About Hengdong

Hengdong, the small city, is the county town or local government center for Hengdong County, which is in the southeastern part of Hunan Province.  The county is filled with tiny farms and farm cooperatives.  It's also home to a fair number of small factories including ones that produce plastic mats, metals, porcelain, and tea.   One variety of locally produced tea is a popular mixture of green tea and herbal medicine promised to "reduce fat and treat cancer."   In character the region as a whole seems a bit like a cup of optimism too, albeit a very ancient cup that's been through a lot.

This is an area that is mostly rural and agricultural in that populous way unique to central China.  The large city of Hengyang is only about 40 miles to the southwest and is the second largest city in Hunan with well over 6 million residents.  But in China places can be very distinct from one another even if separated by only short distances.  With Hengyang and Hengdong this is the case and they are separated by the hills, towns, and rural villages between them.

Notably, Hengdong County lies within sight of the mountain peaks of Hengshan, home to a group of temples that are well known throughout Hunan and much of central China.   The temples are very old, specially honored, and the mountain area surrounding them is carefully preserved.

At its western border the county sits alongside the middle reaches of the Xiang River that flows through the center of the province and it is intersected by a large number of smaller rivers including the Mui Shui, which gently curls around the edges of the city of Hengdong.  The county is served by the Jingguang railroad and a relatively new main roadway large enough for steady truck traffic, both traversing east to west.  The entire region--with its rice, grain, pigs, oranges, vegetables, camellia oil, and tea--seems characteristic of Hunan's reputation for productive agriculture.  Historically, Hunan produced so much grain that it provided surpluses to many other parts of China.  Success, however, also led to overpopulation beginning more than a hundred years ago, which led to waves of peasant uprisings.   

Fittingly then, Hunan is Mao Zedong's home province and birthplace to much of China's early communist movement. It 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.

During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, Hunan was home to its own sovereign realm and 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.   

But as agricultural practices advanced, it turned out that Hunan was located at the heart of an extremely fertile region.  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.  Its population ballooned.  Soon most of its land upon which crops could be grown was cleared.  Dense human and animal populations in the area provided fertilizer for other saleable crops such as high-yielding rice.  Qing rulers in the region failed to restrain competition for land among 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 was still highly taxed in more ways than one.

Mao was part of a short-lived revolutionary movement in Hunan before joining and 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 until 1934, when communist forces began their famous long march out of the region north to Shaanxi Province.  The later communist 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.

Indeed 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.

Buddhist and Taoist traditions are still strong in Hengdong County, perhaps influenced by the close proximity of the Nanyue Shan mountain temples to the west.  A different kind of shrine lies about 30 miles in the other direction, just on the other side of the Luoxian Shan range and technically in Jiangxi Province.  This would be Jinggangshan, which is 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.

Today Jinggangshan hosts a more benign brand of Chinese tourist, but it’s worth considering that the Cultural Revolution (officially 1966-1976) left few families untouched and still strongly reverberates, usually painfully so, in the Chinese collective memory.  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 actually just recently graduated middle school students.  Alleged crimes against the government resulted in public punishment of the accused.  Untold numbers went 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 this group claims that prisoners are today 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 today, Hengdong County may 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.

The county in China's 2001 population census 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's divided into 24 districts over about 1,925 square miles.   The people of this area have traditionally spoken the older Xiang dialect but Mandarin (or Putonghua), being the language of commerce and commerce being the force currently transforming nearly all of China, is commonly understood.

The climate of the region is blistering hot and tropically humid during the long summers.  Temperatures during the winter months can still be chilly, with average highs in the 40s and morning frosts on occasion from mid November through February.  Winter snow often tops the mountain peaks of Hengshan.

Topographically the county today is a mixture of forested hills and flat agricultural spaces.  Occasional cut-away hillsides reveal a deep red color to the earth underneath.   Several of the county’s districts contain midsized towns, some of which stand out as clusters of block-like cement buildings visible in the distance from its main highway. 

Xintang Zhen (town) is one of these and near there on a small lake visitors can 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 is the large Ouyang Yu Experimental Middle School, which serves 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 has been reestablished as a modern agricultural model for China and farmers' average annual incomes there have increased from 558 yuan ($67 USD) in 1989 to 2,299 yuan ($277 USD) in 2001.  In the online archives of China's People's Daily Hengdong County is mentioned in an article about the resourceful farmer Liu Aiping from Daqiao, one of the county's rural villages.  After taking a correspondence course in animal husbandry, he formed the Aiping Group, which has 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 has been singled out as a national success story.

But while farm wages have more than doubled in the past decade, an average $277 USD a year for most farm workers doesn't provide much disposable income.  Moreover, in China's new market economy there are more basic services to be paid for and many more consumer items to buy.

The small city of Hengdong lies in the center of Hengdong County and is its bustling hub, home to several large agricultural markets and hundreds of small shops and businesses.   Its residents live mostly in tall apartment-style buildings separated by grid-like alleys and dusty narrow streets off its main thoroughfares.  Near its main intersection is 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 are 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 is a small park with a busy playground.

Hunan Province has a current projected birth rate of 12.2 per 1000 population.  The average life expectancy in the province is a healthy 69 years.  Its overall rate of population growth is about 5% annually.   In 2000, 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 is typically even greater in mostly rural areas like Hengdong County.  Actual observed gender imbalance is tempered somewhat by underreporting of female births: children abandoned but then absorbed into other families.

There has been interesting debate about the probable causes of observed imbalance.  A lot has been written about underreporting but also about the high prevalence of selective abortion made easier by medical technologies relatively affordable even in rural areas, a practice the Chinese have recently been trying to control.  One theory even suggests that disease may play 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 have been shown to markedly decrease the chances of female births among infected birth mothers.

But, generally, it can be said that families in rural villages want sons.

Historians have written that family preference for male births and female infanticide were part of eastern and south Asian cultures throughout the ancient period, but it is 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.   In modern times social researchers have linked family preference for male births in China to economic reasons and the lack of a social safety net for those reaching old age, especially in poor rural areas.   Some now suggest that in China's new economic climate this is less a determinate than pressure on young parents from paternal grandparents, whose beliefs on the subject may reflect an older Chinese reality.

Population controls have added fuel to the flame, although China's population problem 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 is in many ways on the outer edge of the city of Hengdong and is one of a large number of county level orphanages overseen by the Hunan Provincial Civil Affairs Bureau.  There are 74 counties in Hunan and some have more than one SWI.   There are also 12 municipal level orphanages in this province and these are said to generally house larger numbers of children.  Most adoptions in China are domestic adoptions, albeit within the limitations of the country's strict population controls.  Researchers suspect that most of China's abandoned baby girls, especially in rural villages, are adopted informally. 

Supply still appears 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 is that abandoning a child is illegal, and birth parents can be penalized when the birth of a child exceeds the population control limits set in their region.  Each ad is run in a local newspaper for 60 days after which, if no one comes forward, the child is officially determined to be abandoned and eligible for adoption.   As a result, newspapers throughout China collectively announce the recent abandonment of thousands of baby girls daily.

Very little is known 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 restrictions lead some families to abandon newborn daughters after they have exceeded birth quotas, and that most families want 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 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 are matched with dossiers for children sent in by SWIs in provinces throughout the country.  In other words, children in foreign adoptions are not adopted directly from orphanages.  Nonetheless, adoption fees are an attractive revenue source for desperate orphanages, greedy officials, or a complex mix.  Money changing hands anywhere within China’s bureaucratic system is a ripe target for corruption and this is commonly said to be especially true in Hunan Province. 

But corruption scandal (more on this later) can divert attention from the far greater problem of child abandonment overall, which seems to receive less Chinese media coverage.  The astounding number of baby girls abandoned in China each year has typically resembled in size the population of a typical small Chinese city, although the CCAA now says that, finally, child abandonment is on the decrease.

Foreign adoptions in China take place most often these days in provincial capitals like Changsha rather than in the individual locations that host orphanages throughout each province.  This makes it easier to process both the adoption paperwork and the application for a Chinese passport each child needs to exit the country.  It also serves to limit the visibility of foreign adoptions.  Still, some orphanages accommodate visits from families during adoption trips and others don't.  This we saw first hand during both of our adoptions. 

In fairness, it seems reasonable that some SWI directors might as a routine wish to avoid such visits to ensure that adoptive families focus their attention on their new babies, to avoid disruption back at the orphanage (especially for any older children who might be living there), and to avoid political problems  locally.  Their well meaning goal, it seems likely, is to see that the children in their care find good homes.  They may simply want to avoid anything that could jeopardize that.

The CCAA may actually prohibit 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 believes the CCAA is worried that families visiting orphanages during adoption trips might be tempted to compare children or may unfairly compare orphanage conditions to those in wealthy countries.  The policy is a means of limiting visits overall.  Perhaps it would be better if adoption agencies or local officials were simply more clear about this rule.

In 2003, only 24 of more than 85 orphanages in Hunan's provincial welfare system placed children in foreign adoptions, according to author Kay Ann Johnson.  Foreigners seeking to adopt in China pay an orphanage fee of about $3000 USD, and in Hunan much of this fee is said to go directly to the orphanage.  In the past two years, a large number of foreign adoptions in Hunan have been from the Hengdong SWI, prompting speculation that provincial officials have singled it out as a high priority target for improvements. 

Undeniably, photos from disposable cameras sent to the Hengdong SWI and returned to adoptive families have shown a very humble facility.  In my daughter's photos, some scenes seemed grim, a few even unsettling, in comparison to orphanage scenes I had seen first hand in China previously.