On September 9, 2000, Yuan Zanhua, a 28-year-old woman in a mountain village in Hunan Province, felt the first contractions of labor while preparing lunch. Calm and experienced—this was her third birth—she tidied the kitchen and alerted her mother. Her anxiety was not about pain but about secrecy: She had spent the summer indoors in oversized clothing to hide her pregnancy from neighbors who might report her to the family-planning authorities.

China’s one-child policy, in force since 1979, was administered by the Family Planning Commission, a government agency that punished violators with ruinous fines, property demolition, and forced abortions. Hunan Province, birthplace of Mao Zedong and a center of revolutionary history, exemplified the poverty and state control that defined rural China. Zanhua grew up in the village of Shanghuang as the fourth of six children, working constantly on the family farm from early childhood and dropping out of school after three years because she had to care for a baby brother. She later recalled having no happy memories from childhood.

When Deng Xiaoping lifted internal travel restrictions in 1985, 13-year-old Zanhua left the village with siblings to sell bags retail in neighboring Jiangxi Province, becoming a capable street peddler. At 20, summoned home by her father, she met her arranged match: Zeng Youdong, a quiet, literate farmer from the nearby mountain village of Gaofeng. Initially put off by his poverty and remoteness, she was won over by his gentle manner. They began working together, became engaged, and Zanhua was already pregnant when they formally married.

Their first daughter, Ping, was born in 1995. A loophole in the one-child law permitted rural families a second child if the first was a girl, with a required five-year wait in between. Ignoring this mandatory wait period, Zanhua and Youdong had their second daughter, Yan, in 1997. Officials vandalized their unfinished house in retaliation; they negotiated the fine to 800 yuan and paid it. Pressure from Youdong’s father to produce a son, compounded by the social stigma attached to families without male heirs, weighed heavily on Zanhua. Two years after Yan’s birth she was pregnant again, encouraged by a technician’s suggestive wink during an ultrasound and the auspicious symbolism of the Year of the Dragon.

To avoid detection, Zanhua spent the final months of pregnancy at her oldest brother Guoxiong’s house in Shanghuang, resting in a small shed hidden in a bamboo grove behind the property. When labor began, Zanhua was careful to labor without noise that might attract the attention of neighbors who could report her to Family Planning. A midwife, Li Guihua, was summoned. Zanhua delivered a healthy baby girl, but when the labor pains did not stop, the midwife looked down and shouted that there was another one.

Youdong, who was working in Jiangxi Province, could not stop laughing when word arrived of the twins’ birth. Unlike his father, who viewed a son as a Confucian obligation, Youdong privately preferred daughters. His older girls, Ping and Yan, had given him more joy than anything else, and he quietly relished his father’s distress as a kind of payback for years of pressure. As the second-youngest son in a family of seven, he had been an outstanding student forced to leave school so that an older brother could attend college, and had since shouldered the responsibilities of an eldest son while the others left or died.

The twins shared their mother’s round face and snub nose. The firstborn was slightly larger and bore a small extra tag of skin on her left earlobe, a natural distinguishing marker. Youdong fed and slept beside the babies and described this period as the happiest of his life—though he knew it was precarious.

Demick traces the ideological and bureaucratic history of the one-child policy. After the collectivist farming experiments of Mao Zedong, China’s first Communist ruler, resulted in the catastrophic famines of the Great Leap Forward, the party found it easier to blame overpopulation than its own failures. Influenced by Malthusian thinking, works like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and mathematician Song Jian’s demographic modeling (see Background), the government passed the one-child law in 1979. The State Family Planning Commission, established in 1981, eventually employed an estimated 83 million people—far exceeding the military. Enforcement mechanisms ranged from mandatory IUDs, to urine testing and menstruation checks for female factory workers, to beatings, property confiscations, and forced abortions that sometimes involved killing the infant during delivery. Collective punishment—denying promotions and bonuses to all officials in a jurisdiction that exceeded birth quotas—gave everyone an incentive to inform on neighbors.

The Family Planning office in nearby Gaoping was a feared concrete building where villagers were beaten and illegally detained. Local governments had become financially dependent on the fines they extracted, functioning more and more as extortionists. Rules were bewilderingly complex and subject to arbitrary change. Zanhua’s most vivid memory from childhood was of a pregnant neighbor dragged through freezing rain to a forced abortion while the entire village watched, yelling at the officials but not interfering. The lesson absorbed was unambiguous: You could not fight Family Planning.

Terrified of punishment but unwilling to abandon the twins, Zanhua and Youdong devised a plan. Without a hukou—the birth registration document required for schooling, healthcare, employment, and travel—the girls would exist as legal nonpersons, joining millions of such “black children” across China (33). The parents needed to work as migrants to earn money for fines, but Zanhua’s elderly, overworked mother could not manage infant twins.

The solution was to leave the children with Zanhua’s oldest brother, Guoxiong, a stocky, boisterous man, and his wife, Xiuhua, a tall, energetic woman who had long wanted a daughter. Xiuhua and Guoxiong faced lesser penalties for a third child, since Guoxiong had already paid fines for the couple’s second. But Xiuhua was reluctant to raise two babies simultaneously—twins would attract too much gossip—so the family decided to separate them. The larger, healthier firstborn would stay with the aunt and uncle; the fussier second twin, who likely had colic, would travel with her parents and continue breastfeeding.

The firstborn was named Fangfang and assigned the uncle’s surname, Yuan, to obscure her parentage. The second was named Shuangjie, meaning “double purity”—the only coded hint that twins existed. Just after the Lunar New Year in 2001, the sisters were separated: Shuangjie left for Chongqing with her parents; Fangfang moved into her aunt and uncle’s home.

Fangfang thrived. She was surrounded by adoring cousins, nearby sisters, and a grandmother across the street. She walked before her first birthday, talked early, and Xiuhua became convinced she was exceptional, noting the girl’s uncanny ability to read people’s expressions and emotions.

Demick discusses the historical devaluation of daughters in China, including ancient customs of female infanticide and derogatory expressions comparing girls to “spilled water” (37). Demick is careful to note that these accounts were often the sensationalized reports of white missionaries eager “to depict the Chinese as heathens in need of salvation” (38); she notes similar mistreatment of infants in Europe.

The one-child policy briefly revived infanticide and abandonment of girl babies, but recent scholarship suggests that many of China’s demographically “missing girls” were instead hidden (39), their births unregistered—much like Fangfang. Zanhua and Youdong’s ruse was one variation of countless strategies rural families used, creating a generation of children with false names, multiple birthdays, and deliberately tangled family identities.

In early 2001, Zanhua and Youdong settled in Chongqing, one of China’s fastest-growing cities, where Youdong worked as a bang-bang man, a porter who hauled loads on bamboo poles up and down the city’s steep riverbank streets. They earned four times the wages available at home but lived as barely tolerated migrants with no right to permanent residency or schooling for Shuangjie.

Back in Shanghuang, Fangfang’s remarkable development—toddling between households, chatting with neighbors—began to attract notice. In the spring of 2002, Family Planning officials arrived at Guoxiong’s house while only Xiuhua’s sons, Zan (13) and Dong (10), were home. Recognizing the men by their city clothes and leather shoes, the boys grabbed Fangfang and fled through an upstairs window, over an outhouse roof, and into the mountains, hiding until dark. When Xiuhua learned of the attempt, she kept the doors locked and Fangfang inside. Weeks later, when officials returned, she escaped through the back with the girl and took refuge with relatives in another village.

On returning home, Xiuhua received a direct warning from a village official: She was not entitled to keep the child. She realized that officials were not after fines, but wanted to take away the baby. Child trafficking was pervasive in rural China; the US State Department estimated 20,000 abductions per year. By 2001, a shortage of marriageable women had increased demand for girls, reversing a historical pattern in which boys were the typical targets of child trafficking.

On May 30, 2002, a villager wearing a towel as a disguise scouted the house and alerted officials that Xiuhua was alone with Fangfang. A group of men burst in, pinned down Xiuhua’s arms and legs, then pried away the toddler, who had run to her aunt and was clutching her shirt. Neighbors poured out of their houses, and five-year-old Yan ran from her grandmother’s home to intervene, but the officials reached their waiting car before anyone could stop them. Xiuhua sprinted after the vehicle barefoot but could not catch it.

Several days passed before Youdong, in Chongqing with a new mobile phone he often left off, received Guoxiong’s frantic call. The family learned through informal connections (guanxi) that officials knew Fangfang belonged to the Zengs—flagged repeat one-child policy offenders. They were demanding 15,000 yuan for her return, eventually negotiated to 10,000 as a down payment. Youdong had no savings and could not leave Chongqing, where he had to keep earning. The situation was compounded because, three months before Fangfang’s seizure, Zanhua gave birth in Chongqing to a son, Jialiang, fulfilling the family’s obligation to produce a male heir but pushing them even deeper into legal jeopardy, as they now had five children with only two legally registered.

In Gaoping, other families gradually discovered they were not alone. Cases accumulated: a grandmother’s granddaughter taken on the street; a three-year-old snatched from her nap. Identified officials included Liu Tangshan, Zhou Xiaofang, and Liu Shude, who could not be challenged without violence and reprisals. A turning point came in 2005 when officials took Wei Hailong, a five-year-old boy from a slightly better-connected carpentry family near Gaoping. Community pressure—including a formal complaint from his school—secured his return after 29 days, the first victory against Family Planning. Word spread and emboldened other families.

Yang Libing, a charismatic farmer whose nine-month-old daughter was taken after his elderly father was tricked into signing false abandonment documents, emerged as the movement’s driving force. Beaten when he confronted officials, repeatedly arrested on fabricated charges, and offered bribes he refused, Yang organized the aggrieved families into the Child Search Association, meeting at the Wei family’s carpentry shop.

In March 2006, the group drafted a formal petition with the help of a former teacher, Yuan Chaoren—known as Old Yuan—who wrote out the nine-page document. Parents and relatives stamped it with red-ink thumbprints, naming it “The Petition Signed in Blood.” It detailed 16 documented cases, professed loyalty to the state, accused local officials of child abduction and extortion, and asked, “Where are the dozens of children who were taken from the birth parents and loving adoptive parents?” (60). The families had no answer, trading theories ranging from sale to other families, organ trafficking, or more sinister ends. That Fangfang could be in the United States struck Zeng Youdong as no more plausible than an alien abduction.

On November 15, 2005, police in Hengyang acted on a tip and found 12 infants hidden in cardboard boxes inside a minibus. Subsequent raids led to the arrest of 27 people, many from the Duan family, who openly admitted to selling babies to government-run orphanages, which they believed made the enterprise legal.

The Duans’ operation had grown out of poverty. Their mother, Chen Zhijin, took a low-paying job at an orphanage in the early 1990s and began bringing in abandoned infants she encountered. As orphanages began participating in China’s international adoption program, opened by law in 1991, the incentive structure shifted dramatically: Orphanage directors, who had once turned Chen away, now welcomed her with ever-thicker envelopes of tip money. The Duans formalized this into a business, sourcing babies primarily from a woman in Guangdong Province who kept as many as 20 infants on a single bed and transporting them by train to orphanages across Hunan.

The international adoption program had grown explosively since 1991, reaching 7,906 placements to the United States alone in 2005. It was perfectly calibrated to Western preferences: The children were predominantly healthy girls, the process was centralized and systematic, and prospective parents were required to deliver a $3,000 cash “donation” directly to the orphanage—a sum that dwarfed an orphanage director’s annual salary. This cash influx, intended to fund struggling social welfare institutions, quickly corrupted them.

By the early 2000s, economic changes in rural China, like rising incomes, urbanization, growing female employment, meant that fewer families were abandoning daughters. Demand from Western adoptive parents was at its peak, but supply had dried up. Orphanages in need of revenue began competing for babies, fueling a trafficking market that the Duans supplied. At their 2006 trial, prosecutors documented at least 300 babies sold to six orphanages; the Duans claimed the actual figure was in the thousands. The family received sentences of up to 15 years but only one orphanage director served any prison time. The Duans argued that they were scapegoats for a systemic problem created by policies that harshly penalized unlicensed births while providing no legal mechanism to surrender unwanted children. The $3,000 bounty had, in effect, put a price on infant girls—incentivizing their kidnapping.

The Shaoyang Social Welfare Institute, run by a decorated former military officer named Jiang Dewei, avoided implication in the Duan trafficking trial because it had a more direct supply chain: babies confiscated from villages around Gaoping by Family Planning officials and funneled through the Civil Affairs office. In this case, the government itself was functioning as the trafficker.

Yang Libing suspected the orphanage’s involvement and traveled repeatedly to Shaoyang but was never admitted through its gates. His petition eventually reached journalists; in March 2006, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post ran a brief article describing 13 of the confiscated children, the first public reporting on the Gaoping cases. A government investigation, conducted without interviewing any parents, resulted in a whitewash, blaming the families, asserting that orphanages were legally required to keep adoptees’ information confidential, and denying parents any right to know where their children had been taken.

The Zengs returned to the village in 2005. Old Yuan interviewed them at home and added their account to the petition. Youdong was barely able to contain his rage; Zanhua wept throughout. When Zanhua joined other parents to confront officials at the Gaoping office, they found them playing cards and were told it was their own fault for having too many children.

Life in the village gradually improved. A small convenience shop opened. The family upgraded their wooden house into a multistory brick building; they purchased a motorized three-wheeled cart and eventually a television set. The children helped farm the Zeng family’s two acres of terraced rice paddies and roamed the mountains freely. Youdong and Zanhua alternated between village and migrant work. Yet Fangfang’s absence remained a quiet, persistent grief. Shuangjie, who had no memory of her twin, fantasized about what it would be like to have her back. Youdong consulted a fortune teller who predicted Fangfang was alive and would return; not entirely believing it, he nonetheless held onto the prediction. He scanned every crowd for a girl who looked like Shuangjie but never found her.

The parents’ ignorance about international adoption was structural and intentional. The orphanages satisfied international legal requirements to confirm that children had really been abandoned by placing finding ads in the obscure back pages of legal magazines that village families would never read. The ads assigned children the orphanage surname—Shaoyang babies were all called Shao—listed lunar calendar dates, and described fabricated discovery sites. One such notice presented Fangfang under a new name, with an invented location and date, masking that she had been seized. After a 60-day waiting period with no response since the birth families had no way to know these notices existed, the children were legally classified as orphans and entered the international adoption pipeline. The falsified backstories were transcribed into official adoption paperwork given to families overseas, who would eventually pass the stories on to the daughters themselves as the only account of where they had come from.