According to the statistics released in a meeting on March 7 this year, by Vice-Minister of Ministry of Civil Affairs of China, Dou Yupei, there are about 5,000 orphans adopted by families every year while international adoption accounts for one fourth of these adoptions. China has 573,000 orphans and about 87 percent of them live in rural area.That's a much higher number of orphans than I've seen reported before. And there's another internal inconsistency in the article -- it says that in 2008, there were 3,909 children adopted to the U.S. alone. If international adoption only accounted for one-fourth of adoptions in China, the total number of children adopted would be closer to 16,000 than 5,000!
Sunday, June 7, 2009
China Daily: International Adoption Dwindling
Not news, but kind of a peculiar report in China Daily about dwindling international adoption in China. The article blames it on the new 2007 rules increasing financial standards for adoptive parents, despite the fact that the decline went into effect before the new rules did! Interesting figures reported, though:
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2 comments:
Annoying, isn't it? One wishes one could have the real figures once and for all. Before I adopted Sim, I looked into the number of orphans in China through Human Rights Watch. From the 1996 Death by Default report:
"In addition, Chinese official records fail to account for most of the country’s abandoned infants and children, only a small proportion of whom are in any form of acknowledged state care. The most recent figure provided by the government for the country’s orphan population, 100,000 seems implausibly low for a country with a total population of 1.2 billion. Even if it were accurate, however, the whereabouts of the great majority of China’s orphans would still be a complete mystery. . ."
So there's a 100,000 figure being quoted 12 years ago, when abandonment was still peaking and there was hardly any domestic adoption.
Now there are 500,000 orphans, after umpteen girls have been adopted, after the campaign to convince parents to keep girls has been underway for years and has caught on, and after domestic adoption rules have actually been loosened.
Go figure.
Estimates of the number of girls abandoned annually have also varied widely. Some of these estimates exceed both these figures substantially. It seems safe to say that one will simply never know.
Whoa. Huh? Wha? I need to go find a nice sturdy wall to bang my head on. The smoke and mirrors are maddening. I presume that however many children there are they are in the orphanages not qualified by the CCCAA for IA. Just haunting.
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