China's Hidden Children
Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy
In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children – mostly girls – have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It's generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China's approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story – a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with "China's Hidden Children", she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country's stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed – from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China's so-called abandoned children have increasingly become "stolen" children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally – but illegally – adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of the "unwanted daughter" remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With "China's Hidden Children", Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one's child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China's birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.
About the Author
Kay Ann Johnson is professor of Asian studies and political science at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, where she is also director of the Hampshire College China Exchange Program and the Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, "Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son".
Reviews
"One cannot come away from this book without a much deeper understanding of the terrible human toll caused by the One-Child Policy. Johnson, the foremost authority on adoption and child abandonment in rural China, debunks the popular notion that birth parents viewed abandoned daughters as 'throwaways' at worst, second-class citizens at best. Contrary to the constructed narrative, efforts to keep a daughter collided with a nearly insurmountable wall of laws designed to support the One-Child Policy – with no regard for the best interests of the child. Johnson honors the stories of the birth parents, adoptive parents, and the relinquished daughters caught in the vortex with her sympathetic and sophisticated analysis" – Tyrene White, author of "China's Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People's Republic"
"This is an important book. Johnson provides extraordinarily rich, compelling evidence of what many Chinese families have done to hang on to their daughters, or to adopt daughters from others – all in the face of strong state restrictions and harsh punishments. 'China's Hidden Children' undermines simple descriptions of what has been going on in China and corrects many misimpressions" – Nancy E. Riley, coauthor of "Making Families Through Adoption"
"How did more than 120,000 Chinese children, the great majority baby girls, become available for international adoption in recent decades? In answering that question, this important work, the product of more than two decades of painstaking research in China, dispels multiple myths. Not patriarchal devaluation of girls nor venal and brutal local officials, but unyielding national government pressure for enforcement of the one-child policy's limits on both births and domestic adoptions, is the primary explanation. The detailed and heartbreaking case studies that Johnson uses to build her critique, of rural parents trying to hide 'out-of-plan' children and of baby girls seized from anguished adoptive parents, will leave readers enlightened but also profoundly shaken" – Martin K. Whyte, Harvard University
"Based on a quarter century of intensive research, Johnson provides a rare account of the domestic circulation and hiding of children from authorities within China. The vivid stories of Chinese parents finding ways to hide and hold on to their 'unplanned' births, while others relinquished their daughters and occasionally sons, and still others welcomed those children as their family members, reflect a complex coexistence of helplessness, remorsefulness, and also hopefulness and humanity, in a society where common people face multiple pressures imposed by the state. This is a book that details a relatively unknown aspects of Chinese family lives for China experts, international as well as domestic adoptive families, and anyone interested in the contemporary Chinese families and society" – Weiguo Zhang, University of Toronto Mississauga
