THE WORLD : HUMAN RIGHTS : China’s ‘Model’ State Orphanages Serve as Warehouses for Death

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.

The Chinese government has condemned the report, accusing Human Rights Watch of “cooking up this sort of thing . . . to influence public opinion and swindle the masses.” It described Zhang as an unhappy employee who bore a grudge against orphanage management.

Key in the government’s cover-up was Communist Party Secretary Wu Banguo, Shanghai’s most powerful political figure. He had the Municipal Propaganda Department issue an order forbidding all local media from releasing any negative news about the orphanage. Wu was later elevated to the Politburo in Beijing. Mayor Huang Ju, who also did nothing to discipline offenders, was elevated to the Politburo as well. And though Institute Director Han Weicheng played a key role in the abuses, he not only survived the scandal unscathed, but was promoted to deputy director of the Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau in 1994. He now oversees all Shanghai’s custodial welfare institutions.

Meanwhile, those who dared speak out had their professional lives ruined. Had it not been that Zhang and Ai Ming, a young polio victim raised in the orphanage, escaped from China with their archive and photos, the outside world would have remained as ignorant of the situation as ordinary people in China.

What makes this report so damning is that it is not about just one aberrant institution, but a whole system that appears to have a moral and spiritual vacuum at its core. Every society produces its share of nightmarish situations, but political systems not as thoroughly corrupted by despotism as China’s usually afford some avenues of appeal--where abuses can be brought to light and rectified by concerned citizens. In China, virtually no such avenues remain open.

The irony is that had China’s media not been so emasculated by the Communist Party, policies that led to the death of these children might have long ago been exposed and reformed. Contrary to party claims that civil and political rights have no organic relation to “rights of subsistence,” the tragedy of China’s orphanages makes clear that protection of the rights of society’s weakest members are inextricably linked to the ability of ordinary people to speak out through the press.

One of China’s most celebrated modern short stories, “A Madman’s Diary,” is a parable reminiscent of Franz Kafka, penned in 1918 by China’s leading 20th-century writer, Lu Xun. In it, Lu bitterly attacks the inhumanity of traditional Chinese culture. Behind a facade of China’s “four thousand years of civilization,” Lu’s “madman” metaphorically finds Chinese still engaged in cannibalism. Horrified by discovering such primitivism, he ends the story by frantically crying out, “Save the children.”

It was in part to end such savagery and assure physical and spiritual salvation of China’s next generation that so many intellectuals of Lu’s era turned to socialism. But so brutal was Mao Tse-tung’s revolution that it left the country even more lost, more uncertain of its humanity.

After reading “Death By Default,” Lu’s cry rings out with urgent and poignant new meaning. Instead of dying unattended in the streets of Shanghai, as was common 70 years ago, infants are now dying from the custodial embrace of a state that arrogantly proclaims itself their savior.