UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Children on the Margins: The Global Politics of Orphanage Care in Contemporary China Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4434c760 Author Wang, Leslie Kim Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Children on the Margins: The Global Politics of Orphanage Care in Contemporary China By Leslie Kim Wang A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Thomas B. Gold, Co-Chair Professor Barrie Thorne, Co-Chair Professor Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas Professor You-Tien Hsing Fall 2010 Abstract Children on the Margins: The Global Politics of Orphanage Care in China by Leslie Kim Wang Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology University of California, Berkeley Professor Thomas B. Gold, Co-Chair Professor Barrie Thorne, Co-Chair Since beginning its rapid transition to a market economy in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has sought to become internationally dominant. In order to develop human capital and labor power, it has implemented a range of ideologically-driven policies that have been geared towards improving the overall mental, moral and physical “quality” (suzhi) of the population. The current criteria for assessing the individual value of citizens have resulted in new lines of stratification being drawn among children. As a result, healthy rural daughters and special needs children in particular are now considered unworthy of intensive investment and face a higher likelihood of being abandoned to state care. However, in an ironic twist of globalization, stigmatized children who were once shut away in state-run orphanages have become major recipients of western aid and child-saving interventions as China continues to “open up” to the outside world. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two Chinese state orphanages that received financial and medical assistance from western non-governmental organizations, I consider the role that globalization is playing in the lives of abandoned youth. This is occurring in two main ways: by the exportation of healthy female children out of the country through transnational adoption and the importation of first-world ideologies and practices by foreigners who seek to improve care for the mostly male special needs youth who are left behind. Through interviews and participant observation with western volunteers and Chinese state caregivers, I demonstrate the ways in which defining the “best interests” of institutionalized children is a highly contested process that implicates international power dynamics and differential access to resources. I argue that foreign-Chinese collaborations in orphanages are complex processes of negotiation, conflict and compromise that highlight the socially-constructed and contextual nature of children’s social value. Moreover, these types of partnerships take place on constantly shifting political terrain, rendering them highly unstable and at times even counter-productive for those they seek to help. Ultimately, by bringing children who exist on the margins of society to the center of scholarly analysis, this research provides a new perspective on the human consequences of Chinese modernization in a globalized era. 1 To Jin Jin, Huan Cong, Le Qi and all of the children in China who have touched my life. I am humbled by your grace, resilience and extraordinary courage. i Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Children’s Changing Social Value in Globalizing China……………………………………………………………………………………..1 Global Debates over China’s Institutionalized Children…………………………….…4 Orphanage Care in China: Laying a Scholarly Foundation………………………….…6 Economically Useful and Emotionally Priceless: The Stratification of Children in the Reform Era…………………………………………………………………………….10 The History of the Chinese Child Welfare Regime……………………………………14 Fieldsites and Methods………………………………………………………………...16 The Chapters That Follow……………………………………………………………..17 Chapter 2: Chinese Modernization and the Creation of “Low Quality” Children…………………………………………………………………………………19 China’s Gendered Population Project: The Plight of the “Missing Girls”…………….21 Modernization Processes and the Marginalization of Special Needs Children………..32 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..38 Chapter 3: Reversal of Fortune: Adoption and the Heightened Social Value of Healthy Daughters……………………………………………………………………...41 From “Missing Girls” to Western Sweethearts………………………………………...43 Gender as an Advantage for Healthy Girls in Institutional Settings…………………...45 Chinese Preferences for Girls at the Yongping Orphanage……………………………50 The International and Domestic Implications of Chinese Adoption Laws…………….51 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..60 Chapter 4: The Consequences of Importing Western Childhoods into a Chinese Orphanage………………………………………………………………………………63 Working in the Tomorrow’s Children Special Care Unit……………………………...65 Western Involvement with Orphanages as a Sign of Modernity………………………70 Giving Children a Childhood: Global Ideologies in a Chinese Context……………….71 Cultural and Class-based Struggles over Children’s Best Interests……………………74 The Material Limitations of Unconditional Love……………………………………...79 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..85 Chapter 5: Contested Carework: Gendered Inequalities in a Transnational Context………………………………………………………………………………….88 Global Women in Local Care Settings………………………………………………..89 Fieldwork at the Yongping Orphanage………………………………………………..92 Routinized Care and Children as “Inmates”: Yongping as a Total Institution………..96 “Trailing Wives” in China: Gendered Spheres and Volunteer Work………………..102 Volunteering as a Flexible Way to “Do” Motherhood……………………………….107 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………....110 ii Chapter 6: Conclusion………………………………………………………………...112 Using Transnational Collaborations to Reconceptualize the Global/Local Divide…..114 Fieldsites Revisited…...………………………………………………………………116 Reflections and Implications…...……………………………………………………..118 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………...……119 iii List of Tables Table 2.1: Sex ratios of children by age in China, 1953-2000…………………………..24 Table 2.2: Sex ratio at birth from 1980-2000 and estimated number of sex-selective abortions of female fetuses…………………………………………………………..…..25 Table 2.3: Sex ratios of areas of China according to population regulations, based on the 2000 census..……………………………………………………………………..…..30 Table 2.4: 1990-2000 sex ratios by birth parity……………………………………….....31 Table 3.1: Adoptions from China, 1992-2009…………………………………………...45 Table 3.2: Total Number of Adoptions from China and Percentage to the U.S…………55 iv Chapter 1 Introduction: Children’s Changing Social Value in Globalizing China It was my first day of volunteering at the Yongping Orphanage near Beijing in the fall of 2006. I had been introduced to this institution by the “Helping Hands Organization,”1 a local group of western expatriate wives that provided financial resources and flexible volunteer labor to the small state-run facility. Entering the glass doors of the orphanage, my nostrils were overpowered by the odor of sour milk and dirty diapers. In front of me was the baby room, which housed about 10 mostly special needs infants and toddlers. A small boy with a fixed cleft lip repeatedly pounded his head against the metal bars of his crib. An autistic toddler wailed in the corner, his hands strapped behind his back with a piece of cloth. The only ayi (caregiver) in the room, a young Chinese woman in her early 20s, did not look up or acknowledge my presence. She was a flurry of movement, silently changing each child’s sopping diaper, one after the other in a row. “Lei!” (exhausted), she sighed to herself, blowing long wisps of hair out of her face. I observed Marjorie Lee, the Chinese-American founder of the organization, standing over several ayi who were seated on a couch. With a slight tone of desperation in her voice, she implored them in Mandarin, “I know you’re tired, but these children’s lives are in your hands. Please just do a little more for them!” Xiao Chen, the head caregiver, sat looking uncomfortable with deeply flushed cheeks and an irritated look in her eye. Later Xiao Chen told another Helping Hands volunteer, “Our only responsibility is to make sure that children have food and a place to sleep. If you have a problem with that, then you don’t have to come here anymore!” *** Several months later I began working as a full-time volunteer in another orphanage with the “Tomorrow’s Children” infant special care unit in central China. This unit was funded and managed by western evangelical Christians but operated on one floor of a large state-run orphanage. The western group cared for the institution’s most disabled and ill children either until they died or were nursed back to health and could be returned to the regular facility. One afternoon a Chinese doctor brought a terminally ill four-month old boy to the door; his parents had abandoned him at a local hospital. The baby had an enlarged liver, which caused continuous nausea and turned his skin and the whites of his eyes a dark shade of yellow. Cathy—the white British nurse in charge of the unit—took the frightened child to the gleaming examination room, cooing to him in soothing English. She carefully peeled off multiple layers of dirty clothing and the soiled cloth

Load more