China Fires 12 After Serious Violations of Adoption Regulations UPDATED

“Authorities in a city in Hunan province, where family planning officials had been accused of infant trafficking, said an investigation had found no evidence of such allegations.

However, the Shaoyang city government handed out punishments to 12 civil servants, explaining they were found in serious violation of Party discipline or administrative rules.

No further information on the violations was released.

The investigation, ordered by Zhou Qiang, Party chief of Hunan, followed a report in early May by Caixin Century magazine saying that nearly 20 infants in Shaoyang had been taken away by family planning officials between 2002 and 2005.

The report said officials had accused some families of giving birth to more than one child or of illegally adopting “abandoned” children, and forcibly took those infants away. China’s family planning regulations strictly forbid couples from having more than one child without permission.

Residents who claimed their children were taken away told Caixin Century that officials sold the babies to welfare centers for at least 1,000 yuan ($155) each.

The children were then labeled as orphans ready for adoption and some were taken overseas by foreign adoptive parents. The welfare centers would receive as much as $3,000 from overseas adopters, according to the report.

The report aroused nationwide attention from both the public and high-ranking provincial officials.

However, according to the investigation by local Party discipline and audit departments, no babies were seized or sold, Shaoyang’s information office said on Wednesday.

Of the 14 infants involved in the investigation, eight had been abandoned by their parents and later illegally adopted by local families. One was sent to an orphanage by unmarried biological parents, and the other five were in families that might have violated family planning regulations and cheated authorities by saying the children were “abandoned”, said the announcement.

The announcement did not say what later happened to the 14 children it had investigated.

It did say that no human trafficking was found in the overseas adoption process, which was in line with related international adoption regulations.

However, the investigation has not calmed concerns about the allegations.

“I’m totally suspicious about the results,” said Zhang Chen, a 29-year-old Beijing resident.

“The investigation took more than four months, but the facts are very clear. How could the local government take so long to probe the case? I’m wondering if somebody may want to hide something,” she added.

Ji Gang, director of the domestic adoption department of the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption, said in order to avert future cases like this, procedures and regulations concerning adoption should be made more transparent.

“That’s particularly true in the case of international adoption, which relies more on paper documents, and related departments should make sure of the source of the children for adoption,” he told China Daily on Thursday.

Stunning the entire country, the story also caused ripples abroad, particularly when the New York Times reported that many parents began to question whether their children adopted from China were snatched from birth parents.

According to the US Department of State, 64,043 Chinese children were adopted in the US between 1999 and 2010, far more than from any other country.”

City says no babies seized for adoption
[China Daily 9/30/11]

“After four months of investigation, authorities in Shaoyang, Hunan Province, have determined there was no child trafficking at a local family planning authority.

In May, media reports alleged staff members from local family-planning and civil affairs bureaus had sold children seized from families that surpassed the birth quota. The local government announced a probe into the case following national outcry after the report.

No proof of trafficking or illegal adoption at the welfare center was found.

Local officials announced the results Wednesday, according to a report by rednet.cn, a Hunan-based news portal.

But a total of 12 officials were dismissed from their positions for “negligence and handling work in a simplistic way,” the result said, without revealing their identities.

Wang Huaping, a vice director of the communications department of the Shaoyang Party Committee, declined to tell the Global Times who they are and what exactly happened.

Insiders told the people.com.cn, website of People’s Daily, that two dismissed are family-planning officials in Gaoping Township.

According to previous reports, local family-planning “enforcers” in Shaoyang had seized at least 20 children born after their parents had met their limit for children over the last decade. They were said to have taken them to a local child welfare center. The center then named all the seized children “Shao” and listed them as orphans available for adoption at a cost of $3,000.

Some of the children now live in the US, the Netherlands and Poland and have never met their Chinese parents since being adopted, said the report.

However, the investigation results show among 14 babies that were adopted between 2002 and 2005 from the center, eight were seized from families that had adopted them illegally. One of them, the result of an unwed couple, was voluntarily sent to the welfare center by the parents.

The other five were supposedly “abandoned” by their parents in an attempt to cover up their births and avoid a financial penalty.

However, Gaoping villager Zeng Youdong, father of one of the 14 babies, is skeptical of the police investigation.

As migrant workers in Chongqing, Zeng and his wife left one of their two-year-old twin daughters with his wife’s brother Yuan Zanhua. A year later, about 10 local family-planning officials came to Yuan’s home and took the daughter away, saying they could have the child back for a 10,000 yuan ($1,560) ransom they called a “fine.”

The daughter was then sent to a child welfare center because the family was unable to pay the “fine.” In 2003, Zeng went home, only to find out his daughter was in the US.

“When she was taken away, my brother-in-law told the officials he was bringing up the baby for us. She is not illegally adopted. And we have the economic means to raise her,” Zeng told the Global Times.

Without knowing a specific address for his daughter in the US, Zeng said he had no method to find her, only hoping that the media will do him a favor.

Calls to the welfare center went unanswered on Thursday.”
Probe finds no proof of child-trafficking
[Global Times 9/30/11 by Liu Meng]

Update: “In May this year, the Family Planning Department of Shaoyang City was accused of taking away infants by force over the past few years from dozens of families in order to meet the requirements of China’s one-child policy. The infants, placed in an orphanage, were then sold abroad in the name of adoption.

When exposed, the scandal shocked the public.

On Sept. 28, the investigation was finally published. Yet to the public’s outrage, the 12 officials involved were charged with no crimes, sanctioned instead by simply being expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and removed from their work functions in the Hunan province city offices.

What this means is that neither of the institutes involved in Shaoyang bear criminal liability; a serious tragedy that has stirred turmoil both inside and outside of China is a case where nobody is responsible.

The investigation concluded that Shaoyang Family Planning staff forcibly took infants away from their parents, and the orphanage profited from having arranged adoption for these children. Also, according to the investigation’s findings, the two public departments did not enter into collusion, and thus the accusation of infant trafficking was not justified.

According to previous reports, some of the adopted infants were not “abandoned babies” as the authority claimed, but the kidnapped biological children of the parents involved. This is why it was particularly shocking when the scandal was disclosed.

The survey concluded that the parents should bear the responsibility because they had initially hidden the blood relation. What lies behind this is a very cruel reality. Some of the parents who had more than one child, in order to avoid trouble with their local family planning bureaucrats, and to avoid paying the “social compensation fee,” often concealed the real blood ties of their children.

In other words, the means these desperate parents had employed to avoid the harsh punishment from the one-child policy is now used as the defense of these officials.

“Donations” from foreign parents

This rogue means of the authorities shirking their responsibility is also seen in the other conclusions of the report. For example, the report stated that there were no financial relations between the family planning office, the local Interior Ministry office, and the orphanage. According to the regulation concerning foreign adoption in China, and international practice, it’s legal for the Shaoyang orphanage to accept a donation from the foreign adoptive parents and adoptive organizations.

One can’t deny these facts. But again, another truth lies behind the excuses: the local officials kidnapped these infants to benefit from the “social compensation fees” and the potential donations that the orphanage could get from the foreigners. We have seen many media reports that “these fees had been a major financial resource of certain poor rural regions.”

The false “truth” of the official findings hardly reveal the whole truth. We need a true conclusion that can stand the test of time. But that’s precisely the reason why the survey tries to deny the truth.

Because the acts of these officials are too heinous and the nature of the scandal is so grave, that recognizing the facts will arouse public opinion and grab the attention of the international press. And indeed, at that point, just punishing a few Shaoyang officials won’t be enough to resolve the problem.

Bypassing the larger truth skirts the essence of the problem, avoiding the accountability of officials at an even higher level. But the tragedy remains that those parents have nowhere to pursue justice, and most important of all, have lost their children forever.”

China’s One-Child Policy Leads To Racket Of Fines, Kidnapping, Foreign Adoptions
[WorldCrunch 10/3/11 by Wei Yingjie]

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