Chinese adoptees say they feel conflicted after China announced an end to international adoptions

After China announced earlier this month that it was suspending international adoptions, Maze Felix, a 28-year-old adoptee from China, said she was struck by a striking mix of “anger, relief, grief and confusion – all of it.”

Felix, who uses “they/them” pronouns, is among more than 80,000 children adopted from China to the United States over the past three decades. They were adopted at age 2 by their parents in Cleveland. And they are not alone. From a sense of relief that abandoned children can now retain their birth culture, to mourning at the end of a program that was central to their own experiences, Chinese adoptees say the new policy has only made an already complicated experience even more complicated. more complex.

Grace Newton, an adoption researcher and author of the adoption blog Red Thread Broken, told NBC News that whether adoptees are successful or not, “there’s more to it than just that.”

“I feel like it’s a mismatch,” Newton said. “How could this huge thing that has impacted so many areas of our lives just end on a political level when it can never really end for us on a personal level?”

But given the diversity of opinions, it was ultimately important for many adoptees to find a connection between people with shared experiences, Newton argued.

“We are a group that will ‘die out,’” said Newton, herself adopted from China. “Therefore, it seems even more important to find each other and be in community with each other.”

At a press conference in early September, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning confirmed that international adoptions would no longer continue “in accordance with the spirit of relevant international agreements.” Exceptions, she added, will apply to foreigners adopting children or stepchildren of relatives in China up to the third degree of kinship.

This came after China approved international adoption in 1992, resulting in approximately 160,000 Chinese children being adopted to other countries, half of whom went to the United States. However, this adoption has slowed significantly over the last few years. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, China suspended adoptions completely and no children were adopted to the U.S. for the next two years. However, they have resumed and the US consulate has issued 16 visas for adoption from China between October 2022 and September 2023.

The slowdown in international adoptions coincides with the 2016 reversal of China’s one-child policy, which limited each Chinese family to one child to control population growth. The country has also faced a massive decline in birth rates in recent years, signaling the serious economic and political challenges it faces. In an attempt to correct course, in 2021 China turned to the “three-child policy.” Local authorities have announced incentives including tax breaks, longer maternity leave and housing subsidies. However, a report by the Beijing-based Yuwa Population Research Institute found that the subsidies were either insufficient or had simply not been implemented due to lack of funds. And for two years in a row, the country’s population has been steadily declining.

Katelyn Monaco, a 25-year-old adoptee who lives in Quincy, Massachusetts, said the new rule has sparked reflection on the one-child policy, which is a key backdrop to this development. These policies have resulted in tens of thousands of girls and children with disabilities ending up in the country’s welfare system. This was also the policy under which Monaco stated that she was adopted, and it was difficult “knowing that this is the end of people who may have similar experiences as me.”

However, Monaco said it also sees positives and is optimistic that the new change can provide children living in orphanages a chance to remain in the culture, country and heritage into which they were born. Often, adoptees mourn the separation they experience from their culture, she added. And people adopted into a family of another race can often feel ethnically isolated, as she said. Monaco noted that some adoptees also face legal challenges in securing citizenship, which adds an institutional layer to their identity struggles. Currently, under the Child Citizenship Act, adopted persons born on or before February 27, 1983 are not automatically granted citizenship.

“It was really difficult for me,” Monaco recalls. “Growing up with a single mom, even though she loved me and tried her best, she didn’t have the resources or knowledge to help me understand my Chinese heritage.”

For Feliks, one of the most concerning aspects of the new rule is its potential impact on the documentation of existing adoptions. Felix, a model, actor and sign language interpreter from Los Angeles, was adopted from Yangzhou, China. They said they had been conducting DNA tests for a long time in an attempt to access their old medical records, adoption papers and other documentation. With little clarity about the fate of these documents, Felix and many other Chinese adoptees expressed fears that any possibility of visits to orphanages, searches for biological parents and other connections with their home country would suddenly be severed.

“I longed for something that never really happened… a potential cultural connection or cultural reconnection,” Felix said. “I feel like my life is less valuable because they close the door on it.”

The Chinese government official did not explain in detail how documentation for adopted people would be handled.

Newton noted that in many cases the records were falsified or contained scant information. Still, there is individual and collective documentation “that we even existed in China,” she said.

“There is a huge fear that as a group we will potentially become just a footnote in history or not mentioned at all,” Newton said.

With the door to international adoption closed, Newton stressed that for those currently in Chinese welfare institutes to thrive in their country of birth, they also need more support. She said the money China once allocated to support international adoption should be used to strengthen social support for children and people with disabilities in the system. She added that more needs to be done to break the social stigma around disability in the country.

“The situation is really a bit more complicated for children with severe disabilities, especially with the rising cost of living in China,” Newton said. “Many people, even now that the one-child policy has ended, deliberately choose to have only one child. The social infrastructure must change so that families can afford to support a disabled child.”

While people reacted to the news differently, everyone who spoke to NBC News emphasized that adoptees should be central to discussions about changing the policy, although that didn’t happen often. Newton said adopted people are often seen as “eternal children” whose perspectives don’t need to be considered. Talking to adoptees in activist spaces can be uncomfortable for many people outside the adoption community when their religious or other commonly held beliefs are questioned. There is also a misconception that adoption is a “one-time event” rather than an experience processed in waves over a lifetime, Newton said.

“Some people may not think that we would have any thoughts or feelings about this because our adoption has already taken place,” Newton said of the new policy. “This should be the end for us.”