For three decades, China sent thousands of children abroad for adoption as it implemented a strict one-child policy that forced many families to give up their children. Now the government will no longer allow most foreign adoptions, a move 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 heard from adoption agencies earlier this week that China was going to ban international adoptions. The official confirmation came in the form of a brief comment by China’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday.
“We are grateful to the governments of relevant countries and adoptive families for their willingness and love to adopt Chinese children,” said ministry spokesman Mao Ning. She offered few details about the new policy, except that exceptions would be made only for foreigners adopting stepchildren and children of blood relatives in China.
Before the Covid pandemic, China was the country of origin for international adoptions, sending more than 160,000 Children Abroad since the early 1990s. But he had a program tainted by past allegations of corruption and by association with China’s strictly enforced birth restrictions. Many families left their children on the streets or at the gates 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, many orphanages turned to international adoption to fund their services, and in 1992, China officially opened its doors to international adoption.
“This is, in a way, the end of an era and the end of one of the most shameful chapters of three and a half decades of social engineering, known as the one-child policy,” said Wang Feng, a sociology professor. University of California Irvine who specializes in Chinese demographics. “The Chinese government created the problem and then they couldn’t deal with the financial constraints and that’s why they allowed foreign adoption as a last resort.”
Today, China’s population is declining as the country has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. It maintains a modest policy of limiting families to three children and is trying to encourage births.
According to the Chinese government, almost all foreign adoptions involve children with disabilities. Adoptees from China are mostly girls, with some boys with birth defects and special needs, said Zhou Yun, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.
Having been adopted by families in countries far from their birthplaces, with very different cultures, many adoptees have wondered about their identities, Ms. Zhou said. “It touches on some of the most emotionally charged and politically charged questions of citizenship, belonging, nationalist sentiments and race and ethnic politics,” she said.
In recent years, Chinese officials have tried to promote domestic adoption. International adoption peaked in the mid-2000s and began to slow, as China’s economy boomed and the government allocated more money to help orphans.
Fewer children are also being placed for adoption, a reflection of slower birth rates and more support for children with disabilities. As of 2018, the number of children registered for adoption had fallen to about 15,000, from about 44,000 in 2009, official figures show. were 343,000 orphans in China in 2019According to Chinese officials.
Some Chinese may view the international adoption program as a form of national humiliation, said Guo Wu, associate professor of Chinese studies at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.
The new ban may reflect “popular feelings of national pride and a kind of resentment toward America,” Mr. Wu said. “This policy may fulfill the feeling that ‘we don’t need to send our children to America.'”
Activists such as Peter Møller, a Korean adoptee raised in Denmark who co-founded the Danish Korean Rights Group, welcomed the ban on international adoptions, reflecting concerns about the abuse and neglect of adopted children in general, he said.
“International adoption has proven to be very problematic in both donor and recipient countries, and international adoption affects both adoptees and adoptees’ biological families,” he said.
Other countries have begun closing foreign adoptions in recent years, including Ethiopia, Russia and Kazakhstan. Some European overseas adoption agencies have also closed their operations amid national concerns about abuse, false documentation and liability.
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