The Missing Girls: How China’s One-Child Policy Tore Families Apart
Ricki Mudd was born in 1993 in China during the one-child policy era. She remembers her early childhood only in fragments, but has been told she had spent some of it hidden in a bag.
At age 5, she was adopted from a Chinese orphanage, one of the more than 150,000 children China sent overseas. Most were girls. In the West, they were one of the most visible consequences of the one-child policy, which ended in 2016. This month, Beijing put an end to foreign adoptions.
China is grappling with a demographic crisis, with dropping birthrates and a rapidly aging population. The policies to control the population have given way to new ones in the opposite direction. But a legacy of the one-child policy is a dearth of women of childbearing age.
Because of a government decree that led to forced abortions and sterilizations, millions of girls were never born or were hidden from authorities. In the process, China’s gender ratio became increasingly skewed, with 117 boys born for every 100 girls in 2004, compared with 106 in 1980, United Nations data showed.
A U.N. Population Fund study based on China’s 2010 census estimates the country’s “missing girls,” or females who in regular circumstances would have been born but who were absent from the population, at 24 million.
The girls sent overseas constitute a small part of that void and many embody the impossible choice for many families.
International adoptions had declined in recent years and came to a virtual halt in the pandemic. In the two decades before that, American families adopted more than 80,000 Chinese children, U.S. State Department data show. More than 80% were girls.
As Chinese girls became part of American life, the perception was that they had escaped a society where girls weren’t valued.
“I did have some inkling that women were considered inferior in China,” said Mudd.
That there was more to her own story became clear after her birthparents tracked down her adoptive family’s address and she went to China to meet them.
There, at age 12, she learned that her birth had put the family in a bind. Her mother’s side of the family wanted to keep her, but her father’s mother, her nainai, argued they should save their birth quota for a son. It was an attitude especially common in rural China, where sons are seen as carrying on the bloodline.
In “Ricki’s Promise,” a 2014 documentary by Changfu Chang, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, Mudd described how her parents kept her hidden from authorities, carrying her in a grocery bag on the rare occasions they took her out. They put her in a foster family when she was 3, but after local officials discovered her existence, she was sent to an orphanage. Her father tried in vain to get her back. Two years later, she flew to Seattle with her new parents.
By the time Mudd met her birthparents, they were divorced, unable to overcome the rift that had developed between the two sides of the family over her fate.
Mudd was moved when her maternal grandfather burst into tears when he saw her. “He must have been really worried about me,” she said. “He really loved me.”
She bonded with her younger brother, born two years after her, over karaoke, together belting out the popular song, “I Love You Like the Mice Love Rice.”
On a second trip to China, when she was 18, her parents apologized to her for giving her up. She finally met her nainai, who cooked her a meal. Mudd was upset when her brother said their parents loved her more than him. She told him they were just feeling guilty. At the end of the visit she told her birth mother to treat him better.
Her birthparents declined to be interviewed.
History of adoption
In the 1990s, a decade after the launch of the one-child policy, family-planning officials started more severe crackdowns, including on informal arrangements in which baby girls were raised by parents’ relatives or neighbors. That sent many children to state orphanages and opened the door to international adoption.
“The [Chinese] government at no point wanted to send a lot of babies abroad for foreign adoptions,” said Martin Whyte, a sociology professor emeritus at Harvard University. “But it was a particular consequence of their very coercive enforcement of the one-child policy combined with the existing customs in rural villages.” Whyte and his wife were among the first Americans who adopted girls from China in the early 1990s.
Kay Johnson, who wrote several books on the implications of China’s one-child policy, including the 2004 “Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son,” found that many of the children in orphanages came from parents or foster families who wanted to keep them, but had little or no choice. Johnson died in 2019.
Her daughter, LiLi Johnson, a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was one of the first Chinese girls adopted overseas. In an alternative universe, she said, it is possible she would have been adopted by a Chinese family—“or that I wouldn’t have been abandoned at all in the first place.”
Orphanages were underfunded and overcrowded. Fees and donations collected from overseas adoption groups helped relieve financial pressure.
“China’s central adoption agency and local orphanages seemed to regard [international adoption] as a commercial practice,” said Xue Xinran, a writer and co-founder of Mothers’ Bridge of Love, a nonprofit organization based in London dedicated to supporting Chinese adoptees.
China’s Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption, an agency under the Ministry of Civil Affairs handling overseas adoption, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The increasing flow of children from state orphanages bothered many Chinese, including some officials, according to Robert Glover, founder of Care for Children, a charity based in Norwich, England. In 2003, Chinese authorities hired Glover as a consultant on a national effort to place children in need with families in China.
One of the officials Glover worked with was Yan Mingfu, who had been the vice minister of civil affairs in the early 1990s. Glover said Yan told him that it pained him to watch Chinese children leaving China for adoption. Yan died last year.
Most of the adoptions were handled out of the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, where one hotel, the White Swan, was so regularly filled with American parents getting to know their new children that it became informally known as the White Stork.
In 2006, official media documented how a trafficking ring had been selling babies to six orphanages in Hunan province, a revelation that shocked the overseas adoption community. In 2007, China tightened international adoption rules and adoptions started to decline.
Only 16 Chinese children were adopted by American families in the fiscal year ended September 2023. After announcing the end of international adoptions, Chinese officials told U.S. diplomats in China that the policy applies to all pending adoption applications as well, according to a State Department spokesperson.
Parallel lives
Very few adoptees have reconnected with their biological parents. Orphanages often have moved or closed. Records are frequently incomplete and inconsistent.
Kati Pohler is one of the few who has any insight into the parallel existence she might have had, because of her reunion with her biological sister in China.
Soon after Pohler was born in a rural town in eastern China in 1995, the second of two daughters, her father left her at a market with a note written with a brush pen. “Due to the poverty of our family and the pressure of worldly affairs, we had no choice but to abandon our daughter in the street,” it said.
Pohler, now 29 and working as a music teacher in Prague, was adopted by an American couple when she was 1. Two decades later, her birth father’s note offered enough clues to bring about a reunion.
A moment that touched Pohler—captured by Chang, the filmmaker, in a 2017 documentary, “Meet Me on the Bridge”—was when her birthparents presented her with a traditional red envelope full of bills, some of them so old they were no longer in circulation. They represented Lunar New Year gifts they had saved for her every year since her birth.
Her sister, Xu Xiaochen, said she didn’t know she had a younger sister until she was in the fourth grade. One surprise was that her younger sister was the taller of the two.
The sisters, both soft-spoken and self-described introverts, aren’t blaming their parents for deciding to abandon one of their daughters, citing instead the restrictions of the era.
“It’s still hard for me to comprehend something so strict for an entire generation, the government making personal choices for people,” Pohler said.
She can’t help wondering what it would have been like to grow up with her sister in China. “I miss that part of me, that ‘could-have-been’ sometimes,” she said. In August, Pohler became an aunt when her sister, who now lives in Hangzhou, had a baby boy.
“I hope China’s choice to close their international adoption program means that China and her people are ready to take care of those who society often overlooks,” Pohler said.
A few years ago, Mudd, now a manager at a tech firm, arranged for her younger brother to stay with her adoptive parents and study in the U.S. He has since returned to China and is now working in e-commerce.
“I think he looks at me as the one with a lot of the privileges because American culture is a lot less prescriptive about how you go about your life than I feel Chinese culture is,” she said.
She said she was lucky because she got all the love and support she needed from her adoptive parents.
Orphanages still exist in China, mostly populated by children with medical issues. “I’m worried about the many special-needs children in orphanages, given the lack of resources devoted to them in a Chinese society,” said Chang, the filmmaker.
The number of children in state care dropped 73% over a 10-year period, to 144,000, last year, with more than 70% placed with local families rather than in orphanages, official data showed.
In Hunan, where the child-trafficking ring was busted in 2006, one former orphanage has been converted into a nursing home.