Abstract
This article explores the development of international adoption policy in post-liberation South Korea, emphasizing the roles of American and Korean professional social workers. By analyzing the orphan registry and a pivotal international adoption law, it reveals how international adoption in South Korea presents a unique opportunity to observe the formation of modern social policy in a newly liberated nation during the Cold War. The study argues that adoption policy served as a crucial locus of transnational governance, where American and Korean social workers pursued their liberal ideals of professional social work within the context of the authoritarian policies of the South Korean state. However, their quest for scientific professionalism, standardized procedures, and public oversight led to a paradoxical evolution of adoption policy, diverging sharply from the trajectory seen in Western liberal democracies where social work significantly contributed to the consolidation and expansion of the welfare state. In South Korea, embedded transnationality and ideological mismatch resulted in the state’s further withdrawal and the creation of policy workarounds that undermined the core social work principle of the child’s best interests. This case highlights the complexities and blurred moral boundaries in the shaping of modern governance and the broader journey toward modernity under postcolonial, Cold War conditions.
Issue Section:Article
“Everything began with the registry when a child was taken in for international adoption,” recounted Kim Kwang-su, a retired social worker in his eighties, as we sat in a café in central Seoul in 2017.1 He shared his experiences of handling adoption paperwork in 1970s South Korea, after I inquired about the typical adoption procedures of that time.2 In South Korea, the family registry (hojŏk) served as the foundational document for identification and citizenship until its abolition in 2008.3 This system, however, was not originally developed by Koreans. At the turn of the twentieth century, amidst imperial competition and expansion, the Korean peninsula fell under Japanese colonial rule, and the Japanese introduced the family registry system in 1909 in an early effort to make the Korean population legible to the colonial state. Unlike birth certificates or other typical forms of identity in Western societies that assign legal status to individuals, the family registry system conferred this status on the family as a unit. In particular, emphasizing the patrilineal principle, it required all individuals to be registered under the name of the family’s male head either as his spouse or child. Through their inclusion in this patrilineal system, individuals obtained official identification. When Korea was liberated in 1945 and two separate governments were subsequently established in the North and South during the intensifying Cold War divide, the South Korean government chose to retain the official role of the family registry.4
For children placed in overseas adoptions, however, a special variant known as the “orphan registry (koa hojŏk)” was used.5 Unlike the family registry where a child is listed under the father’s household, the orphan registry designated the child as the head of a single-person household, leaving blank all familial information such as details about the parents (see Figure 1). Social worker Kim elaborated that this registry was one of the first documents used to facilitate international adoption. Containing minimal information about the child, usually just an assumed date of birth and a name assigned by social workers, and seen as inconsequential, necessary paperwork, this document has long been overlooked outside the adoption profession.
