About 80 newborn baby girls from a county in Guizhou have been confiscated from their parents by family planning officials since 2001 and handed over to foreign adoptive parents as orphans at a price of US$3,000 each, state media reported.
Struggling farmers in Zhenyuan county who breached the two-child policy set down for rural areas but failed to pay some 20,000 yuan (HK$22,700) in total fines were forced to surrender their baby girls, The Southern Metropolis News reported yesterday. Authorities later forged documents stating the babies were orphans and gave the babies to foreign families in the United States, Belgium, Spain and other European countries. The US$3,000 each in adoption fees was split between the orphanage and the officials.
County adoption records show at least 78 girls were handed over to foreign families in the past eight years.
The records suggested that adoptions from the county's orphanage dramatically rose from 2003 to 2005, when police started to crack down on trafficking in children nationwide. But the number of adoptions rose again in 2007.
Farmer Lu Xiande's youngest daughter was confiscated by authorities in 2004 after he failed to pay a fine of four times the family's annual income.
'[Officials] said the government would raise our daughter, but she disappeared from the government-funded orphanage,' said the farmer, who has three other daughters and a son. He was allowed to have two children under the strict birth-control policy but the couple eventually had five because they had wanted a son.
The father later found his daughter's picture in an orphanage announcement, which said the baby was an orphan found outside Mr Lu's house and was suitable for adoption.