There is still little data to draw a clear picture of the scope of child abandonment in China. But what little data there are combined with a few very good recent studies on closely related aspects of China's social welfare system can at least provide a useful framework of clues for thinking about the problem.
This framework would seem to show that, on the positive side, China's state controlled orphanage system has been humming along, placing large numbers of mostly healthy abandoned children in domestic and foreign adoptions--with occasional age old problems of government bureaucratic corruption and other challenges notwithstanding. On the downside, there appear to be very large numbers of vulnerable abandoned and orphaned children who are not covered adequately by the state, probably even larger numbers not covered at all.
There actually is a substantial body of research literature addressing the problem of China’s “missing girls,” a term linking child abandonment with China’s growing gender imbalance among reported births, and the studies reported have produced a wealth of data. It's just that the conclusions in these studies are often debated.
Daniel Goodkind's article in Population Studies (2004, Vol. 58 Issue 3, p281-295) is a good example of the studies that focus on the demographic, statistical aspects of the problem and perhaps as a result tend to produce huge numbers. Goodkind looked closely at China's 2000 population census to estimate a total of nearly 37 million children "missing" in these census figures, this from comparing the census results to data from the previous census in 1990 and China's own population projections based on the previous data available. His analysis attributed missing children on the census rolls to under reporting of children of both sexes born in violation of state-enforced birth quotas.
Others have focused on wide gaps between recorded male and female births. The under reporting of children within these gender gaps logically might represent abandoned girls. However, social researchers collecting visible data on the ground, especially in rural villages, have documented observed gender imbalance and not just among children, which has fueled reasonable skepticism about the frighteningly large abandonment figures that could be related to under reporting.
Moreover, there are at least two potential causes of gender imbalance other than unreported abandoned girls that have been discussed by other social researchers in the literature. A lot has been written for example about the high prevalence of selective abortion made easier by medical technologies relatively affordable even in rural areas, a widespread practice the Chinese have recently been trying to control. Another theory debated by Monica Das Gupta, Emily Oster and others 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. (Example: Oster, Emily. 2005. “Hepatitis B and the case of the missing women,” Harvard University Center for International Development Working Paper 7, Cambridge, MA.)
It seems highly likely that what may be at work are a number of factors—including under reporting of female births linked to abandonment, sex selective abortion, and disease related inhibitors to female births—all serving to indicate a reality that may include fewer “missing girls” than the most drastic figures suggest. In other words, the actual number of China's abandoned children still appears undetermined.
But lest anyone doubt the staggering scale of the problem, take a look at the graphic entitled China’s Missing Girls created by cartography specialist Mathew Bloch using information from the China Data Center at the University of Michigan. This map identifies gender ratios in specific regions throughout China for both first born and second born children using data from China’s detailed 2000 census. Foreign adoptive parents will quickly recognize that the widest gender gaps occur in regions typically said to produce the largest numbers of abandoned children as well as in provinces with the highest numbers of foreign adoptions. This would seem to offer at least some support for those attributing gender imbalance to under reporting at least to a substantial degree and so would also seem to support estimates for very large numbers of abandoned children. The map is coldly fascinating.
| Foreign adoptions are coordinated nationally by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA). But social welfare institutes like Hengdong’s are part of the civil affairs system of each province and managed locally. Their only legal responsibility, says a study cited here, may be to those with claim to local residency (such as orphans, senior citizens, and the disabled), which would not technically include abandoned children. Many local governments obviously allow their SWIs to accept abandoned children but the system appears to be ad hoc rather than official policy. This confusing state of affairs may actually explain a lot. |
China's detailed census occurs once every ten years. Five-year population sampling in 2005 indicated increases in gaps between recorded male and female births and the possibility of more missing children, including broader gender gaps in provinces surrounding the core south central provinces where gaps (and abandonment) have been widest--this despite improved socioeconomic conditions across many regions, legal campaigns against sex selective abortions, and social campaigns such as the "Care for Girls" program during the same period. More recent sampling, albiet from smaller samples, has finally begun to show some closing of wide gender gaps in those core south central problem areas.
The reports and studies cited below use the terms "orphans" and "abandoned children," occasionally implying the distinction that orphans are children whose legal parents could be identified but are either deceased or no longer able to provide care. However, the term orphans is more often used generically in China, perhaps implying a reluctance to acknowledge the abandoned children so obviously linked to population controls, although China's population problem is of course very real and obviously not easy for a government to address.
Many published reports seem to agree that in China today there are usually about 50,000 to 60,000 children in government care. The number is a moving target, given its ebb and flow due to steady demands for both domestic and foreign adoptions. Some reports have referred to about 1,000 state controlled orphanages housing children. A 2004 white paper issued by China's State Council counted "192 special welfare institutions for children and 600 comprehensive welfare institutions with a children's department, accommodating a total of 54,000 orphans and disabled children. There are also nearly 10,000 community services around China for orphans and disabled people, such as rehabilitation centers and training classes for mentally retarded children."
The Chinese government issued a news release in fall 2005 that referred to a large-scale survey on orphaned children commissioned by China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, Beijing Normal University, and the Save the Children Foundation. If the survey used credible methodology, it would indicate the presence of a large group of abandoned or orphaned children that may be independent of the large number of abandoned infants now commonly said to be absorbed into hidden families. The survey reportedly identified more than 500,000 "orphaned minors," mostly in rural areas, with more than half lacking government support. It was said to have shown that Henan Province had more than 50,000 orphaned children, more than any other province. The provinces of Hunan, Anhui and Jiangxi each were said to have more than 40,000.
A similar group of children is referred to by Shang Xiaoyuan and Wu Xiaoming in their study "Welfare Provision for Vulnerable Children: The Missing Role of the State" published in the peer-reviewed journal China Quarterly (March 2005, Issue 181). They estimate a total of 300,000 to 400,000 "orphaned" children, 95 percent of them initially abandoned, in rural areas living outside state controlled institutions. They also discussed two additional groups of China's vulnerable children who need to be considered and addressed. One is comprised of perhaps several hundred thousand children of prisoners with long-term or death sentences who are incarcerated in the country's vast prison system, by far the largest in the world. The other smaller group is that of street children who are those most commonly represented as victims in government statistics on child kidnapping.
As a matter of policy, the state is the sole welfare provider for vulnerable children in China, according Shang and Wu. But this system sets up a sort of a rural-urban double standard. "Only state-run welfare institutes are legally permitted to be the guardians of orphans and abandoned children found in urban areas ... Children who are registered urban residents are entitled to minimum living security benefits, that is, income support to the urban poor, which is provided in cash. They are also entitled to the care services provided by [state controlled orphanages]. In rural areas, the state policy is not to take direct responsibility for supporting these children. The situation of China's rural orphans has never been systematically examined, and theoretically, they are protected by traditional family and kinship networks, and wubao. "
Wubao is "the five guarantees," a rural community based social protection system that in theory provides free food, fuel, clothes and health care to orphans, senior citizens, and disabled people who are not able to support themselves and who have no one legally responsible for their well-being. Free education for children and funeral services for senior citizens are also provided. But for rural abandoned children the wubao system has functional barriers, according to Shang and Wu. "Abandoned children are clearly not entitled to wubao: if the parents are known, they are not entitled to wubao because their parents continue to be responsible for them; but if the parents are not known, they are not local orphans and hence not entitled to wubao as it is a community based system which provides protection to orphans in the relevant community only. In both cases, the safety net for abandoned children in rural areas is missing."
Within this apparently unrealistic national social welfare system, Shang and Wu say in a footnote that local civil affairs officials have told them that communities are given the latitude to choose on their own to provide financial assistance or social services to abandoned children. This may help to explain why it is so difficult to determine the number of state controlled orphanages with adoption programs for abandoned children.
It may also explain why local adoption agency representatives and local officials told us when we adopted our daughters separately in Jiangxi and Hunan provinces that it would be difficult to say exactly where our daughters were from. We were told in each case that while she was found in the small city that was home to her state controlled orphanage she was more likely to have come from a village in the rural countryside, but not necessarily a village close by.
I find this interesting: the idea that some orphanages may accept large numbers of abandoned children with no clear claim to legal local residency (children unrecognized by the state) basically because they choose to. Perhaps it is a small wonder then that these orphanages would become dependent on adoption fees.
At any rate, all this is certainly a confusing state of affairs.
In China the children in high demand for domestic and foreign adoptions are generally those deemed free of health problems or physical defects. Shang and Wu warned that, "The number of orphans may increase rapidly in the next five to ten years due to the spread of HIV/AIDS. It is estimated that the number of HIV/AIDS orphans will be around 160,000 to 200,000 by 2010. More than 80 per cent of HIV/AIDS orphans will be living in rural areas."
If there has been any recent decline in the numbers of abandoned children housed in China's state controlled orphanages, this could be influenced by many factors including two recent documented trends: (a) a welcome acceptance by the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) of the introduction of foster care within the state social welfare system and (b) a steady increase in the number of Chinese couples, in both urban and rural areas, who seek to have a child through adoption.
There of course may also simply be declines in the numbers of abandoned children found within some of the communities served by the subset of state controlled orphanages that have been approved to participate in the foreign adoption program, especially if many of these communities are in regions likely to have experienced socioeconomic development. This would make plenty of sense, but does not yet appear to be well documented. Still, it's worth noting is that the CCAA is said to have cited declines in the numbers of healthy abandoned children arriving at its partner orphanages in recently announcing new, more restrictive rules for foreign adoptions.
Shang Xiaoyuan described the quiet policy shift toward the use of foster care in an article published in Social Services Review (June 2002) titled "Looking for a Better Way to Care for Children: Cooperation Between the State and Civil Society in China." The main drive for the shift has not come from the central government, according to Shang, but from local officials who are directly facing huge challenges in managing institutional care. The local officials are also responding to the lobbying and support activities of various non-government organizations, both domestic and foreign.
The use of foster care by many orphanages is a counter to the greedy orphanage stereotype that may be encouraged by the Hunan "baby traffficking" cases. In adjacent Jiangxi Province for example many orphanages have relied on foster care for more than a decade to improve conditions for their children. My oldest daughter came to us through an orphanage in the small city of Gao'an there, but she been living with a family who lived nearby. As early as 1994 her orphanage began a program in which nannies would take children home each night so that the children could sleep beside them in small basket-like cribs. In 1998 the orphanage began to seek more foster mothers in the area and initially paid them 200 RMB per month. Today most of these foster mothers care for two or three children from the orphanage at a time for about 480 RMB per month. In contrast, the large new orphanage building that opened on the outskirts of town in 2007 is mostly empty of children. Assisted by a private foundation that is now working cooperatively with the orphanage, my family pays for school tuition and other support for a child in one of these foster families, a girl with Hepatitis B.
At the Nanchang Municipal SWI about 75 miles to the northeast I once watched an extraordinary meeting between four foster families and the foreign adoptive parents who had come to adopt babies these foster parents had nurtured. It was an emotional meeting to say the least but a lot of hope, love, and good will were passed between them. I learned something important that day that I still can't put words to. The two directors at this large urban area orphanage were very active locally in their public support of foster care, more effective family planning, and of better care for children generally.
In the most recent study to be published on the subject of domestic adoption in China, Zhang Weiguo has produced a very detailed examination of adoption trends and practices in contemporary rural China. Zhang's is an important study because, in dealing with domestic adoption in rural China, it largely focuses on the practice of informal adoption, which seems to be the generally murky process through which by far most abandoned children find families.
Zhang's report was published in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Family Issues. Based on interviews and quantitative data from a survey of 425 adoptive families conducted in the summer of 2001, Zhang found that rural Chinese families are willing to adopt girls, although strong son preference persists, and that adoptions of children in rural China are increasingly the result of individual desires rather than state promotion.
But where this study veers toward remarkable relevance to the issue at hand is in indicating that the scandal breathlessly uncovered and pursued by the Xinhua news agency in Hunan, with its baby traffickers and milder intermediaries like Liang Gui Hong in Guangdong Province, is in Chinese society probably less real news than the norm--the troubling but commonplace means through which informal adoption occurs in the absence of a state policy to address hundreds of thousands of rural abandoned children. For within this study's sample of rural adoptive families, half or 50 percent obtained their children through intermediaries (including so-called traffickers), 26 percent from birth parents who were family members, and 23 percent obtained abandoned children who were found directly or found by family, friends or neighbors. Less than one percent of the children covered in the study were adopted from state controlled orphanages.
Moreover, it appears from Zhang's research that the widespread practice of informal adoption is actually promoted by the state as a primary means of dealing with the problem of rural child abandonment. This squares with the description of separate urban and rural social welfare systems from Shang's and Wu's study discussed above.
Xinhua is the official news agency of the Chinese government and a branch of its State Council, which is the government's chief administrative authority. It's difficult to guess at Xinhua's motives for drawing such a tabloid illustration of informal rural adoption's common intermediaries through its published reporting of Hunan's baby trafficking "scandal." The scandal was clearly the connection in this case to state controlled orphanages and the foreign adoption program, but in China the intersection of the market discovered by rural intermediaries and a fee-driven system for funding state-controlled orphanages was probably inevitable.
Zhang's study describes who adopts in rural China, why, and how. It discusses the related common practices of child trafficking and draws only a minor distinction between traffickers and simple intermediaries. It describes how obtaining a child from either usually involves some negotiated payment. It discusses the costs of these payments, usually ranging from 2,000 to 8,000 yuan for a boy and less for a girl. These costs tend to vary significantly by region.
Unexplored in the literature is the extent to which this market demand for children filled informally by intermediaries and traffickers might also have influenced the recently reported decline in number of abandoned children arriving at the state-controlled orphanages. While this method of obtaining children may serve to provide homes for more children than state-controlled orphanages, it also unregulated. Who assures the safety and well-being of these children or guarantees that they wind up in families at all?
By supplying this guarantee, the CCAA's foreign adoption program still seems fundamentally important.
But to summarize, there is an overall lack of supporting research for all the studies cited above. We're still left with a rather fuzzy picture.
What is clear about the continuing problem of child abandonment and orphaned children in China and about China's social welfare system is that these are topics that raise issues of substantial complexity. Hence, it's unwise to generalize too much about them based on individual events or sensational media reports. China is a huge county with striking regional differences and a population of such staggering size that it is beyond comparison on the planet. These factors alone make most generalizations suspect and comprehensive research on these problems understandably difficult.
It's been about ten years since Kay Ann Johnson published her important essay "The Politics of the Revival of Infant Abandonment in China, with Special Reference to Hunan" in the journal Population and Development Review (Vol. 22, 1996). Much of course has changed since then, but her essay is still important, and perhaps especially so in light of the attention recently brought upon Hunan by the Qidong "baby trafficking" trials. In fact there is much in this essay that can give some of the information from these trials a useful historical perspective.
Johnson pointed out that there was a long history of child abandonment in Hunan even before population controls were introduced in the last quarter of the last century. She cited a provincial history which said that, prior to 1949 and the communist period, abandonment "was widespread and that it involved almost entirely girls. ... The widespread nature of infant infanticide and child abandonment led to the criminalization of these acts by the late 17th century and to the creation of a provincial network of foundling homes. By 1849 there were 68 county-run establishments to care for foundlings. In 1934, a provincial official told a national meeting of charity organizations that the largest of these institutions, the Foundling Institute of the Provincial City (Changsha) Salvation Center, had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of baby girls in its 220-year history."
In news reports of the Qidong trial, much was made of the seemingly large number of children that had been brought from Guangdong Province to six Hengyang area orphanages between the years 2002-2005. Yet Johnson cited figures from early in the period after population controls began to be strictly enforced, and when abandonment rates first began to rise, that showed 233 children found abandoned in Hengyang city alone in 1988, rising to 352 in 1989, then to 854 in 1990. My point here is not that bringing abandoned children from Guangdong to Hunan was okay, particularly in the questionable manner in which this was alleged to have been done, but that it may be useful to consider the number of children involved in relation to the overall numbers that Hengyang area orphanages were long used to seeing from children found locally.
Johnson's essay also provides an invaluable and detailed description of the means through which population controls were practically enforced locally in Hunan during the early 1990s and how this might have exacerbated the problem of abandonment. Local officials charged with enforcing these policies uncomfortably found themselves in the position of risking the anger of fellow citizens, their neighbors, who desired to have children beyond set limits for popular reasons such as to try to have a son. These cadres also risked trouble from higher authorities if limits were not enforced. The easiest way out was to monitor the size of families after the fact rather than to more closely monitor early pregnancies or focus on family planning.
The view presented by the essay is one in which, against difficult pressures from population controls, child abandonment has been commonplace for at least two generations. Prior to this there was a relatively brief period of a few generations during which Mao Zedong encouraged families to have as many children as possible in what is now considered throughout China as pretty much of a disaster. But prior to that, against the difficult pressures of daily life in rural Hunan, child abandonment was sad but also, unfortunately, relatively normal.
Against this backdrop, a half dozen or so abandoned infants arriving monthly at the Hengdong SWI, which serves a rural county with a population exceeding 660,000, would not be especially unusual, perhaps even if beginning around 2002 many were readily supplied to the orphanage by intermediaries who had found in this a market. Just tragic.
