China Doll - Background articles

I went to China several years ago after the BBC aired a documentary called The Dying Rooms, which showed secret footage of babies dying in orphanages. Of course, in response to that show, the Chinese government shut the orphanages to Western observers, stopped doing cleft-palate surgeries and refused money given to them.

Oprah show 2004: Lisa Ling Goes Inside China

http://www.oprah.com/tows/slide/200412/20041202/slide_20041202_107.jhtml

Lisa Ling traveled to China to find out what is happening now to China's unwanted girls. She was part of the first camera crew allowed back in by the government to cover this topic since The Dying Rooms.
Today in China, Lisa found that baby girls are still being either aborted or abandoned by the thousands and boys outnumber girls by 17 million.... ""The problem is that no matter how you try, you can't force yourself to have a boy. So if you continue to have girls, as a lot of these families do, they continue to give away or kill baby girls until they have a boy, and some may never have a baby boy."

2006 U.S. Department of State Report

http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2006/78771.htm

The Law on the Protection of Juveniles forbids infanticide; however, there was evidence that the practice continued. According to the National Population and Family Planning Commission, a handful of doctors have been charged with infanticide under this law....

Despite government efforts to prevent kidnapping and the buying and selling of children, these problems persisted in some rural areas, and children were trafficked for labor purposes (see section 5, Trafficking).

Female infanticide, sex-selective abortions, and the abandonment and neglect of baby girls remained problems due to the traditional preference for sons and the birth limitation policy (see section 1.f.). Many families, particularly in rural areas, used ultrasound to identify female fetuses and terminate pregnancies, even though this practice remained illegal. An official study in Hainan Province found that 68 percent of abortions were of female fetuses. According to a 2002 survey, 35 percent of women in one rural township admitted to having an abortion because of a preference for a male child. Female babies also suffered from a higher mortality rate than male babies, contrary to the worldwide norm. State media reported that infant mortality rates in rural areas were 27 percent higher for girls than boys. Neglect of baby girls was one factor in their lower survival rate. One study found the differential mortality rates were highest in areas where women had a lower social status and economic and medical conditions were poor.

The law forbids the mistreatment or abandonment of children. The vast majority of children in orphanages were female; males in orphanages were usually disabled or in poor health. Medical professionals sometimes advised parents of children with disabilities to put the children into orphanages.

The government denied that children in orphanages were mistreated or refused medical care but acknowledged that the system often was unable to provide adequately for some children, particularly those with serious medical problems. Adopted children were counted under the birth limitation regulations in most locations. As a result, couples that adopted abandoned baby girls were sometimes barred from having additional children.

Chinese Orphanages Today, 2003

http://www.yeongandyeong.com/excerpts_wanting_daughter.htm

"There are, however, huge inequalities in this system, as there are in China as a whole. The distribution of funds contributes to the problem. Orphanages permitted to do international adoptions get to keep a significant portion of the fees that foreign adopters pay. These same orphanages benefit disproportionately from the money donated by grateful foreign adoptive parents and the adoption agencies and charitable organizations they fund. Chinese central government organizations also favor areas that have well-run systems and that maintain good relations with the Civil Affairs bureaucracy. International organizations are steered in the same direction. Thus the most visible orphanages, generally located in major cities, have seen the greatest improvements. To be fair, these orphanages are also among the largest in the system and care for a significant number of abandoned children. And in some provinces a percentage of adoption revenues is set aside for poorer and more remote institutions within the child welfare system."

From The One-Child Policy: China's Solution

http://www.wnmu.edu/academic/hum/contest2004/onechildpolicy.pdf

Because the One Child Policy allows each couple only one child, it is common for female infants to be disposed of, either by sex-based abortions, abandonment, or other methods of infanticide. It is not uncommon in rural areas to hear of a farmer who drowned his female child in a bucket of water,....

These cases of infanticide are quite common. It fact, that is why 1.7 million females are unaccounted for each year. These numbers have unbalanced the sex ratio between the number of males and females in China. This leaves 118.5 males to every 100 females (Richards 7-8). There are a total of over 60 million more males in the country. ...

Female and handicapped children are also being dumped off in orphanages. Wang Rui Quiong, the director of the Shenhen Society Welfare Centre in southern China said, ˜Because Chinese law allows couples to have only one child, everyone wants a good one. Parents do not want to be burdened with a stupid child. (Richards 8). Regrettably, because of the high numbers of children being abandoned, approximately forty percent of orphans die in state-run welfare centers and as many as eighty percent die in smaller, less equipped ones...

Orphans were placed in a back room in the orphanage and left to die alone in the dark. The mass of unwanted babies that are neglected in China are left to rot to make room for new children to fill the orphanages. Orphans are considered to be a surplus in the population, so if the child dies, it is a step toward slowing the population increase.

China promotes girls to avoid glut of bachelors

http://www.un-instraw.org/revista/hypermail/alltickers/en/0086.html

August 8, 2006

The program launched by the State Population and Family Planning
Commission (SCPFP) in 2003 in 24 pilot counties provides social benefits,
including cash payments, to families with only girls, in order to boost the
status of girls and women.

The program is credited with reducing the boys-to-girls ratio in those
counties from 133.8/100 to 119.6/100 over the past three years.

UK Home Office: Country Assessment - October 2003 - Children

http://www.ecoi.net/doc/en/CN/content/4/9592-9610

6.363. The 1992 Law on the Protection of Juveniles forbids infanticide, as well as mistreatment or abandonment of children. Physical abuse of children can be grounds for criminal prosecution. The Constitution provides for 9 years of compulsory education. [2d]

Child Care Arrangements

6.364. A number of children are abandoned each year, despite the penalty under law of fines and 5 years in prison. Most of the children in orphanages are female although some are disabled or in poor health. The treatment of children in these institutions varies from adequate to deplorable. Infant mortality rates appear to be very high. Bureaucratic indifference and corruption on the part of orphanage administrators appear to be significant factors in such cases. [2d]

Opinion from the director of Human Rights Watch

(By Holly Burkhalter, Washington, D.C.)

New York Times on January 11, 1996

"When a group of prospective parents visited last year, the director herded them into a sparkling clean "special care" room. But one visitor reported that when he wandered into a room not on the official tour, he saw a heart-breaking scene: a room full of children sleeping on the floor while a tiny blind boy, ignored in a far corner, was weeping in his crib. I strongly support adoption from China, and hope the program will be expanded. But Western adoption agencies must not cover up for the Chinese authorities, as one American agency did this week when it told a client that Human Rights Watch's Chinese sources exaggerated the conditions in order to improve their changes of getting political asylum in The West. "

In Shanghai three-month old baby up for on sale on internet

http://www.asianews.it/view.php?l=en&art=4415

Such an offer is unusual insofar as how it was advertising but abducting and selling children is a widespread criminal activity in China,...

Last August seven leaders of a child abduction ring were sentenced to death and executed. The other 45 ring members were given prison sentences ranging from five years to life. In 2003, the gang had kidnapped 61 children in Guihou province for resale to families in Henan and Hebei provinces. ...they joined the ranks of China 573,000 official orphans. According to a joint study by China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Save the Children Fund and Beijing Normal University, Chinese orphans receive little government assistance; more than a third receive no aid whatsoever and for many there is no medical care and education. The report found that 86 percent of all orphans live in rural areas but, whilst in cities 70 percent receive some form of local government assistance, in the countryside [where the vast majority of the 40,000 institutions are located] only half does. In many provinces, the aid orphans receive is merely symbolic. In these areas, payments do not cover even a quarter of a normal child's daily living expenses, and in many regions, it's as little as a tenth, said Shan Xiao Yuan, professor at the Beijing Normal University, who took part in the study. Many orphans are living in extreme poverty, especially in rural areas. Many experts believe that the government's lack of care for orphans favors abductions and sale to childless couples. In such a "market," baby boys are deemed "quality goods" and sold at prices more than twice that of baby girls, who are usually seen as "substandard".

Abandoned rural children are clearly not entitled to wubao [social protection system]

An adoptive parent reporting from Hengdong

2004 China Internet Information Center: The survey reportedly counted more than 500,000 identifiable "orphaned minors," mostly in rural areas, with more than half lacking government support.

2005 China Quarterly: ...estimate a total of 200,000 to 400,000 orphaned children, 95 percent of them initially abandoned, in rural areas living outside state controlled institutions. ...In rural areas, the state policy is not to take direct responsibility for supporting orphans and abandoned children....Abandoned [rural] children are clearly not entitled to wubao [social protection system]: if the parents are known, they are not entitled to wubao because their parents continue to be responsible for them; but if the parents are not known, they are not local orphans and hence not entitled to wubao as it is a community based system which provides protection to orphans in the relevant community only. In both cases, the safety net for abandoned children in rural areas is missing."

U.S.: Infanticide and Forced Abortions Rampant in China

by NewsMax.com Wires

December 14 2004, WASHINGTON --" Despite some changes, China's one-child family planning program remains a source of coercion, forced abortions, infanticide and perilously imbalanced boy-girl ratios, State Department officials said Tuesday. .... "The one-child policy is the most pervasive source of human-rights violations in China today," said Harry Wu, a human- rights activist who spent 19 years in the Chinese labor camp system. Wu cited a 2003 document from an area of southern Guangdong Province where party secretaries and village heads were told their salaries would be cut in half if, in a 35-day period, they did not reach a goal of sterilizing 1,369 people, fitting 818 with IUDs and carrying out 163 abortions.

In China's Countryside, 'It's a Boy!' Too Often

by Washington Post

XICUN VILLAGE, China, May 29, 2001 --" Not much seems to have changed in Xicun, a cliff-side village deep in the mountains of southern Guangxi province. Except when you scan the birth records. Last year, 20 children were born to the women of Xicun. Sixteen were boys. The year before, 24 were born and 19 were boys. ... Boys are even more prevalent in rural areas, where they are needed to work and eventually inherit the land.

Sex-selective abortions, infanticide and significant differences in children's access to medical care are contributing to an increasingly skewed sex ratio in China's countryside, Western and Chinese researchers say. .... In heavily rural areas such as Guangxi, where boys are prized because of their value for farm work and because they inherit the land, the numbers approach 140 boys for every 100 girls, well off the international norm of 105 to 100. Overall, Chinese researchers say, there are 41 million more males than females among China's 1.2 billion people, up 10 percent from the previous estimate in 1997.

In a Chinese Orphanage

by Anne F. Thurston, The Atlantic Monthly

www.theatlantic.com/issues/96apr/contrib.htm

"The orphanage I visited is on the outskirts of a city, but the little girls were presumed to have come mostly from rural backgrounds. China is in the midst of what must be the largest rural-to-urban migration in human history. In recent years perhaps 100 million of China's 900 million peasants have moved to cities in search of jobs. The baby girls are left at railway stations, in parks, and in front of police stations....

The children were an unruly, unsocialied group. Some were handicapped. Others seemed retarded, though the foreign volunteers were convinced that what appeared as retardation was often really a failure to thrive, the result of too little love and attention....

Two or three staff members--untrained, minimally paid women from nearby villages who were struggling to support their own families--were on hand for the infants....Babies who are not adopted are eventually moved out of the infant room into what the foreign women call the toddlers' room, a much larger space with six rows of eight cribs each. Staffing is minimal there--three or four women for forty-eight children. The quality of care precipitously declines. It is almost impossible for the volunteers to guess the ages of the children. Many suffer such serious developmental delays that they appear and act much younger than they are. Children who have just been moved are generally placed in the middle two rows. They are given bottles but scant assistance in feeding, and the schedule is rigid. Some of the children grab their bottles and eat lustily, and some--often the same ones--demand attention, crying, spreading their arms to be held. Their eyes beg for human warmth and affection. Others are already passive and withdrawn. Their bottles lie untouched, as though they are too weak, too indifferent, or still too young to make the effort. When feeding time is over, even the unfinished bottles are collected....

Babies who are not adopted are eventually moved out of the infant room into what the foreign women call the toddlers' room, a much larger space with six rows of eight cribs each. Staffing is minimal there--three or four women for forty-eight children. The quality of care precipitously declines. It is almost impossible for the volunteers to guess the ages of the children. Many suffer such serious developmental delays that they appear and act much younger than they are. Children who have just been moved are generally placed in the middle two rows. They are given bottles but scant assistance in feeding, and the schedule is rigid. Some of the children grab their bottles and eat lustily, and some--often the same ones--demand attention, crying, spreading their arms to be held. Their eyes beg for human warmth and affection. Others are already passive and withdrawn. Their bottles lie untouched, as though they are too weak, too indifferent, or still too young to make the effort. When feeding time is over, even the unfinished bottles are collected.

For the most part those who struggle and survive are eventually moved to the first two rows, although there are no hard and fast rules. When passive children become weak, they are moved to the last two rows--by whose decision or according to what criteria, we never learned. In the months that I visited the orphanage, from October to December of 1994, I never saw the children in these cribs being fed. Christine, who has been visiting for more than two and a half years, has sometimes seen the children fed, but has never seen any of them recover. Rather, she has watched them disappear, to be replaced by new arrivals.

Growing Sex Imbalance Shocks China

by The Guardian International

May 13, 2002

The natural ratio should be 105 males per 100 females. The Chinese figure was only slightly above this norm 20 years ago. The current high of 116.9 males to 100 females is more than five percentage points higher than the figure of 111.3 males recorded in the last full census in 1990. The census ...carried out two years ago - reveals a figure that five provinces show more than 125 male births for every 100 females, with the percentage reaching 130 in Guangdong and as high as 135 in Hainan.

[U.S.] Congressional-Executive Commission on China

2003 Annual Report
www.cecc.gov/pages/annualRpt/2003annRpt.pdf

Birth ratios of 138 boys to 100 girls in rural provinces like Jiangxi and 115 boys to 100 girls even in urban areas like Chongqing prove the prevalence of either sex-based abortion or infanticide. Some of
the imbalance in these ratios may reflect the growth of a population of ‘‘black,’’ or unregistered female babies, invisible to the state and ineligible for schooling and other state benefits. Most of the distortion, however, reflects a real reduction in the number of girls surviving birth and infancy.

The scarcity of women resulting from these practices has led to a number of serious social problems, including abandonment of infants, forced marriage, and trafficking of women and girls. An illicit
trade in baby girls as future servants or brides is widespread in China....

China's Gender Dilemma
http://www.hsstudyc.org.hk/Webpage/ChinaBridge/CB0409.htm

2005

Baby girls in large numbers are abandoned, drowned, smothered or left to die from lack of care and food. They are often left in rice fields, and in rubbish bins.

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