Theorizing Pathways to Family Formation: Birth, Adoption, and Infant Abandonment Under China’s One-Child Policy

Abstract

China’s one-child policy, which restricted the number of children allowed per family from its inception in 1979 until its conclusion in 2015, has attracted much scholarly attention. Sociologists have documented the policy’s various impacts, from the aging workforce and skewed sex ratio to the effects on women’s reproductive health and state-society relations. This dissertation examines one understudied impact of the one-child policy: the abandonment of female infants. Caught between state demands for a smaller family and familial demands for a son, and with no legal means to place children for adoption, thousands of Chinese families left their female infants anonymously in public places. Some children died before being found, while many were reabsorbed into Chinese society via informal, unregistered adoptions. The remaining unclaimed children were funneled into state orphanages, from which at least 150,000 were sent abroad to families in North America and Europe. Taking advantage of the author’s unprecedented access to families who abandoned daughters, this dissertation analyzes the context, process, and aftermath of infant abandonment from the perspective of the families themselves. The dissertation is composed of three essays that draw from ethnographic fieldwork in rural China and in-depth interviews with families who abandoned children and comparison families who did not. The first essay asks how states and institutions structure cultural aspirations for an ideal family; the second essay investigates the cyclical process of striving to realize this ideal family; and the third essay examines the emotional aftermath of infant abandonment as one particular cost of striving. Overall, this dissertation presents family formation as a socially patterned process, consequential for our understanding of aspirations, inequality, and grief.