Some of you have already seen the British documentary China’s Stolen Children, made a decade after The Dying Rooms, by the same investigative team. Recently, the film was shown to a chapter of Families with Children from China. A panel discussion that followed included Kay Johnson, author of Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son. Osolomama nabbed Kay selfishly before the holidays to ask her some questions about the film and about the child trafficking and adoption situation in China. The interview that follows is distilled from several e-mail exchanges and close to two hours of conversation over the phone.
To orient those who have never seen the film, here is a summary and a hefty clip.
The film follows several stories. Some of the main characters:
Detective Zhu is an ex-cop who hunts down child traffickers.
Chen Jie is a little boy who was stolen from his parents.
Wang Li is a child trafficker who sold his own child.
Way Ling and her boyfriend had no license to have a baby because they were unmarried. They thought about selling their daughter but eventually arranged an informal adoption.
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O: China’s Stolen Children is mostly about kidnapping and trafficking within China. It doesn’t deal with adoption overtly except at the very end when an informal adoption is mentioned. (Way Ling’s baby is adopted informally.) Yet adoption is the question mark hanging all around the edges. I certainly felt that way all the way through. How about you?
KJ: I was thinking that the key thread tying all of this to our adoptions is the birth planning policy and the way it coerces parents to find “alternatives” for out-of-plan children. The young couple tie the story of the documentary directly to the kind of adoptions I have studied for many years. In an earlier era, people in their situation were more likely to abandon the child, assuming she would be picked up and adopted by someone. I wish the filmmakers had told us something about the “informal” adoption. But I think it sort of strayed from what they wanted to talk about—a more sensationalistic story about child trafficking and the damage done by the one-child policy. I think the story of this damage is also a mundane one that you can find in almost every corner of Chinese society.* (see end of post)
O: This is the same group of film-makers who made The Dying Rooms. How do the two films compare in your view and how do you think the Chinese government feels about such investigations?
KJ: The Chinese government does not like to see foreign reporters out investigating these things. No doubt about that. Especially THESE foreign reporters who they believe have a purely political agenda of trashing China. They proved that in The Dying Rooms. They [the government] don’t expect a fair or reasonable portrayal from them and they think they are part of an interntaional effort to condemn China. Indeed, their implication—incorrect in my view—that the Chinese government neither cares nor does anything about kidnapping is wrong and doesn’t even stand up to their own evidence. It is a deep prejudice they bring to all of their filmmaking about China. But this one is far less marred by their general anti-China views than The Dying Rooms. The interviews are great, though I suspect some of the language is a bit contrived to suit the filmmakers’ needs and desires.
O: Can you give us an example?
KJ: One part that seemed a bit contrived was some of the language used in the Way Ling interview and she might have used it to please the filmmakers. That was the word “sell” because this couple ends up not doing that, not selling their child. They ended up having an informal adoption and generally people do not use the word “sell” into adoption even if some money may be involved, as in private adoptions in the US. The word that is normally used is “give away,” as in you send your daughter to be married in a family or you “give a gift.”
O: What is the government of China trying to do about the problem of kidnapping and trafficking? In the film, the parents of some kidnapped children seemed to embarrass their local governments when they lobbied Beijing.
KJ: I think you are right about the local government feeling admonished and maybe even receiving black marks for this. But “the government” is many different levels and Beijing often reacts by trying to help in these situations. It depends on whose attention you can get. Same in the US, I would think—if you can grab the attention of a big shot in the FBI you may get more resources mobilized on your behalf if your child is missing. But it is not about saving face; it is about political power, related to political reputation. Anyway, the point is the government is not trying to hide kidnapping as a problem.
The filmmakers seem to say the government wants to keep this a secret, but really what they say is that the Chinese government doesn’t “want the world to know”—whatever that could mean in the era of the Internet. In fact, this is the hottest story in China today. One cannot turn on the TV without hearing a story about kidnapped children, PSAs about watching your child in public, how to go shopping with your children, how to pick them up at the school gate to ensure their safety, taking pictures of your child, and so forth. Every time a trafficker is caught, that person is paraded in front of the cameras, vilified, and denounced. So I can’t accept the stereotypical portrayal of the Chinese government wanting to cover this up. Of course, they do not want to look incompetent in the face of this problem and want to tout mainly their successes and hide their failures. But that is a different matter.
O: Let’s talk about adoption in China. When I was adopting the agency told us flat-out that no one in China would ever adopt because of the importance of blood lines. This is obviously not the case. There has been a huge amount of informal adoption and it’s also tied up with the one-child policy.
KJ: I have heard this too. Even in urban areas in China, many people believe this but there are many informal and unregistered adoptions in China, and registered ones as well. Unregistered adoptions are revealed by looking at census data. In 1990, demographers estimated from sample census survey data that there were as many as 400,000 adoptions per year and that this number—as well as the percentage of girls—was increasing. Couples often arrange “informal” adoptions secretly through friends or relatives. You know someone who is going to have an overquota child, and they know you want to adopt a girl, or someone helps find an adoptive family. After the adoption, the birth family may know where the child lives and may see her from afar though often the adoptive family doesn’t allow contact.
There are fewer registered adoptions because of the restrictive legal requirements (childless, over age 35 which has dropped to age 30). In 2000, when the legal age was dropped to 30, we know there were 50,000 registered adoptions. After that it fell. In 2001 there were 35,000 and it’s stayed around 35,000 – 45,000 every year. In 2008, there were 37,000 registered domestic adoptions. These are usually recorded as adoptions of foundlings but it could be your neighbour’s relative’s friend’s over-quota child who is hidden and then handed over to you—a childless couple over 30—to register as a foundling.
In the early 1990s, there were lots of real foundlings. Some orphanages would fill the hallways with cribs. There aren’t many foundlings now. There are some, but they’re few and far between, and so people who want to adopt find it harder to find them.
O: And some of the children who are adopted have been kidnapped, right?
Yes, people do buy kidnapped children. People have no sympathy for those who adopt at the expense of other people’s pain but do you really think the traffickers go up to people and say, “I have this kidnapped child for you?” When people start arranging adoptions themselves, you can see how it creates middlemen like Wang Li.
Tonight a friend of mine watched the film, an adoptive parent with two older teenage girls. She made an interesting observation: How is Wang Li so different from a private US adoption agency that has sprung to life and makes a business off of China adoption or any other kind of adoption? I’m not sure how far I’d go with that, but I do see the similarities between an “agent” like Wang Li and an adoption facilitator/private adoption lawyer in the US. Some of them are sleazy too. And some make a lot of money facilitating the connection between birth mother and adoptive parents.
I thought Wang Li also had a pretty good understanding of what he was doing. He said he was merely a middleman who got the two sides together. The one-child policy created the supply and the demand—the people who had over-quota children that they needed to hide or pay for in fines and the people who didn’t have the children they wanted to have. He got 3000 RMB [1 US dollar = 6.8 RMB] out of a 12,000-RMB payment and at the end of the film they showed him supporting an older family member and a couple of kids. He wasn’t wealthy.** (see end of post)
O: We’ve also heard about over-quota children being confiscated and sent to orphanages. You are pretty convinced that most of those children were children who had been adopted already.
KJ: When there were many foundlings, people adopted children right off of the street—Chinese adopters were taking most of them although there were so many of them many made it through to the orphanages as well. The majority of domestic adoptions I’ve learned about were foundlings who were taken into homes. That spontaneous adoption was mostly illegal because the adopters were usually too young or were not childless. What the government tried to do was create channels to get the abandoned children into the government’s hands. In order for orphanages to get abandoned babies, they have to take them out of the hands of Chinese adopters or pick them up before adopters do. The orphanage incentive programs might have begun that way when abandonment started to decline, but it’s important to remember that the government is also trying to crack down on illegal behaviour and get people to stop picking up these children and taking them in without government approval.
Directly or indirectly, this is about population control, which remains very tight in many places. If you are a local official and you perform badly with population control, you can lose as much as a year’s salary. The penalities can be severe. Most of the confiscated children that I have learned about are children who were found and adopted in violation of the adoption law and therefore counted as an illegal overquota child living in the area. It’s technically legal to confiscate an illegally adopted child but illegal to confiscate a birth child.
O: You mentioned how the film brings together stories about how people manipulate, fabricate, or plan alternatives to avoid punishment or get what they want under the one-child policy. This film really puts that policy on trial, doesn’t it?
That’s what I find in all my research and am continually struck by—the deep scars that have been left because of this policy. One of the things about the notion of “trafficking” that I don’t like is that it focuses people on the market as the cause and not on the policy. I like the way this film ties it together with the one-child policy.
Who puts a price on the head of a child? It’s the policy. Sometimes the fine for an over-quota child is five times the parents’ annual income. I don’t know if you noticed but there was an overquota child in the film and the fine for having him was 20,000 RMB. I remember finding a child in the 1990s whose name meant “3000”. His parents named him “3000,” Sanqian, after the fine they had to pay for him. Children are priced by the one-child policy. Today the fines are much much higher, and so is the price of a child, whether it is your own birth child or one you obtain from someone else—a trafficker or a birth parent.
O: Where do you think the policy is headed? Don’t you agree it has been necessary?
KJ: That’s a whole other conversation but I don’t believe it was necessary to begin with. Throughout East Asia, fertility has declined everywhere without anything like a one child policy. In Taiwan it’s 1.1. By the time the one-child policy was implemented by the end of the 1970s, fertility in China had already fallen to around 2.8 or 2.7. Once they got contraception into all areas of the countryside, people reduced fertility voluntarily. Then they imposed the one-child policy. A lot of cities were below 2 before the policy was announced. And China was still quite poor then. Since then, all the things associated with lower fertility have happened, such as the economic boom.
O: China’s Stolen Children was recently shown to a group of parents who adopted from China. What concerns did they have after watching the film?
KJ: They were concerned about many of the same things you hear on the lists, such as wondering about the likelihood of a kidnapped or seized child getting into the international adoption pool. One woman talked about what she would do if she were in this situation and she said she would develop an open adoption. She asked questions about how she might pursue that. My opinion is that if you go looking for your child’s birthparents and you find she was seized or kidnapped and you aren’t willing to try to create some sort of open adoption or ongoing communication to salve the wounds of the birth parents, you should reconsider searching and reopening those wounds. Of course, it’s easy to say but harder when it’s right there in front of you.
There was some discussion around whether or not it is safe to take children to China, almost like a fear or dislike of China. One of organizers of the event said she had a friend who said how dangerous it was because your child might wander off and get kidnapped! Yet we know adoptees benefit from going back. I’ve taken both my kids to China many times. Now that my oldest daughter is in university, she appreciates China as just an ordinary place—good and bad—like the United States. I think it’s good for kids to have a view of China that’s normalized, neither glorified nor villified. My daughter feels this has been important in being comfortable with who she is.
O: To sum up, what do you think the relationship is between kidnapping and trafficking in China and the international adoption program?
KJ: As for the term “trafficking,” we create an entire industry from getting children from China, with payments to adoption agencies, social workers, and so on. It’s all on the backs of these children. If trafficking means paying money, then we participate in it too. Trafficking seems to mean everything from what we do in adoption to criminal kidnapping or facilitation of an adoption by a trafficker who doesn’t coerce anybody. Adoption in and from China takes place in the context of the Chinese government forcing someone’s hand with the threat of financial ruin because of an over-quota child.
But I believe that the vast majority of kidnapped children are not sold to orphanages because there’s more money to be made in the kind of adoption brokering you see in the film. Girls are more likely to be adopted normally than boys. Kidnapped children are more likely to be boys because they are less likely to be available for adoption and therefore can draw a higher price on the adoption market. And orphanages don’t pay that well even if they do have so-called “incentive programs” for finders.
O: What about the long-term prospects of the adoption program?
KJ: It depends on how much they choose to prop it up. It could never be revived to its peak (13,000 – 14 000 children per year). This year, 50% of children adopted to the US have special needs and the total number is down from 8,000 in 2005 to around 3,000 today. Think this trend will continue.
O: What about parents who do abandon today?
KJ: In my experience, now and in the past, parents who do abandon tend to abandon locally—they don’t want the child to go into orphanage or go abroad necessarily. And these are not voluntary abandonments—they’re involuntary or pressured, as in the past.
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*Kay pointed out that, “The case of the boy in the park is also an adoption. Wang Li arranges for him to be adopted by the couple in the hotel room.”
**My copy of the film wasn’t the greatest and it kept cutting out. I guessed at the number of people in the room. Kay later clarified: “In fact there are two older family members in the scene, probably his elderly parents. And two children—his son and a younger daughter (I guess). The guy is clearly a scumbag, with a very challenged sense of ethics, but he definitely is not rich or even particularly well off judging from his surroundings.”
Filed under: adoption, films, kids, life, searching , adoption, adoption agency, childless, China's Stolen Children, domestic adoptions, fee, foundlings, Kay Johnson, kidnapping, Needing a Son, one-child policy, overquota child, population control, trafficking, Wanting a Daughter
