ABSTRACT
The question of “What next?” is a pressing one for children who age out of the orphan welfare system without being adopted. This concluding chapter begins by introducing the stories of some of these children, before turning to the “what next” question for private orphan relief in China. For decades, non-governmental caregivers have provided family-style care to children without families, thereby bringing new meaning to China’s long-standing “utilitarian familist” approach to welfare. But although China has expressed commitment to fulfilling the human rights of orphans, recent restrictions on welfare pluralism in this field suggest there are limits to the state’s willingness to utilise all available resources to this end. This chapter also discusses the contribution of this book’s case studies to broader questions about the nature of civil society, law, and law-/policy-making in China. The empirical findings presented herein speak to scholarship on unauthorised NGOs and illegal practices generally, demonstrating the subordination of formal laws in practice to flexible, discretionary, and local understandings about an organisation’s legitimacy. This balance of formal/informal rules shifted post-Lankao, when a local crisis drew national attention to an unauthorised-but-tolerated sector, leading to a top-down intervention with mixed outcomes for China’s “lonely children“.
