As I write this, it is exactly one year since I returned from my journey to the Hengdong SWI and both Chinese and western news agencies are carrying reports naming Hengdong SWI Director Chen Ming a fugitive after being sentenced with at least nine others in what has become known as the Hunan "baby trafficking" trial.
The basic news story goes like this: a group of relatives in Hunan Province allegedly bought 78 infants between 2002 and 2005 from three people identified in the media accounts as "traffickers" in Guangdong Province, although the actual role of these three may be more complex. The babies are said to have been sold at 3,200 yuan ($398 USD) to 4,300 yuan each to county-level SWIs in Hengnan, Hengyang, Hengshan, Hengdong, Changning and Qidong. All are under the prefecture jurisdiction of Hengyang City in Hunan. (Some reports say the amount the orphanages exchanged for the children was lower, at around $50 USD.)
The purpose was allegedly to then obtain larger "donations" for the same children, but this is not at all clear. It is also not clear whether the children went to Chinese or foreign adoptive families. A few of the reports say this is still under investigation, although the actual investigation into all this likely began some time ago. No cases of foreign adoptive parents being contacted as a result of the investigation have been reported at this time.
During a series of court trials based in Qidong, Chen Ming, perhaps one other orphanage director, and nine individuals charged with trafficking are said to have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year (Chen Ming) to 15 years. More than 20 county and orphanage officials have been "punished" or fired, including Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau Director Zhou Liqun.
Accounts vary. Some of the news stories initially claimed the 78 infants in question were "abducted" in Guangdong. However, both National Public Radio (NPR) and China adoption investigator Brian Stuy say this appears not to be the case. "The first person in the chain of transport ... was Liang Gui Hong, a 56 year-old woman. Families with unwanted children approached this woman, due to her well-known connections for finding homes for unwanted children (she apparently has been facilitating adoptions for over 10 years). These parents would give Ms. Liang a "Lucky Money" envelope with 20 or 30 yuan in it as thanks for locating a family to care for their children," Stuy says.
Chen Ming’s legal troubles in this case might have began last year when police in Hunan Province stopped someone named Duan Meilin who was driving with several babies in a car that had come from Guangdong Province to the south. A local Xinhua press bureau filed a report for internal government use saying a baby-trafficking ring was operating. Xinhua apparently serves a dual function as a news service and domestic intelligence agency and is said to file thousands of these "internal reference" reports every year.
Something less sinister than baby trafficking may have been afoot: perhaps the Chinese equivalent to giving up a child for adoption.
Duan was a partner with Liang, the woman from rural Wuchuan County in Guangdong mentioned above, who was well-known in her local area for her connections for finding homes for unwanted children. Supporters say she and the others from Guangdong in the case passed on as many as 1,000 abandoned babies to orphanages over the past 14 years. They say they weren't paid for the babies but were reimbursed for travel and other expenses. All this is according to a March 6 news account distributed by the Associated Press wire service.
Some of the babies obtained by Liang are said to have been eventually given to members of Duan Mei Lin’s family of Changning city in Hunan and the family had a relative working in the Hengyang County orphanage, which may have established a connection to other area orphanages as well. Hengyang is about 40 miles from Hengdong. Somehow, Chen Ming became involved in the case when he paid Duan and her partners for their "travel expenses," for transporting an unspecified number of children and implied is that the children wound up at the Hengdong SWI.
During a series of court trials based in Qidong County, Chen Ming, perhaps one other orphanage director, and nine individuals charged with trafficking were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year (Chen Ming) to 15 years. More than 20 county and orphanage officials have been "punished" or fired, including Hengdong County Civil Affairs Bureau Director Zhou Liqun. The Associated Press now quotes an official in the Qidong County prosecutor's office who says all the babies in this case appear to have been abandoned or given away. "There is no apparent evidence that these children were abducted," the prosecutor says.
A spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou has said the U.S. Embassy in Beijing contacted Chinese authorities to seek details about the case soon after press reports began to appear. The Ministry of Civil Affairs and China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) assured the Embassy that the case was being properly handled, but said they they could not discuss its details because it was still being investigated and processed through the Chinese judicial system. CCAA representatives went to Hunan Province to be briefed on the case and this authority has since issued a statement declaring that none of the children in question had been abducted but had initially been abandoned in Guangdong as the defendents in the case had pleaded.
The situation at the Hengdong SWI has appeared unsteady. During the last few weeks a translator has attempted to call the orphanage. In each call an unnamed woman answered and said she did not know the exact whereabouts of Director Chen Ming or the other administrative staff, only that Chen Ming "is traveling on business." She did not know when he would return. Apologizing, she could not say who was in charge in their absence or provide anyone's mobile phone number.
From the outset, the conditions I found at the Hengdong SWI seemed out of sync in relation to the substantial amount of revenue from adoption fees that I knew must have been generated there. But it is still unclear to me the extent to which officials at the bottom rung of the bureaucratic ladder would have been able to benefit from this revenue directly. Also, published data from social researchers indicate that direct government support for abandoned children in China is lacking. [See later post.]
When I visited the orphanage, Hengdong county officials had openly discussed a RMB figure close to what would have been raised there from foreign adoption fees and said these funds had been set aside as part of their plan to eventually build a new orphanage facility that was obviously needed. In other words, that money had been raised from a large number of foreign adoptions in Hengdong was hardly concealed during my visit. In the months following, as a plan for an emergency renovation of the old building progressed into a sped up plan to begin the new orphanage, it appeared that at each stage in which funds were to be expended permission was needed and obtained on behalf of the orphanage, at the request of county officials, from the Hunan Department of Social Welfare.
If a new orphanage really is built, much that has happened may be explicable. But if not, where will all this money have gone and what will happen to the children still living, and arriving, at the old orphanage?
What a shame it would be if Chen Ming were to have been driven over the brink and his assistants were to have been disgraced because, in the end, in just another way that most of us never quite imagined, they were simply trying to find homes and families for more abandoned children. Still, one wonders how Chen Ming and his colleagues could really have been sure the children they paid for were not obtained through nefarious means.
Meanwhile, because I've visited Hengdong and the Hengdong SWI and feel that I know Chen Ming, Director Zhou, and others there, I should say at least something on their behalf. While I am exasperated at this turn of events, I do not think that officials in Hengdong were out for personal gain. There is more to this.
To summarize, it's useful to consider that Chen Ming and his staff spent most of their days and nights working under the same poor conditions as the children in their care, whom they worked hard to find families for. There will be so much about my Hengdong daughter's past that we will never know, but this I'm pretty sure of.
Researchers have estimated that only about 10-20% of the several hundred thousand children abandoned in China each year actually wind up in orphanages, while the rest are adopted informally, absorbed into hidden families. In that 80-90% of abandoned children absorbed into hidden families is the obvious fact that many childless Chinese families wish to have children.
One way that this is often accomplished is via the exchange of fees to the person who can arrange this or to the birth parents themselves. For many families this is just far easier than navigating the bureaucratic domestic adoption process and, after all, there is no open adoption option in China.
Thus a market has formed, creating a niche for baby "traffickers" and likely less sinister match-makers who for a fee will find a home for a child born to parents who for any number of personal, familial, cultural, legal, or economic reasons sadly decide they cannot keep her. One can imagine how some couples may prefer this option to abandonment. What if a match-maker could guarantee that a child who could not be kept would be placed in an orphanage where children have a good chance of eventually being adopted by comparatively wealthy families who could afford to pay adoption fees equal to more than a year's salary?
If Chen Ming went along with a scheme like this it was likely with the idea that he would be somehow helping all the children in his care, perhaps with the goal of helping to fund construction of the new orphanage that between 2002 and 2005 was a distant goal. In February 2005 he said he had raised $1.5 million yuan toward this project. But this is a case around which there has been far too much speculation already.
In the case of my Hengdong daughter, I suspect that the police report of her being found abandoned at the Hengdong County Farmer's Market was real, as were the other papers with dates from various local agencies that I sifted through in her file at the Hengdong SWI. So appeared her red cloth abandonment note. In my travels through southern Hunan in February 2005 too many disinterested parties—cab drivers, restaurant workers, hotel workers--had said that abandoned children were commonly found locally for this not to be so.
But if Clara-Li had been sold or given up with the gift of a small fee by a family who could not keep her in the hope that she would find a good home, clearly she landed first in a bad spot. There are some things that no developing child should have to go through for nearly two years and one of them is to wait in the queue each day for almost everything in a struggling state-run orphanage, especially a crumbling, poorly-supported facility like the Hengdong SWI.
China's adoption system, especially in Hunan Province, needs reform. In some provinces apart from Hunan, foreign adoption fees are distributed among orphanages regardless of their participation in the foreign adoption program, based on need. Orphanage support generally needs to be distributed throughout China based on need, rather than on the ability of orphanages themselves to somehow produce large numbers of adoptable children.
(See update.)
