China's hidden children : abandonment, adoption, and the human costs of the one-child policy / Kay Ann Johnson.
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.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780226352510
- ISBN: 022635251X
- Physical Description: xiii, 218 pages ; 23 cm
- Publisher: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Content descriptions
Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Formatted Contents Note: | Introduction: somebody's children -- Relinquishing daughters: from customary adoption to abandonment -- Adopting daughters and hiding out-of-plan children -- From "unwanted abandoned girls" to "stolen children": the circulation of out-of-plan children in the 2000s -- An emerging "traffic in children" -- Conclusion: the hidden human costs of the one-child policy. |
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Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Coatesville-Clay Twp PL - Coatesville | 362.709 (Text) | 78321000025784 | Adult Non-Fiction | Available | - |
Mooresville PL - Mooresville | 362.709 JOH (Text) | 37323005257152 | NONFIC | Available | - |
Plainfield-Guilford Twp PL - Plainfield | 362.7 Johnson (Text) | 31208912269737 | non-fiction | Available | - |
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Kay Ann Johnson is professor of Asian studies and political science at Hampshire College, where she also directs the Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment. She is the author of several books, including Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son.