Importing Western Childhoods into a Chinese State-Run Orphanage

Abstract

Since the early 1990s the Chinese government has allowed foreign humanitarian non-governmental organizations to aid children residing in official state-run orphanages. As one aspect of a larger research project on child abandonment and forms of orphanage care in contemporary China, this article examines an innovative state-civil society partnership of a Western infant special care unit housed within a large official state-run institution. The "Tomorrow's Children" special care unit, funded and managed by middle-class Western volunteers, uses First World medical practices and universalistic ideologies of children and childhood to care for the institution's most severely ill and disabled children. This article utilizes ethnographic methods to discuss conflicts over children's best interests that arise between Western volunteer employers and the local working-class and poor Chinese caregivers who are expected to implement the imported practices. I contend that disagreements over appropriate childcare hinge on cultural and class-based understandings of childhood and differential access to social and financial resources. This research grounds discussions of globalization in a detailed case study by exposing the tensions and negotiations that occur at the local level in processes of transnational exchange.

Letting Her Go: Western Adoptive Families’ Search and Reunion With Chinese Birth Parents

“…This lack of transparency results from Chinese government policies that not only regulate adoption but have also inadvertently contributed to the illegal relinquishment of certain children (Johnson, 2004;Smolin, 2011;Wang, 2010). We suggest that the ambiguity of children's origins may exacerbate feelings of loss and stimulate the desire to verify the exact circumstances by which they became available for adoption.…”

“…As the PRC began transitioning to a market economy in the late 1970s, central authorities also instituted the world's strictest family planning regulations, limiting couples to one, or sometimes two, children. In combination with long-standing cultural preferences for sons and a newly competitive economy, these changes led many rural parents to illegally abandon daughters and special needs offspring in order to ensure the birth of a healthy male heir (Wang, 2010). After sweeping family planning campaigns triggered the abandonment of overwhelming numbers of children to state orphanages, China began its international adoption program in 1992 (Johnson, Banghan, & Liyao, 1998).…”

Unequal Logics of Care

“…My participation with this group was part of a larger project that explored children's care in Chinese orphanages (Wang 2010a). At the beginning of my fieldwork, I sought to conduct research in institutions without foreign partnerships.…”

Making adoptable children: A case study of the child assessment programme for Chinese–US transnational adoptions

“…Moreover, the legal restrictions on domestic adoption in China, that adopters should be over 35 and childless, limited Chinese domestic adoptions in the 1990s (Johnson, ). The population control policy has been strictly implemented for almost 30 years, and it has dramatically driven down the birth rate, reduced family size, and shifted conceptions of the family and childcare in China (Greenhalgh, ; Wang, ).…”