Report Alleges Neglect Kills China Orphans

An international human rights organization has alleged that thousands of abandoned children die unnecessarily each year in Chinese state orphanages under a system of “malign neglect” tied to population-control policies and a booming adoption trade.

A new 331-page report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch cites government statistics to show that more than half of the children admitted to state orphanages ultimately die there, usually in their first year of life.

Moreover, the report claims, “there is compelling evidence that these astonishing death rates are the result of a deliberate policy to minimize China’s population of abandoned children, many of whom have been born in violation of the country’s family planning regulations.”

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The most dramatic material was supplied by Dr. Zhang Shuyun, a physician who worked from 1988 to 1993 at the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute, where she compiled dozens of case studies of infants who died of neglect at the orphanage, long promoted by the government as one of its model facilities.

After failing for several years in her efforts to get Shanghai government officials to take action against the orphanage management, Zhang clandestinely left China last year in search of international human rights organizations to present her case.

“I carried out [of China] 20 to 30 kilograms [44 to 66 pounds] of documentation,” Zhang said in a telephone interview from London.

The Chinese government immediately condemned the report.

“Human Rights Watch has been cooking up this sort of thing all along to influence public opinion and swindle the masses,” China’s governing State Council said in a statement. “This can only serve to expose their dark political plots and hostility toward the Chinese people. As a developing nation, China has been making great efforts and steadily improving the living conditions of the children at its orphanages.”

The government described Zhang as an unhappy employee who bore a grudge against the orphanage management.

In the statement from the State Council, Chinese officials also disputed the high mortality rates at the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute presented in the report.

“Some children were suffering from serious diseases when they entered the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Center; some were down to their last breath,” the council said in response to questions from foreign journalists. “After entering the institute, the children were actively treated, bringing the mortality rate of the institute down to about 4%. The alleged number of abnormal deaths of children in excess of 1,000 is rumormongering with ulterior motives.”

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The Human Rights Watch report, co-authored by Human Rights activist Robin Munro and freelance writer Jeff Rigsby, is the latest of several by foreign journalists and international human rights groups to describe China’s state orphanages as a Dickensian horror in which disabled infants or those not deemed suitable for adoption are left to die or starved to death by orphanage staff.

An article in September by German journalist Jurgen Kremb in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel described an orphanage in the northern city of Harbin as a “children’s gulag” where emaciated infants “doze in their own urine, some naked, some dressed in a dirty little jacket.”

China has consistently denied the allegations, in one instance accusing a British television network of fabricating film footage of an orphanage “dying room.”

The Human Rights Watch report, however, is the first attempt to link the neglect documented in individual orphanages to a broad government program to eliminate unwanted and unadoptable infants.

The adoptability factor is important; China in recent years has become a major source of children for foreign adoptive parents, including many in the United States.

Although China denies that it sells the children, most orphanages require a $3,000 “donation” to the institution, creating an economic incentive for the orphanage staff to groom and nurture some babies for adoption while neglecting others deemed unadoptable.

“China has family planning policies that only permit one child per family,” Zhang explained in the telephone interview, “so there are many female infants who are abandoned by their parents. From among these, they [orphanage staff] picked out a certain number of kids who were fairly good looking, who were fit for visitors to see and adopt, and in this way they made big profits. . . .

“There were kids dying from abuse and neglect every day, but there was a steady stream of new ones coming in.”

In detailed case studies of several hundred patients at the institute, Zhang gave numerous examples of cases in which infants who died of malnutrition were classified as having died of another condition, commonly “congenital maldevelopment of the brain.”

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A case in point involved Zeng Yuan, a girl born Oct. 25, 1991.

The report said Zeng was “admitted to the orphanage on Nov. 30, 1991, weighing a bouncing 4.5 kilograms [9.9 pounds] and reportedly well in all other important respects.

“However, she was marked down as a ‘monitor intelligence’ case. Three days later, implausibly enough, her physician recorded that she was suffering from ‘second-degree malnutrition.’ By Dec. 12, she was ‘listless,’ showed poor response to external stimuli and her subcutaneous fat layer had vanished and the shape of her intestines had become visible. The next day, she was diagnosed as suffering from ‘congenital maldevelopment of the brain.’ ”

For the next two weeks, there was a blank in her medical records.

When Zeng then died, her medical records cited “congenital maldevelopment of brain function” and “total circulatory failure.”

Ironically, Zhang’s campaign to reform the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute from within official channels was a case in which the system almost worked.

As she built her case against neglect of the unwanted or unmarketable children, Zhang won many allies in the orphanage, including members of the Communist Party.

As the group made its appeals to Shanghai officials, it also won the support of 14 members of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress, who wrote an appeal to the standing committee of the congress.

“At the beginning,” orphanage Director Han Weicheng said in a telephone interview, “lots of Shanghai people believed what she [Zhang] said. Later they found that they had been taken in.”

According to Zhang and her colleagues, the reform attempt eventually failed after Wu Bangguo, then the Shanghai Communist Party chief, ordered it halted because of the bad publicity it was bringing the city. Wu is now a member of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and one of the most powerful politicians in China.