Chinese adoption gone wrong

I picked up my LA Times subscription this week and found a shocking story that really soured a topic that I've had mixed feelings about in the past: adoption of Chinese babies.

Yang Libing and his wife, Cao Zhimei, with their son. Their daughter was taken away in 2005. "Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products," said Yang, a migrant worker from Hunan province. He has since learned that their daughter is in the United States.

This LA Times story must be adopting parents' nightmare and one that doesn't seem possible outside of some crime fiction novel. Even though I try to cast some doubt on negative stories about China since not all the stories read on the internet are true I know there are plenty of other stories that never make it out of the country. I believe this is one of those true stories that has only just surfaced and will send shock waves across the world and hopefully where it counts - the adoption agency networks.

Something has to be fixed! What does this say about the Chinese system, the officials who hold power and the agencies that govern the adoption process? Nothing in the remedy will ever be enough for the parents that lost a child or the parents that gained one.

This is one of the saddest stories I've read and I think the last paragraphs of the article capture the reality of what has been created in the name of greed. I wonder if the author of White Swan will update her book with a new chapter.

"In Philadelphia, Wendy Mailman, who adopted in 2005 from the orphanage in Zhenyuan that took in confiscated babies, now questions everything she was told about the girl who orphanage officials said was born in September and abandoned in January.

"Why would a mother who didn't want a baby girl be so heartless as to wait until the dead of winter to abandon her?" she said. She wonders what she would do if she discovered that her daughter was one of the stolen babies. She knows she could never return the Americanized 6-year-old, who is obsessed with "SpongeBob" and hates the Chinese culture classes her mother enrolled her in. But she said, "I would certainly want to tell the birth family that your daughter is alive and happy and maybe send a picture."

"It would be up to my daughter later if she wanted to build a relationship," she said. For many birth families, that would be enough.

"We'd never make her come back, because a girl raised in the West wouldn't want to live in a poor village like this," said Yang Shuiying's mother-in-law, Yang Jinxiu.

"But we'd like to know where she is. We'd like to see a picture. And we'd like her to know that we miss her and that we didn't throw her away."

Exemplary example of Chinese human rights

It's a little known fact that China took in 20,000 Jews escaping persecution from the Nazis in the 1930s! Who says the Chinese have a human rights issue?

Today, NPR interviewed some of these survivors who fled to China about a neighborhood called Tilanqiao or "Little Vienna" in Shanghai. This quaint bit of Europe was transplanted to Shanghai, but is the lesser known Eurozone compared to the well ventured French Concession district I walked through during my stay last year.

In the Hongkou district near the Northern Bund sits Ohel Moishe Synagogue which is recognized as the heart of this historic area. It's one of two synagogues, but there used to be six here at the height of the area's boom. Now, beside the place of worship all is not peaceful since the area has been under threat from the relentless cycle of development.

A fight to get Tilanqiao recognized goes back to April 27, 2006 when about 120 former Jewish refugees and their families returned to Shanghai from all over the world for a '2006 Shanghai Reunion.' The aim was to get the United Nations to list Tilanqiao as a world heritage site.

I read that in 2003 Professor Ruan Yishan of Tongji University, an ardent preservationist and dean of the National Cultural and Historical City Research Institute, helped restrict the urban development plans for the North Bund by challenging the Shanghai Urban Planning Bureau. He and his supporters succeeded in geting the city to declare "12 Key Preserved Historical Zones," including Tilanqiao.

Today, however, the White Horse Cafe that was founded by Jewish immigrants in 1939 is finally succumbing to the push for modernization. A new road is being built and the cafe must go. Without the road the future traffic in central Shanghai will be unbearable said an official. It seems that urban historical areas aren't in vogue in China. Although sections of Tilanqiao will remain, we don't know for how long? I hope I get to return and walk those streets myself before it turns into Spaghetti Junction!

Jet Li in Davos for the World Economic Summit!

Amazing to see Jet Li representing his causes at Davos, Switzerland, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful leaders of the world.

Chandni Chowk to China...crazy Bollywood Kung Fu!

This is showing at my local independent cinema...From the hustle-bustle of Chandni Chowk to the hutongs of Beijing, the electric energy of Shanghai and sheer breathtaking Chinese landscapes, "Chandni Chowk to China" chronicles the lunatic adventures of a hapless simpleton cook from Delhi. As he goes to seek his destiny, he finds himself thrown into a crazy world of megalomaniac villains, femme fatales, crazy inventors, Chinese mysticism and outlandish kung-fu assassins!

China still growing...

Despite the downturn in the world economy a newswire I read today made me raise an eyebrow. Market research firm, iSuppli, said that China has defied the expected 5 percent global decline in mobile handset shipments.

Instead, China’s domestic wireless phone market is projected to increase by 7 percent in 2009! That means the Chinese are expected to continue to buy phones even when their jobs might be threatened this year as global consumption (of Chinese-made goods) falls. That's some 90 million new subscribers in 2009?!

Handout How could this be? First, I heard on NPR that only one third of China's production is for export, so it's not as exposed to the global freefall as we in the West might think. The rest of production is to "feed" the Chinese market of one billion people. Second, China’s three mobile operators are offering discounts and the government is even lending a hand (after all it's still Communist China) as it ponies up subsidies to keep the consumers spending!

But it's not all a bed of roses for China's mobile industry according to The Register who know their CDMA from their W-CDMA :)