Their families gave them up for adoption
Chinese girls in Britain are looking for their biological families
The girl Fu Lian is searching for her origins.
From the source
Pippa Curtis holding her adopted daughter Becky when she was 15 months old.
From the source
Most of the adoptive children's families tried not to distance them from their Chinese heritage and culture.
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China abolished the one-child policy in 2015. Archive
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During the one-child policy phase, which was imposed by the Chinese government during the period from 1980 to 2015, several families abandoned tens of thousands of their young daughters to be adopted by families in other countries, and pregnant women aborted many female fetuses, in order to circumvent the one-child policy.
"There is an old saying in China that the birth of a boy represents great happiness, but the birth of a girl is just a small happiness," says Fu Lian Dobley, a victim of such ordeal.
She knows the meaning of these words well.
Because of China's ingrained cultural preference for sons over daughters, Fu Lian was one of tens of thousands of young girls who were abandoned by their families, put up for adoption or even had their mothers aborted during that time before they saw the light.
Volian is looking for her roots
Many of the same generation are now searching for their truth, their heritage and their genealogy when they come of age, as has Fu Lian, who, like thousands of her gender, was adopted by a British couple and raised in the United Kingdom.
She was adopted when she was 13 months old, and she believes that her biological parents gave her up against their will and offered her to be propagated.
The 21-year-old, who studies Chinese at the University of Manchester, has commissioned the voluntary group, the International Alliance for Searching for Adopted Children, to search for her origins in her hometown of Changning, Hunan Province, to find out the truth about her origins, as do many others like her.
Fu Lian spoke about how to search for her origins, describing it as "a really long process, you have very little paperwork, no birth certificate, the only papers I have is about my biological family's abandonment of me."
She later found out that the manager of the orphanage where she was staying when she was young was a gang leader in a child smuggling group in 2006. “This is something I find hard to deal with," she says.
"Your whole life depends on a few pieces of paper that can be fake," she says.
Rosie doesn't care about her origins
Fu Lian's search continues, unlike her younger sister Mei Mei, who was also adopted by a British family, but this girl doesn't even want to discuss her heritage, let alone track down her biological family.
She told the coalition that she might think about it in the future, but she never felt a strong need to do so.
Rosie, 27, lives in London and works for an environmental agency, was adopted as a baby and raised in Essex.
She says her adoptive parents, who adopted another child when Rosie was three, encouraged them to take an interest in and be proud of their heritage and take an interest in Chinese culture.
"Our adoptive parents take us to private schools to learn Mandarin, celebrate Chinese New Year with other adopters, visit Chinatown and exhibits on Chinese art and history in London," she wrote on her blog.
But Rosie says that despite growing up in a predominantly white area, she has no interest in researching her Chinese identity.
"I would definitely be interested in doing a DNA test just to understand more about my biological background," she says.
"I don't know anything about my ethnicity, and I'm not bothered about it," she says.
Becky finds her American cousin
Becky, 59, has adopted Becky, who is now 18 and is studying at an English university.
Beiqi's beginnings were a little different from Fu Lian and Rosy.
She spent the first five months of her life in a children's home, but was then taken in by a foster family before Pippa adopted her 10 months later.
“Becky has always been very loved and happy, but I feel it is my responsibility to find her biological parents, so I turned to a DNA database and found out that Becky has a second cousin (Jade Steer) who is seven years older than Becky and lives in Washington state,” says Pippa. in the United States, and was born in Guangdong, the neighboring province of Guangxi, where Becky was born.”
They haven't met yet but for Pippa, she is reassured that her daughter has had a positive relationship with a biological member of her family.
“I know an adoptive family that found the biological family, but the biological mother found it very difficult,” says Pippa. “Another adopted child found out that her biological family continued to have more children that she kept, and it shocked her.” Pippa believes that finding the family Biology can dampen interest in the search for assets, but it can also lead to a strong shock.
Rosie submitted her thesis on the one-child policy for an undergraduate degree in politics and international relations, describing the policy as a "gross violation of human and reproductive rights."
She added, "It is cruel to impose such a policy, especially when I think of my parents, who I suppose were forced to abandon their child, which is me."
Fu Lian expresses this policy, saying, "I have a very negative reaction to this policy, I don't like the fact that it continues to discriminate against young girls."
"When they announced its cancellation and families can now have two children, it annoyed me - why did they adopt it at that time?"
"Young children don't know how much sacrifices we've made, the same blame goes for the old Chinese, because they didn't think about the consequences of giving up their kids, and it all makes me wonder if it's really worth it in the end," she concludes.
Cancellation of the one-child policy
When China's one-child policy was abolished in 2015, the government encouraged couples to have a second child, but many families were hesitant, not only because of the cost and gender imbalance, but also because the mother and father were accustomed to growing up without siblings. A family consisting of one child is the norm in society.
In May 2021, China adopted the three-child policy after the results of the 2020 census, which showed that only 12 million children were born that year, down from 14.65 million in 2019, which is a decline of 18% year-on-year and represents the fourth consecutive decline in Annual birth rate.
China's National Bureau of Statistics says the country's fertility rate was 1.3 children per woman - below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to stabilize the population.
Soon after the three-child policy was announced, an online survey conducted by China's Xinhua News Agency found that 90% of respondents said they "would not consider" having three children.
Of the 31,000 people surveyed, only 1,443 were "ready" to have a third child, 828 were "undecided", and 213 said it was "on their agenda."
However, the survey disappeared shortly after the results were published.
International Coalition for Searching for Adopted Children
The International Child Search Alliance is an international, all-volunteer group of adoptive and adoptive parents that serves as a central source of all information for Chinese adopters who wish to research their ancestry.
This includes a list of researchers based in China who collaborate with families around the world and get paid for their time and travel expenses.
Costs can vary depending on the distance the researcher has to travel, for example, one family paid nearly £500 for a three-day search for one of their children.
Adopters from the same region also collaborate to recruit a researcher on behalf of their entire group.
The organization believes that collecting DNA samples from putative parents can be very effective because matching their DNA to the same databases that adopters use is key to finding the most matches.
• The International Child Search Alliance is an international group that is a central source of all information for Chinese adopters who wish to research their origins.
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