What was I saying about moving to Shanghai?

Check this out: the usually thought-provoking Shanghaiist blog (a group blog by a bunch of expats in China) has taken a look at adoption & abandonment - especially what happens to those kids who are taken in by Chinese families in what's been called "informal adoptions." The problem is that a kid without papers in a society like China's faces immense obstacles - "socialism with Chinese characteristics" being big on supplying services to its citizens, as long as they can prove they actually are citizens.

The entry starts with an excerpt from a Shanghai Daily article on one such informal adoption and its repercussions 14 years later. The girl in question can't go to senior high school, or college, or get married, or find a job. She's not in the system. The mom can't legally adopt her because she's already had a biological son - that's her One Child, according to the One Child Policy. Authorities at the school recommended signing her over to an orphanage, but the officials there told her they won't take in children over three years old.

So, for now, she's sort of stuck. Along with 1,000 other kids in Shanghai. And a lot more like her across the country.

The Shanghaiist gang also link to a UNICEF report (apparently from 2003, but still current enough, I guess) that estimates 100,000 babies are abandoned every year, the vast majority of which end up in what they call Child Welfare Institutes (CWIs), which I've always seen listed as Social Welfare Institutes (SWIs), but which they say are basically orphanages by another name.

So problem of undocumented children is becoming a noticeable problem now - prominent enough that the newspapers are publishing stories about it. At least that's a step toward fixing it.

At the same time, however... remember those family-planning riots in Guangxi? Well, the authorities have jailed two of the... ringleaders? activists? I'm not sure which to call them. Pranksters, basically. According to the court (which is, as a reminder, a big "according to"), these two guys snipped out some government letterhead and used a xerox machine to make official-looking documents that promised people refunds for their "social support fees" - a euphemism for, among other things, the money you have to pay to the government when you have a child over your One-Child Policy limit. They handed out 400 of these fliers. The return address was the family planning office.

One of the pranksters was the father of an unapproved child who had to pay tens of thousands of yuan in fines. Now he's in jail for two years.