The Chinese government on Friday announced that it will no longer allow foreign families to adopt Chinese children, ending a program that has found homes overseas for more than 160,000 children since 1992. While Beijing refused to clearly explain its decision, most observers suspected it was a response to declining birth rates in China.
The cutoff of foreign adoptions was so abrupt that families with pending cases had no idea if their adoptions would go forward. When the U.S. State Department sought clarification, Chinese officials said they “will not continue to process cases at any stage.”
“We understand there are hundreds of families still pending completion of their adoption, and we sympathize with their situation,” the State Department said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry mumbled something about bringing foreign adoptions into line with “the spirit of relevant international conventions.”
This might have been a vague reference to Denmark and the Netherlands saying earlier this year that they will no longer allow overseas adoptions. Both of those decisions were prompted by bureaucratic irregularities and allegations of fraudulent paperwork, after a sharp decline in foreign adoptions during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
China is probably more worried that it no longer has children to spare. Overseas adoptions of Chinese children became commonplace during the last years of China’s hideous One Child Policy, which sought to control overpopulation by forcing families to have only one child apiece.
The One Child Policy was notoriously biased against female children in its implementation, as families saw girls as a luxury they could no longer afford. According to China’s Children International, a nonprofit group founded in 2011 to support Chinese adoptees around the world, about 82,000 Chinese children were adopted by American families over the past 30 years, and most of them were girls.
China rather abruptly went from worrying about overpopulation to worrying about demographic collapse after the One Child Policy ended in 2016. Panic is growing in the Chinese Communist Party that it cannot reverse its collapsing birth rates. In the space of a few years, Beijing went from forcing women to abort excess babies to offering a plethora of financial incentives for motherhood, practically begging young families to have children, and even suggesting people who don’t reproduce quickly enough might be traitors. None of these measures has worked terribly well.
University of California at Irvine sociology professor Wang Feng said China’s ban on foreign adoptions marked “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.”
“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,” Wang told the New York Times (NYT) on Friday.
Guo Wu, an associate professor of Chinese studies at Allegheny College, suggested rising Chinese nationalism could also be a factor in shutting down foreign adoptions.
Guo said China’s nationalists may find the notion that China cannot raise its own children insulting, especially since half of the foreign adoptions have gone to the United States, whose relations with the Chinese government are growing more tense.
“This policy might fulfill that feeling that ‘we don’t need to send our kids to America,’” he said.
Hopeful adoptive families in the U.S. told the NYT they were devastated by China’s sudden halt to the process.
“It’s really hard that there are hundreds of families that are waiting, that have a place prepared and we sit here hopeless, with our hands tied. We loved the country, we love the people and part of my grief is for the connection with China,” said would-be adoptive mother Courtney Moore.
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