SAN FRANCISCO — For the last several years, the Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly reviled Western entreaties that it show greater respect for freedom of speech, press and assembly--all guaranteed by China's constitution. Instead, the party has proclaimed that the central focus of "socialist system" is welfare rights, what it calls "the rights of subsistence": rights to employment, housing, health care and old-age benefits. But a meticulously documented report, released today by Human Rights Watch/Asia, offers a horrifying look behind China's wall of official propaganda into an important part of its "socialist" welfare system.
With more than 20 million babies born in China each year, the party has implemented a "one family, one child" policy. One unexpected result has been that orphanages have filled up with abandoned girl babies. Because girls "marry out" and leave a family just as they become economically productive, and because boys pass on the familial name, many parents jettison female offspring and try again for a male. Babies who do not die of exposure end up in state-run orphanages. But instead of finding refuge, it is here, paradoxically, that an infant's troubles often really begin. What the human-rights report, "Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages," reveals is that the death-to-admissions ratio for babies entering the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute, touted as a model orphanage, probably ran as high as 90% in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The orphanage's own records show a death rate of 77.6% in 1991, and incomplete figures for 1992 showed an increase, which is gruesome enough, since it means that, between 1986 and 1992, more than 1,000 children died unnatural deaths while under state care.
What is so haunting about even the orphanage's own statistics is that, though hundreds of babies are admitted annually, the number of children in residence barely increases. Equally grizzly is the fact that, despite rising admissions and relatively few adoptions or transfers, fewer than 10 teenagers were discharged each year, making anyone wonder, "Where have all the children gone?" The report's explanation is blunt: "Many institutions, including some in major cities, appeared to be operating as little more than assembly lines for the elimination of unwanted orphans."
Relying on eyewitness accounts of inmates, staff members and doctors who worked at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute, as well as a cache of "for internal use only" documents from the orphanage itself, the report claims the existence of a tacitly accepted policy, known as "summary resolution," for selecting children for death by neglect, leaving them in "waiting for death rooms," where malnutrition and dehydration would claim them. The documents were made available by Zhang Shuyun, a physician from the orphanage who fled China last year, after unsuccessfully trying to bring the abuses to the attention of Shanghai officials.
By making false medical diagnoses of mental retardation and other disorders, doctors used medical records to create an appearance that death resulted from some mental or physical disability rather than neglect. According to Zhang's testimony, "the child-care staff would wait until a child marked for 'summary resolution' was completely listless from hunger, then spoon a little food into his or her mouth; by this time, of course, the child was usually unable to swallow food." This allowed the doctor to make an entry on the official medical record that the child was refusing to eat.
Calling Chinese orphanages "places of no return for the majority of abandoned infants who enter them," the report notes that the Ministry of Civil Affairs, which presides over them, is also responsible for China's crematoriums. This has enabled orphanage officials to dispose of large numbers of children's bodies with no public scrutiny.
Such high death rates are not, alas, limited to Shanghai's "model" orphanage. One "high level" official from the Ministry of Civil Affairs defends the institute's record by saying that, in comparison with orphanages elsewhere, 'Shanghai's [death rate] cannot be considered very high." Indeed, in four other provinces--Fujian, Shaanxi, Guangxi and Henan--where the human-rights group obtained comparable official statistics, mortality rates among infants in such institutions ranged from 57.2% to 72.5%.
Almost as sinister as the neglect of these children is the official cover-up launched by the government when a few courageous staff members sought an outside inquiry of both the orphanage and its then-director. After some initial progress in getting the Municipal Procuracy to investigate and acknowledge that allegations were "basically correct," the efforts of these staff members were obstructed by high officials.
