"They didn't say what they were going to do with the baby, just that they would send him to the orphanage, but I realized that they were planning to sell him," said the baby's father, Hou Yongjun, a driving instructor. Unable to raise the money on short notice, he telephoned everybody he knew, including a journalist.
At 10:30 that night, Hou's wife heard a noise and looked out the window to see two people running away. Thirteen hours after he had been taken, she found the baby on the doorstep, hungry but unharmed.
Adoption experts say that China's system is badly in need of repair.
Deng Fei, an investigative journalist based in Beijing who has written frequently about the issue, believes there should be more scrutiny of the cash paid by foreign parents.
"That money is a windfall for the orphanages and local officials," Deng said. "It seduced them into going to look for babies to send abroad."
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."
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barbara.demick@latimes.com
Nicole Liu and Angelina Qu of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.
