It was, to some, a beautiful thing. In 1992, the Chinese Communist Party decided to send children abroad for adoption. Child abandonment had surged in the preceding decade because of a law that restricted most families to one child and brutally penalized violators. Most of the abandoned children were newborn girls, discarded as a result of a long-standing patriarchal tradition in which sons care for their parents in old age. If families could have only one child, they wanted a boy.
Americans opened their arms to these tiny orphans. In 1992, the first full year of the policy, about two hundred Chinese babies were adopted by U.S. families. The phenomenon was trumpeted by a 1993 Times Magazine cover story: “How Li Sha, Abandoned in Wuhan, Became Hannah Porter, Embraced in Greenwich Village.” The Chinese girls, with their shiny black pigtails, became media darlings in the United States—photographed taking ballet lessons, attending performances of “The Nutcracker,” riding ponies, visiting Disneyland. Evangelicals launched nonprofits to raise money to help Christian families adopt as many children as they could afford. In 2005, almost eight thousand children were adopted from China, topping the number from South Korea, which had dominated international adoptions during the nineteen-eighties. Families from Spain, Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands, France, and Australia, among others, joined the queue for children from China.
Before long, the supply chain broke down. Demand for Chinese adoptees was rising too fast for the country to keep up. Meanwhile, the nation’s demographics began to shift. Although China announced the end of its one-child policy in 2015, young people today are balking at early marriage and procreation. Like their neighbors in Japan and Korea, urbanized Chinese prefer smaller families. Now the country’s leadership fears a future with too many senior citizens and too few young workers. In 2022, for the first time since the famine of the nineteen-sixties, China had more deaths than births. The 2024 U.N. World Population Prospects report estimated that China’s population of more than 1.4 billion will fall to less than eight hundred million by the end of the century. President Xi Jinping has become an unabashed pro-natalist, speaking about the need “to actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing and to strengthen guidance on young people’s view on marriage, childbirth, and family.”
The era of the adopted Chinese baby officially ended on September 5th, when the Chinese foreign ministry announced the termination of the program. (A week later, the demographic fallout continued with a statement that the retirement age would be raised for the first time since the nineteen-fifties.) Since 1992, the country had sent about a hundred and sixty thousand children abroad, more than half of them to the United States. Nowadays, there aren’t enough babies to spare. “They are not placing children for adoption. They are just keeping them all, and people are not eager to have children,” Mary House, of Children’s Hope International, which was one of the leading agencies for adoptions from China, said.
In 1979, China enacted a repressive population-control regime, hoping that fewer births would boost per-capita income. It soon became the signature policy of the Chinese Communist Party, which devoted huge resources to enforcement. Family planning, as it was euphemistically called, morphed into a terrifying apparatus with an estimated eighty-three million full- and part-time personnel, more than the People’s Liberation Army. Violators of the birth quotas (which varied depending on region and family circumstances) were subject to exorbitant fines, sometimes equivalent to several years’ worth of income. If the violators didn’t pay, they could have their houses demolished and livestock confiscated. Heavily pregnant women were chased down, forced to have abortions, and often sterilized. Many died as a result of these procedures.
Terrified families abandoned tens of thousands of babies, sometimes leaving them at markets and on busy roadsides, with tear-stained notes scrawled on scraps of paper. Orphanages filled up with babies, at times packed three to a crib.
For a country obsessed with saving face, the decision to allow foreign adoption was an embarrassing admission of the Communist Party’s policy failures. As far as I know, no scholar has been privy to the deliberations inside Zhongnanhai, the secretive leadership compound in Beijing. But Melody Zhang, the associate director of Children’s Hope International, who worked closely with China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on behalf of her adoption agency, believes that the decision grew out of genuine concern for the children. The official who advocated for international adoption, according to Zhang, was Peng Peiyun, the head of the family planning commission—who, as it happens, went on to serve as the only female member of the powerful State Council, a body that is akin to the cabinet.
“In the early nineties, people in the government in China were open-minded enough,” Zhang said. “I was told the top leadership wanted to give these children a chance, and these adoptions will build bridges of friendship with the United States.”
The program succeeded beyond expectations. “This was such a lovely thing for the adoption market,” Mei Fong, the author of “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment,” said. “You had a huge supply of healthy children whose parents weren’t going to make a big fuss from the other side of the world, and you had a government that was committed to doing it. Everybody was happy—except the birth parents.”
China was changing. From 1980 to 2000, household incomes more than tripled in rural areas. Young women started landing jobs making toys and electronics in the factories of southern China. Beginning in 1984, exemptions in some areas allowed disabled military veterans, ethnic minorities, and families with one daughter to have a second baby, and in subsequent years officials tweaked the policy. Enforcement eased, ever so slightly. New parents didn’t want to give up their daughters, no matter what they were told by the government or their families. And they had the money to pay the exorbitant fines.
This was good news for rural Chinese, but a disaster for the orphanages. Although most adoption fees were channelled through Beijing, adoptive families were also required to provide “donations” of three thousand dollars to the orphanages—cash only, in hundred-dollar bills. And the orphanages, poorly funded by the state, had become dependent on that money.
As the supply of babies dwindled, orphanages started buying them. Traffickers from the countryside would look for abandoned babies or procure them from midwives. They cajoled new mothers, pregnant women, and grandparents into giving up their children.
During my seven years as a foreign correspondent in China, I learned about the mechanics of the adoption market out in the field. One of my best tutors was Chen Zhijin, an illiterate woman who was the matriarch of the Duan family (Chinese women retain their maiden names), and whose family became one of China’s most notorious traffickers. In the early nineties, Chen was hired by an orphanage as a nanny for a dollar a day. It was not uncommon in those years to find abandoned babies. Chen would bring in newborns and plead with her boss to accept them, she told me when we met, in 2010, for an article for the Los Angeles Times. She recalled that the orphanage director told her they didn’t have enough people to care for more babies. The director’s attitude changed in the mid-nineties, as international adoption picked up. “Auntie, you’re such a good person,” the director said, according to Chen. “Bring me all the babies you can find.”
Before long, Chen and her adult children were running a business. Orphanages competed with one another for babies. They received dinner invitations, gifts of liquor, and ever-increasing payments. As “finders fees,” the Duans received envelopes of cash—at times more than five hundred dollars per child. By the time they were busted, in 2005, they had trafficked at least a thousand babies. The authorities would invent new back stories, which were published in local newspapers as notices searching for birth families, a requirement before children were put up for adoption. “They would fabricate the information. They would make up names and say the baby was found at the Sunday market, near the bridge, on the street,” Duan Fagui, the family’s patriarch, said in the same 2010 interview. “Very few of the stories about the babies were true.”
Still worse was a cruel practice that picked up around 2000. Family-planning officers would seize babies from people too poor to pay the fines for excess births. They preyed on vulnerable families in remote villages who were often illiterate—claiming untruthfully that the law permitted officers to confiscate unregistered children.
In one mountainous corner of Hunan Province, nearly twenty babies were taken, sometimes violently wrenched from the arms of family members. I met a family who lost one of their identical-twin daughters in 2002. In another village, I interviewed a frail grandmother who was taken into custody and forced to stamp her thumbprint on a document giving up a granddaughter she was babysitting.
“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products—our own flesh and blood,” one father, Yang Libing, said. His daughter was taken from his parents in 2005, when she was nine months old, while he was doing migrant work in Shenzhen. She was a first-born child, but family-planning officials claimed that he hadn’t properly registered his marriage.
Brian Stuy, an adoptive father, founded an organization called Research-China in 2001 to help adoptees research their history. He estimates that up to ten per cent of adoptees were taken by force or coercion. The vast majority of the others, he believes, were at some point trafficked into the orphanage system so that they could be legally adopted abroad and their documents fabricated.
Although Stuy and his wife have three adopted Chinese daughters, he has become one of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese adoption system. “Was there ever really a need for international adoption from China?” Stuy said. “As it relates to healthy girls, there were always domestic families who wanted to adopt those children.”
China’s decision to end international adoptions leaves in the lurch hundreds of American families who had been matched with prospective children and were waiting for them to arrive. Some of those adoptions were arranged before 2020, when the COVID pandemic suspended exchanges with China. The State Department said that it would raise “deep concerns with the Chinese government at senior levels.” These children, like most Chinese adoptees in recent years, are believed to have special needs.
China’s decision has been applauded by many in the adoption industry, including people who made their careers by sending Chinese babies to the United States. “As social workers who have been trying to help children, our goal has been to work ourselves out of a job,” Melody Zhang said. “It is not something to celebrate when we have too many abandoned children.”
The shift away from international adoptions is in keeping with worldwide trends. A 2019 U.N. General Assembly resolution called for children in need of care to be raised with relatives or in their communities. The Dutch government in May entirely banned adoption from foreign countries because of abuses in the system. Some of the largest U.S. adoption agencies no longer facilitate international adoptions, among them Bethany Christian Services, which explained on its Web site in 2020 that its decision was a “reflection of our desire to serve children in their own communities.” According to State Department data, U.S. adoptions of foreign-born children declined from a high of more than twenty thousand in 2004 to about thirteen hundred last year.
Grace Newton, a thirty-year-old who was adopted as a toddler from Nanjing and now writes about Chinese adoption on her blog, “Red Thread Broken,” also praised China’s decision.“I think there is a feeling of relief that these children will be able to be raised with their extended families and kinships,’’ Newton, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago said. “At the same time, we don’t want to be forgotten in Chinese history, our records and our stories swept under the rug.”
Newton cautions that not all adoptees feel similarly. Some adoptees had hoped to adopt themselves. Many feel they were destined to be raised by their adoptive families, paying less attention to, as Newton put it, “the social, political, economic realities have driven international adoptions.” Some also fear, Newton said, that “with no new members, our community may become even more marginalized.”
In South Korea, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating the circumstances under which an estimated two hundred thousand children were sent abroad for adoption. Adoptees do not expect China to follow suit, given its habit of burying unflattering episodes from its past. But the legacy of the one-child policy will be long-lasting. Demographers believe that it will be difficult for China to boost its birth rate, in part because there are now too few women of childbearing age, the result of more than thirty-five years of abandonments and abortions. But the Chinese government is trying. Some localities have recently announced subsidies of up to four thousand dollars for families having a second or third child. Women have been given incentives like water bottles and rice cookers to attend pro-family lectures. The same government officers who once terrorized families are now tasked with promoting more births. ♦
