To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement.
One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site.
Issued on:
At the height of China's controversial one-child policy, children were torn away from their birth families and put up for adoption. FRANCE 24's Yena Lee follows one adoptee, now an adult, who is on a quest to find out more about her background.
China opened its doors to international adoption in 1992. Since then, over 150,000 Chinese babies have been adopted by foreign couples. The objective was to match abandoned children with would-be parents. But what we discovered during this report is that many infants had received incomplete or even forged documentation, putting into question the very nature of their presence in an orphanage.
Indeed, at the height of China's one-child policy, some babies were torn away from their families and sold for overseas adoption. Others were kidnapped and sold to childless couples, or even brideless men in China. Chinese authorities have since cracked down on such trafficking. They set up a DNA database in 2009 to ensure children were not actively being sought after by a family member before domestic or international adoption. Today, this database is also being used to match adoptees with their birth families.
Watch moreMillions of single Chinese men desperately seeking a wife
But the wounds of the past are still raw for victims. The parents who lost their children three decades ago hang on to old photographs. The adopted babies of the one-child policy era are now adults. Some of them have more questions than answers about their origins.
In this documentary, we follow one adoptee on a quest to find out more about her background. Ten years after the end of the controversial family planning policy, we look at what happened to China's lost children.
