Hengdong, the small city, is the county town or local government center for Hengdong County, which is in the southeastern part of Hunan Province.
In 2004, the year we adopted our Hengdong daughter, this was a place mostly rural and agricultural in that populous way unique to central China. It was filled with tiny farms and farm cooperatives. It was also home to a fair number of small factories including ones that produced plastic mats, metals, porcelain, and tea. One variety of locally produced tea was a popular mixture of green tea and herbal medicine promised to "reduce fat and treat cancer." In character the area seemed a bit like a cup of optimism too, albeit a very old one that had been through a lot.
The large city of Hengyang was only about 40 miles to the southwest and the second largest city in Hunan with more than 6 million residents. But in China places could be distinct from one another even if separated by only short distances.
Notably, Hengdong County lay within sight of the mountain peaks of Hengshan, home to a group of temples that were well known throughout Hunan and much of central China. The temples were very old, specially honored, and the mountain area surrounding them was carefully preserved.
Most of the county's residents were still living in small villages and struggling to get by, working tiny plots of adjacent land by hand. Like other areas of the countryside throughout China, this one was losing many of its younger people in a general migration to large cities either within Hunan itself or to factory towns in the economic development zones of its neighboring provinces, especially the southern and coastal provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang. However, while Hengdong and the six other counties within Hengyang’s administrative district were still very rural, they were decidedly not remote, which is likely an important point in this story.
..........
At its western border Hengdong County is set alongside the middle reaches of the Xiang River, which flows through the center of Hunan Province. It is intersected by a large number of smaller rivers including the Mui Shui, which gently curl around the edges of the city of Hengdong. Following the route of the Xiang River in 2004 was a highway and rail line that served Central China as a major north-south artery. The county itself was served by the Jingguang railroad and a relatively new main roadway large enough for steady truck traffic, both traversing east to west.
This part of Hunan—with its rice, grain, pigs, oranges, vegetables, camellia oil, and tea—was characteristic of the province’s reputation for productive agriculture. Indeed the province had historically produced so much grain and other staples that, beginning long ago, it provided surpluses to many other parts of China. Success, however, had also led to overpopulation beginning more than a hundred years before, which eventually led to waves of peasant uprisings.
Fittingly then, Hunan was Mao Zedong's home province and birthplace to much of China's early communist movement. It had strictly adopted Mao's grand social experiments and was a bit slow in adopting the reforms put forward by Deng Xiaoping in the years that followed Mao's death. Mao's hometown, the once-tiny village of Shaoshan, is only about 50 miles from Hengdong, to the north and about halfway between Hengdong and Changsha.
In ancient times and during much of China's long early historic period of Imperial dynasties, Hunan was home to its own sovereign realm and was often considered a frontier region between the imperial empire and disputed regions to the south. Later, together with Hubei to the north, it was part of the imperial province of Huguang until the Qing dynasty in the 19th century.
Its early inhabitants found that the area of Hunan was located at the heart of an extremely fertile agricultural region and by the end of the Ming dynasty and certainly the early Qing dynasty, the province was firmly established as an economic center with a large exported agricultural output, especially grain, along well established trade routes. Soon most valleys or hillsides that could serve as cropland were cleared. Population ballooned. Eventually Qing rulers in the region failed to restrain the competition for land between both landlords and peasant farmers. Revolution that led to the abdication of the last Chinese emperor in 1912 left many local leaders in power and land in the region remained highly taxed in more ways than one.
Mao was part of a short-lived revolutionary movement in Hunan before joining and eventually leading the communists against the broader nationalist Kuomintang government. In the late 1920s and early 1930s communist forces often fought with Kuomintang forces in the mountains just east of Hengdong County along the Hunan-Jiangxi border, on the western edge of the revolution's Jiangxi Soviet base. Then in 1934 the communist forces began their famous long march out of the region, eventually north to Shaanxi Province.
The later communist central government under Mao hardly solved the region’s land shortage and ecological issues, however. By 1957 only 20 percent of the Xiang River Basin, which includes Hengdong County, was forested and more than 20 percent was barren land.
In the following year as Mao prepared to launch his calamitous Great Leap Forward campaign of collective industrialization, he rejected as unpatriotic an early attempt at population control begun in 1955 in response to inadequate food supplies and a very low standard of living nationally. Waves of famine ensued.
..........
In 2004, Buddhist and Taoist traditions were still very strong in Hengdong County, probably influenced by the close proximity of the Nanyue Shan mountain temples in Hengshan nearby to the west. A different kind of shrine lay about 30 miles in the other direction, just on the other side of the Luoxian Shan range and technically in Jiangxi Province. This was Jinggangshan, historically considered the birthplace of the Red Army, but which during the Cultural Revolution became a place of pilgrimage for young Red Guards who often journeyed there on foot to relive the experiences of their revolutionary forebears. At its peak, more than 30,000 Red Guards arrived daily without food, housing, and sanitation facilities there to supply them.
More than 30 years later Jinggangshan hosted a more benign brand of Chinese tourist, but the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966-1976) left few families untouched and still strongly reverberated, usually painfully so, in the Chinese collective memory.
During the Cultural Revolution traditional education was halted. Countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed. Young "intellectuals" living in cities were ordered to the countryside; most were simply recently graduated middle school students and because of their education were deemed guilty by their association with an elite social class. Alleged minor crimes against the government often resulted in public punishment of the accused. People branded as political enemies were sent to forced labor camps, one of which was located in Hengdong County (a place called the Xuantang Tree Farm). It was disbanded in July 1986, according the human rights group Laogai Research Foundation, which monitors forced labor in China. But according to this group, in 2004 prisoners were still toiling in large numbers of Chinese prison factories including the Hengyang Prison Provincial No. 2 that produces automobiles and Provincial No. 5, also in Hengyang, that produces auto parts.
Like much of China, Hengdong County could be seen as struggling through sometimes drastic economic and social reforms to emerge in incremental steps from a long period during which bad things could often happen to good people.
..........
Hengdong County in 2004, according to Chinese census data, had 660,000 residents living in 187,094 households and 610,000 of the county's residents were considered to be living in a rural area. It was divided into 24 districts over about 1,925 square miles. The people of this area have traditionally spoken the older southern Xiang dialect but Mandarin (or Putonghua, "the common speech"), being the language of commerce and commerce being the turbulent force then transforming nearly all of China, was commonly understood. Still, it was said that even Mao struggled with Mandarin.
Typically the climate of the region was blistering hot and tropically humid during the long summers. Temperatures during the winter months could still be chilly, with average highs in the 40s and morning frosts on occasion from mid November through February. Winter snow often topped the mountain peaks of Hengshan.
Topographically the county was a mixture of forested hills and flat agricultural spaces. Occasional cut-away hillsides could reveal a deep red color to the earth underneath. Several of the county’s districts contained midsized towns, some of which stood out as clusters of block-like cement buildings visible in the distance from its main highway.
Xintang Zhen (town) was one example of these and near there on a small lake visitors could ride tour boats and fish from the shore line at the Wild Duck Vacation Village, whose proprietor, Luo Guohua, first cultivated fish in the lake, later tried raising farm animals on its banks, and in recent years, in the spirit of the times, transformed his property into a local tourist attraction.
On the outskirts of Xintang was the large Ouyang Yu Experimental Middle School, which in 2005 served about 2500 students between the ages of 11 and 17. In the 1940s a young local man named C.J. Huang left the area and eventually immigrated to Taiwan, then later to the U.S. Along the way he built an impressive career as an engineer and businessman. He pledged the money that built this school on a return visit in 1986 and later established a fellowship in Asian studies at Stanford University that occasionally sends young research fellows to live and work at the Ouyang Yu middle school, and to teach English to students and teachers there.
Hunan Province had been reestablished as a modern agricultural model for China and farmers' average annual incomes there increased from 558 yuan ($67 USD) in 1989 to 2,299 yuan ($277 USD) in 2001. In 2005 the online archives of China's People's Daily included an article about the resourceful farmer Liu Aiping from Daqiao, one of Hengdong County's rural villages. After taking a correspondence course in animal husbandry, he formed the Aiping Group, which helped some 3,600 other local farmers to raise their standard of living by establishing pig farms linked by his breeding and marketing services. Hengdong County's Aiping Group had been singled out as a national success story.
But while farm wages doubled during the 1990s, a resulting average $277 USD a year for most farm workers still did not provide much disposable income in 2004. Moreover, in China's new market economy there were more basic services to be paid for and many more consumer items to buy.
The small city of Hengdong in the center of Hengdong County was the county's bustling hub. In 2004 it was home to several large agricultural markets and hundreds of small shops and businesses. Its residents lived mostly in tall apartment-style buildings separated by grid-like alleys and dusty narrow streets off its main thoroughfares. Near its main intersection was a brand new two-story shopping mall with glassed-in jewelry shops and fashionable clothing stores, and a modern escalator between floors. Not far away were the official-looking offices of the Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau and, in the other direction, the People’s Hospital of Hengdong County. Across from the county headquarters was a small park with a busy playground.
Hunan Province at the time had a current projected birth rate of 12.2 per 1000 population. The average life expectancy in the province was a healthy 69 years. Its overall rate of population growth was about 5% annually. The latest detailed census figures then available, from 2000, showed that gender imbalance among official (legal) births in Hunan was represented by an annually widening ratio of 126.9 male births to every 100 female births. Gender imbalance measured in recorded births was typically even greater in mostly rural areas like Hengdong County. Actual observed gender imbalance was likely tempered somewhat by underreporting of female births: children abandoned but then absorbed into other families.
Then as today there was debate among researchers about the probable causes of gender imbalance. A lot had been written about underreporting of births but also about the high prevalence of selective abortion made easier by medical technologies relatively affordable even in rural areas, a practice the Chinese had begun trying to control. One theory even suggested that disease might have played a major role in gender imbalance not just in China but across southern and central Asia, more specifically highly prevalent diseases such as Hepatitis B that had been shown to markedly decrease the chances of female births among infected birth mothers.
But, generally, it could be said that families in rural villages wanted sons.
Historians had written that family preference for male births and female infanticide were part of eastern and south Asian cultures throughout the ancient period, but it was doubtful that anywhere in China could still be considered stuck in that era, given what China came through during the second half of the 20th century. Social researchers linked family preference for male births in China’s modern era to economic reasons and the lack of a social safety net for those reaching old age, especially in poor rural areas. By 2004 some were suggesting that in China's new economic climate this was less a determinate than pressure on young parents from paternal grandparents, whose beliefs on the subject may have reflected an older Chinese reality.
Population controls added fuel to the flame, although China's population problem was at the time, and still is, truly staggering. If you are reading this in the U.S. you might envision six people for every one of those around you. Then imagine the resulting effects.
The Hengdong SWI was in many ways on the outer edge of the city of Hengdong and one of a large number of county level orphanages overseen by the Hunan Provincial Civil Affairs Bureau. In 2004 there were 74 counties in Hunan and some had more than one SWI. There were also 12 municipal level orphanages in this province and these were said to generally house larger numbers of children. Most adoptions in China even then were domestic adoptions, albeit within the limitations of the country's strict population controls. Researchers suspected that most of China's abandoned baby girls, especially in rural villages, were adopted informally.
Supply still appeared to exceed demand.
In 1999 the U.S. State Department requested that Chinese orphanages wishing to make orphaned children eligible for adoption place "child abandonment ads" in newspapers to assist birth parents in deciding to somehow claim them. The Chinese government complied and these have become known as "finding ads." Catch 22 was that abandoning a child is illegal, and birth parents were penalized when the birth of a child exceeded the population control limits set in their region. Each ad was run in a local newspaper for 60 days after which, if no one came forward, the child was officially determined to be abandoned and eligible for adoption. As a result, newspapers throughout China, in 2004 and during the heaviest foreign adoption years preceding, collectively announced the recent abandonment of thousands of baby girls daily.
Very little was known then or now about child abandonment in China other than generalized assumptions. However, in one instance researchers were able to interview 237 families in central China who abandoned children in the 1980s and 1990s. Within this sample, 88% were from rural areas, most had average incomes and education levels for the areas in which they lived, and most had been in their middle to late child bearing years when they had abandoned a child. Gender, birth order, and the lack of a male sibling were indeed the major determinants of abandonment in these cases. But only 11 of these families had abandoned first daughters, and in these few cases there were extenuating circumstances including three in which difficult birth defects were cited. The study found this contradiction: that population restriction led some families to abandon newborn daughters after they exceeded birth quotas, and that most families wanted to have and keep at least one daughter. (See Johnson, K.; Banghan, H. and Liyao, W. (1998) "Infant abandonment and adoption in China." Population & Development Review, Vol. 24 Issue 3, p469-510.)
..........
Foreign adoption in China was and still is centrally managed by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA), a branch of the Civil Affairs Ministry in Beijing. This is where dossiers from foreign parents wishing to bring abandoned children into their families were matched with dossiers for children sent in by authorized state-controlled orphanages in provinces throughout the country. In other words, children in foreign adoptions were not adopted directly from orphanages. Nonetheless, adoption fees were an attractive revenue source for desperate orphanages, greedy officials, or a complex mix. Money changing hands anywhere within China’s bureaucratic system was historically a ripe target for corruption and this was commonly said to be especially true in Hunan Province.
But corruption scandal (more on this later) can divert attention from the greater problem that was child abandonment overall, which seemed to receive very little Chinese media coverage. The astounding number of baby girls abandoned in China during the 1990s and the early part of the following decade each year typically resembled in size the population of a typical small Chinese city, although the CCAA has now begun to report that abandonment of non special needs children has been decreasing.
Foreign adoptions in China took place in provincial capitals like Changsha rather than in the individual locations that hosted orphanages throughout each province. This made it easier to process both the adoption paperwork and the application for a Chinese passport each child needed to exit the country. It also served to limit the visibility of foreign adoptions. Still, some orphanages accommodated visits from families during adoption trips and others did not. Our family has seen this variance firsthand during the course of our [three] adoptions.
In fairness, it seems reasonable now that some SWI directors might as a routine have wished to avoid such visits to ensure that adoptive families focus their attention on their new babies, to avoid disruption at the orphanage (especially for older children who might be living there), and to avoid political problems locally. Their well meaning goal, it seems likely, was to see that the children in their care found good homes. They may simply have wanted to avoid anything that could jeopardize that.
Meanwhile, the CCAA may have actually prohibited orphanage visits from adoptive families during adoption trips in its guidelines to orphanages involved in the foreign adoption program while allowing for return visits later, according to the director of one private charitable foundation working in China. She said the CCAA was worried that families visiting orphanages during adoption trips might have been be tempted to compare children or unfairly compare orphanage conditions to those in wealthy countries. The policy was a means of limiting visits overall. Perhaps it would have been better if adoption agencies or local officials simply had been clearer about this rule, although we still would have pressed to visit, since the orphanage was such an important part of our children's background, maybe the only part about which we could be be certain.
In 2004 only 24 of more than 85 orphanages in Hunan's provincial welfare system placed children in foreign adoptions. Foreigners seeking to adopt in China paid an orphanage fee of about $3000 USD, and in Hunan most of this fee was said to go directly to the orphanage and, by law, only for the purpose of capital improvements. Between 2002 and 2004 a large number of foreign adoptions in Hunan had been from the Hengdong SWI, prompting some speculation among local Chinese then working with adoption agencies in the area that provincial officials had singled out the orphanage as a high priority target for renovations.
Undeniably, photos from disposable cameras sent to the Hengdong SWI and returned to adoptive families had shown a very humble facility. In my daughter's photos, some scenes from the orphanage had seemed unusually grim, a few even unsettling, in comparison to orphanage scenes I had seen firsthand in China previously.
Comments