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.

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 agencies and 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.

1. Human Rights Watch, Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China’s State Orphanages (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996), 112.
2. For an excellent discussion of social welfare organizations and their marginalized status in post-1949 China, see Linda Wong, Marginalization and Social Welfare in China (New York: Routledge, 1998). A brief but cogent discussion of how these problems affected the care of institutionalized children in this era can be found in Xiaoyuan Shang, “Looking for a Better Way to Care for Children: Cooperation Between the State and Civil Society,” Social Service Review 76, no. 2 (June 2002): 203–28, esp. 205–6.
3. Shang, “Looking for a Better Way.”
4. As the Chinese economy grew under the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) controlled by the central government actually declined dramatically because of decentralization and the growth of nonstate sectors of the economy. At the same time that the state ceded much of its central control over the economy, it also reduced its responsibility for funding local social institutions.
5. Domestic adoption fees, unlike international fees, vary from place to place and sometimes by income of the adopter, but generally are equivalent to a few hundred dollars or less--a small fraction of the international fees. Therefore domestic adoption does not provide much funding for the orphanages.
6. Beijing has granted the provinces considerable autonomy in deciding how to allocate the money that comes in from international adoptions, although regulations state it must be spent on orphanage care. In Anhui province, for example, a number of county-level orphanages have benefited from the wide distribution of international adoptions and funds. By contrast, in Hunan in 2003, where international adoptions take place in twenty-four out of eighty-five orphanages in the provincial social welfare system, a civil affairs official stated that 5 percent of international adoption fees are redistributed--a tiny amount relative to provincial orphanages’ overall expenses. Visits to several rural orphanages in Hubei province as early as 1998 revealed substantial investments in new buildings and equipment even in some social welfare institutions that did not do international adoptions, though the source of the funding was not specified. Yet throughout China there is no question that the orphanages that do international adoptions benefit most from the practice and have a stake in its continuance, often allocating resources within the institution in favor of those children most likely to be adopted internationally.
7. In 2001, China’s total export earnings amounted to US$133 billion, according to the China Statistical Yearbook, 2002. International adoption fees thus account for less than two ten-thousandths of annual export earnings.
8. Shang, “Looking for a Better Way.”