China stops foreign adoptions, ending a complicated chapter

HONG KONG — For three decades, China sent tens of thousands of young children overseas for adoption as it enforced a strict one-child policy that forced many families to abandon their babies. Now the government will no longer allow most foreign adoptions, a move that it said was in line with global trends.

The ban raises questions for many of the hundreds of families in the United States who were in the process of adopting children from China and had heard earlier this week from adoption agencies that China was moving to bar international adoptions. The official confirmation came in the form of a brief comment by China’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday.

“We are grateful for the desire and love of the governments and adoption families of relevant countries to adopt Chinese children,” said Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the ministry. She offered few details about the new policy, except to say that exceptions would be made only for foreigners adopting stepchildren and children of blood relatives in China.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, China was a top country of origin for international adoption, having sent more than 160,000 children overseas since 1992. But its program had been tainted by past allegations of corruption and by its association with China’s harshly enforced birth restrictions. Many families left their babies in alleyways or at the doors of police stations or social welfare institutions, to avoid severe penalties for violating the one-child policy.

Unable to pay for the care of these children, orphanages turned to international adoption to help fund their services.

“This is, in a way, the end of an era and the closing of one of the most shameful chapters of the three and a half decades of social engineering known as one-child policy,” said Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in China’s demographics. “The Chinese government created the problem and then they couldn’t deal with the financial constraints and that is why they allowed foreign adoption as a last resort.”

Today, China’s population is shrinking as the country grapples with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. It maintains a nominal policy of limiting families to three children, and it has been trying to encourage births.

Nearly all foreign adoptions involve children with disabilities, according to the Chinese government. Adoptees from China have largely been girls, because of a cultural preference for boys, along with some boys with physical and developmental disabilities, said Zhou Yun, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.

Being adopted by families in countries far from their place of birth, with vastly different cultures, has left many adoptees wondering about their identity, Zhou said. “It touches on some of the most emotionally fraught and politically charged questions of citizenship, belonging, nationalistic sentiments, and gender and racial politics,” she said.

In recent years, Chinese officials have sought to promote domestic adoptions. International adoptions peaked and began to slow in the mid-2000s, as China’s economy boomed and the government allocated more money to support orphans.

Fewer children have been put up for adoption, too, a reflection of slowing birth rates and more support for children with disabilities. By 2018, the number of children registered for adoption had fallen to around 15,000, from about 44,000 in 2009, official statistics show. There were 343,000 orphans in China in 2019, according to Chinese officials.

Some Chinese may have regarded the international adoption program as a form of national humiliation, said Guo Wu, an associate professor of Chinese studies at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.

The new ban “might reflect the popular feelings of rising national pride and a kind of resentment of America,” Wu said. “This policy might fulfill that feeling that ‘we don’t need to send our kids to America.’”

Activists like Peter Moller, a Korean adoptee raised in Denmark who is a co-founder of the Danish Korean Rights Group, welcomed the halt in international adoptions, which in general reflects concerns about abuse and neglect of adopted children, he said.

“International adoption has been proven very problematic in both donor and recipient countries, and international adoption takes a toll on both adoptees and the adoptees’ biological families,” he said.

Other countries have started to wind down or stop foreign adoptions in recent years, including Ethiopia, Russia and Kazakhstan. Some European overseas adoption agencies have also stopped their operations amid national concerns about abuse, falsified documents and accountability.

At the same time, China’s decision came with little advance warning for many American families that were already in the process of adopting children. More than 82,000 children from China have been adopted by families in the United States, according to the State Department.

The State Department said China’s Civil Affairs Ministry told the United States that it had completed processing of cases with previously issued travel authorizations, but it would not continue to process cases other than exceptions for those with relatives.

“We understand there are hundreds of families still pending completion of their adoptions, and we sympathize with their situation,” the State Department said in response to questions about the issue. The Civil Affairs Ministry in China did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

At least six of these families told The New York Times they were in a panic, devastated by the news that they would no longer be able to bring home the girls and boys that they had been matched with in China.

They said they had already received approval by both China and the United States to adopt children in 2019 and early 2020, before China closed its borders, and had been preparing to welcome them. They had bought clothes and modified their homes to accommodate the disabilities that some of the children had. Several described spending months communicating with the children they hoped to bring home through video calls, letters and photo exchanges.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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