Kidnapping and Corruption in Chinese Adoptions

Jane

China, long thought to be squeaky clean in international adoptions turns out to have a history of corruption, according to David Smolin, one of the world's leading experts on international adoption scandals. According to Smolin, the decline in the number of Chinese infants arriving on U.S. shores since the Nineties as adoptees was largely due to the Chinese government’s curtailment of baby buying--not by adoptive parents directly, but by the orphanages, which profited from the huge numbers of children they exported to the U.S.

How did this happen? In November of 2005, Chinese news agencies reported that orphanages paid intermediaries--let's call them what they are, child traffickers--a little more than $300 per infant, usually girls. Some of the children truly had been abandoned. But others were kidnapped; and some confiscated by population-control officials in adherence with the one-child-per-family policy, in an effort to control population growth. 

Chinese law requires foreign adopters to pay orphanages $3,000 per child, so the margin of profit between cost per child and processing her for adoption was around $2,500--enough to encourage kidnapping and child trafficking. Additionally, adoption agencies and adoptive parents were encouraged to donate additional money to the orphanages, creating a strong financial incentive for orphanages to process as many children as they could. We shouldn’t be surprised by this exchange of bucks for babies. As long as Americans are willing to pay big bucks ($30,000+) for healthy infants, traffickers will supply them no matter how much misery they cause as long as regulators look the other way.

By 2006, reports of the kidnapping began to surface, and the government began prosecuting traffickers. At the same time, the government reduced the amount orphanages were permitted to pay intermediaries for children to between $62.50 and $125. The result was far fewer "abandoned" infants arriving at orphanages.  

David Smolin

Smolin, professor of law at Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, and the father of two girls adopted from India, reported on the situation in the Cumberland Law Review: The Missing Girls of China: Population, Policy, Culture, Gender, Abortion, Abandonment, and Adoption in East-Asian Perspective. (January 2011). Smolin became an advocate of curtailing international adoption when after an arduous six-year search he located his both his daughters' parents in India, and discovered they had been stolen and trafficked.

Origins of Asian adoption
 From the end of the Korean War until the late 1980’s, South Korea was the major supplier of babies and children for the international market. It is widely thought that much of South Korea's recovery is due to the influx of cash into that country due to international adoptions of their children. In 1988, the Korean government began curtailing adoptions as a result of Korea being dubbed “A baby-exporting nation” by the media during its coverage of the Olympics in Seoul that year. 

Adoption agencies turned their eyes westward and discovered baby-rich China. According to folk lore passed on by these agencies, China’s one-child policy, and its preference for male children resulted in untold number of infant girls abandoned by roadsides or in railway waiting rooms. The lucky ones were rescued and taken to orphanages where these agencies arranged for western families to adopt them. Approximately two-thirds of the girls came to the United States. Chinese girls seemed like the perfect product: smart, well-behaved, attractive; clearly meant for the likes of NPR weekend host and author of Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption, Scott Simon, and his wife, Caroline Richard. 

China takes the lead in baby exporting
China became the number one supplier of children to the U.S. market. The number of Chinese infants arriving on U.S. shores increased from 61 in 1991 to a peak of 7,903 in 2005. Then adoptions began to decline, and in 2009, only 3,001 arrived. Correspondingly, the wait for healthy babies or toddlers increased from less than nine months to nearly two years. 

In addition to China, other major suppliers of children to the U.S. adoption market have cut the supply. Ethiopia reduced its adoptions by 90 percent because of systemic and rampant corruption. Russia curtailed adoptions because of the abuse and murder of Russian children by adoptive parents here, and Russia’s desire to keep its children within its borders in face of its own shrinking population. Reformers in South Korea are working to help single mothers keep their children rather than relinquish them for adoption to western families. The U.S. government stopped processing applications from Cambodia and Guatemala because of corruption. For the same reasons, Vietnam shut down most international adoptions in 2008.

Overall, international adoptions in the U.S. have declined from a high of 22,884 in 2004 to 12,782 in 2009. The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions, ratified by 81 countries including the United States, has made it more difficult for international adoption agencies to find fertile sources of children. 

We at First Mother Forum are hopeful that wide scale foreign adoptions have run their course. With the exception of children who are disabled to the point that they cannot receive the care they need, it is better for children to be raised in their own countries. Dollars spent on international adoption are better spent on helping poor families. With increasingly available reproductive technologies, Americans may decide that buying American is best.
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We recommend The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka for understanding the issues and questions that young adult adoptees will eventually ask their families and themselves.

For more on international adoption see: Call it what it is: Child Trafficking as "Adoption"; and More Madonna News; Child Trafficking in Asia.