For nearly five years, Penelope carried a photograph of an American family around the Chinese orphanage she’d lived in since infancy. The Kentucky couple had promised to adopt her, preparing a room with a pink bed while waiting for the final paperwork.
Her chance for a life in America ended abruptly last week, when China’s Foreign Ministry shocked many by announcing overseas families can no longer adopt Chinese children. The ban applies to all pending applications, according to a US State Department spokesperson, who put the number of affected families at hundreds.
“I got the news via email while sitting in my car and just wept,” said Penelope’s prospective adoptive mother, Aimee Welch, 47. “The promises made to these children should be kept,” she added, noting that at nearly 11 years old, and with medical conditions, Penelope was an unlikely candidate for domestic adoption.
China’s move to undermine a rare area of cooperation between the world’s largest economies contrasts with President Xi Jinping’s push to bolster people-to-people exchanges, which he’s touted as the foundation of healthy US ties. A deepening chill between the two rival nations over trade and military spats is frustrating grassroots exchanges.
Washington has spearheaded a global campaign to block China’s access to high-end chips over national security concerns, while Beijing has launched an anti-spying campaign that casts a wide net of suspicion on foreigners. As relations have soured, the number of American students in China has fallen to 900 from 15,000 a decade ago.
“Some may view these international adoptions as a form of humiliation,” said Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “Such programs could damage China’s image while providing an opportunity for the US to project soft power in China.”
China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t explain its decision other than saying it was in line with international conventions. The country’s Ministry of Civil Affairs and central adoption authority didn’t immediately reply to faxed requests for comment on the changes.
Beijing’s decision followed those in recent years of countries including Kazakhstan, Russia and Ethiopia for reasons including the safety of children, integrity of the process and diplomatic tensions. But China’s lack of explanation — reflecting a general increase in opacity from the ruling Communist Party — has left many speculating about the government’s intentions.
“It truly fulfills a Chinese sense of assertiveness that ‘We can take care of our orphans well and we don’t need to send them to the West,’” said Guo Wu, associate professor of history at Allegheny College, noting how much wealthier China has become over the three decades since the adoptions formally began.
Rather than boosting national pride, however, the ban was met with disappointment on Chinese social media where many expressed concern for the impacted children.
“Will those who issued such a ban be willing to adopt?” one user on China’s X-like Weibo asked in a post that received some 9,000 likes. “Can they see those abandoned, poor kids in the orphanages?”
Myriam Avery, executive director at Agape Adoptions, a placement service in the state of Washington working with affected families, called on China to reconsider the decision.
“Historically, we have really kept politics out of child welfare,” she said. “Nobody can ever convince me that leaving a child in an orphanage is in their best interest if they have an opportunity to have a family.”
Demographics is also a consideration for leaders in Beijing. Foreign parents in past decades helped underfunded Chinese orphanages find homes for babies — mostly girls — abandoned by parents complying with the now-scrapped one-child policy.
That saw China send some 150,000 children abroad, with about half going to America, said Zhou Yun, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. With China’s birth rate hitting a record low last year, Beijing is now trying to encourage people to have more children.
China’s Population Shrinks Faster
Deaths rose while the number of births fell to a record low in 2023
Source: Chinese official data
That’s handing policymakers one of the world’s biggest demographic challenges, as the nation also faces the prospect of 30% of its population being age 60 or above by 2035. Demographic issues are a threat to China’s already slowing economy, as officials try to bolster the declining workforce.
Ending foreign adoption removes one of the last stains of an extreme birth control policy that left “deep scars on society,” said Feng Wang, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Exporting Chinese babies will keep reminding people in China of the horrific human consequences of that policy.”
While China made exceptions for foreigners adopting a child or stepchildren of blood relatives within three generations, others await clarification.
For Welch and her husband, the process began in 2019 after a previous adoption inspired them to take in an older child with special needs, but was initially halted by the pandemic.
With the bedroom for Penelope that’s been vacant so long still empty, Welch pleaded for Beijing to let already matched children be allowed to join the parents waiting for them.
“Uniting children with families is something that everyone should be able to agree on,” she said. “It’s a win-win for China, the US and the waiting children.”
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