My last two blogs discussed Kay Ann Johnson’s research on
abandonment and orphanage care in China and whether Chinese
parents desire to adopt girls. This blog continues to explore
domestic adoption within China. Johnson and her colleagues have
interviewed 1200 Chinese adoptive families. Many of these
interviews were in person, locating adoptive families by word of
mouth. Johnson says that the procedural paperwork,
discrimination, and expense (relative to income) faced by
parents adopting internationally is far less than those faced by
the Chinese families who adopted children in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. Chinese authorities wanted to forestall the
practice of trying to circumvent the family planning laws by
having a friend or relative “adopt” a daughter while the couple
tried again for a son. Sometimes these adoptions were real
adoptions in which the child assumed the same status in the
adoptive family as a birthchild, but other times these adoptions
were temporary arrangements where relatives kept the