“Sheer fabrication,” said a staffer at the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute last week. Han Weicheng, the orphanage’s former director, told NEWSWEEK “a very detailed investigation [by Shanghai authorities] revealed that none of the charges were true.” He denounced as “crazy” his former subordinate, Zhang Shuyun, an orphanage doctor who led a failed campaign to expose the scandal in the early 1990s and ended up fleeing the country last year–armed with extensive documentation. The Chinese government, which scheduled a tour of the orphanage for foreign journalists on Jan. 8, denounced the charges as “completely baseless.”
The report also faced criticism from a new corner: U.S. adoption agencies and some of the thousands of parents who have brought healthy infants home from Chinese orphanages in the past few years. Many of them fear that the Chinese might now cut off the supply of children, out of pique. Others refuse to believe that the abuses are so widespread. “Where my baby came from was good,” insists Nancy Robertson, a New Yorker who adopted 20-month-old Grace a year ago from the Shanghai orphanage.
Last year China became the No. 1 source of babies for American parents adopting abroad. Thousands of foreigners have visited Chinese orphanages, and some from adoption agencies have visited dozens of times. Many describe conditions there as poor, with little heat, food, clothing or toys, but not abusive by any means: “Everything we hear and see now is that conditions are improving rapidly in orphanages,” says Susan Freivalds, executive director of Adoptive Families of America in Minneapolis.
According to Human Rights Watch/Asia, since foreigners began coming to China for adoptions the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute has cleaned up its act–sort of. The report alleges that more readily adoptable babies are kept in the main institute in downtown Shanghai, while children marked for death–those with a cleft palate, say–are taken to the “number two” institute outside the city on Chongming island, where foreigners don’t get invited.
The Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute is China’s showcase orphanage. In hundreds of others across the country, according to interviews by NEWSWEEK and other foreign news organizations, conditions can be horrific. A documentary last year by Britain’s Channel 4, “The Dying Rooms,” showed children tied to wooden toilets, sleeping in their own excrement; one subject, little Mei Ming (whose name means “No Name” in Chinese), expired after 10 days in a “dying room” in Guangdong, one of China’s richest provinces. An American missionary told NEWSWEEK about a boy toddler he befriended in an orphanage in southwest China in 1991. Chinese staff members said the boy was severely retarded. “He had a crippled leg, but otherwise he was healthy,” the missionary remembered. “I taught him to sing. Then I left town on business. And when I got hack, he was dead.”
More damning even than the anecdotal evidence from journalists, however, are the Chinese government’s own statistics. The Ministry of Civil Affairs, which runs China’s orphanages, published only one volume, in one year, that reveals the death rates among children in these institutions. They are simply staggering. Nationwide, in 1989, the ratio of deaths to new admissions exceeded 50 percent per year–far higher than the rates in Romanian orphanages that so shocked the world that same year. For example, Shaanxi province’s sole orphanage took in 232 children in 1989. Nineteen kids left the orphanage, and 210 died. That’s closer to a death camp than an orphanage; the death rate at Auschwitz was between 70 and 80 percent.
The vast majority of kids in Chinese orphanages are not orphans at all, but abandoned children. They’re almost always girls, victims of the government’s one-child-per-family policy and the traditional peasant preference for boys. According to a 1992 adoption law, only childless couples may adopt a healthy orphaned or abandoned baby, and they must be over 35 years old, whether they’re foreigners or Chinese. The guidelines are already more relaxed. But if the law were revised, surely thousands more children would find homes.
Charges of human-rights abuse have infuriated China’s leaders in the past. Will they close the adoption door in retaliation this time? American parents feel the $3,000 required “donation” to the Chinese is relatively modest, but it’s a fortune for an orphanage that may be spending less than 25 cents a day to sustain the child. The Chinese may not want to give up the money, no matter how furious Western allegations make them. Still, a few thousand American adoptions will hardly alleviate the woe of China’s legions of abandoned children. “Every single day my heart sings to see another baby get out of there,” says adoptive mother Robertson. But so many, many more are left behind.
