People who submitted their dossiers to China (really the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA)) two years ago are still waiting. This is tremendously frustrating and can even be frightening. While the reasons for the wait are not at all clear and there is much speculation, some possible reasons can be discerned or guessed at.
This document from the CCAA, dated October 31, 2007, offers a few glimpses into an other wise dark area (see
Priority rules in the review of inter-country adoption application dossiers by CCAA). Although the purpose of the document is to lay out new rules restricting the adoptive parents in international adoptions of children from China, it offers a rational not just for why the rules were changes, but also for the slow down of placement of children.
In a nutshell the documents states "[a]t present, the number of adoption application documents that the China Centre of Adoption Affairs (hereafter referred to as CCAA) receives is increasing very fast. However, the limited number of Chinese children available for inter-country adoption is far from being able to meet the demand of families from overseas. The CCAA maintains, in accordance with the principle of protecting the best interests of children in the
Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect of Inter-Country Adoption (hereafter referred to as Hague Adoption Convention)" and goes on to state the new requirements (which are, of course at this point in 2009, no longer new).
There is a subtext to this part of the document: that there are not a lot of children, or at least fewer than the world wide demand, available for international adoption. It is important to remember that the Chinese people adopt children 'in country' just like we do here in the US. These internal adoptions take precedence over international adoptions. There are Chinese couples who are unable to have children biologically, just like here.
I have no data on this and I intend to continue researching it, but I make the following speculations:
1) The number of internal Chinese adoptions has gone up recently as urban income has risen.
2) That the so called "one child" rule has produced a secondary effect of making it culturally undesirable in certain segments of Chinese society to have more than one child. By this I mean that people are now having only one child more from cultural pressure or assumptions that from the force of law.
3) If the above is true, it seems reasonable that there is also a segment of Chinese culture in which it is not unheard of to opt for adopting a child instead of having a child biologically.
If the above are true, and going under the assumption that the original document represents the real situation in China, there is no reason to expect the wait times to come down significantly.
As I mentioned above, I intend to continue researching this, so stay tuned.
Dave Basener
basener@asianbridgestaff.org
