China suspends adoption of foreign children due to demographic crisis

The Chinese government announced Friday that it would no longer allow foreign families to adopt Chinese children, ending a program that has found overseas homes for more than 160,000 children since 1992. While Beijing has declined to provide a clear explanation for its decision, most observers suspect it is a response to China’s declining birth rate.

The halt to overseas adoptions was so abrupt that families with pending cases had no idea whether their adoptions would go ahead. When the U.S. State Department asked for clarification, Chinese officials said “They will not continue to process the files at any stage.”

“We understand that there are still hundreds of families waiting for their adoptions to be finalized, and we sympathize with their plight,” the State Department said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry mumbled something about bringing foreign adoptions into line with “the spirit of relevant international conventions.”

This may have been a vague reference to Denmark and the Netherlands. adage Earlier this year, they will no longer allow adoptions abroad. Both decisions were prompted by bureaucratic irregularities And allegations of fraudulent documents, after a sharp drop in overseas adoptions during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

China is probably more concerned that it has no more children to choose from. Overseas adoptions of Chinese children became commonplace in the last years of the one-child policy, which aimed to control overpopulation by forcing families to have only one child each.

The one-child policy was notoriously biased against girls in its implementation, as families viewed girls as a luxury they could no longer afford. According to the Chinese organization Children International, a non-profit group Founded in 2011 to support Chinese adoptees around the world, approximately 82,000 Chinese children have been adopted. adopted by American families over the past 30 years, and most of them were girls.

China shifted rather abruptly from worry about overpopulation to worry about demographic collapse after the end of the one-child policy in 2016. Panic is growing within the Chinese Communist Party over its inability to reverse the trend. Collapse of birth ratesIn the space of a few years, Beijing has gone from forcing women to abort when they have too many babies to offering a plethora of financial incentives for motherhood that are virtually unprecedented. begging young families to have children, and even suggesting People who don’t reproduce fast enough might be traitors. None of these measures worked very well.

Wang Feng, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, said China’s ban on foreign adoptions marked “the end of an era and the closing of one of the most shameful chapters in the three and a half decades of social engineering known as the one-child policy.”

“The Chinese government created the problem and could not cope with the financial constraints. That’s why it allowed foreign adoption as a last resort,” Wang said. said THE The New York Times (NYT) Friday.

Guo Wu, an associate professor of Chinese studies at Allegheny College, suggested that rising Chinese nationalism could also be a factor in the halt in foreign adoptions.

Guo said Chinese nationalists might find the idea that China cannot raise its own children insulting, especially since half of foreign adoptions have been made in the United States, whose relations with the Chinese government have been increasingly strained.

“This policy could address this sentiment that ‘we don’t need to send our children to America,'” he said.

Hopeful adoptive families in the United States told the The New York Times They were devastated by China’s sudden halt to the process.

“It’s really hard to see hundreds of families waiting, having a place prepared and us sitting here, hopeless, our hands tied. We love this country, we love its people and part of my heartbreak is our connection to China,” said Courtney Moore, a prospective adoptive mother.