginning to emerge and spread. Opening to
international adoption was part of the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ growing
acknowledgment that orphanages were overcrowded and needed help. Surely top
officials realized that allowing international adoption inevitably meant that
China’s problem of infant abandonment would become more widely known to the
outside world.
By 1993–94, a publicity campaign in a number of
Chinese cities, spearheaded by Yan Mingfu, the minister of Civil Affairs,
appealed for donations and volunteers to come to the aid of local orphanages.
The ministry also solicited international funding for orphanage projects through
overseas Chinese charities and other international nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs). A new SOS children’s village set up by the International SOS charity
organization to house homeless children got good publicity, and a few private
orphanages sprang up, seemingly with official approval.
These developments marked the beginning of a
larger transformation of the Chinese welfare system from a total state monopoly
accompanied by a high degree of secrecy to a somewhat more open, mixed system
that, while dominated by the state, sought support from a variety of private and
charitable sources and encouraged greater local initiative and community
involvement. One scholar described this trend as an evolution from welfare
statism to welfare pluralism.3 If the financially strapped government
could not or would not provide adequate funding, it would at least help solicit
and institutionalize channels for outside support.4
The negative publicity of The Dying Rooms
and the HRW campaign damaged these early efforts, even as they helped draw
attention to the plight of orphanages. Because the producers of The Dying
Rooms had lied their way into many Chinese orphanages, claiming to be social
workers from America who hoped to better understand the problems of Chinese
orphanages so as to provide help, the Ministry of Civil Affairs responded by
closing orphanages to all outsiders, including most Chinese. While some early
international adopters had been given open access to walk around and photograph
inside orphanages, now many were not even allowed to drive by the outside. Some
officials became suspicious of any offers of help. The Chinese government
angrily denounced the report by Human Rights Watch, a relentless critic of
Chinese policy, as groundless anti-China propaganda. The public discussion of
problems of abandonment and orphanage care that had begun to filter into the
Chinese media abruptly ceased amid official denials of culpability. Even worse,
some international NGOs such as the Red Cross temporarily cut back some of their
funding for fear of supporting a system accused of intentionally murdering
children, and some private donations dried up as well.
Yet gradually efforts to improve orphanage
conditions resumed and gathered steam. Throughout this time, international
adoption increased, bringing in fees set at US$3,000 per adoption paid directly
to the orphanage or its Civil Affairs welfare unit to support and improve
orphanage operations. By the late 1990s some orphanages once again opened their
doors to visitors, including foreign adoptive parents. International adoption
agenciesand charities, several of
them funded by international adoptive parents of Chinese children, joined the
Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to improve orphanage care throughout the
system.
There are, however, huge inequalities in this
system, as there are in China as a whole. The distribution of funds contributes
to the problem. Orphanages permitted to do international adoptions get to keep a
significant portion of the fees that foreign adopters pay.5 These
same orphanages benefit disproportionately from the money donated by grateful
foreign adoptive parents and the adoption agencies and charitable organizations
they fund. Chinese central government organizations also favor areas that have
well-run systems and that maintain good relations with the Civil Affairs
bureaucracy. International organizations are steered in the same direction. Thus
the most visible orphanages, generally located in major cities, have seen the
greatest improvements. To be fair, these orphanages are also among the largest
in the system and care for a significant number of abandoned children. And in
some provinces a percentage of adoption revenues is set aside for poorer and
more remote institutions within the child welfare system.6
While inequalities and problems remain great
and rates of abandonment remain high (though perhaps now finally abating), it is
clear that there have been dramatic improvements in the conditions of many
orphanages since the early 1990s, when the economic boom that had swept China in
the 1980s left the orphanages far behind, carrying a heavier burden with no
increase in funding. By the turn of the twenty-first century, many orphanages
had begun to benefit from the rising standard of living in China as a whole;
several of them even appeared to have pulled ahead of what one might expect in a
country that, while modernizing rapidly, is still poor, beset with budget
deficits, and suffering from a variety of economic dislocations.
The orphanages that have improved the most are
those best situated to take advantage of the government’s new, more open and
eclectic, approach to the organization and funding of the welfare system. The
government is still squarely at the center of this system and, for its part, has
increased its per capita support for daily operations perhaps three- to
fourfold. International adoption fees have brought well over one hundred million
dollars into the system in the past decade, at a rate of around twenty-five
million dollars per year in the past two to three years. While these fees add up
to less than a drop in the bucket of the overall economy7£making
charges that China is exporting babies to fuel its economic growth sheer
nonsense--it is a significant amount for the child welfare institutions that
receive these funds.
In addition to the fees collected from
international adoption, the central government has established channels to bring
in support, both money and expertise, from a growing number of international
sources that have an interest in Chinese adoption and child welfare. While
funding from these organizations is less than that derived from international
adoption fees and far less than the government’s funding of basic capital and
operational expenses, it still amounts to several million dollars each year and
contributes to strategically important off-budget improvements in the overall
quality of life for children in the orphanages.
Cooperative interaction with various
international NGOs and child welfare organizations has also led to the sharing
of knowledge and experience from other countries, promoting improvements in
childcare methods. One of the most important developments in this regard has
been the recent spread of foster care programs, particularly for disabled
children, a development that may be fundamentally altering Civil Affairs’
long-standing preference for institutional care of abandoned and orphaned
children. Only ten years ago, Civil Affairs saw foster care as a last resort,
preferring instead to expand and improve institutional care facilities.
International child welfare organizations and U.S adoption agencies have long
believed that foster care was far better for children than institutional care,
and this view is increasingly shared among experts in China as well. Some
officials in the Ministry of Civil Affairs now hope to put up to half of the
children under the ministry’s care into some form of foster care within five
years.8
My
daughter and I have visited her orphanage four times in the past ten years. I
have also visited several other orphanages during this time. Over the decade I
have witnessed the resulting changes, particularly in two large state
orphanages, Wuhan and Hefei. While these are by no means typical social welfare
institutions, they illustrate the magnitude of change that has swept through the
system since the mid 1990s.
Notes
1. Human
Rights Watch, Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State
Orphanages (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996), 112.
|
