China’s One-Child Policy Sent Thousands of Adoptees Overseas. That Era Is Over.
Beijing formally ends a program that was propelled by birth restrictions and that had been largely on hold since the pandemic
Sept. 5, 2024
China said it was formally ending almost all international adoptions, shutting down a process that saw tens of thousands of Chinese-born children join families in the U.S. and other countries since the 1990s.
International adoptions from China had been declining for years and were largely on hold since the pandemic. Many countries have tightened restrictions on international adoptions, driven in part by concerns over the adoption of children who had been stolen from their parents.
China’s move also reflects its transition to the world’s second-largest economy, where concerns have shifted in recent decades from overpopulation to sharply slowing birthrates.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a regular press briefing on Thursday that under China’s new policy, international adoptions would be limited to foreigners adopting children or stepchildren of relatives.
China expressed gratitude to families “for their desire and love in adopting children from China,” she said.
In 1990, a decade after the launch of the one-child policy, Beijing tightened rules to stem arrangements where parents placed children born outside the policy with relatives or other families. That created a flow of children to state orphanages and opened the door to international adoption.
“Government coercion sits at the center of China’s international adoption program,” wrote Kay Johnson, a professor of Asian studies at Hampshire College, in her 2016 book “China’s Hidden Children.” Johnson, who died in 2019 and whose daughter was one of the first adoptees from China, talked to hundreds of parents, many of whom had relinquished their children to escape punishment by family-planning officials.
After China formally approved overseas adoptions in 1992, it became a leading country of origin for adoptions. Between 2004 and 2022, more than 89,000 children from China were taken in by families in some two dozen nations, according to data compiled by Peter Selman at Newcastle University.
Chinese official data released in 2016 showed that nearly 150,000 children were adopted globally over a 30-year period. The number was likely higher because some adoptions in the late 1980s and early 1990s weren’t accounted for, said Xue Xinran, a writer and co-founder of the Mothers’ Bridge of Love, a nonprofit organization based in London dedicated to supporting Chinese adoptees.
The leading destination was the U.S., which adopted more than 82,000 Chinese children between 1999 and 2023, according to State Department statistics. Most of them were girls.
Most of the adoptions were handled out of the U.S. consulate in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Before 2013, the consulate was located on Shamian Island, a quiet district filled with colonial-era buildings, and a nearby hotel became an unexpected way station for adoptive families. The White Swan Hotel was regularly filled with so many American parents getting to know their new children that it became informally known as the White Stork.
The peak of such adoptions was in 2005, when more than 7,900 Chinese children were adopted by American families.
In 2006, official media documented the trial of a trafficking ring that had been selling babies to six orphanages in Hunan province. Foreigners had made donations of up to $3,000 to adopt a child from the orphanages, the official Xinhua News Agency said at the time.
“The suspects said that they were doing good work to save the abducted children from death. However, we found that they paid more to buy children when there was demand,” Lei Dongsheng, the then local police chief, told Xinhua.
The revelations shocked the adoption community. In 2007, China tightened international adoption rules and punished local officials.
The numbers of adoptees to the U.S. steadily declined, then dropped sharply during the pandemic to 202 in 2020 and none in 2021 and 2022, according to the State Department. Last year, 16 Chinese children were adopted to the U.S.
China’s move to curb international adoptions follows similar moves in countries around the world. Ethiopia, which had been a leading country of origin, halted foreign adoptions after cases of abuse, including a mother and father in Washington state who were convicted in the 2011 death of a girl adopted from Ethiopia. The country later issued stricter rules for foreign adoptions.
In May, the Netherlands said it would no longer allow citizens to adopt from abroad following a two-year freeze. Denmark’s only adoption agency also said this year it would end foreign adoptions, while a regulatory body in Norway recommended a pause while allegations of wrongdoing were investigated including children taken from families that didn’t want to give them up.
Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com and Liyan Qi at Liyan.qi@wsj.com
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Appeared in the September 6, 2024, print edition as 'China Bars Nearly All Overseas Adoptions'.