[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 9 (Wednesday, January 24, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S341-S345]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          ORPHANAGES IN CHINA

  Mr. PELL. Mr. President, our attention should be drawn to a 
horrifying report issued this month by the respected human rights 
organization, Human Rights Watch/Asia, titled ``Death by Default: A 
Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages.'' The allegations 
raised in ``Death by Default'' are more than a little disturbing; they 
are shocking. Mr. President, I ask that the report's ``Summary and 
Recommendations'' be submitted for the Record.
  The report paints a grim picture of the lives of China's youngest, 
least fortunate citizens. With well-documented details from one 
institution--the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute--and publicly 
available statistics for orphanages nationwide provided by China's 
Ministry of Civil Affairs, the report indicates that orphans in most of 
China's state-run institutions are living in horrible conditions with 
little hope for survival. Statistics provided by the Ministry allow 
Human Rights Watch to conservatively estimate a national death rate in 
China's orphanages of 25 percent. Critics of the report charge that 
terrible conditions and high death rates are to be expected in a 
developing country because of a lack of adequate funding, but ``Death 
by Default'' again uses official documents to show otherwise. The 
report shows, for example, that from 1989 to 1992 employees' salaries 
at state-run orphanages nationally increased at close to twice the rate 
of expenditures for the children. The question does not seem to be 

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one of having funding, but one of how that funding is used.
  This report relies heavily on documents and pictures taken by a 
former doctor and a former inmate at the Shanghai Children's Welfare 
Institute for its most harrowing sections. It provides pictures of 
emaciated children and children tied to their beds, and stories of 
medical neglect, dying rooms, beatings and rapes by orphanage 
officials, and children carrying the corpses of other children to the 
orphanage's morgue. These nightmarish allegations are made worse by 
documented accounts of how the doctor and others tried in vain to raise 
the issue of conditions at the orphanage with city government 
officials. An investigation into the situation was apparently 
stonewalled and later stopped completely by senior officials. The 
report notes that conditions at the Shanghai Children's Welfare 
Institute have since improved remarkably and it is now open to 
visitors, even foreigners. But the report strongly indicates that the 
Shanghai No. 2 Social Welfare Institute, which is not open to the 
public, may be carrying on many of these same abuses.
  Mr. President, I have not visited either of these institutes in China 
and cannot personally vouch for the accuracy of ``Death by Default.'' 
But I can say that the evidence it presents to support its allegations 
is compelling enough for me to join Human Rights Watch/Asia in calling 
on government officials in Beijing to reopen the investigation into the 
Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute and to review conditions at 
state-run institutions nationally. I also urge the U.S. Embassy in 
Beijing to raise the issue of child welfare with Chinese Government 
officials at the highest levels. The U.S. Government cannot credibly 
claim to champion human rights issues globally if it ignores the brutal 
treatment of young children documented by this report.
  This is not the first public report on the state of China's 
orphanages. The British Broadcasting Corporation and other media 
organizations have looked at conditions in them before. But I want to 
commend Human Rights Watch/Asia for again bringing this serious matter 
to public attention with such a carefully researched document. I hope 
it is widely read and its recommendations taken in Beijing.
  There being no objection, the report was ordered to be printed in the 
Record, as follows:

Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages


                     I. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

                    China's Orphans and Human Rights

       In response to widespread criticism of its human rights 
     record, the Chinese government has frequently argued that the 
     international community places too much emphasis on civil and 
     political rights, while neglecting the more basic rights to 
     food, shelter, and subsistence--rights which China claims to 
     have secured for its citizens more effectively than some 
     democratic countries. In accordance with the country's post-
     1949 political tradition, China's leaders assert that 
     economic well-being forms the basis for the enjoyment of all 
     other rights, and that the protection of economic rights can 
     therefore justify restrictions on civil liberties.
       In some important respects, China's record in protecting 
     social and economic rights may serve as a model for the rest 
     of the developing world. Levels of well-being, as measured by 
     social indicators such as literacy and life expectancy, are 
     considerably higher in China than in other countries at 
     comparable stages of development, and in some cases higher 
     than those in much wealthier nations.
       But China's claim to guarantee the ``right to subsistence'' 
     conceals a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural 
     death--a world into which thousands of Chinese citizens 
     disappear each year. The victims are neither the political 
     activists nor the religious dissidents who dominate the 
     international debate over human rights in the People's 
     Republic; they are orphans and abandoned children in 
     custodial institutions run by China's Ministry of Civil 
     Affairs. This report documents the pattern of cruelty, abuse, 
     and malign neglect which has dominated child welfare work in 
     China since the early 1950s, and which now constitutes one of 
     the country's gravest human rights problems.
       Human Rights Watch/Asia has now pieced together at least a 
     fragmentary picture of conditions for abandoned children 
     throughout China, including staggering mortality rates for 
     infants in state institutions and the persistent failure of 
     official statistics to track the vast majority of orphans, 
     whose whereabouts and status are unknown.
       The evidence--largely official documents cited in detail 
     below--indicates that the likelihood of survival beyond one 
     year, for a newly admitted orphan in China's welfare 
     institutions nationwide, was less than 50 percent in 1989. 
     The documents also show that overall annual mortality at many 
     of China's orphanages is far higher than that documented in 
     any other country. In Romania in December 1989, for example, 
     when foreigners first visited the grim state orphanages 
     housing abandoned and handicapped children and were outraged 
     by what they found there, a representative of the France-
     based humanitarian group Medecins du Monde stated that the 
     1989 death rate from infectious disease and neglect was 40 
     percent, in one home that was particularly abusive. In the 
     Chinese provinces of Fujian, Shaanxi, Guangxi and Henan, 
     overall annual mortality among institutionalized orphans that 
     year ranged from 59.2 percent to 72.5 percent.
       When sustained over an extended period, moreover, any of 
     the above annual rates means far higher actual mortality. We 
     estimate that in China's best-known and most prestigious 
     orphanage, the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute, total 
     mortality in the late 1980s and early 1990s was probably 
     running as high as 90 percent; even official figures put the 
     annual deaths-to-admissions ratio at an appalling 77.6 
     percent in 1991, and partial figures indicate an increase in 
     1992. Neither institutional welfare policy nor the size of 
     the orphanage system have changed notably since then, while 
     the crisis of abandoned children continues unabated, due in 
     part to China's one-child policy. In the case of Shanghai, 
     there have been cosmetic improvements at the orphanage itself 
     since 1993, designed to encourage foreign adoption, but there 
     is evidence that many disabled infants and children are now 
     simply transferred to a facility outside the city, where 
     access for outsiders is extremely rare and where, according 
     to numerous reports received by Human Rights Watch/Asia, the 
     children are grossly mistreated.
       Unlike their Romanian counterparts, the management and 
     staff of China's orphanages cannot claim that their 
     shortcomings result from a lack of funding or from 
     inadequately paid employees. Dispelling a misconception 
     reflected in nearly all Western media coverage of the issue 
     to date, Human Rights Watch/Asia's research confirms that 
     many Chinese orphanages, including some recording death rates 
     among the worst in the country, appear to enjoy more than 
     sufficient budgets, including adequate wages, bonuses, and 
     other personnel-related costs. Expenses for children's food, 
     clothing, and other necessities, however, are extremely low 
     in institutions throughout the country.
       The crisis, both nationwide and in Shanghai, is known to 
     the top leadership of China's Ministry of Civil Affairs. 
     Conditions at the Shanghai orphanage are well known to the 
     local political elite and by members of the Politburo. But 
     the government reaction has been to maintain a facade of 
     normalcy, to punish dissenters who have sought to expose 
     abuses and, in certain crucial cases, to promote those 
     responsible for the abuses.

                          A Nationwide Crisis

       Abandonment of children surged in China during the 1980's, 
     in part due to the one-child population control policy and in 
     part due to policies restricting adoption by Chinese couples 
     who are not childless. The national statistics on mortality 
     cited in this report do not contain a gender breakdown, but 
     anecdotal and journalistic reporting on orphanages nationwide 
     reveals that the vast majority of children in orphanages are, 
     and consistently have been during the past decade, healthy 
     infant girls; that is, children without serious disabilities 
     who are abandoned because of traditional attitudes that value 
     boy children more highly. The financial and social problems 
     that these children are perceived to constitute are made more 
     acute by the fact that Chinese couples are not permitted to 
     adopt them, for the most part.
       Reports of inhumane conditions in Chinese orphanages have 
     attracted growing international concern in recent years, 
     prompted chiefly by the country's greater openness to foreign 
     press coverage and charitable work financed from abroad, as 
     well as a dramatic increase in overseas adoptions from the 
     People's Republic. Although some scattered allegations have 
     succeeded in bringing to light grave abuses against China's 
     orphans, there has been virtually no effort to place these 
     charges in context through systematic research on the 
     country's institutional welfare system.
       The Chinese government's own statistics reveal a situation 
     worse than even the most alarming Western media reports have 
     suggested. In 1989, the most recent year for which nationwide 
     figures are available, the majority of abandoned children 
     admitted to China's orphanages were dying in institutional 
     care. Many institutions, including some in major cities, 
     appeared to be operating as little more than assembly lines 
     for the elimination of unwanted orphans, with an annual 
     turnover of admissions and deaths far exceeding the number of 
     beds available.
       In any case, the majority of abandoned children in China 
     never reach the dubious security of a state-run orphanage. 
     Many are sent instead to general-purpose state institutions, 
     where they are confined indiscriminately with retarded, 
     disabled, elderly, and mentally disturbed adults. Although 
     the statistical evidence is unclear, the limited eyewitness 
     information available suggests that death rates among 
     children held in these facilities may be even higher than in 
     China's specialized orphanages.
       In addition, Chinese official records fail to account for 
     most of the country's abandoned 

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     infants and children, only a small proportion of whom are in any form 
     of acknowledged state care. The most recent figure provided 
     by the government for the country's orphan population, 
     100,000 seems implausibly low for a country with a total 
     population of 1.2 billion. Even if it were accurate, however, 
     the whereabouts of the great majority of China's orphans 
     would still be a complete mystery, leaving crucial questions 
     about the country's child welfare system unanswered and 
     suggesting that the real scope of the catastrophe that has 
     befallen China's unwanted children may be far larger than the 
     evidence in this report documents.

                         Evidence From Shanghai

       In addition to nationwide statistics on the condition of 
     China's institutionalized children, Human Rights Watch/Asia 
     has recently obtained a large quality of internal 
     documentation from one of the most prominent specialized 
     orphanages in the country, the Shanghai Children's Welfare 
     Institute. Based on these documents, which include medical 
     records and other official files recording the deaths of 
     hundreds of children, and on the testimony of direct 
     witnesses who left China in 1995, Human Rights Watch/Asia has 
     concluded that conditions at the Shanghai orphanage before 
     1993 were comparable to those at some of the worst children's 
     institutions in China, several of which have already been 
     exposed in journalistic accounts in the West. Since 1993, a 
     program of cosmetic ``reforms'' has transformed the Shanghai 
     Children's Welfare Institute into an international showcase 
     for China's social policies, while an administrative 
     reorganization of the city's welfare system has largely 
     concealed the continuing abuse of infants and children.
       Ironically, the Chinese government has praised Shanghai's 
     municipal orphanage extensively as a national model for the 
     care of abandoned and disabled children. In addition to 
     frequent flattering coverage in China's official media, the 
     Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute receives considerable 
     financial support from Chinese and international charities 
     and hosts a steady stream of private and official visitors. 
     Behind the institution's glossy official image, however, lies 
     a pattern of horrifying abuse. The brutal treatment of 
     orphans in Shanghai, which included deliberate starvation, 
     torture, and sexual assault, continued over a period of many 
     years and led to the unnatural deaths of well over 1,000 
     children between 1986 and 1992 alone. This campaign of 
     elimination could be kept secret through the complicity of 
     both higher- and lower-level staff, and because the city's 
     Bureau of Civil Affairs, responsible for the orphanage, also 
     runs the crematoria, where starved children's corpses were 
     disposed of with minimum oversight, often even before a death 
     certificate has been filled out by the attending physician. 
     In addition, officials of various Shanghai municipal agencies 
     knowingly suppressed evidence of child abuse at the 
     orphanage, persistently ignored the institute's high monthly 
     death figures, and in 1992, quashed an investigation into 
     orphanage practices.
       Conditions in the Shanghai orphanage came close to being 
     publicly exposed in the early 1990s as a result of pressure 
     by concerned orphanage employees, local journalists and 
     sympathetic Shanghai officials. By 1993, however, virtually 
     all the critical staff members were forced out of their 
     positions and silenced. The orphanage leadership was assisted 
     in its efforts to cover up the truth by three of the city's 
     top leaders: Wu Bangguo, Shanghai's Communist Party 
     secretary; Huang Ju, the city's mayor; and Xie Lijuan, deputy 
     mayor for health, education, and social welfare. Wu, Huang, 
     and Xie were fully informed of the abuses occurring at the 
     Children's Welfare Institute, but took no action to halt 
     them or to punish those responsible, acting instead to 
     shield senior management at the orphanage and to prevent 
     news of the abuses from reaching the public. Meanwhile, Wu 
     Bangguo and Huang Ju have risen to positions of national 
     prominence in China's ruling Politburo.
       The cosmetic changes at the Shanghai orphanage since 1993 
     have been engineered by Han Weicheng, its former director. 
     Although he was a major perpetrator of abuses there, Han was 
     promoted to an even more senior position within the municipal 
     welfare bureaucracy. At about the same time, the orphanage 
     was opened to visitors and large numbers of children from the 
     city's orphanage began to be transferred to another custodial 
     institution, the Shanghai No. 2 Social Welfare Institute. 
     Located on Chongming Island, a remote rural area north of 
     Shanghai, the No. 2 Social Welfare Institute, which is 
     ostensibly a home for severely retarded adults, has been 
     transformed since 1993 into a virtual dumping ground for 
     abandoned infants delivered to the orphanage. While the city 
     government has aggressively promoted the adoption of healthy 
     or mildly disabled orphans by visiting foreigners, reports 
     from visitors to the orphanage in 1995 indicate that infants 
     with more serious handicaps are generally diverted to the 
     Chongming Island institution within weeks or months of their 
     arrival. Human Rights Watch/Asia has not been able to 
     ascertain the mortality rates of children at the No. 2 Social 
     Welfare Institute, but has collected credible reports of 
     severe mistreatment and of staff impunity. Extreme secrecy 
     surrounds the functioning of the Chongming Island 
     institution, raising serious suspicions and fears as to the 
     likely fate of children transferred there.

                      Perversion of Medical Ethics

       Some Western observers have charged that the phenomenally 
     high death rates among China's abandoned children result from 
     neglect and lack of medical training on the part of orphanage 
     employees. Anecdotal evidence from foreign charity workers 
     and adoptive parents has painted a grim picture of decrepit 
     and poorly financed institutions run by demoralized and 
     unskilled nursing staff.
       However, medical records and testimony obtained by Human 
     Rights Watch/Asia show that deaths at the Shanghai orphanage 
     were in many cases deliberate and cruel. Child-care workers 
     reportedly selected unwanted infants and children for death 
     by intentional deprivation of food and water--a process known 
     among the workers as the ``summary resolution'' of childrens' 
     alleged medical problems. When an orphan chosen in this 
     manner was visibly on the point of death from starvation or 
     medical neglect, orphanage doctors were than asked to perform 
     medical ``consultations'' which served as a ritual marking 
     the child for subsequent termination of care, nutrition, and 
     other life-saving intervention. Deaths from acute 
     malnutrition were then, in many cases, falsely recorded as 
     having resulted from other causes, often entirely spurious or 
     irrelevant conditions such as ``mental deficiency'' and 
     ``cleft palate.''
       The vast majority of children's recorded at the Shanghai 
     orphanage thus resulted not from lack of access to medical 
     care but from something far more sinister: an apparently 
     systematic program of child elimination in which senior 
     medical staff played a central role. By making unfounded 
     diagnoses of mental retardation and other disorders, these 
     doctors have helped to disseminate the widespread belief--
     which appears to be quite inaccurate--that virtually all of 
     China's abandoned children are physically or mentally 
     handicapped. Worse, the Shanghai orphanage's medical staff 
     then used these supposed disabilities as a justification for 
     eliminating unwanted infants through starvation and medical 
     neglect. Such unconscionable behavior by doctors in China's 
     most advanced and cosmopolitan city points to an ethical 
     crisis of immense proportions in the country's medical 
     profession.
       This corruption of medical ethics reflects broader trends 
     in Chinese law and health policy, including recent debates in 
     the National People's Congress, the country's nominal 
     legislature, on legalizing euthanasia for the incapacitated 
     elderly. Official press reports indicate that the Chinese 
     government may also have given serious consideration to 
     allowing euthanasia for handicapped children, but has 
     declined to do so for fear of the international 
     repercussions. The medical evidence suggests, however, that 
     just such pseudo-eugenic practices may have been carried out 
     at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. At the very 
     least, the city's abandoned infants, even when not genuinely 
     disabled, became the victims of a policy of deliberate and 
     fatal neglect resulting in their wholesale death by default.
       Reports from the Shanghai orphanage also indicate that 
     medical staff there misused their authority in other ways. In 
     several cases, children who were accused of misbehavior or 
     were in a position to expose abuses at the orphanage were 
     falsely diagnosed as ``mentally ill'' and transferred to 
     psychiatric hospitals against their will; in one case, a 
     teenage girl named Chou Hui was imprisoned for four months to 
     prevent her from testifying that she had been raped by 
     orphanage director Han Weicheng. Many other children were 
     given powerful drugs without any apparent medical 
     justification, in order to control their behavior. Human 
     Rights Watch/Asia calls on the leaders of the Chinese medical 
     profession to denounce these gross ethical violations and to 
     take urgent steps to improve standards of medical ethics in 
     China.

                   The Need For A Worldwide Response

       The enormous loss of life occurring in China's orphanages 
     and other children's institutions calls for immediate action 
     by the international community. The United Nations and its 
     specialized agencies must take the lead in investigating 
     conditions in China's child welfare system and in bringing 
     these abuses to an end. Governments throughout the world must 
     make the treatment of China's abandoned children one of their 
     highest priorities as they continue to press for improvements 
     in the country's human rights record.
       The People's Republic of China ratified the United Nations 
     Convention on the Rights of the Child in December 1991, and 
     submitted its first implementation report to the U.N. 
     Committee on the Rights of the Child in 1994. The Chinese 
     government has thus submitted itself voluntarily to 
     international monitoring on the treatment of its minor 
     citizens. Nevertheless, the evidence compiled in this report 
     shows that China's policies towards abandoned infants and 
     children are in clear violation of many articles of the 
     convention. Human Rights Watch/Asia urges the Committee on 
     the Rights of the Child to place conditions in the Chinese 
     child welfare system at the top of its agenda for the coming 
     year. Specialized agencies working on children's issues in 
     China, such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) 
     and the World Health Organization, should also make a 
     thorough reform of the country's orphanage system their 
     highest priority. We further call for an immediate 
     investigation into abuses against institutionalized children 
     in China by the Special Rapporteur on 

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     Extrajudicial Executions, who investigates patterns of deliberate state 
     action resulting in death.
       Action by the United Nations and its agencies must be 
     accompanied by a strong response from national governments. 
     Bilateral pressure on China to ensure the rights of abandoned 
     infants and children should be give at least as high a 
     priority as demands to free political and religious detainees 
     or to end torture and ill-treatment in the country's prisons. 
     Protecting the lives of China's orphans must remain at the 
     top of the agenda in any future human rights dialogue with 
     the Chinese authorities.
       Despite the Chinese government's generally hostile attitude 
     towards Western human right organizations, Human Rights 
     Watch/Asia believes that many government and Communist Party 
     officials will recognize the need for immediate action to 
     resolve this humanitarian crisis. Other branches of the 
     Chinese government must hold the Ministry of Civil Affairs 
     and its officials fully accountable for the atrocities being 
     committed against China's orphans. Human Rights Watch/Asia 
     calls on the authorities to take immediate steps to bring an 
     end to these abuses and offers its full cooperation to the 
     Chinese authorities in formulating the necessary reforms. A 
     list of the organization's recommendations follows.

                      Ending Impunity in Shanghai

       Most Chinese citizens familiar only with official media 
     reports on the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute accept 
     the authorities' claim that conditions for the city's orphans 
     are exemplary. This report shows that the fate of most 
     abandoned children in Shanghai is, in fact, much the same as 
     elsewhere in China. Until 1993, the majority of infants 
     brought to the institute died there within a few months of 
     arrival, and the minority who survived to older childhood 
     were subject to brutal abuse and neglect.
       Indeed, the only genuinely unique feature of the Shanghai 
     orphanage appears to be its success since 1993 at generating 
     revenue for the municipal Civil Affairs Bureau. The city's 
     newly reorganized child welfare system now presents the 
     municipal orphanage as its acceptable public face, serving as 
     an advertisement for both charitable giving and profitable 
     foreign adoptions, and a ban on negative media coverage of 
     the Children's Welfare Institute has been in force since 
     1992.
       Human Rights Watch/Asia believes that the spectacular 
     financial success of the Shanghai policies is the real motive 
     behind official praise of the city's child welfare system as 
     a national model. We fear that efforts to duplicate the 
     Shanghai experience elsewhere in China are likely to further 
     worsen conditions for the country's abandoned children, and 
     to strengthen the vested interest of the Ministry of Civil 
     Affairs in obstructing genuine reforms.
       Any attempt to improve the treatment of Chinese orphans 
     must therefore begin by reopening the official investigation 
     into misconduct within the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau, 
     launched in 1991 and abruptly terminated the following year. 
     Above all, such an inquiry would seek the widest possible 
     publicity for any evidence of wrongdoing uncovered and would 
     pursue appropriate legal sanctions against bureau employees 
     found responsible for abusing children and causing avoidable 
     deaths.
       Such an inquiry will confront the fact that a number of 
     people associated directly or indirectly with abuses at the 
     Shanghai orphanage continue to hold positions of authority, 
     and many have since been promoted or otherwise risen in 
     status. The beneficiaries of this apparent impunity range 
     from ordinary staff members such as the child-care worker Xu 
     Shanzhen, certified as a ``model worker'' in early 1995 
     despite her brutal abuse of a retarded child, to the former 
     Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, Wu Bangguo, who 
     reportedly ordered media coverage of the scandal suppressed 
     and has since been appointed vice-premier of China.
       However, these obstacles make it all the more imperative 
     that swift action be taken at the most senior levels to break 
     the cycle of impunity. Human Rights Watch/Asia urges the 
     Chinese authorities to take the following immediate steps:
       (1) The highest government and Communist Party officials in 
     the country should publicly state their determination to 
     investigate unnatural deaths and abuse of children in welfare 
     institutions run by the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau.
       To demonstrate this commitment, the authorities should 
     immediately reopen the 1991 inquiry into conditions at the 
     Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. The leadership of the 
     new investigation should be entirely independent of both the 
     Shanghai municipal government and the Ministry of Civil 
     Affairs. Such an inquiry could be led by a specially 
     appointed committee of delegates to the National People's 
     Congress or the Chinese People's Political Consultative 
     Conference. Members of the committee should include medical 
     and legal professionals and should be drawn from throughout 
     the country.
       Pending the outcome of the investigation, all management 
     personnel at the institution should be suspended from their 
     positions and replaced by an independent leadership group, 
     preferably including a number of qualified medical doctors, 
     which would aid the authorities in gathering evidence about 
     conditions at the orphanage. Administrative authority over 
     the city's custodial welfare system should be temporarily 
     transferred from the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau to another 
     government department, possibly the Shanghai Public Health 
     Bureau.
       (2) The authorities should emphasize that institute staff 
     members implicated in criminal offenses against children, 
     including murder, rape, assault, sexual abuse, and financial 
     corruption, will be tried and punished according to Chinese 
     law. Criminal penalties should be applied as well to those 
     responsible for administrative violations, such as 
     falsification of medical records and unlawful disposal of 
     corpses, which constitute, among others, the crime of 
     ``dereliction of duty'' (duzhi zui) under China's Criminal 
     Code.
       In reopening the investigation, the authorities should 
     place particular emphasis on the practices of ``summary 
     resolution'' before 1993, whereby children were intentionally 
     killed through deprivation of food and medical care. Public 
     statements by senior officials should stress that all such 
     incidents, where they can be verified, will be prosecuted to 
     the full extent under Chinese law.
       (3) The scope of the investigation should be extended 
     beyond the original terms of the inquiry launched in 1991, 
     and should examine evidence of complicity by senior Shanghai 
     officials in shielding the management of the Children's 
     Welfare Institute. Criminal charges of ``dereliction of 
     duty'' should be brought against present and former city 
     officials who appear to have knowingly suppressed evidence of 
     child abuse at the orphanage. Among the officials so 
     implicated, in official documents cited in this report, are 
     Wu Bangguo, the former Communist Party secretary of Shanghai; 
     Huang Ju, Shanghai's former mayor; Xie Lijuan, the city's 
     deputy mayor, and Sun Jinfu, director of the Shanghai Civil 
     Affairs Bureau.
       (4) The investigation should also examine the legal 
     culpability of other official bodies in Shanghai which helped 
     to conceal misconduct within the Civil Affairs Bureau, in the 
     process implicating their own officials in possible criminal 
     acts. At a minimum, these include:
       The Shanghai Public Security Bureau, for allowing the 
     Children's Welfare Institute to disobey regulations governing 
     the reporting of unnatural deaths; for unlawfully detaining 
     and intimidating Chou Hui, the plaintiff in a rape case 
     against the then-director of the orphanage, Han Weicheng; and 
     for failing to investigate the orphanage employees accused of 
     assaulting Chen Dongxian, a driver at the Shanghai orphanage;
       The Shanghai Public Health Bureau, for failing to 
     investigate the extremely high monthly death figures reported 
     from the Children's Welfare Institute over a period of years;
       The Shanghai Supervision Bureau, for suppressing evidence 
     obtained during an eight-month-long inquiry that it carried 
     out into conditions at the children's Welfare Institute in 
     1991 and 1992.
       (5) The investigation should urgently examine the present 
     situation at the Shanghai No. 2 Social Welfare Institute, 
     including evidence of unlawful practices such as the 
     detention of mentally normal adults against their will, and, 
     the use of disciplinary measures constituting torture or ill-
     treatment. Special attention should also be paid to 
     conditions for infants and young children secretly 
     transferred to the Chongming Island institute since 1993, and 
     should seek to determine whether the killing of infants 
     through ``summary resolution'' or other similar methods is 
     presently occurring there. A criminal investigation should be 
     opened into the alleged rape and murder of a twenty-nine-
     year-old woman, named Guang Zi, at the facility in August 
     1991.
       (6) The municipal Propaganda Department should lift its 
     present ban on critical coverage of events at the Children's 
     Welfare Institute, and invite journalists familiar with 
     conditions at the orphanage to publish any information which 
     might assist the authorities in their investigation. The 
     progress of the official inquiry, including any resulting 
     criminal prosecutions, should be publicized without restraint 
     by local and national media.

                         Public Accountability

       Despite the urgent need to resolve these outstanding 
     problems in Shanghai, the above measures represent only the 
     first stage of what should be a nationwide campaign to 
     improve conditions for children in China's welfare 
     institutes. A critical factor in the success of any such 
     effort will be the Chinese government's willingness to expose 
     these institutions to intensive public scrutiny, not only 
     from concerned foreigners but, even more importantly, from 
     China's own citizens. The deceptive policy of ``openness'' 
     introduced by the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute in 
     1993 must be replaced by genuine transparency in order to 
     prevent future abuses from going undetected.
       Human Rights Watch/Asia believes the following measures are 
     likely to produce immediate and substantial improvements in 
     the quality of care for children in state custody, even 
     without fundamental reforms in management and law:
       (1) The Ministry of Civil Affairs should immediately 
     publish comprehensive statistics on the scale of China's 
     child abandonment problem. These should given detailed 
     figures on the number of abandoned infants and children 
     discovered in each Chinese province in recent years, as well 
     as the number of such children offered up for legal adoption, 
     fostered with private families, and placed in institutional 
     care.
     
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       The ministry should also publish a list of all custodial 
     institutions in China which care for unsupported minors, 
     including specialized orphanages, urban ``social welfare 
     institutes,'' and collectively run ``respecting-the-aged 
     homes'' in rural areas. The list should include the location 
     of each institution and its population on a specified date, 
     as well as all available statistics on child intake and 
     mortality rates in recent years. In future, such basic 
     population statistics for each institution should be 
     published on an annual basis.
       Since most abandoned infants and children in China are 
     delivered to the civil affairs authorities by local police 
     departments and hospitals, the Ministry of Public Security 
     and the Ministry of Public Health should begin compiling and 
     publishing regular statistics on child abandonment, including 
     the sex and estimated age of each child discovered. This will 
     provide an independent check on the accuracy of intake 
     figures submitted to the Ministry of Civil Affairs by 
     individual institutions, and will prevent the under-reporting 
     of intakes which allegedly took place in Shanghai during the 
     1980s.
       (2) The Ministry of Civil Affairs should make public its 
     policy on ``fostering'' orphans and abandoned children in 
     private family care, including details of the screening 
     process, if any, for prospective foster parents, and of 
     monitoring procedures aimed at ensuring that fostered 
     children are treated humanely.
       (3) The propaganda organs of the Communist Party should 
     publicize the severe problems in Shanghai's child welfare 
     system, and instruct the state-controlled media throughout 
     China to investigate conditions for children in welfare 
     institutions within their own area of coverage. The Ministry 
     of Civil Affairs should ensure that journalists participating 
     in these investigations receive full cooperation from 
     institute staff, including unrestricted access to all 
     children in each institution. Any abusive or negligent 
     conditions uncovered during the course of journalists' 
     inquiries should be publicly exposed and promptly remedied. 
     Objective reporting on conditions in China's child welfare 
     system should remain a priority indefinitely.
       Welfare institutes should permit unscheduled visits by 
     local residents, including both Chinese and foreign 
     nationals. Local civil affairs authorities should encourage 
     public involvement in the care of orphans, particularly by 
     qualified medical personnel.
       The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and established 
     private children's charities from overseas should be granted 
     access on a regular basis to all welfare institutions holding 
     minors.

                           Management Reforms

       Although the steps outlined above are likely to bring about 
     a sharp reduction of some of the worst abuses within the 
     child welfare system, basic changes in institutional 
     management are equally important in order to guarantee that 
     these initial improvements last. These include administrative 
     measures to strengthen the outside monitoring of children's 
     treatment, as well as improvements in the selection, training 
     and discipline of institute staff. Human Rights Watch/Asia 
     recommends that the Chinese authorities undertake the 
     following reforms:
       The leadership of the Ministry of Civil Affairs should 
     publicly state its commitment to improving conditions for 
     institutionalized children, and should emphasize that the 
     directors of welfare institutes and other management-level 
     staff will be evaluated primarily on their success in 
     reducing children's death rates to an absolute minimum. The 
     directors of welfare institutes where child mortality rates 
     appear to be higher than expected, given normal levels of 
     care, should be subject to investigation and dismissed if 
     mismanagement is shown to be a contributing factor.
       The Ministry of Civil Affairs should immediately begin 
     reorganizing its custodial welfare system to ensure that 
     minors and adults are kept in separate institutions. The use 
     of all-purpose ``social welfare institutes'' to warehouse 
     orphans and other incapacitated persons should be ended as 
     soon as practically possible.
       (3) The Ministry of Civil Affairs should cooperate with the 
     Ministry of Public Health and the Ministry of Public Security 
     to ensure that staff of welfare institutions strictly follow 
     all rules and other legal requirements regarding the 
     reporting of inmates' deaths. All deaths of minors in 
     institutional care should be treated as potentially 
     unnatural, and hence subject to reporting, investigation and 
     documentation requirements of the Public Security Bureau, as 
     well as independent autopsies by qualified medical personnel 
     affiliated with the Bureau of Public Health. Local health 
     bureaus which are notified of a significant number of 
     children's deaths in welfare institutions within their 
     jurisdiction should immediately call for an investigation by 
     local authorities.
       (4) The Ministry of Civil Affairs should promulgate strict 
     rules prohibiting the abuse of children in welfare 
     institutions, such as excessive corporal punishment, tying of 
     children's limbs, medically unjustified use of drugs to 
     control children's behavior, and all forms of paid or unpaid 
     child labor. The ministry should also promulgate a formal 
     disciplinary policy to be applied by institute management in 
     cases of misconduct by junior staff.
       (5) All staff at custodial welfare institutes should 
     undertake a period of formal training, aimed at impressing on 
     newly assigned employees that the protection of inmates' 
     well-being is of paramount importance. Ordinary child-care 
     workers should be trained in basic first-aid techniques, 
     particularly to respond to cases of choking and accidental 
     injuries, and in appropriate feeding methods for infants and 
     small children, especially those with disabilities.
       (6) Welfare institutes should be staffed with, or (where 
     personnel shortages cannot be resolved) be provided with full 
     and regular outside consultancy services by, an adequate 
     number of fully qualified medical professionals, including 
     specialists in pediatrics. Doctors whose medical educations 
     were interrupted, for example during the Cultural Revolution, 
     should not be employed as institute medical staff unless they 
     have completed the necessary remedial coursework.
       (7) The surgical repair of harelips, cleft palates and 
     other correctable birth defects should be one of the highest 
     medical priorities for welfare institutes and cooperating 
     local hospitals. Abandoned infants requiring these relatively 
     inexpensive procedures should receive them as soon as 
     medically advisable, and should be given individual attention 
     in the meantime to ensure that they remain adequately 
     nourished.
       (8) Infants and small children should not be classified as 
     ``mentally retarded'' until they are old enough to undergo 
     appropriate psychological tests. Training programs for child-
     care workers should emphasize the importance of individual 
     care, attention and stimulation for infants' normal mental 
     development.

                          Legislative Reforms

       The phenomenon of child abandonment is not unique to China, 
     and many of the factors which lead parents to abandon their 
     children are beyond the government's power to remedy, at 
     least in the short term. Rural poverty, prejudice against the 
     disabled, traditional attitudes towards female children, and 
     the pressures generated by the country's stringent population 
     policy all contribute to the problem. It must be stressed, 
     however, that whatever the reasons for the orphanhood or 
     abandonment, once such children are accepted into state care, 
     the government has an unshirkable duty to provide them with 
     adequate care and protection.
       For the foreseeable future, China will need to maintain a 
     system of state-run foster care for some orphans, 
     particularly the severely disabled. However, Human Rights 
     Watch/Asia believes that relatively minor legislative changes 
     would enable most children now living in welfare institutions 
     to be placed for adoption with Chinese families. An effective 
     domestic adoption program would eliminate the need for 
     institutional care for virtually all of China's abandoned 
     children.
       Human Rights Watch/Asia urges the Chinese authorities to 
     take the following steps:
       (1) China's ``Adoption Law'' and its implementing 
     regulations should be amended to abolish the legal 
     distinction between ``orphans'' and ``abandoned infants.'' 
     The provisions of the adoption law which prohibit adults 
     under age thirty-five and couples with children from adopting 
     abandoned infants without handicaps, and which prohibit 
     foster parents from adopting more than one abandoned child, 
     should be repealed.
       (2) The State Commission for Family Planning should issue 
     instructions to local family planning authorities, expressly 
     prohibiting any interference in the adopting of children from 
     welfare institutions.
       (3) The propaganda organs of the Communist Party should 
     publicize changes in the country's adoption policy through 
     the official media. Both the media and the State Commission 
     for Family Planning should actively promote the adoption of 
     orphans as an alternative for couples seeking larger families 
     than China's population policies allow.

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