Ed: In Daughters Of The Bamboo Grove (Random House, May 2025), Barbara Demick tells the story of two identical twins born in China but separated at birth out of fear of repurcussions under the one-child policy. Below, she focuses on the context of international adoption and child trafficking that was widespread in the 1990s and 2000s. Join us tonight at Asia Society in New York for the book launch.

On the afternoon of November 15, 2005, police acting on a tip flagged down a minibus coming off the expressway in Hengyang, the second-largest city of Hunan province. They followed their noses to a cardboard box stashed in a luggage area in the back of the bus and smelling of urine and feces. Inside were four very young babies, just a few months old. Listening for cries, they found other boxes containing a total of 12 infants. The babies were sent to a nearby hospital and the suspects were taken into custody on charges of human trafficking.

Over the next few weeks, the police set up dragnets around the highways and train station. They nabbed three more suspects on a train from southern China arriving at the Hengyang station. Another van was intercepted on the road. In all, 27 people were arrested, many of them related and going by the family name Duan. There were three siblings — Duan Yuelin, 37, and his younger sisters, Meilin and Zhilin — as well as their parents and various in-laws and cousins.

Upon questioning, police learned that the Duans came from the lowest rung of Chinese society — they had been chicken farmers, garbage pickers, nannies and porters. Then by the early 2000s, they had become entrepreneurs, owners of a thriving business that trafficked babies. The suspects freely admitted what they were doing; in fact, they were proud of it. They insisted that it was a legitimate enterprise because they were selling babies to social welfare institutions, which in turn ran orphanages. These institutions were run by the government. It had to be legal.

By opening up the country for international adoption, China was in effect acknowledging that the Communist Party had erred.

In 1991, China had quietly enacted a comprehensive adoption law that allowed foreigners to adopt Chinese children. Until then, adoption was available for only a handful of foreigners with family ties to China. But something needed to be done with the children who were piling up in the orphanages, sometimes three to a crib.

At the time, various Chinese reports put the number of abandoned children at 100,000 to 160,000 per year — largely due to the brutally enforced law that limited most families to one child. For the purposes of population control, Chinese policymakers had reasoned that it was pointless for these unregistered, over-quota children to remain in China, especially not in orphanages where they would be costly wards of the state. For a country obsessed with losing face, it was an embarrassing concession. By opening up the country for international adoption, China was in effect acknowledging that the Communist Party had erred.

Inside China, foreign adoption wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t publicized either. Orphanages were housed within larger social welfare institutions, which were discreetly tucked away in city outskirts and, sometimes misleadingly labeled as kindergartens. When adoptive parents — usually Caucasian — came to China to pick up their babies, they usually did so at hotels in nearby cities. They were discouraged from visiting the orphanages, since the presence of foreigners would attract stares and raise obvious questions.

On the other hand, Americans knew all about adopting from China. The program quickly exceeded expectations. In 1992, the first full year of the policy, 206 babies were adopted to the United States, according to State Department statistics; by 2005, the number had exploded to 7,906, making China the largest source of children adopted internationally, topping South Korea, which had dominated through the 1980s. Interest in Chinese adoption spread beyond the U.S. Soon Spaniards, Canadians, British, Dutch, French and Australians, among others, were enthusiastically lining up for Chinese girls.

China’s approach was perfectly tailored to meet the preferences of Western families. Adopting families usually wanted girls, not boys, believing that they would assimilate more easily in new environments, and some 95% of Chinese children offered for adoption were female, at least through the early 2000s. Chinese regulations favored older adoptive parents — at least 35 years old — which happened to fit the demographics of Western couples, who married later and often didn’t consider adoption until after failed attempts at in vitro fertilization. At least initially, the Chinese law allowed adoptive single parents, which opened a pathway for gay couples to adopt, although they couldn’t openly declare their sexual orientation.

The babies from China were less likely to have birth defects than other international adoptees. Chinese birth mothers sometimes had better prenatal health than their Western counterparts, since they came from the countryside, where women tended not to drink or smoke. Fetal alcohol syndrome was rare. Rates of malnutrition had dropped dramatically in China, so birth mothers were reasonably well-nourished but unlikely to suffer from obesity.

Chinese adoption looked systematic, predictable and relatively corruption-free. Although more than 400 social welfare institutions were participating in the adoption program, arrangements and money were handled in Beijing through the China Center for Adoption Affairs (later renamed the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption). The centralized bureaucracy appealed to parents navigating the bewildering process of adoption. And nobody with a heart could resist the satisfaction that came from rescuing a discarded child. As one adoption agency advertised:

China has a model adoption program which has been specifically praised by the U.S. Congress. In addition to having a large source of healthy infants, adoptions from China are often less expensive than from other countries, and the process is much more predictable and stable.

Word of mouth quickly circulated among prospective parents about how well these Chinese girls adapted to life in the U.S. Unlike the earlier generation of adoptees from Korea, who were often the only Asians in white Christian communities, the Chinese adoptees usually had company. A critical mass of Chinese adoptees ensured that the girls did not feel like outliers, especially in larger cities with ethnic Chinese communities. By the mid-1990s, Chinese babies had become the international adoptees of choice. New Yorkers joked about seeing so many Chinese girls in the strollers of New York City that people did a double take if the mother also appeared to be Chinese.

The girls, with their shiny black pigtails, were media darlings in the U.S. — photographed taking ballet lessons, wearing pretty velvet dresses as they attended performances of The Nutcracker, riding ponies, visiting Disneyland. Stories abounded about how Chinese adoptees excelled socially and academically. Celebrities boasted of their adoptee kin. “We have embraced her with a loyalty that is all the more tenacious for having not been preordained by biology,” the columnist Ellen Goodman wrote movingly of her adopted granddaughter. “Together, we have all learned about the globalization of love.” It was a feel-good story with excellent visuals: adorable little girls who had been rescued from the garbage heaps of China now living the good life in America or Europe.

Everybody wanted a Chinese daughter. Demand was soaring. But just when it seemed the supply of abandoned baby girls was inexhaustible, it wasn’t.

Nobody with a heart could resist the satisfaction that came from rescuing a discarded child.

By the turn of the new millennium, demographic, economic and social changes sweeping rural China made families more reluctant to give up their daughters. Young women who left the countryside to work in factories were making nearly as much money as men and often sending it home to their parents. They didn’t always quit work when they married. From 1980 to 2010, the rural share of China’s population dropped from 80% to under 50%, according to World Bank data.

Urbanization meant that people were living in smaller homes. In any case, rural income had risen enough that farmers could pay the fines. And if somebody really didn’t want a girl, they might have an (illegal) ultrasound and then abort. Fewer babies were being abandoned. China was running out of adoptable baby girls, just when demand was highest. “Supply chain problems,” we would call it in today’s terminology.

This was heartbreaking for the families overseas who were waiting to adopt. For the orphanages, it was a catastrophe. There was big money in adoption, and the orphanages had become dependent on it. Besides the basic adoption fees, which were handled in Beijing, adopting parents were required to make an additional off-the-books “donation” to the orphanage that had fostered their daughter. The fee was set at $3,000. The idea was to compensate the orphanage for the feeding and care of the baby. But the money couldn’t be tacked onto other fees, paid by wire or check. It had to be delivered in person in crisp new $100 bills. If it was an uncomfortably large sum for the mostly middle-class Western parents to carry with them in cash, stashed away in fanny packs or in tightly gripped briefcases, it was a veritable fortune in rural China.

All that cash injected a volatile new element of corruption into the system. Orphanage directors barely made $3,000 in an entire year, and it was no surprise that some got in trouble for misappropriating the money. One was charged with buying himself a Mercedes-Benz, which he claimed was necessary for escorting adoptive parents from abroad.

But in fairness, the orphanages really did need the money. In the Chinese administrative system, orphanages are part of larger organizations, known as Social Welfare Institutes. These institutes have a range of responsibilities that include caring for the disabled and elderly. They were in a bind; their obligations were growing, and their funding from national and local government was minimal. Those $3000 “donations” were what kept the system afloat.

They needed more babies.

China was running out of adoptable baby girls, just when demand was highest.

That’s where the child traffickers came in. The Duans’ story followed a familiar trajectory: rags to riches, riches to prison. At the start of the 1990s, the Duans were down on their luck. While the Chinese economy was roaring, lifting millions out of poverty, they remained in a ground-floor apartment with chipping paint in Changning, a township outside of Hengyang. Duan Yueneng, the oldest son, had cycled through various low-paying jobs at factories that hadn’t lasted long, in hard times falling back on scavenging scrap metal to recycle. “The only thing I hadn’t done was beg,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2010.

Their woes mounted. His wife killed herself after failing to give birth to a son. His two younger sisters had only primary school educations and couldn’t find work at all.

The Duans’ mother, Chen Zhijin, rescued her hapless adult children from penury. Chen was a tiny pixie of a woman with close-cropped hair that hugged her face like a tulip, and was illiterate to the point that she couldn’t even write her name. In 1993, she got a job as an ayi or “aunty,” a Chinese term for a female domestic worker, at an orphanage in her hometown. It was the lowest level of job, paying only one dollar a day, but she didn’t mind. Chen loved babies.

Enforcement of the one-child policy was at its most unforgiving at the time. By many accounts, it was not uncommon to find abandoned babies in the 1980s and early 1990s. “When it was dark, people would leave babies,” Chen told me. “Sometimes at the side of the road or in front of an orphanage.” They were sometimes left with a bag of sugar, thought by rural people to give a baby strength. By the time Chen found them, the babies were often crawling with ants, attracted to the sweet smell. It broke her heart. She couldn’t help but bring the babies to her home.

One girl she kept for six months, crying her eyes out when she finally decided it would be best to give up the girl to the orphanage. “You’re crying so much. You’d think that girl was your granddaughter,” her boss teased her.

At first, Chen had to plead with the orphanage to take in the babies, especially if they were weak, disabled or in need of medical attention. “We don’t have enough food or people to care for the babies. We can’t take any more,” the orphanage director chided her.

That attitude changed in the mid-1990s, when orphanages around Hunan began participating in the international-adoption program. The director, who had once been so dismissive, now welcomed her to his office and greeted her with ingratiating smiles. “Aunty. You’re such a good person. Bring me all the babies you can find,” the director instructed.

Chen soon became known around town as the kindly old lady who could safely deliver unwanted babies to the orphanage. She’d be contacted by an aunt or a grandmother, sometimes a man who claimed he was just “helping a friend.” There was still a social stigma to abandoning a baby, and it was against the law. Chen was a useful intermediary.

The orphanage reimbursed her expenses with a small tip, tucked discreetly into an envelope like a thank-you note. At first, it was a 50 yuan bill (roughly five dollars), and then 100 yuan. As abandoned babies became scarcer, the sums grew larger.

These were good deeds of the best kind: the kind that made money. What had been largely a charitable undertaking quickly morphed into a very profitable business. In 1999, Chen’s son-in-law (the husband of daughter Duan Meilin) got a job working on a chicken farm in Wuchuan, in the southeasternmost corner of Guangdong province. Guangdong is the manufacturing hub of southern China, which produces many of the world’s toys, electronics, Christmas ornaments and just about any export imaginable. Babies among them, it turns out. Perhaps because of the patriarchal culture of southern China and the large population of young, unmarried migrant workers, Guangdong seemed to produce more unwanted girl babies than other parts of China.

Living near the chicken farm was an older woman, Liang Guihong, like Chen, illiterate and fond of babies. She had been a garbage collector, and in this line of work, she often came across babies. She kept up to 20 at a time lined up on a queen-size bed with blankets or plastic sheeting underneath them. She didn’t have money for cribs or diapers.

For the Duan family, Liang’s baby nursery was a gold mine. At the time, Hunan had many orphanages that had been cleared by the government to handle international adoptions, but they didn’t have the goods. That is to say, the babies. And it was illegal to traffic the babies between provinces.

As one Hunan orphanage director, Wang Huachun, later told the police, according to court records: “Under our policies, we weren’t allowed to accept babies from other provinces. But in 2001, we started a service to allow foreigners to adopt babies. The fee we would receive was $3,000. Because there were not enough babies in the orphanage, I talked to my supervisor and was told yes, we can accept from other provinces.”

The orphanages were competing with one another for babies. The envelopes of cash handed to the Duans were getting ever thicker. If a baby was especially pretty and healthy, the traffickers might get as much as $600. Even after giving the old woman near the chicken farm her cut, they were making more money than they’d ever dreamed of.

The Duans rented a house of their own near the farm and set themselves up for a long-term business. They hired new staff and sought new sources of supply. They enlisted a midwife. They paid the elderly proprietor of a tea stall — where people often exchanged gossip — to tip them off about unwanted and abandoned babies. The various Duan siblings, cousins, in-laws and neighbors signed up. Many hands were needed to transport babies on the 500-mile train trip from Wuchuan up to Hunan province, where the orphanages needed more babies. One or two couriers would work together, usually women, who attracted less attention. A pair of traffickers could carry up to four babies, often putting them in cardboard boxes stashed under the train seats. Some couriers were later accused of sedating the babies to keep them quiet.

It wasn’t risk-free. On at least three occasions, the traffickers attracted the attention of railroad police and they were arrested. Once, in 2003, the three Duan siblings were arrested together and turned over to the police in Qidong County, another part of Hengyang. The head of the orphanage in Changning came to their defense, confirming that, yes, these people were in essence working for government employees, bringing babies to the state-run orphanage. The police did their job, traveling from Hunan to Changning to investigate the source of the babies. They determined that the babies were being sold to the orphanage, but that they hadn’t been kidnapped.

The Duan siblings spent a month in jail after this first arrest before being released. They decided then that selling babies had become too dangerous and that they ought to quit, but the orphanage directors convinced them to keep going. Business was booming. Duan Yueneng later recalled that his mobile phone rang constantly with new orders. The orphanage officials invited him to meals and bought him gifts of expensive liquor. “They couldn’t get enough babies,” Duan told me. “They kept calling.”

He couldn’t say no. Duan used to be a punk, a migrant worker in plastic sandals. Now he was a businessman wearing brand-name athletic shoes and a shiny black leather jacket. He paid for his father to renovate their apartment. He felt rich. Only later would he realize that the real money was going to the orphanages and what he was getting, as his father would put it, was like “the dregs of the tofu.”

When the Duans went on trial in 2006, their attorneys obtained a wealth of previously confidential documents from the orphanages, which eventually found their way to journalists. The secrets of the adoption business were spilled out to the public. In the trial, prosecutors were able to present evidence of 300 babies sold to six orphanages, but the Duans later told journalists that the numbers were in the thousands and that the babies were sent to orphanages all over China. It was a professionally run operation. There were receipts and invoices, ledgers indicating how much the orphanages had paid the traffickers. There were no euphemisms, simply “buyers” and “sellers” of babies with “single eyelid” or “small mouth.” Just like any other trade, except that the merchandise was human.

In the end, the Duans took the fall for everybody. Members of the Duan family were sentenced to up to 15 years in prison. The Chinese government was trying to contain the scandal and preserve the system, pinning all the blame on these lone “evil, greedy criminals,” as they were demonized in the state press.

The Duans later said they were just one family among many who were selling babies to the orphanages. They insisted that the real fault lay with a government that harshly penalized families for unlicensed births while failing to set up any legal mechanism for babies to be turned over to the orphanage.

“I would make sure those babies were safe. I would bathe them, and feed them,” said the mother, Chen, soon after she got out of prison. “You can judge for yourself: Was I a good or a bad person?”

The orphanages were competing with one another for babies. The envelopes of cash handed to the Duans were getting ever thicker.

It was true that the trafficking system worked for a while. Babies made it to the orphanages. The orphanages earned money, building hotels, old-age homes, playgrounds. The adoptive parents were thrilled with their daughters. One might say it was a win-win situation. Except that it was all illegal, in violation of international law. And that $3000 cash donation was in effect a bounty that incentivized a wave of kidnappings.

The cases were shocking. In 2004, a man jumped out of a van on a busy road in Dongyuan County, Guangdong province, and snatched a 16-month-old girl from the arms of an eight-year-old cousin walking along the side of the road. The owner of a teahouse in Chongqing walked out to the market in the summer of 2003 without realizing that his 25-month-old daughter had tried to follow him. When he returned to the tea shop and realized she was missing, he and his wife put up missing posters around the town, including at the gates of an orphanage. They got no response. The father asked to search the orphanage for his child but was refused entry. After a few weeks, his wife managed to sneak into the orphanage on the pretext of volunteering as a nanny and recognized her daughter. She had arrived just in time. The orphanage had already started the paperwork to send her out for adoption.

At times, Communist Party cadres were the culprit. From 2000, possibly earlier, officials from the Family Planning Agency — which handled enforcement of the one-child policy — started confiscating babies from families too poor to pay the fines for excess births. I visited one isolated village in Guizhou where people complained of officials sneaking in to look for diapers on clothes-lines to pick out possible targets. Near Shaoyang, in Hunan, officials took at least 16 babies and toddlers from their families. One of the twins I write about was grabbed by a posse of about ten men, who stormed a family home and overpowered an aunt who was babysitting the child.

The orphanages weren’t charged with direct involvement in these kidnappings. They were more like fences who didn’t question the origins of the stolen goods dropped at their doorstep. They disclaimed any responsibility. “We can only take care of the child. It is up to the public security bureau [police] to investigate if that child was really abandoned,” said Chen Ming, a former orphanage director from Hengyang. He was the only orphanage director who served any prison time. Investigators later said it was because he didn’t pay a bribe. ∎

Adapted from Daughters Of The Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins by Barbara Demick. Copyright © 2025 by Barbara Demick. Published on May 20, 2025 by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Header: Parents hold posters with information about their missing children after a second trial of Yu Huaying, a woman sentenced to death for trafficking children, in December 2024, Guiyang, China. (Qiao Qiming/VCG/AP)

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