PBS Interview: China's "Foreign Adoption Ban" Leaves Children and Families in Limbo
by Katie Lauder
Nanchang Project Communications Coordinator
In October 2024, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reached out to Nanchang Project to discuss the termination of China’s long standing international adoption program and its impact on adoptees, families, and family reunification efforts. The international adoption program was terminated on August 28, 2024, and the U.S. Department of State notified impacted adoptive families and adoption agencies on September 4, 2024. The final version of the PBS segment heavily modified and cut out all mentions of adoptees’ concerns about continued access to adoption documents and the impact on reunification efforts; additionally, the segment cut out all mentions of Nanchang Project and misrepresented our organization to not include our reunification work. Below is Communication Manager Katie Lauder’s full candid responses to the initial interview questions that were cut from the final version of the PBS segment.
How is this news resonating with the adoptee community?
We asked our community on social media to share how they’ve been processing the news and we published a blog post with a lot of adoptees’ mixed reactions. Right now, the adult Chinese adoptee community is made up of early 30s to 20 year olds and we were adopted during a time when China was sending out healthy young children to mostly white families, so there’s a sentiment of relief and vindication that no more children will experience the isolating trauma of being so completely severed from our people and our heritage.
On the other side of that, there are the younger teen adoptees from the late 2000s to 2010s who mostly had medical needs or disabilities and are extremely sad at the closing of international adoptions from China because there’s a lot of uncertainty for those children still in the welfare system that they now won’t have the opportunity to access supportive services to improve their qualities of life that being adopted into a foreign family may have granted them. Overall, there’s a lot of sadness and unease about the ending of China’s international adoption program.
How does the change in China's policy impact the work you're doing on behalf of adoptees?
It’s hard to say right now what the long term impact of this policy change is. What we know now is that it’s extremely difficult to arrange appointments with the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption office (CCCWA) in Beijing which is the office that has copies of our records. Our work is entirely funded and supported from within our community and I think we’re only going to see a higher need from adoptees wanting to reconnect with their roots, wanting to find biological relatives or any connection to China, which we’re going to need more support from outside the adoptee community and really lean into support from fellow Asian diaspora groups.
What are your biggest concerns, now that China has ended international adoptions, as it relates to the needs of adoptees?
Some big concerns are with the uncertainty of how China will proceed in regards to acknowledging us adoptees as a lost generation, how they will foster and allow us to access a connection with China, and what, if anything, they will do with our orphanage records. These papers are really important to us because they’re the first records of our existence in the world and they’re our most tangible connection to China. Some people lose their paperwork or their information went missing between the transfer from China to the receiving country, so reassurance that China has that information is so important and precious to us. It’s an invaluable resource that we really hope we can continue to access.
Is there concern that this will further complicate reunification efforts? If so, how?
This policy change could complicate reunification because of the closing of these international relations. There were already very little resources for us from adoption agencies and government bodies to conduct searches, so now we worry that with this close there’s even less incentive from these organizational bodies to invest effort into helping adoptees reconnect with their relatives. But, there’s also a huge opportunity for the Chinese government to offer adoptees a way to find their families by helping to amplify our searches to the Chinese public and making DNA testing more accessible to adoptees abroad. One of their currently established domestic programs is to help families find lost or abducted children within China through DNA testing, but that program has also been successful in reuniting several international adoptees with their families. It has huge potential to help reunite the approximately 140,000 international adoptees with their Chinese families. The biggest barrier is that it requires adoptees to physically travel to China to submit their info. Learn more info about our National Reunion Database program here.
What do you want people to understand about China's adoption history, and where we are today?
The biggest realization that adoptees have to come to terms with when they’re “coming out of the fog,” is that Chinese families and parents were put into an impossible situation with the One Child Policy regulations. So many parents that we’ve interviewed have expressed their grief and regret over having to relinquish their children, but they had no other options. The One Child Policy had a singular goal and it was to reduce the size of families and there was little to no graces given to families who broke the policy; there were also so many barriers put in place that domestic adoption was not a viable option either.
A big myth or half truth that older adoptees have to break is that we were abandoned solely because we were born female; the bigger context is that we were a second or third or some subsequent sibling and the consequences of that were exorbitant fines that could be as much as a whole lifetime salary and parents were faced with a harsh decision to relinquish one child to care for the other and ensure at least the financial future of the rest of the family with a male child that could earn more. So currently, there are Chinese siblings who are conducting searches for their lost siblings and they want to reconnect with their siblings as much as, if not more than, their aging parents.
And in regards to where Chinese adoption is today: there’s still a huge wealth disparity in China, so impoverished families with disabled children or children with medical needs had to relinquish their children in order to give them an opportunity to access the medical treatment and supportive lifelong care that they need, which highlights a big issue China will have to face regardless of international adoption. Their large majority aging, working population is going to have medical and disability needs; those social services are going to be necessary within the coming decades. So the hope is that the children still in orphanages/welfare institutes will get the care that they need and, along with that, hopefully the domestic adoption process will be made more accessible. And hopefully no more families will be separated due to financial barriers.
There are so many Asian adoptee scholars who have published works on the history of international adoptions from Asia, with our Chinese peers now joining those publications; we have plenty of resources to learn more and for Chinese adoptees to find community support on our website.
If you are a member of the Chinese adoption community and have a perspective to share, we welcome you to leave a comment below to contribute to this discussion. In your response, please indicate your role or connection to this community (Chinese adoptee, adoptive parent, other).
Katie Lauder’s feature on “PBS News Hour” aired December 23, 2024 as part of a segment on the ending of China’s international adoption program. It streamed live on the PBS News Hour Youtube channel and on local PBS channels in the U.S.
Our blog stories come from readers like you!
We invite you to send us your own story to share. We accept submissions from anyone whose life may have been touched by Chinese international adoption including, but not limited to: adoptees, adoptive families, birth families, friends, searchers.
Details in the link below!