Flying back to Beijing from Sichuan, I come across a jolly group of
newly minted parents in the Chengdu airport. It’s a familiar sight to anyone
who has traveled in China in the last decade or more, a bunch of middle-aged
westerners oohing over Chinese babies, some awkwardly cradling them, others chasing after
toddlers, their faces filled with a peculiar combination of joy, hope and
anxiety. This particular group were Spanish, all of them well into their
forties, a few over fifty. There were some mother-father couples but also a
few single mothers. Most were on the plumpish side and a few looked as
though they might technically be classified as obese (there are many
definitions of obesity of course, but in this case I’d go with the Chinese government’s rules, a Body Mass index over 40; up to 25 is considered okay. BMI, by the ways is calculated by taking your body weight in kilos and squaring it, then dividing that by your height in centimeters).
I give all this perhaps somewhat irrelevant sounding detail because under the new
rules issued by China¹s adoption bureau that will come into force in May
almost all those happy Iberians would likely have been disqualified. You can no longer be over
50, or obese or single, for a start. You can¹t have a criminal record either
and there are a slew of other disqualifications having to do with income and
previous marriages. On the face of it, none of the new rules seems
particularly outrageous or arbitrary. But people working in the system that
has brought 12,000 Chinese babies new homes in the U.S. in the last decade
are puzzled. There’s no doubt that if applied strictly, the new rules will
reduce adoptions sharply. The Chinese authorities who issued the new
regulations say they are being put in place because more and more Chinese
are adopting so there¹s no need to rely on overseas adoptions to find homes
for orphans. Unfortunately, even if domestic adoption rates are indeed rising, and there’s
a very strong cultural bias against the practice that will take time to overcome, there are certainly far more children out there needing care than the increase can possibly cope
with. In Henan Province alone, there are around 100,000 kids orphaned
after their parents contracted HIV when selling their blood. These children
will find it very hard to get a home because of their association with AIDS.
And there are also hundreds of thousands of other physically and mentally
handicapped children who face similar odds because of those same cultural
prejudices. These two groups are precisely those that foreign adopters are more
likely to be receptive to taking home, too. Watching the Spaniards playing
with their new charges, I confess that the sight of all those Caucasian
parents and bouncing Chinese babies on their laps still struck me once again as a
little odd, which is especially strange as I have an adopted Chinese son
myself. The fact the sight seemed somehow askew even to me made me wonder
what a fervently nationalist Chinese official might feel on viewing the same
scene. Indeed, I began to wonder whether the motivation for the new rules
might have something to do with national pride. After all, China sees itself
as an emerging superpower taking its rightful place on the global stage. It
must seem humiliating to some that foreigners are still coming in an taking
away Chinese children, a symbol perhaps of the country¹s inability to take
care of its own. Let¹s hope the rule change wasn’t spurred by a misplaced nationalism. The welfare of the children is much more important.