Abstract In September 2024, the People’s Republic of China announced that it was closing its intercountry adoption program after 30years. Since this program was once one of the most active in the world, its cessation brings the future of intercountry adoption into question. Here, we present a brief history of intercountry adoptions from China and other countries, discuss reasons for its demise, and consider the consequences—for China’s children and for intercountry adoptions more broadly. We question whether we are indeed seeing the end of intercountry adoption “as we know it,” while recognizing the emergence of new systems of care. This includes improved child protection, family preservation, and alternative forms of care — including domestic adoption in previous “sending” countries like China — that more closely align with children’s rights. Keywords Intercountry adoption· Social work· China· Child rights· Social welfare China has been one of the top three countries of origin for intercountry adoptions (ICAs) over the last 30 years, spe- cifically for those adopted to the USA (Neville & Rotabi, 2020; Selman, 2024). On September 5, 2024, China announced that it was ending its ICA program, stating only that it wished to bring its policy “in line” with international standards. China’s ICA closure does indeed follow several other countries closing to ICA, but the world’s reliance on China as a primary source for “adoptable” children for over three dec- ades means its closure is felt to have a larger impact, particu- larly as ICAs continue to wane worldwide (Selman, 2020). In this article, we explore the decline of ICA and ques- tion whether the closure of ICA in China is in fact the end of ICA “as we know it.” We consider the significance of this trend for children’s rights and social welfare, as per the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), 1989) — specifically, the right of a child to be cared for by their own parents whenever possible (Article 7); for the child to not be separated from their parents against their will, except by a competent authority guided by the best interests of the child (Article 9); to receive care that is congruent with their cultural background (Article 20); to not be sold, kidnapped, or adopted in a manner that violates the domestic laws of their home country; and to not be adopted to other coun- tries when appropriate care is available in the child’s home country (Article 21). Ultimately, we argue that, though this may be the end of ICA “as we know it”—characterized as it has been by illicit and ethically questionable practices—this development actually bodes well for children’s rights and well-being, in China and elsewhere. Overall Global Decline ofIntercountry Adoption: US Statistics Since its peak in 2004, ICAs have dropped by approximately 90% (Selman, 2024). Because the USA has been the most frequent receiving country in the world, with US citizens adopting nearly half (48.1%) of all children adopted inter- nationally (Neville & Rotabi, 2020; Selman, 2012, 2024), the use of US State Department data is illustrative. The overall trend of ICA to the USA is illustrated in Fig.1. It is notable that US adoptions from China remained consistently higher than adoptions from other major sending countries from the 1990s until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began and virtually all intercountry adoption ceased glob- ally. In that time, however, over 120,000 children left China for international adoption—at least 85,000 of them to the USA (Johnson, 2016
Despite the outcry that China’s halt in ICAs has elicited from the international press, primarily for how it inconveniences prospective parents (see, for example, Kim, 2024), China has been gradually drawing down its ICA program for some time now: Since its peak in 2005 when nearly 15,000 children were adopted from China, only 15 were adopted in 2022 (Selman, 2024; see Fig.2). To understand why the numbers dropped, however, we must first consider how China came to be the top sending country for ICAs in the first place.
China’s One‑Child Policy The rapid growth in ICA from China is overwhelmingly attributed to its One-Child Policy, a state-imposed plan to thwart rapid population growth by restricting most families to having a single child between 1979 and 2015. Mainland China became a significant source of ICAs when it opened to foreign adoptive parents in 1992. Kay Ann Johnson, who carried out extensive field research in China, outlined a com- plex social context: …the standard discourse of intercountry adoption from China explains that healthy infant girls, the most desir- able object in intercountry adoption, became available in large numbers in the 1990s because of the clash between an ancient patriarchal Chinese culture and the government’s effort to control runaway population growth through a set of policies commonly referred to as the ‘One Child Policy’ (Johnson, 2012, p. 128). When families could only have one child in this patrilo- cal society, many opted to keep male children, who were expected to remain and provide care for their parents in old age, whereas girls were expected to move to their husband’s home once they married and to contribute to that household. Due to this preference for male children, abandonment of overwhelmingly female children — as well as disabled chil- dren — into large residential care institutions created a push factor for ICA (Dowling & Brown, 2009; Selman, 2009). However, Johnson also pointed out that gender pref- erences and ICAs were only part of the story; if given a choice, Chinese families would have preferred children of both sexes. But factors such as China’s strict birth control program prevented them from doing so; pregnant women were coerced into abortions or abandonment of their chil- dren born “out of plan” (Johnson, 2016). This scheme violated not only the parents’ rights to family life but also children’s rights to life, family, identity, and nationality—as well as precipitating a rise in child trafficking. Moreover, in addition to China’s draconian family planning program leading to mass child abandonment, the lack of government social services—from old age to disability support—meant that many disabled boys were abandoned, along with girls (Johnson, 2016). Passage of the 1992 Adoption Law meant that many of these children ended up in ICAs, as the law not only opened the country to ICAs but also limited domestic adoptions to one child per childless couple over 35years of age (Wilkerson, 2021, p. 465). For many years, then, China was viewed as a stable and secure source of internationally adoptable children (Dowl- ing & Brown, 2009; Selman, 2020). However, evidence of corruption and illicit adoption practices intersecting with the One-Child Policy gradually emerged. For example, Meier and Zhang (2008) documented a scandal in Hunan, in which government officials utilized the One-Child Pol- icy to forcibly remove infants from families—even those allowed more than one child, such as families living in the countryside whose first-born child was a girl . The abducted children were sold into the ICA sys- tem. As is the case in other countries with a history of illicit adoptions, the children’s identities were changed in order to make them appear abandoned. These children may be called “paper orphans” as their paperwork was altered to make them appear to be without parents due to death, or “social orphans” due to abandonment (Huygens, 2013; Terre des Hommes & UNICEF, 2010). It is notable that the term “orphan” is often a misnomer (Rotabi & Bunkers, 2011), as it has been estimated that roughly 80% of children liv- ing in residential care institutions (so-called orphanages) worldwide have at least one living parent and are in those institutions largely because of poverty (Csáky, 2009, p. 5). The Hague Convention onIntercountry Adoption China signed the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption(HCIA) in 2005, the year in which the highest number of ICAs from China—nearly 15,000—was recorded. The HCIA is a binding international convention that holds signatories to child rights-based standards to ensure that ICAs are in the best interests of the child. This includes the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that domestic options for finding a family for children without parental care should be exhausted before ICA can be considered. Its intent is to strengthen adoption practices and prevent illicit adoptions involving “the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children” (The Hague Conference on Private International Law, 1993). Since China signed the convention, the number of ICAs from there has dropped precipitously with each con- secutive year (see Figs.1 and 2), though the HCIA has not always been effective in curbing criminality in ICA practices (Cheney, 2023). Additional Restrictions onICAs In the early twenty-first century, China’s adoption program saw a significant downturn in sending children overseas, with at least a 60% reduction from 2005 to 2010 (Selman, 2012). The policies and practices shifted as a result of the Chinese government placing restrictions on who can adopt internationally and domestically. These included a ban on single women and gay couples, among other factors like prospective adoptive parents’ body weight (Bellock & Yardley, 2006; Selman, 2009). Domestic adoptions became more prevalent as the Chinese government allowed Chinese families to adopt their own citizen children—albeit with restrictions as noted above (Johnson, 2012). Subsequently, many of the children who entered the ICA system after 2010 were considered “special needs,” ranging from children with minor physical deformities to those with chronic physical and developmental disabilities (Dowling & Brown, 2009).
The End oftheOne‑Child Policy In 2016, China’s One-Child Policy was abolished, allow- ing Chinese couples to have two children (Johnson, 2016). This change was crucial, as China was starting to experience adverse demographic effects from the policy, including an aging population/workforce and a gender imbalance skewed toward males, which could adversely affect the country’s emerging economy. In 2021, the state allowed Chinese families to have three children (Feng, 2021). This prompted further reformation of China’s adoption and child protection systems, prioritizing the best interests of children through family preservation and limiting institutionalization (Wilkerson, 2021). Limiting ICAs toChildren withSpecial Needs Despite the outcry at the news of the closure, China’s ICA program had already been restricted to children with spe- cial needs. By 2009, 49% (over 60% of those adopted to the USA, the Netherlands, and Sweden) of all ICAs from China were already special-needs children (Selman, 2020). There is some speculation about whether the increase in aban- donment of special-needs children to Chinese orphanages spurred their adoptions by foreigners, or whether foreign demand spurred their abandonment, but the percentage of abandoned children who also had disabilities or other special needs increased by 50% from 2008 to 2015 (Raffety, 2019). There has therefore been some concern about China creating an ICA “market” for special-needs children, raising addi- tional concerns about incentivizing abandonment (at best) and (at worst) trafficking children with special needs into ICA. Leslie Wang (2016) argued that China started promot- ing the adoption of special-needs children and “grooming” them for futures in middle-class foreign homes, effectively “outsourcing” care for China’s unwanted children. In any case, the number of special-needs children gradually came to dominate ICAs from China while the country drew down adoptions of healthy infants and toddlers, especially with the lifting of the One-Child Policy. ICA Interruptions Due toCOVID The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–2022 essentially closed down ICAs globally (Fronek & Rotabi, 2020) for the dura- tion of lockdowns and travel bans, with different countries reopening on timelines related to their lifting of restrictions. As China was the epicenter of the pandemic, the lockdown there was quite dramatic, and the lifting of restrictions occurred later than in other countries (Zhou & Tian, 2023). According to Wilkerson (2021, p. 479), “Aside from the uncertainty within ICA processes resulting from COVID- 19, the temporary cessation of international travel allowed countries to focus on domestic affairs and reform adoption practices to address the social injustices and poverty among those in need.” Reopening borders thus did not result in a resurgence of ICAs, as was hoped by prospective families with open adoption cases. Even as other countries reopened to ICA, China still refused to process ICAs, ostensibly to protect adopted chil- dren from COVID-19 (Wilkerson, 2021). At the same time, concerns about COVID originating in China may have led prospective adoptive parents to search elsewhere for adopt- able children. The COVID-19 health emergency therefore only hastened the end of Chinese ICAs. Why Did China Close Its ICA Program? This gradual closure in the wake of COVID restrictions makes sense—not only because of widespread evidence of human rights violations in ICAs globally (Loibl & Mackenzie, 2023), but also because ICA was only ever meant to be a tempo- rary measure to weather crises in care. Indeed, ICA has been proven not to be an effective child protection measure, espe- cially when one considers the number of children in need of parental care globally versus the number of children actually adopted internationally (Rotabi & Bromfield, 2017). ICA has always ebbed and flowed, with such circumstances precipi- tating an opening of the market to meet demand (Cheney, 2014; Cheney & Rotabi, 2017), so it is no surprise that China has experienced a similar shift. While China has increased its wealth, its demographics have shifted such that perhaps too few babies are being born. China is currently the second largest economy in the world (U.S. Bank, 2024) and so will have more trouble claiming that they cannot take care of Chi- nese children, including those with disabilities. Countries that experience such growth tend to close down ICA programs as a point of national pride, suggesting that while they may have needed to “outsource” care for a while, they can now provide for their own children. As mentioned above, fewer and fewer children were being offered for ICA amidst falling birth rates in China—fall-out, perhaps, from the One-Child Policy that survived long enough to become ingrained in the society, where parents and their children were harshly pun- ished for violating the rules. As also noted above, the policy had the effect of skewing the sex ratio in favor of males, such that men are now finding it difficult to meet women eligible for marriage (Feng, 2021). In addition, the increasing costs of living—particularly child care—have caused young Chinese citizens to delay and even forego having children. Reuters reports that the birth rate has fallen for two consecutive years, despite China incentivizing young women to have children (Feng, 2021; Master, 2024). In 2022, deaths in China outnum- bered live births for the first time since 1961, posing a threat to recent economic growth (Ng, 2023).
