The New Yorker:

A program that offered new lives to abandoned infants also increasingly depended on abuse, abduction, and trafficking.

By Barbara Demick

It was, to some, a beautiful thing. In 1992, the Chinese Communist Party decided to send children abroad for adoption. Child abandonment had surged in the preceding decade because of a law that restricted most families to one child and brutally penalized violators. Most of the abandoned children were newborn girls, discarded as a result of a long-standing patriarchal tradition in which sons care for their parents in old age. If families could have only one child, they wanted a boy.

Americans opened their arms to these tiny orphans. In 1992, the first full year of the policy, about two hundred Chinese babies were adopted by U.S. families. The phenomenon was trumpeted by a 1993 Times Magazine cover story: “How Li Sha, Abandoned in Wuhan, Became Hannah Porter, Embraced in Greenwich Village.” The Chinese girls, with their shiny black pigtails, became media darlings in the United States—photographed taking ballet lessons, attending performances of “The Nutcracker,” riding ponies, visiting Disneyland. Evangelicals launched nonprofits to raise money to help Christian families adopt as many children as they could afford. In 2005, almost eight thousand children were adopted from China, topping the number from South Korea, which had dominated international adoptions during the nineteen-eighties. Families from Spain, Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands, France, and Australia, among others, joined the queue for children from China.

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