China's Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Cost of the One-Child Policy by Kay Ann Johnson (review)

The world in the twentieth century witnessed quite a few gargantuan social engineering projects, from forced massive collectivization in the Soviet Union, compulsory villagization in Africa, to planned economies in a large number of socialist countries following the Second World War. Aimed at transforming societies and modeling human lives, such projects demonstrated the might of the state power, not infrequently with terrifying horror and human tragedies of massive scales. A particular and extreme example was the birth control campaign in the People's Republic of China, the world's most populous country. In the context of a global fear of population explosion in the latter half of the century and with a trade-mark known as the one-child policy, China's birth control campaign came after most of its fertility decline had already been achieved. In three-and-half long decades, enforcement of the policy deprived Chinese families and individuals of their reproductive rights, resulted in tens of millions of sterilizations, IUD insertions, and induced abortions, almost all born by women, and forcefully altered the family and kin network of hundreds of millions of Chinese families. Kay Ann Johnson's book, China's Hidden Children, offers a penetrating political analysis of this social engineering project, interweaved with gut-wrenching stories of parents and children, who were the victims of this unprecedented and extreme birth control policy.

"Unintended consequences" is now commonly acknowledged wisdom and a widely adopted phrase in describing state actions among scholars of the social sciences. China's one-child policy had a few of its own. Of all the consequences anticipated at the time of the policy formulation in China, abandonment and adoption of children, of all places to the United States and Europe, was far from the wildest imagination. In two decades between the early 1990s and the late 2010s, over 120,000 children left China for international adoption, with the overwhelming majority, 85,000, ending up in the United States.

These large numbers of Chinese children ended up for international adoption as Johnson documents, nevertheless, represent only a very small fraction of the vast pool of children hidden in China, children who were hidden by their parents to avoid penalties from the authorities, and children who were denied official residential registration therefore do not "exist" in the official government statistics because they were born "out of the plan." Johnson's book examines the origin and the lives of this population, China's hidden children, and those affected. In separate chapters of the book, she documents and analyzes why and how Chinese parents "hid" their births, how and why other Chinese families tried to adopt these abandoned children, and how the many hidden children in China ended up being "stolen," with some in the human trafficking schemes. The study is supported by statistics and movingly written personal stories, all based on a research project spanning a decade and a half time.

Much more than just a heart-wrenching chronical of this chapter of the Chinese history, Johnson's book shines with her deep and insightful political analysis, an analysis revealing the complexities and contradictions of political power. She does so by debunking two prevailing misconceptions. First, the large number of hidden children and children who were abandoned and later adopted overseas, Johnson shows, are by no means "unintended" consequences of state policies. Rather, these children were products of explicit state policies. During the first decade of the one-child policy in the 1980s, Chinese couples initially often relied on relatives and friends to take in and to raise their "out of the plan" births, or births in violation of the state birth control policies. It is China's 1991 national adoption law, which made relinquishment of a child via adoption or other means illegal, that Chinese parents were forced to turn to more anonymous and...