[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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