Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China

by Leslie K. Wang

It's no secret that tens of thousands of Chinese children have been adopted by American parents and that Western aid organizations have invested in helping orphans in China—but why have Chinese authorities allowed this exchange, and what does it reveal about processes of globalization?

Countries that allow their vulnerable children to be cared for by outsiders are typically viewed as weaker global players. However, Leslie K. Wang argues that China has turned this notion on its head by outsourcing the care of its unwanted children to attract foreign resources and secure closer ties with Western nations. She demonstrates the two main ways that this "outsourced intimacy" operates as an ongoing transnational first, through the exportation of mostly healthy girls into Western homes via adoption, and second, through the subsequent importation of first-world actors, resources, and practices into orphanages to care for the mostly special needs youth left behind.

Outsourced Children reveals the different care standards offered in Chinese state-run orphanages that were aided by Western humanitarian organizations. Wang explains how such transnational partnerships place marginalized children squarely at the intersection of public and private spheres, state and civil society, and local and global agendas. While Western societies view childhood as an innocent time, unaffected by politics, this book explores how children both symbolize and influence national futures.

Genres: Adoption, Nonfiction

204 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 31, 2016

Reviews

[Ebookwormy1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Chinese American visiting China who is fluent in Mandarin, Ms. Wang was able to straddle two cultures in this research about the influences upon China’s orphans. She identifies three forces that conflate in the care of these vulnerable children: the Chinese Government/ Communist Party, Western Non-Profits, and local Chinese social welfare agency employees, both leaders and caregivers. Don’t let the research label intimidate you, Ms. Wang writes an approachable narrative, and the writing style is not hard to read, though the content can be challenging.

The aims of the Communist party are fairly consistent. Ms. Wang identifies how continued propagation of the party via birth policies, economic control and expansion of ‘soft power’ entangle to both create parentless children and sustain them in ways that brush up Communist party image both within and outside China. Whether out of appreciation for the party’s socialistic vision, love for China or simply a desire to keep her own personal options open, Ms. Wang’s account of the party is moderate in tone. She has a few pointed criticisms, but otherwise simply accounts their actions as reasonable outflows of their worldview.

Chapter 2, “Survival of the Fittest” describes government efforts to create “high quality” citizens. This concept was particularly illuminating in tying together themes of international competition, class disparity between rural and urban citizens, and the parallel of raising up vulnerable children to make them useful while simultaneously despising them. These are ideas I’ve encountered in vague ways before, but Ms. Wang integrated them in a way that had previously eluded me.

"...the PRC's stringent population control program has divided children into two opposing categories based on their perceived level of 'quality.' Although urban little emperors bear the heavy responsibility of building a glorious future for their country, a much larger number of youths from rural areas are viewed at best as a hindrance, and at worse as a dangerous threat, to Chinese modernization. The abandonment of 'unplanned children' relates directly to the PRC's quest to become a modern society and achieve 'material and moral parity with the West.'" pg. 30 Outsourced Children, Wang, 2016

Chapter 3 elucidates the social concerns of raising children from discardables without opportunities in China to American darlings sitting atop the international economic ladder, painting the social dualism that characterizes the experience of these children and the reactions of native Chinese to them.

Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to western non-profit interventions in China, one which Ms. Wang deems successful and one she deems unsuccessful. Viewing them as intruders in China, who lack cultural insight and serve out of questionable motives, Ms. Wang is much more free in her criticism of these organizations that lack the power to restrict her future travel in China.

Finally, Special Needs adoption, the most common type from China to the West today, is discussed in Chapter 6, including the shift from healthy girls to needy boys. Ms. Wang’s insight into the dynamics of China are helpful, and some of her critique of adoption organizations are fair, but her strange criticism of adoptive parents, makes the reading challenging, particularly if you ARE an adoptive parent.

Ms. Wang’s research is condescendingly presumed to be impartial and as such endeavors only to document the situation without proposing any solutions to the dilemmas confounding the childhood of these human beings. While she complements the “resilience and courage” of these unfortunate children she offers nothing to change their prospects but pointed criticism of Westerner actors and soft rebukes of Chinese (both government and local workers).
Ms. Wang’s most pointed criticism is, strangely, reserved for Western individuals acting from a faith conviction, either by volunteering, leading or funding non-profit organizations or through adoption itself (as organizations promoting orphan care or adoptive families). She questions their motives, claims their actions cloud the issues and minimizes the value of their commitment to children in families. Clearly, her worldview favors large government intervention (somehow more ‘pure’) over individual actions, even though she notes the self-propagating actions of the Communist Party early in the book.

Her desire for ideological purity in serving the children is complicated by the fact that Ms. Wang herself was sustained while doing her research by grants from various American academic organizations. In this way, her own perspective is similarly tainted by making her living from these children in just as concrete a manner as the agencies she censures. In fact, her service in China isn’t motivated by the idealism to serve others (like the Westerners who have left their homes to serve Chinese children), or to feel good about herself (as she notes about American ex-patriot wives), or the desire to ultimately place children in families (ala the adoption agencies), or to do the life long hard work of raising these children into healthy and productive adults (as adoptive parents do), but rather, the desire to publish research to fuel her own professorial career. Her critical insights might have been more palatable had she acknowledged that she has more in common with the meddling Westerners than any other party in her sphere of research.

In the end, I appreciate her nuanced treatment of most sides of the issue, though she possesses neither self-perception of her own role in the dynamic, nor an appreciation for the role of a free market supported private sector in addressing social concerns, nor empathy with conservative Christian families. I would recommend that families adopting from China both read this book and preserve it for their children, particularly those that were in state care at the time of Ms. Wang’s research (from 2007-2014).

Some may find my recommendation of her work ironic. However, I do not think it is ironic. Ideological - or even personal - purity should NOT inhibit our actions in trying to DO SOMETHING to improve the lives of orphaned children, all over the world. They need secure families in which to grow as 3 or 4 years to a bureaucracy is nothing, but to a child it is the hardening of a foundation for life. I agree with many of Ms. Wang’s criticisms of all parties, and appreciate her unique language and cultural gifts, but if you are a person of faith, you’re going to have to have a thick skin to absorb her adjectival attacks/bias in what is otherwise a valuable written account of the predicaments involved with orphan care.

For a journalist memoir of a Chinese broadcaster’s experience with displaced children and the mothers who relinquished them, see
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother, Xinran, 2010
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Brian Stuy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leslie K. Wang’s book “Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China” is a well-researched treatise on China’s adoption program, the result of personal experiences of the author working in various orphanages, combined with academic studies. The central thesis of the book, that China has allowed international adoption of its children as a means to increase the overall value and productivity of its remaining citizens, is a fairly new idea in the adoption community. Few adoptive parents realize the overall goals and objectives of the Chinese government in encouraging and promoting adoption, and for this single reason alone Wang’s book is a valuable contribution to the history of China’s adoption program.

Wang spends considerable space putting a personalized face on the orphans in China, mostly special needs. Her time in the Haifeng Children’s Welfare Institute, an orphanage that does not participate in the international adoption program, is illuminative of the issues present in the Social Welfare Institutes regarding the severely handicapped. Wang gained access to the Haifeng orphanage as a volunteer for “Tomorrow’s Children,” a Christian faith-based NGO that assisted the orphanage in caring for its special needs children. Her experiences in Haifeng are contrasted with those she had in the Yongping orphanage near Beijing where another group, “Helping Hands,” worked. This group was comprised of expat women who, as Wang describes, were looking to put meaning into their lives as their husbands went off to work. The contrast between these two groups – how their methods were accepted or rejected by the nannies that worked in each facility, by the government, and by the children themselves, is fascinating to read, and provides a valuable assessment of the damage that “first-world” attitudes can sometimes have in such settings.

But the core of the book is devoted to the idea that China has allowed the exportation of her children with a simple goal in mind: To increase the overall productivity of its people with the stated goal to become a first-world nation. With this goal in mind, children abandoned by largely rural, uneducated and less productive birth families in a real sense act as weights to the progress of China overall. By removing these children from the national population, the government accepted that the remaining population would increase in education and productivity. Wang states that “Although urban little emperors bear the heavy responsibility of building a glorious future for their country, a much larger number of youths from rural areas are viewed at best as a hindrance, and at worst as a dangerous threat, to Chinese modernization” (p. 29-30). When viewed in this light, the actions of the CCAA and other national governmental agencies can be clearly understood, especially as it relates to ethical breeches in China’s adoption program. Simply stated, orphanage actions such as baby-buying and Family Planning confiscations achieve a national interest, even if those same actions result in lapses in international treaties and standards.

Which brings me to the one objection I have to Wang’s assessment of China’s program. Although Wang gives a hat tip to reports of scandals in China’s program, overall she maintains that the direction of the adoption program is dictated by Beijing. She states, for example, that it is the outcome of the HCIA (Hague Convention) “combined with a proactive effort by the top sending countries – namely Russia and China – to lower the number of kids they place abroad” (p.131) that resulted in the collapse in international adoptions after 2004 (Russia) and 2005 (China). She also writes that the PRC “severely limited the supply of healthy girls following the Hunan child trafficking scandal” (p.132), and still later observed that “it is highly significant that, as the country’s global economic position has improved, the number of children it sends abroad has declined dramatically” (p. 148). Intentionally or not, these and other similar statements by Wang imply that the number of children adopted internationally is controlled by the Central Government, controlled from the top down. There is no doubt that this is a commonly held view, even by those involved in the adoption community, but it is largely a misperception.

The idea ignores the well-documented data and experiences in China’s orphanages themselves. There is no question that China’s program took a dramatic turn in late 2005. In fact, when one graphs the findings (the number of children entering the orphanage) by the orphanages in the provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan and Jiangxi, etc., the main providers of adoptable children in 2005, one can see the decline beginning in December 2005, exactly when the Hunan scandal was being reported on inside China. In February 2006, three months after the scandal broke and when the decline was already visible, the CCAA (the office of the national government responsible for international adoptions) began actively pushing orphanages to submit as many children as they could, even severely special needs. When the number of submissions continued to fall, only then did China change the criteria for who could adopt. The lack of definitive action to curtail corruption in the face of various adoption scandals since Hunan should also be seen in this light.

Thus, the decline in adoptions from China was not a result of top-down actions such as Hague implementation, progress in economic circumstances, access to ultrasounds, the 2008 Olympics, or any of the other “macro” explanations that have been given. Rather, it was a bottom-up reaction by millions of Chinese birth families, most of whom learned for the first time in December 2005 that their children were being “sold” to Westerners by the orphanages, and consciously chose to no longer cooperate, largely out of fear for their child’s safety and well-being. As a result, the number of healthy children entering the orphanages fell dramatically, and the apparent emphasis shifted, as Wang documents, from healthy young infants to older special needs children. I say apparent, because it was the disappearance of the healthy children that made the adoption of the special needs children both more desirable by Western families due to the longer wait times for a healthy child, and more visible to outsiders. But the mission of the national government is still firmly in place: Adopt out as many children, healthy or special needs, as possible to elevate the productivity and desirability of the rest of China’s citizenry.

Wang’s book is a highly interesting view of the China program, and she brings many perceptive and important observations to the conversation moving forward. Do Western NGOs do more harm than good? Are their efforts sustainable? Is the West being used by the Chinese to accomplish their national goals of “population improvement” and the “outsourcing of orphan care”, care that they appear unwilling to give themselves? These and many other considerations are addressed and explored by Wang in what is a fascinating read.

[Ebookwormy1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Chinese American visiting China who is fluent in Mandarin, Ms. Wang was able to straddle two cultures in this research about the influences upon China’s orphans. She identifies three forces that conflate in the care of these vulnerable children: the Chinese Government/ Communist Party, Western Non-Profits, and local Chinese social welfare agency employees, both leaders and caregivers. Don’t let the research label intimidate you, Ms. Wang writes an approachable narrative, and the writing style is not hard to read, though the content can be challenging.

The aims of the Communist party are fairly consistent. Ms. Wang identifies how continued propagation of the party via birth policies, economic control and expansion of ‘soft power’ entangle to both create parentless children and sustain them in ways that brush up Communist party image both within and outside China. Whether out of appreciation for the party’s socialistic vision, love for China or simply a desire to keep her own personal options open, Ms. Wang’s account of the party is moderate in tone. She has a few pointed criticisms, but otherwise simply accounts their actions as reasonable outflows of their worldview.

Chapter 2, “Survival of the Fittest” describes government efforts to create “high quality” citizens. This concept was particularly illuminating in tying together themes of international competition, class disparity between rural and urban citizens, and the parallel of raising up vulnerable children to make them useful while simultaneously despising them. These are ideas I’ve encountered in vague ways before, but Ms. Wang integrated them in a way that had previously eluded me.

"...the PRC's stringent population control program has divided children into two opposing categories based on their perceived level of 'quality.' Although urban little emperors bear the heavy responsibility of building a glorious future for their country, a much larger number of youths from rural areas are viewed at best as a hindrance, and at worse as a dangerous threat, to Chinese modernization. The abandonment of 'unplanned children' relates directly to the PRC's quest to become a modern society and achieve 'material and moral parity with the West.'" pg. 30 Outsourced Children, Wang, 2016

Chapter 3 elucidates the social concerns of raising children from discardables without opportunities in China to American darlings sitting atop the international economic ladder, painting the social dualism that characterizes the experience of these children and the reactions of native Chinese to them.

Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to western non-profit interventions in China, one which Ms. Wang deems successful and one she deems unsuccessful. Viewing them as intruders in China, who lack cultural insight and serve out of questionable motives, Ms. Wang is much more free in her criticism of these organizations that lack the power to restrict her future travel in China.

Finally, Special Needs adoption, the most common type from China to the West today, is discussed in Chapter 6, including the shift from healthy girls to needy boys. Ms. Wang’s insight into the dynamics of China are helpful, and some of her critique of adoption organizations are fair, but her strange criticism of adoptive parents, makes the reading challenging, particularly if you ARE an adoptive parent.

Ms. Wang’s research is condescendingly presumed to be impartial and as such endeavors only to document the situation without proposing any solutions to the dilemmas confounding the childhood of these human beings. While she complements the “resilience and courage” of these unfortunate children she offers nothing to change their prospects but pointed criticism of Westerner actors and soft rebukes of Chinese (both government and local workers).
Ms. Wang’s most pointed criticism is, strangely, reserved for Western individuals acting from a faith conviction, either by volunteering, leading or funding non-profit organizations or through adoption itself (as organizations promoting orphan care or adoptive families). She questions their motives, claims their actions cloud the issues and minimizes the value of their commitment to children in families. Clearly, her worldview favors large government intervention (somehow more ‘pure’) over individual actions, even though she notes the self-propagating actions of the Communist Party early in the book.

Her desire for ideological purity in serving the children is complicated by the fact that Ms. Wang herself was sustained while doing her research by grants from various American academic organizations. In this way, her own perspective is similarly tainted by making her living from these children in just as concrete a manner as the agencies she censures. In fact, her service in China isn’t motivated by the idealism to serve others (like the Westerners who have left their homes to serve Chinese children), or to feel good about herself (as she notes about American ex-patriot wives), or the desire to ultimately place children in families (ala the adoption agencies), or to do the life long hard work of raising these children into healthy and productive adults (as adoptive parents do), but rather, the desire to publish research to fuel her own professorial career. Her critical insights might have been more palatable had she acknowledged that she has more in common with the meddling Westerners than any other party in her sphere of research.

In the end, I appreciate her nuanced treatment of most sides of the issue, though she possesses neither self-perception of her own role in the dynamic, nor an appreciation for the role of a free market supported private sector in addressing social concerns, nor empathy with conservative Christian families. I would recommend that families adopting from China both read this book and preserve it for their children, particularly those that were in state care at the time of Ms. Wang’s research (from 2007-2014).

Some may find my recommendation of her work ironic. However, I do not think it is ironic. Ideological - or even personal - purity should NOT inhibit our actions in trying to DO SOMETHING to improve the lives of orphaned children, all over the world. They need secure families in which to grow as 3 or 4 years to a bureaucracy is nothing, but to a child it is the hardening of a foundation for life. I agree with many of Ms. Wang’s criticisms of all parties, and appreciate her unique language and cultural gifts, but if you are a person of faith, you’re going to have to have a thick skin to absorb her adjectival attacks/bias in what is otherwise a valuable written account of the predicaments involved with orphan care.

For a journalist memoir of a Chinese broadcaster’s experience with displaced children and the mothers who relinquished them, see
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother, Xinran, 2010
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

[This is actually my review from Amazon, re-posted here to save me writing a more detailed or considered one.]

Snide and Padded, but Some Decent Points:

The author's academic papers on this subject are a much cleaner and quicker way to hear her arguments and observations. These boil down to: there are several ways that foreigners have tried to get involved in improving the care of orphans and foundlings, some motivated more by religion and some by boredom (to simplify a little); rich Western women volunteering in and poor Chinese women working in orphanages have different approaches (really!?) so frustrations and misunderstandings ensue (however, her evidence for how this can result in poorer experiences/outcomes for the children is extremely slender, and her arguments around that question rely on essays that talk about other countries); the Chinese government has made some unpleasant calculations about very young citizens it considers worthless (according to its concept of 'quality', which Wang explains nicely) and has been happy for rich foreigners to pay money to take them away, which may be part of a long-term soft power move. This last point is the only real substantial contribution of the book, and Wang makes the case well.

Considering how long Wang did fieldwork in orphanages/welfare centres it is surprising that there are no profiles of the Chinese caregivers or other orphanage employees, and no real interaction with them or their perspectives (beyond labelling their style of care 'custodial'). There is almost no data about the actual funding situation of these institutions. Beyond three important organising figures, we don't even really learn all that much about most of the Western volunteers who are scattered through the pages. The work is marred by a condescending, and almost self-righteous tone (an attempt at academic detachment?) towards the foreign volunteers.

Kay Ann Johnson's books on the subject ("Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son" from 2004; the more recent and focused "China's Hidden Children") are far superior.

[Layla Win · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well-written book that delves deep into the reasons why kids are available for adoption from China and what their lives are like in orphanages. As an adoptive parent, I found myself crying at various points when reading about some of the conditions that the author witnessed. It's pretty different from other adoption books I've read because it's looking at the bigger structural issues that affect the practice. While I don't necessarily agree with everything the author argues, she really convinced me that adoption and international relations go hand in hand. It's a brave book. Highly recommended!