In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, China became the world s largest supplier of healthy, predominantly female, children for international adoption--a veritable diaspora of 120,000 girls. We in the west have come to believe that this situation was the result of China s One-Child Policy, combined with a traditional Chinese cultural disdain for females and for adopting outside family bloodlines. While there is one truth in this account it does not nearly tell the whole story. Kay Ann Johnson should know. For the last twenty-five years she has been one of the few scholars who has done research on child abandonment and local adoption in China itself. She is also the mother of an adopted Chinese daughter. Her book paints a startlingly different picture. For Chinese parents, giving up their daughters is fraught with grief and remorse. Were it not for the punishments and threats of birth planning campaigns, they would have kept and raised the girls they gave birth to, regardless of how many daughters they had. Johnson presents parents stories about why and how they relinquished a second or third daughter in an often desperate effort to hide her birth from authorities to avoid punishment (including the threat of mandatory sterilization). As the Chinese government cracked down and increased its surveillance, the methods of relinquishing one child changed: from adopting-out a child to a known daughterless family among friends or extended kin, to secret abandonments at carefully chosen doorsteps of likely potential adopters, then finally to outright abandonment in public places. In the 21st century, the so called abandoned children of China have become stolen children. Declining fertility rates and increased seizures of illegally, but locally adopted children have made the dwindling numbers of relinquished children more vulnerable to increasing interregional child trafficking for official and unofficial adoption. Ironically, childless Chinese couples no longer can readily fin healthy young children locally to adopt. Ultimately, Johnson argues that birth planning policies and restrictive adoption regulations, including the perverse incentives these policies create, help drive current patterns of child trafficking and make its eradication difficult if not impossible."

In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child Policy, 120,000 children—mostly girls—have left China through international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.

For those who have adopted children from China this book is a must. It gives us a history easy to read about adoption both domestic and international in China.

In 1997 journalist Karin Evans walked into an orphanage in southern China and met her new daughter, a beautiful one-year-old baby girl. In this fateful moment Evans became part of a profound, increasingly common human drama that links abandoned Chinese girls with foreigners who have traveled many miles to complete their families. At once a compelling personal narrative and an evocative portrait of contemporary China, The Lost Daughters of China has also served as an invaluable guide for thousands of readers as they navigated the process of adopting from China. However, much has changed in terms of the Chinese government?s policies on adoption since this book was originally published and in this revised and updated edition Evans addresses these developments. Also new to this edition is a riveting chapter in which she describes her return to China in 2000 to adopt her second daughter who was nearly three at the time. Many of the first girls to be adopted from China are now in the teens (China only opened its doors to adoption in the 1990s), and this edition includes accounts of their experiences growing up in the US and, in some cases, of returning to China in search of their roots. Illuminating the real-life stories behind the statistics, The Lost Daughters of China is an unforgettable account of the red thread that winds form China?s orphanages to loving families around the globe.

In a future where the Population Police enforce the law limiting a family to only two children, Luke, an illegal third child, has lived all his twelve years in isolation and fear on his family's farm in this start to the Shadow Children series from Margaret Peterson Haddix. Luke has never been to school. He's never had a birthday party, or gone to a friend's house for an overnight. In fact, Luke has never had a friend. Luke is one of the shadow children, a third child forbidden by the Population Police. He's lived his entire life in hiding, and now, with a new housing development replacing the woods next to his family's farm, he is no longer even allowed to go outside. Then, one day Luke sees a girl's face in the window of a house where he knows two other children already live. Finally, he's met a shadow child like himself. Jen is willing to risk everything to come out of the shadows—does Luke dare to become involved in her dangerous plan? Can he afford not to?

Hidden Treasures is the true story of a young woman whose brief visit to Nanning, Guangxi, China in 1992 sparked the beginning of nearly two decades of work with abandoned babies in China. At age 29, Kit Ying Chan was sent to the Nanning state orphanage to conduct a needs assessment in response to alarming reports about the poor conditions in the local state orphanages as they struggled to cope with the widespread infant abandonment crisis that resulted from the country's one-child policy. What Kit Ying witnessed in that first visit was something she couldn't unseen or turn away from, calling her to leave her life in Hong Kong and move into the Nanning state orphanage.This book follows her remarkable journey from the first baby she picked up and nurtured back to health, to facilitating the first intercountry adoptions in Guangxi, to founding and leading Mother's Love, a home for abandoned babies, to modeling best practices and training child care workers in state orphanages across China, to the final closure of Mother's Love in 2011. Drawing from Kit Ying's own personal story, interviews with those involved with Mother's Love, and research on the infant abandonment crisis of the 1990s, it documents the deep and palpable scars left by this massive disaster on everyday Chinese citizens and the stories of transformation of the individuals who responded to the need. It is also a personal letter from Kit Ying to the 1,500+ young people who were adopted from Mother's Love and an accounting of this critical part of their history and identity.Hidden Treasures is the story of what happens when we choose to open our hearts to the call for help from one human to another.Kit Ying Chan is the Director of Services at Mother's Choice, overseeing the organization's services for children, youth, and families. After graduating from the University of Guelph with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Sociology, Kit Ying was hired as the first social worker at Mother's Choice in 1988. In 1992, she began her work with China's state orphanages, in response to the widespread baby abandonment during that time. In 1995, she founded "Guangxi-Hong Kong Mother's Love Orphanage", the first joint venture between Hong Kong and China, where she pioneered a professional model for residential child care services, introducing foster care and specialized care for children with special needs. Kit Ying returned to Hong Kong in 2011 and continues to pioneer in this field as she leads the team to provide life transforming services for clients of Mother's Choice.