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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Area / regional studies
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China's Hidden Children - Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy (Paperback)
Loot Price: R630
Discovery Miles 6 300
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China's Hidden Children - Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy (Paperback)
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In the thirty-five years since China instituted its One-Child
Policy, 120,000 children mostly girls have left China through
international adoption, including 85,000 to the United States. It's
generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China's
approach to population control, but there is also the underlying
belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the
One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for
a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full
story a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a
China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter. Johnson
spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish
their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the
1990s and early 2000s, and, with China's Hidden Children, she
paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a
daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always
fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the
constant threat of punishment for breaching the country's stringent
birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised
their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With
clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson
describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or
third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government
cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child,
strategies for surrendering children changed from arranging
adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret
placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment
in public places. In the twenty-first century, China's so-called
abandoned children have increasingly become "stolen" children, as
declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of
children available for adoption more vulnerable to child
trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally but
illegally adopted children and children hidden within their birth
families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted
children taken from parents and sent to orphanages. The image of
the "unwanted daughter" remains commonplace in Western conceptions
of China. With China's Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex
web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to
give one's child up for adoption and the profound negative impact
China's birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.
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