Some Chinese parents say their babies were stolen for adoption
By Barbara Demick
September 20, 2009
Some Chinese parents say their babies were stolen for adoption In some rural areas, instead of levying fines for violations of China's child policies, greedy officials took babies, which would each fetch $3,000 om adoptions. Chinese parents tell of abducted children A young Chinese girl pines for her twin Graphic: Chinese adoptions Photos: Reunited in Beijing Adopted teen finds answers, mystery in China By Barbara Demick September 19, 2009 E-mailPrint Share Text Size reporting from Tianxi, China - The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: "Bring out the baby." Yang wept and argued, but, alone with her 4-month-old daughter, she was in no position to resist the man every parent in Tianxi feared. "I'm going to sell the baby for foreign adoption. I can get a lot of money for her," he told the sobbing mother as he drove her with the baby to an orphanage in Zhenyuan, a nearby city in the southern province of Guizhou. In return, he promised that the family wouldn't have to pay fines for violating China's one-child policy. Then he warned her: "Don't tell anyone about it." For five years, she kept the terrible secret. "I didn't understand that they didn't have the right to take our babies," she said.
Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States. The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China's restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls. But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping -- sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned. Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages. "Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products," said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States. Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community. "In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money," said Ina Hut, who last month resigned as the head of the Netherlands' largest adoption agency out of concern about baby trafficking. The Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs, the government agency that oversees foreign and domestic adoption, rejected repeated requests for comment.