ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the challenge that my fieldwork on Chinese birth families and domestic Chinese adoptive families (Johnson, 2004)1 poses to two closely related adoption discourses that have dominated North American thinking on these topics. One is the discourse of international China adoption-a discourse that attempts to explain the rise of China as the major sending country in the world today, focusing on traditional Chinese culture and its persistence in the context of government policies to control population growth. The basic outline of this discourse can be found in a wide range of venues-on adoption agency websites, popular news media and magazine articles, websites for adoptive parents dedicated to the discussion of China adoption, articles and books on China adoption, and scholarship on closely related topics. A second related discourse that my field studies challenge is the dominant critique of intercountry adoption (ICA) that has recently emerged out of five decades of ICA, a critique that alerts us to systemic problems of trafficking and corruption in the practices of ICA.
