The Chinese government says it is drafting plans for adoptions of children orphaned by the massive earthquake on May 12. However, perhaps surprisingly to Americans, not all Chinese are in favor of this.
This earthquake is being compared to the 1976 quake which killed over 240,000 people in Hepei Province. The quake is referred to as the “Tangshan Quake” for the area in which it was centered.
Su Yuopo, whom the Chinese paper “People’s Daily” identified as a “quake reconstruction specialist”, has studied orphans of the 1976 quake throughout the years. He told the People’s Daily that most of them preferred a special school or institution to being adopted.
“Children who live in foster families always feel uneasy,” he asserts. “They think they owe their foster families a great deal. When staying in an institution, however, all the children are equal and can support each other.”
The paper quotes one 39-year-old woman who lost her parents in the Tangshan Quake when she was seven years old. She was raised by an aunt and uncle, who she says “were very nice to me, even though they had three children themselves. But I always felt like an outsider.”
Of course, these answers reveal that these adoptions, at least, were very different from the Western idea of adoption. The use of the words “foster parents” implies substitute parents or caregivers of wards of the state. The concept of the family having three children “for themselves”(meaning their three biological children) also grates on the ears of Western adoptive parents, who consider all of our children, biological and adoptive, to be our own. As a parent of both a biological child and two adopted children, I can attest to this.
Dong Yuguo, who served as president of a government-run school that sheltered 148 Tangshan Quake orphans in Hebei Province, believes, “a special institution for these children, preferably in their home province, would help them feel closer to their dead parents and remind them that they are not alone.”
As of now, however, the government says it is drafting procedures for adoption of at least some of the quake orphans, and many Chinese have called local administrative affairs bureaus to express their interest.