孤儿领养的新规则

Linette Corrigan from the United States adopted a baby girl from Yunnan Province five years ago.

"She was just a baby when we adopted her, so English is her first language. She knows she is Chinese, I know she is very proud of being Chinese, but she is essentially an American girl."

Last year, the family adopted a 15-year-old boy with special needs from China. Corrigan says teenagers have to face more challenges in a new environment.

"The first one is the language. If you can imagine not being able to talk to your parents and being in a new situation where you don't know what to expect; another difficulty is learning a new culture. For example, America really values personal space, having people not stand too close, and China much less personal space is required. So an older child coming to United States may stand very close to a classmate. For them, that's natural. But for the classmate, that's wired and rude. They want the child to move further away."

According to the latest data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, more than 100,000 Chinese-born orphans and children with physical disabilities have been adopted by overseas parents in the past 30 years.

Most of them were from orphanages and child welfare institutions.

According to China's current Adoption Law, the guardians of an orphan, social welfare institutions and parents who are unable to rear their children because of unusual difficulties are entitled to put the children up for adoption.

But Zhang Shifeng, Director of China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption, says the actual situation is different.

"In real life, we hardly see the first and the third scenario, which is when the guardians and parents put their children up for adoption - especially the parents. So the new proposal aims to set out detailed implementation measures to help guardians who can't provide due care find a caring home within the country or overseas for the children."

Brian Stuy is the founder of Research-China, a U.S.-based company that provides birth parents search analysis for overseas parents who adopted children from China.

He says the proposed change acknowledges authorities' concerns about the welfare of all children. But he believes it is in the best interest of children if they remain in their birth country and with their birth families as much as possible.

"There are many losses that occur in adoptions. One is obviously the loss of one's birth family. And the second loss is the loss of culture, loss of birth country; and that is also very much an important part of child development. So internationally it has been studied and decided that keeping a child in their birth country is better than taking them to a foreign country where they have no connection to the culture, history, and so on."

Zhang agrees with Stuy and says although a detailed policy has not been worked out, it will put domestic adopters at the top of the list, as protecting the interest of children is the ultimate purpose of the plan.

Last year, more than 31,000 families registered for adoption programs in China - about 27,000 of which were Chinese families.

For CRI, I'm Zhang Shuangfeng.