Chinese Orphanage Gives Tour, Denies Abuse Claims

In February 1988, an abandoned boy was admitted to the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute.

At age 7, he was older than most of the foundlings dropped off at the doorstep of the city’s main orphanage, a former Catholic home for abandoned children that had been converted into a state institution by the Communists in 1949.

Doctors determined that the boy was deaf and mute and showed minor motor-coordination problems. Otherwise, he was fairly healthy. He weighed 64 pounds. The doctors gave him the name Jian Xun, using the family name the orphanage was assigning that month to abandoned children.

The boy flourished for a year in his new home, even gained weight. But three years later, on July 17, 1992, Jian Xun died.

The last recorded diagnosis was severe malnutrition. A clandestine photograph smuggled out of the hospital before the boy’s death showed his emaciated arms and legs tied to the metal frame of his bed. His head was wedged at an angle between the bars of the headboard. His fearful eyes, like those of a trapped baby rabbit, gazed up from his thin straw mattress.

To the administrators of the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute, Jian Xun, classified as “mentally deficient,” was an example of the kind of damaged human goods left for the orphanage to raise.

“Many of the children have been discarded by their parents and left in dustbins,” said Shi Derong, director of the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau, which administers the orphanage. “The police get them to us, but they are often in terrible condition. Many are severely handicapped.”

But according to Human Rights Watch, a New York-based international human rights watchdog organization, the dead boy represents an institutionalized system of neglect found in China’s state orphanages that has resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Using documents and case histories supplied by a former physician at the Shanghai institution, the human rights organization in a report of more than 300 pages detailed a pattern of neglect at the orphanage between 1988 and 1993. During that time, hundreds of severely retarded or disabled children were selected to die under a policy euphemistically entitled “summary resolution.”

According to the Human Rights Watch report, which uses government statistics to build its case, similar patterns of neglect--tied to China’s attempt to handle its massive overpopulation--exist in child care institutions across China.

Chinese officials strongly deny the allegations contained in the Human Rights Watch report. They accuse the group, which did not allow the Chinese government to see or respond to its allegations before the report was released, of conducting “a dark political plot.”

On Monday, in an effort to refute the charges, Shanghai officials permitted 20 foreign correspondents in China to tour the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute.

One of those conducting the tour was Han Weicheng, the former director of the orphanage accused in the report of orchestrating the policy of “summary resolution” and of personally abusing some of the children in the institution, including allegedly raping a young girl.

Han tearfully denied all of the charges, blaming them on the thwarted political ambitions of former orphanage physician Zhang Shuyun, whose smuggled hospital records were the basis of most of the more serious allegations.

Han, a specialist on the rehabilitation of children with cerebral palsy, said Zhang’s attack began in 1988, when she was frustrated in her attempt to become director of the orphanage. For the next five years, he said, she took her campaign to several levels of the Shanghai government, spurring at least three investigations into the orphanage.

At one point, Han was suspended from his job pending the result of an investigation. “She made accusations against me everywhere, even before the master of the Jade Buddha Temple, the honorary director of the institute.”

After Shanghai authorities cleared him of the charges, Han said, whistle-blower Zhang, a graduate of Beijing Medical University, fled to Hong Kong and continued her attack in Hong Kong newspapers--and now in the U.S. human rights community.

“I ask you,” he pleaded, “what about my human rights? Who will protect me?”

Despite his claims of being maligned by Zhang, Han confirmed other parts of the Human Rights Watch report, including the extremely high death rate. In 1989, during an extremely cold winter when the electricity in the orphanage failed, the mortality rate for the orphanage reached 19% of its population, or about 100 children.

Journalists made repeated but unsuccessful requests for a detailed year-by-year accounting of the mortality rate in the orphanage.

Han denied the neglect or mistreatment of Jian Xun, the deaf and mute child. “I have never allowed anyone to tie hands or feet to a bed,” Han said, examining a photograph of the bound child.

The Human Rights Watch report cited a doctor’s log instructing nurses to tie the child’s hands and feet to the bed “to prevent him from clutching his throat.”

Han had no explanation for how a child could arrive at the orphanage in relatively healthy condition and above-average weight, only to die four years later of malnutrition.

The orphanage is located near the Huangpu River in an older section of Shanghai. Its campus, with several tree-shaded gardens and courtyard playgrounds, is spread over several acres and uses buildings that date from before the 1949 revolution. Then, it was a Roman Catholic institution known as the Shanghai Hall of New and Universal Succor.

According to Shi, the Civil Affairs Bureau director, the orphanage is home to 500 children who are cared for by a staff of 320 employees, including 200 nurses, 42 other medical professionals and 23 teachers.

The orphanage wards and classrooms, viewed in several buildings, were clean, well-lighted and warm on Monday, despite the damp and cold Shanghai winter. The children appeared responsive and unafraid. Because of regular visits from foreigners in recent years, including parents seeking to adopt, the children barely looked up when the pack of journalists entered the room.

The school appeared well-supplied with toys and other items, many of which were donated by foreign charities. In one playroom, 4-year-old Xu Yao, who has been assigned to the orphanage while her father serves a prison term, deftly lifted wooden beads out of a tray with a set of chopsticks.

“The physical conditions of this place have gotten a lot better since 1993,” said Yan Chunhua, a child care worker who has been at the orphanage since 1975. Since 1992, the orphanage has generated substantial extra income to supplement its $800,000 annual budget from the state by charging “contribution” fees to foreign couples who adopt children at the orphanage.

Last year, said an orphanage official, 40 of its children were adopted by foreign couples, generating $120,000 in income for the institution. Across China, the adoption trade last year generated several million dollars in income for the state. At some orphanages, “contributions” by adopting parents exceed the state funding.

One result of the new money has been the refurbishing and cleaning up of some orphanages in the major cities where foreigners, mainly from North America, come to adopt.

The Human Rights Watch report caused one nonprofit U.S. agency that has arranged adoptions in China over the past two years to release a statement saying it had no knowledge of the types of abuses cited and had good experiences with Chinese orphanages and government officials.

“The report paints a picture that does not reflect our very positive experience with the orphanages and with foreign adoptions in China,” Janice Goldwater, executive director of Adoptions Together Inc. of Maryland, said in a statement released Sunday.

In its report, even the Human Rights Watch organization admits that “conditions for children living in the orphanage appear to have improved.”

However, the organization contends that the wards of neglected children--the so-called dying rooms for children deemed hopelessly disabled and therefore not adoptable--have been moved to another institution, the Shanghai No. 2 Social Welfare Institute, a two-hour ferry ride away on Chongming Island in the Yangtze River delta.

Officials denied allegations that infants were routinely being transferred to the Chongming facility, claiming that it is reserved for older children.

However, repeated requests from reporters to visit the Chongming Island facility were denied, with the explanation that there are some disabled patients at the institute who have families, and family permission would be necessary before a visit could be made.