For around two decades from the early 1990s, more than eighty thousand Chinese baby girls were adopted by American families. Those families were told that the children were victims of the ‘boy preference’ in Chinese society and the notorious one-child policy, which for over thirty years restricted parents to a single baby in most circumstances. The adoptive parents were told that they were taking in unwanted babies, who would otherwise live in harsh orphanages or even face abandonment and starvation. In many cases, this was true.

In many cases, however, it wasn’t. Often, agencies of the Chinese state would go into the countryside to find children who had been born illegally (that is, in breach of the one-child rule) and forcibly seize them for adoption. Worse still, in one large province, Hunan, a racket developed in which brokers would solicit local agents to kidnap children and forge papers showing they were orphans, then sell them on to adoption agencies. 

 Barbara Demick spent many years reporting from China for the Los Angeles Times and came to know the country intimately. This book tells the story of two families, one Chinese and one American, she met during her investigations into modern Chinese population planning. In 2002, in Gaofeng village in