The Dying Rooms

The medical histories of the dead children of the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute, China's showcase orphanage, read like macabre experiments in human starvation:

Ke Yue, a girl, was admitted to the orphanage in November 1989, the month of her birth. Two and a half years later, on June 9, 1992, orphanage doctors recorded that she had developed "third–degree malnutrition," was "breathing in shallow gasps." On June 10 she was admitted to the medical ward, where she died later the same day. Two separate causes of death were diagnosed by her physician, Wu Junfeng: "severe malnutrition" and "congenital maldevelopment of brain."

Huo Qiu, a girl born in approximately February 1988, arrived at the orphanage on January 3, 1991, at the age of 3. One and a half years later, on June 16, 1992, she was diagnosed as suffering from "severe malnutrition" and "cerebral palsy." A week later, she was dead. According to her medical records, she died of the two illnesses just mentioned, together with, for good measure, "mental deficiency."

Ba Chong, a baby girl, was admitted to the orphanage on January 3, 1992, the day after her birth, weighing a respectable six pound. On June 17 she was admitted to the medical ward and diagnosed as suffering from "severe malnutrition" and "severe dehydration." Three days later she developed a head infection caused by a bed sore, and was recorded as being "listless." She died on June 30, at the age of six months. Death was noted in the medical records as having resulted from "malnutrition," "severe dehydration" and "phlegmona" (an uncontrolled form of subcutaneous necrotic infection).

Sun Zhu, a baby girl born in May 1989, was admitted to the orphanage at the age of one month. Medical staff recorded her general condition on arrival as "poor," although her weight was normal, and branded her as being "mentally defective." In late July, after a seven–week gap in the medical records, Sun was suddenly said to be suffering from third–degree malnutrition. Ten days later she was again diagnosed as being "mentally defective," and the physician suggested she might also have cerebral palsy, although the only indications were that she was "listless" and had "high muscular tension in all limbs," probably because she was starving. In any event, no medication or treatment was prescribed, and three days later Sun died, ostensibly of "congenital maldevelopment of brain."

Zeng Yuan, a baby girl born on October 25, 1991, was admitted to the orphanage on November 30, 1991 weighing a bouncing ten pounds, but was marked down as a "monitor intelligence" case. Three days later, implausibly enough, her physician recorded that she was suffering from "second–degree malnutrition." By December 12, she was "listless," showed "poor response to external stimuli," and her subcutaneous fat layer had vanished. The next day she was diagnosed as suffering from "congenital maldevelopment of brain." The doctor ordered the nursing staff to "take measures in accordance with the symptoms," followed as usual by a complete blank on the medical records. Two weeks later, Zeng died, ostensibly of "congenital maldevelopment of brain function" and "total circulatory failure."'

When these damning records were reprinted in a 394–page report by Human Rights Watch/Asia earlier this year, they were condemned as "sheer fabrication" by a staffer at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. Foreign journalists were hastily invited to tour the orphanage (which was carefully spruced up for the occasion), where they heard Han Weicheng, the former director of the orphanage under whose tenure the worst abuses were said to have occurred, assert that "a very detailed investigation revealed that none of the charges were true. "Completely baseless," echoed China's governing State Council.

Baseless these charges are not. There is mounting evidence that the practice of letting unwanted children die of starvation and neglect is not limited to Shanghai, but is found in orphanages nationwide. As early as 1993 the South China Morning Post published photos and an account of "dying rooms" at an orphanage in Nanning in Guangxi province. Staff members told the Hong Kong newspaper that 90 percent of the baby girls who arrived at the orphanage died there. When a British journalist paid a call on the orphanage three months later, conditions had not improved. He wrote:

The scene in the shabby upstairs room of what is little better than a squalid hovel is utterly heartbreaking. Nineteen newborn infants, crammed four and five to each rusty cot, lie sleeping on filthy mattresses, their tiny heads peeping out over torn blankets.... This is the place they call the Dying Room.. Mr Lin [Jiiie. the director of the orphanage] says the orphanage has its own doctor, but no one ever knew where to find him. So the babies die of problems which could easily be remedied . . . "Ten percent a month die at least. That's quite normal," he said matter–of–factly.

In 1995 a British television crew posing as American charity workers managed to gain access to several Chinese orphanages. They encountered scenes of Dickensian horror: infants suffering from extreme malnutrition, young children tied hand and foot to wooden toilets. and the like. They were even able to slip into the "dying room" of one Guangdong orphanage, where they found a weak and emaciated little girl, Mei Ming, who had been abandoned there by the staff a week earlier. Mei Ming--whose name means "No Name" in Chinese--expired three days after their visit, as they were later able to confirm by telephone. The documentary which resulted, called "The Dying Rooms," aired on Britain's Channel 4 and was later shown in the US, in somewhat abbreviated form, on "Eye–to–Eye with Connie Chung."

An article in September 1995 by German journalist Jurgen Kremb in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel described similar conditions in a Harbin orphanage in the far Northeast of China. Kremb called this institution a "Kindergulag" (children's gulag) where the children are:

... like discarded, abandoned human garbage, their hands raven–black with dirt, their faces smeared with leftover food, snot, and excrement, their small bodies strangely twisted.... [In the dying room] handicapped small bodies, some just skin and bones . . . doze in their own urine, some naked, some dressed in a dirty little jacket.... Under a bed in the next room: a small bundle of rags. "Dead," says the graceful Guo Ymg, the l4-year old girl in charge. Last night the infant, whose name no one knows, died. The older children have wrapped the body in a couple of dirty cloths, which serve as a shroud. They then shoved the dead baby under the bed, where it stays until the staff get around to removing the corpse. On weekends that can take two or three days.

Anecdotal evidence abounds. An American missionary befriended a boy toddler in an orphanage in southwest China. Chinese staff members had stigmatized the boy as "mentally defective," but the missionary disagrees. "He had a crippled leg, but otherwise he was healthy," the missionary maintains. "I taught him to sing. Then I left town on business. And when I got back. he was dead."

On a visit to Hong Kong in June 1994, a local social worker showed the author pictures of dead and dying infants which she had taken in the "dying room" of an another orphanage in southwest China. This eyewitness recounted how baby girls were simply cast aside at the first sign of weakness to die a slow and painful death by dehydration and malnutrition, suggesting that this was how the orphanage staff coped with the large numbers of abandoned baby girls produced by the one–child policy.

The most explosive charge leveled by the Human Rights Watch/Asia report is that the neglect which has been documented in a dozen individual orphanages is neither uncommon nor benign. but rather is universal and deliberate. The reason that conditions in China's orphanages are so appalling, the authors claim, is that there is a broad government program aimed at eliminating unwanted infants of all kinds, but particularly females.

The introduction of the one–child policy in China 15 years ago has been a disaster for girls. Couples desperate to have a son to support them in old age--according to Chinese custom daughters go to live with their husband's families after marriage--have gone to extreme lengths to ensure that their only legally permitted child be the right sex. Female fetuses are selectively aborted, while newborn baby girls fall victim to infanticide. Those infant girls who are merely abandoned, rather than killed in utero or after birth, must be considered fortunate. The rigid application of the one–child policy even leads parents to cast aside older daughters upon the arrival of a son, and to abandon the earlier–born handicapped child for a later–born healthy one.

In dynastic times peasants left their children to the mercy of strangers because they had nothing to feed them. But living standards have radically improved over the last 15 years of economic reform, with double–digit growth in the gross national product of late. The current wave of child abandonment is driven by political imperatives, not economic necessity. From time to time this comes through loud and clear, as in the note that was pinned to one foundling. It read:

Kind–hearted people, we are abandoning our child not because we cannot care for her, but because of the official one–child policy. Dear daughter. we do not have bad hearts. We couldn't keep you. Friendly people who take her up. we cannot repay the debt in this life. But perhaps in the next life.

Of the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of girls abandoned each year, many die of exposure. Others are taken home by "friendly people" who are willing to risk the wrath of the population-control offcials. Even so, China's orphanages are filled to the bursting with female newborns and toddlers, with dozens more arriving each month. Abandoned girls are said to account for over 90 percent of the inmate populations of Chinese orphanages. At the main orphanage in Wuhan, for instance, researcher Kay Johnson reports that for the four–year period from 1988 to 1992 over "90+ percent" of the inmates were girls. And still the foundlings keep coming in an endless stream.

This influx of baby girls, of course, puts an enormous strain on the resources of China's state–run orphanages. But while shortages of staff or medical supplies might lead to moderately increased infant mortality, it cannot account for annual death rates of 90 percent or more among new admissions. Nor can it account for the deliberate, even malicious, way these helpless infants are condemned to die by starvation and dehydration. The origins of the practice of death by malign neglect lie, as do so many things in China, in the politics of one–party dictatorship.

The huge numbers of abandoned baby girls constitute a massive indictment of the one–child policy, which was imposed on the Chinese people fifteen years ago by Communist patriarch Deng Xiaoping. Their piteous cries give the lie to the Party's claim that cases of female abandonment are rare. Indeed, their very existence is seen as an embarrassment, even an insult, to senior Party leaders. From the point of view of Party functionaries, including those who run China's orphanages, it would have been better if they had never been born. To deny their existence, a "zero population growth" policy has been established in China's orphanages, under which inmate populations are kept stable through deliberate attrition.

The politics of the one–child policy have thus totally perverted the purpose of China's so–called "child welfare institutes." Orphanages have become adjuncts of the population-control program: killing sites where surplus babies are selectively targeted for elimination. Infant girls who survive the earlier gauntlet of sex-selective abortion, female infanticide and abandonment now face a further risk: they may be left to die of hunger and thirst in the very institutions where they were taken for sanctuary.

[AUTHOR ID] Steven W. Mosher, who first exposed the brutality of China’s one-child policy, now works with Human Life International. His article is adapted from a report which first appeared in that organization’s newsletter.

Harry Wu, a Chinese native and naturalized US citizen, gained international prominence in 1995 when he was arrested by the Chinese government, charged with "stealing state secrets," and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was released and returnd to the United States only after a storm of protest from international human-rights groups, and a series of stern formal protests from Washington.

The son of a Shanghai banker, Wu was first arrested in 1960 for lodging public complaints against the government. In his memoir, Bitter Winds, he describes a harrowing 18-year confinement that included torture, forced labor, and improper nutrition. (Born a Catholic, Wu confessed in that memoir that his prison experience made it difficult for him to maintain a charitable attitude toward the political leaders whose regime he was fighting.) Upon his release he made his way to the United States, where he founded the Laogai Research Foundation to call public attention to the Chinese prison camps. He was returning to China to conduct research on the laogai, carrying a valid US passport, when he was arrested in 1995.

Although many Western observers cherish the hope that expanding economic contacts with the outside world will gradually lead to greater human freedom in China, Wu disputes that assumption. In a March 1996 address to the Independent Institute in San Francisco, he cautioned against the widespread belief that "Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms are the first rays of freedom shining on China's horizon." That economic liberalization, he contended, currently works to the benefit of Communist Party members, leaving the average Chinese resident behind.

In practice, Wu charged, the brand of capitalism now encouraged by Chinese officials allows only Party members to enjoy substantial private-property rights, and these Party members "can hardly be expected to risk losing their monopoly privileges by extending ownership." He concluded that "until private ownership is allowed on a wide scale, genuine liberalization--representative government, free markets, and individual rights--will remain elusive."

But in Wu’s mind the question of property rights is always secondary; his primary focus is on the laogai system. Thus he told the Independent Institute:

Another barrier to freedom is China's machinery for crushing dissident: the more than 1,100 labor reform camps called the laogai. The laogai is not simply a prison system. It is a political tool for maintaining the Communist Party's totalitarian rule. Many of the laogai's 6 to 8 million inmates are political prisoners, most of whom will spend the rest of their lives in the camps. Although psychological and spiritual domination are the preferred methods to achieve the goal of "thought reform," violence is used when these means fail.

The laogai, Wu said, also play an important role in the Chinese economy, producing goods for export to the West. "Just to give a glimpse of its importance," he continued, "forced labor from the laogai produces about one-third of China's tea and a significant amount of its cotton. About 60 percent of China's rubber vulcanizing chemicals are produced in a single laogai camp in Shanyang." He added that the laogai account for a substantial proportion of other Chinese exports, including steel pipes, artificial flowers, graphite, and hand tools.

The Dying Rooms

Chinese Orphanages adopt a “zero population growth policy”

By Steven W. Mosher

Jan. 07, 2002

This is an old article - Jan. 7, 2002.

I don’t believe this is true anymore.

There is a HUGE problem with not enough little girls to some day be wives. In fact trying to adopt a little girl from China is VERY DIFFICULT today.

“The greed of american corporations has allowed this country to gain power by looking the other way! “

Don’t forget the consumers that can’t get enough of “china prices” for crap they dont really need.

It’s not the corporations. It’s not the “customers”.

It’s about a society that elevates males over females to an extreme.

“It’s not the corporations. It’s not the “customers”.”

If you’re referring to the economic growth taking place in China it is certainly about corporations and customers being greedy.

“It’s about a society that elevates males over females to an extreme.”

No, its about a government that kills babies, forced sterilizations, and forced abortions.

The male over female is a reaction by desperate parents to the govt atrocities. The asian cultures certainly value males more than females but its a deeper issue. Parents depend on their kids for support when they get old. Girls cannot support their parents.

Of course, what is happening in China should not only be a lesson unto itself as to what has happened there, but what could happen/may be happening here. To be honest, if Americans themselves didn't feel the need to breed as much as they do, the same problem wouldn't be raising its ugly head here in America, that of having more children than one or two can properly rear and educate without government (taxpayer's) assistance in one form or another, including schooling and health care. I have never felt it is anyone else's obligation to pay a dime for my children's care, and chose to have two, and only two. With the two-income family more of a necessity than ever, we Americans need to take a close look at our own priorities in this regard, and not make the same errors of judgment. If we do, we will pay for our mistakes in human lives in the relatively near future. Socialism is only a very temporary salve for failure. It takes individual responsibility and accountability to avoid the worst that societies and their fragile economies can engineer for our future. If one fails at that, one should realize the ultimate cost alone.

This is from 2002. It is an old article?

Orphanages in Eastern Europe are just as grim. In Russia handicapped children are shunted into psychiatric institutions to die among the insane. Orphaned children in Russia and Ukraine are preyed upon by pedophiles with access to the orphanages. Children in the poorest orphanages and in the institutions for "imbeciles" (which are often closed to foreigners) live without heat, with little food because the money to feed them is siphoned off by the corrupt or never paid by the govt. Children in my son's baby orphanage were fed sugar water for days one winter to survive when no money arrived from the govt to pay for food. In the summer the staffs bring vegetables and fruit from their tiny gardens to share with some of the children. Yogurt is like gold- so is a banana. I've seen the faces of kids who see these foods offered to them.

At least they have a roof over their heads- check out “The Children of Leningradsky” to see a documentary about Russian street children.

Humna Rights Watch has issued reports about both the Chinese "dying rooms; and about the entire Russian orphanage system, done in 1998. Romania where the poor dump their babies and handicapped kids in hospitals and abandon them, has not even permitted adoption for many years now. People are so poor in Moldova that human flesh is reportedly sold as food during the winter. You can imagine the fate of orphans in such a poor society. Street children are bought and sold by the hour in the Philippines and Cambodia.

Adopting from China and most of these other places has become an onerous process, unfortunately. Many good people are being turned away or turned off by the long wait.

This is incredible. How can a communist country blame capitalisim?

Social engineering is at the root of communisim and socialisim. The state assumes it knows who should live or die.

How many generations must learn this lesson? I guess Stalin & Hitler, Pol Pot and even Mao himself weren’t enough. The Left ignores it’s own sad history, and can not see the death it reaps even now.

Thank you for bringing these horrific atrocities of eastern Europe to this forum as well.

“If you’re referring to the economic growth taking place in China it is certainly about corporations and customers being greedy.”

You know nothing about China. You read too much propaganda. Corporations are not creating these orphanages. It is the government that has a one child policy because there are OODLES of people over there that often starve to death. So the government came along with the one child policy. I don't agree with it but it has NOTHING TO DO WITH CORPORATIONS!

It has everything to do with Communism. It keeps people down. As China becomes more capitalistic, they are RELAXING the one child policy when people can AFFORD to feed more than one child. That's a fact.

“It’s about a society that elevates males over females to an extreme.”

No, its about a government that kills babies, forced sterilizations, and forced abortions.

The GOVERNMENT does do that because they believe it is more “compassionate” than seeing people starve to death. I don't agree with it.

You really don't understand the Chinese. It the GOVERNMENT forcing the abortions. The family would keep the girls but they are only limited in many areas to one child so they value th boy over the girl. Many a poor Chinese girl has pitched in to help support the family. The Chinese still have an extended family type outlook - that includes females.

Half of my family is Chinese. We go to China. I know what I am talking about.

Of course I’m not the only person out here extremely disturbed by this situation and wondering HOW to help.
Is it possible for you or somebody to post links to any reputable organizations that help these orphanages ?

or is anybody able to give a “ballpark” estimate of how much it costs to adopt a child from these places ?

does anyone think it could be possible for groups to contribute towards the goal of adopting children one at a time for willing folk to raise ? ( I hope you can understand what I mean here....together we could bring out one child at a time )
I am willing to help out in anyway I can,the SAME as MANY OTHERS.
we just need some knowledge to get started.
thank you.
....i don’t believe for one minute that it’s a simple coincidence that i read this post—

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