This article was written by Melinda Liu.

The United States adopts more children from abroad than any other country, in an act known as international adoption. 13% of adopted children are adopted internationally, and of those, more than half (51%) are from Asia. China, specifically, made up 29% of all internationally adopted children – more than any other country. 

It also comprised 57% of all children adopted from Asia. Although these numbers are from 2011 and may now be dated, Asian international adoptees are often overlooked in discussions about the AAPI community.

On August 28, 2024, a little over a year ago, China “terminated its longstanding international adoption program” and “all pending and future applications will no longer be processed for foreign families in any country.” Between 1989 and 2024, when the program was in operation, over 140,000 children were adopted from China to countries abroad. 

However, in the years prior to the end of the program, adoptions were already in decline, owing to China’s economic conditions significantly improving over decades since the implementation of the so-called ‘one-child policy’ taking effect in 1980, a declining birth rate (families are having fewer children), and preference for males becoming less popular in society – all factors that had led to the implementation of the program in the first place.

The reactions from adoptees who had been adopted as a result of the program were mixed. Tessa Osborne, adopted from the Hunan Province of China in 1999 says, “I had this huge sigh of relief, because I’m glad it’s over.”

 Despite most adoptees having supportive parents and happy childhoods, and possibly “[facing] a tough, uncertain life if they hadn’t been adopted from China,” this sentiment was echoed frequently. 

Adoptees cited “a bevy of scandals in which Chinese agencies were found to be buying babies or outright kidnapping children to put up for international adoption in order to collect the lucrative fees” and “the complicated and often painful questions of identity and assimilation that Chinese adoptees face.” 

“Two things can be true at once,” as Hannah Jones, an adoptee from eastern China currently residing in Texas put it. “I can be grateful, and I can have a great, great relationship with my parents. But I can also still be critical of the systems that caused my adoption.”

There are millions of international adoptees living, working, and growing up in the United States, and there are even more entering the US every year. Adoptees of all cultural backgrounds may face challenges such as discrimination and struggles with cultural identity that are unique to them. 

Adoptees face higher rates of anxiety and depression than non-adoptees, and these risks are heightened in adoptees of races and nationalities different from their adoptive parents.

Many “struggled to connect and find community with fellow Chinese Americans,” feeling “[isolated and untethered] and estranged from [their] own identity, with no blueprint to follow.” Chinese adoptees are unlikely to reconnect to their past or biological families, since “child abandonment is illegal in China and subject to strict criminal punishment,” and no documentation is provided with adopted children. 

Many people “can still only see [Asian adoptees] as whitewashed, and not fully Asian.” Adoptees do not have community or family members to help them understand their experiences or lives, nor do they feel connected to the culture and language of their birth country.

Adoptees may be questioned by their teachers and peers as to why they are “a different race from [their] adoptive parents.” As one adoptee named Teigan put it, “The realization that I was not the same race as my parents or as most of those around me was a negative one, and all I wanted to do was draw as little attention to it as possible.” 

This belief and internalized racism can drive adoptees, as it drove Teigan, to “aim to make friends with lots of white people, and ensure [they are] never seen with too many other Asians” and not “want to learn Mandarin, learn about China, talk about China, or admit that [they are] Chinese.”

However, just like the rest of the AAPI community, Asian international adoptees experience anti-Asian racism as well. One Chinese adoptee, who grew up in Ontario, said that growing up, “boys made it clear that white girls were the most attractive; my peers made it clear that Chinese culture was weird and our food was gross.” 

The same adoptee faced challenges like “being taken unwillingly from [her] homeland; experiencing racism, racial fetishization, Sinophobia, and racialized misogyny; losing access to [her] language and culture, and then still being questioned and invalidated by others.”

Despite loving parents and happy childhoods, “[Asian adoptees] frequently encountered racism growing up, with no genuine connection to the country of their birth.” 

“I got called China Doll. I got called Ching Chong — the usual derogatory statements and sentiments by schoolyard elementary school bullies,” Hannah Johns, who grew up in rural Texas says.

 It is important to understand the lived experiences of Asian international adoptees, as well as the broader cultural and societal context surrounding them, in order to better understand the AAPI community.

China’s one-child policy resulted at least in part to the large number of international adoptees from China. This policy, until its official end at the beginning of 2016, was enforced through measures such as “contraception, fines, sanctions, intimidation and coercion, and abortion and sterilization.” 

Frequently, these measures were non-consensual. Additional children could also not be registered into China’s national household system, excluding them from many social services. 

Children were “said to have been picked up at train stations, markets, and roadsides, where they had been abandoned by families fearful of the ruthlessly enforced one-child policy.” They had no identification and there was no expectation that they would ever try to reconnect with their birth families in China.

It is important to note another factor relating to adoption from China in particular. Culturally, China has long prized male children above female ones. Sons inherit the family name and property, while daughters are expected to marry and leave the household. 

Consequently, among 78,257 children adopted into the US from China, 60% were girls. Furthermore, the adoption of many other children from Asia – particularly from China – has a dark side.

Due to China’s one-child policy, especially when it and the international adoption program were in effect, a trafficking market was created. It’s easy to see why. According to one website that helps parents adopt from abroad, it costs between $15,000 and $25,000 to adopt from China, including travel costs. There is money to be made.

The one-child policy is speculated to have “spurred human trafficking when China began its international adoption program and deprived domestic families of the ability to adopt.” While families were often told that the children they were adopting had been abandoned, “the money [needed to adopt a child] was used to pay traffickers who would bring in babies,” according to the 2019 documentary One Child Nation. One former trafficker, interviewed for the documentary, said “he was paid $200 for every infant he brought to an orphanage.”

In 2005, Chinese police in Hengyang (a city in China’s Hunan Province) flagged down a vehicle. Inside, they found “a cardboard box stashed in a luggage area in the back of the [bus], smelling of urine and feces.” Inside, there were four babies, only a few months old. Other boxes on the same bus contained a total of 12 other infants. Over the next few weeks, nearly 30 suspects were arrested, mostly from the Duan family – manual laborers who, in the early 2000s, “had become entrepreneurs, owners of a thriving business that trafficked babies.”

Adoption rates from Europe and America quickly exceeded the expectations of the new international adoption program. In 1992, the policy’s first year, 206 babies were adopted from abroad. By 2005, the number had risen to nearly 8,000. China had become the single largest source of internationally adopted children. The demand for Chinese children had exhausted the amount of orphans that could be adopted.

For orphanages, which needed the money to keep running, it was a disaster. Chinese orphanages are part of larger social welfare programs, which are institutions with a variety of responsibilities. Funding is limited. More babies were needed. The answer was traffickers, like the Duans.

 In their trial, evidence was presented of “300 babies sold to six orphanages, but the Duans later told journalists that the numbers were in the thousands and that the babies were sent to orphanages all over China.” The operation, described as professionally run, involved “receipts and invoices, ledgers indicating how much the orphanages had paid the traffickers.” It was a business, and the merchandise was humans.

Foreign money fueled a lucrative and growing “baby market” in China. One member of the Duan family said in an interview that “they started buying infants from a supplier in Guangdong province 600 miles away.” One orphanage director, interviewed by Marketplace, said that “she’s willing to pay $150 for a healthy baby girl.”

The Duans and many others argue that they gave the babies better lives, feeding and clothing them, before adopting them out to foreign countries where they could have new opportunities. The ones really at fault, they claim, is China’s government and its policies that forced families to resort to abandonment, orphanages to pay traffickers, and in general, allowed a trafficking industry to grow and flourish.

Whatever the case, Chinese international adoption is not a simple issue, and it is easy to see why many, including adoptees themselves, are happy that the program has come to an end.

In conclusion, it is important to learn about the lives and experiences of Asian international adoptees in the US. They are an often overlooked, but crucial part, of the AAPI community. The team at the AAPI Angle hopes that this article has helped to shed some measure of light on this part of our community.