Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. x, 190 pp. (Tables, figure.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0011-9.
China’s treatment of its children interests English-language readers for many different reasons. But as parents and non-parents alike know, judging how other people raise their children is fraught with peril. The open-mindedness that Leslie Wang demonstrates towards this thorny problem is one of the major strengths of her new book, Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China. Wang’s book tackles a vast array of issues regarding childcare in China and America: racial prejudice, disability, gender preference, domestic and international adoption, orphanage administration, class/religious influences on childcare practices, state interference in fertility management, orphan tourism, attitudes towards domestic labour, cultural imperialism, globalization, and more. If this list seems dizzying, it is: the book weaves through all of these topics across the world’s two most influential countries, tying some together, yet leaving the reader wondering why others are part of the story. By the end, Wang has presented us with a narrative experience that confirms her point that children “exist … at the juncture of local and global agendas” (23), but the central argument—and sometimes, even the central topic—remains elusive.
The book opens with an introduction to Emma and Henry, two disabled Chinese children who have been “outsourced” within China, giving the reader an immediate insight into some of the wrenching personal stories the author uses to tackle social, medical, and emotional dilemmas throughout the book. The chapter then expands to explore China’s recent economic and social development, including policies surrounding fertility planning (often known as the “one-child policy”), the scandal involving China’s orphanages sparked by the BBC’s 1990s documentary “The Dying Rooms,” changes in international adoption policies and their rationales, and the tension between the PRC Party-state’s responsibility for national social welfare and the desire of Western humanitarian NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) to “improve the lives of unwanted youth” (16). Here the unfortunately named concept of “outsourced intimacy” is introduced (“unfortunately,” because like 100 percent of those I unofficially polled, I initially assumed it referred to prostitution): “the process by which the Chinese state has outsourced the care of locally devalued children to Westerners who, using their own resources, remake them into global citizens” (4).
Chapter 2, “Survival of the Fittest,” reprises many of these macro-level themes, intertwining them with heartrending (and sometimes heartwarming) stories of individual babies. This chapter focuses on the concept of suzhi—“a set of quantifiable categories relating to the physical health, mental ability, and … productive power of individuals, groups and nations” (30)—currently trending within China about children’s potential contributions to China’s future. Wang compares these views with how other cultures have historically viewed the “social value of children” (28), making the critical point that even in the US, “as the U.S. economy developed and expanded, new ideologies of children” prevailed (28), radically changing the meaning and thus care of children. Yet she stymies her own valid argument by seeming to suggest that China’s “capitalist transformation” has achieved the point that cultural and childcare norms have already reached stasis (29). As a historian reviewing a sociologist’s work, I am gratified to see recognition of historical change, yet dismayed at the short time frame Wang allows for these processes.
Historical change is also discussed in chapter 3, “From Missing Girls to America’s Sweethearts,” which tackles the issue of gender bias in Chinese and American families. Wang reviews how Chinese girls became the focus for American and then Chinese parents seeking adoptions, leaving disabled children and healthy boys in China’s orphanages. While the absence of healthy girls in these institutions needs explanation (the author herself admits being “surprised to see boys everywhere” [60]), the digression into American adoptive parents’ “racialized preferences” (55–57)—while interesting—is the kind of departure that detracts from the main points of the book.
Chapters 4 and 5 delve into what Wang herself rightly characterizes elsewhere as her book’s primary contribution: a systematic study of daily life in Chinese state-run orphanages. These chapters present Wang’s personal insights as a volunteer participant-observer for two different Western charitable groups in China: the first an evangelical Christian organization running a special care unit of a Chinese orphanage, and the second a local grassroots group of affluent expatriate wives in Beijing working within a state-run orphanage. Here, Wang challenges us to understand “different logics of care” (78). She details how “affluent Western volunteers attempted to import a highly individualized middle-class approach to care that differed greatly from that of the local working-class Chinese caregivers” (78). The former she calls an “intensive” or “emotional” logic of care; the latter, a “pragmatic” or “custodial” logic (147–151). The different logics give rise to different ways of “raising the children,” and Wang does an admirable job of identifying and presenting both approaches sympathetically. She is less sympathetic to some Americans, however, particularly the ex-pat wives volunteering in Beijing, whom she calls “largely self serving” (151)—a criticism broadly true of any philanthropist, I would argue.
Chapter 6, “Waiting Children Finally Belong,” details the rise in special-needs adoptions in the US through the American evangelical church-based adoption movement (130). Here Wang also singles out certain actors for criticism. She argues that “the evangelical mission to pluck non-Western kids out of difficult circumstances one by one and place them into Western families has been bolstered by neo-liberal values that prioritize individual-level solutions over large-scale systemic change” (142), allowing Western Christians to “perform moral superiority and altruism” on disabled orphans (148). Although sympathetic to the original charge, the historian in me recognizes that social change will inevitably come, while meanwhile, lives are being saved regardless of the saviours’ motives. Wang might reserve some of her open-mindedness for these parents.
Wang’s book does a particularly good job of problematizing the work of well-meaning international NGOs. The futility of blindly imposing foreign ideals on actors not ready to accept them in environments unsuited to their acceptance comes through strongly in her book. Wang further nuances even this insight: The story of Dang Yan suffering from spina bifida reveals some of the unintended consequences of trying to forcefully export cultural imperatives, when her encounter with an emotional logic of care ends badly. Yet the ultimate outcome of Dang’s institutionalization (153) also shows that over time, change does occur, and happy endings are possible even for China’s disabled orphans. Neither a streamlined nor a particularly academic book, Outsourced Children offers a cross-culturally provocative smorgasbord introducing the politics surrounding China’s children.
Caroline Reeves
Harvard University Fairbank Center, Cambridge, USA