Baby snatchers
Originally published in the print edition of Times Literary Supplement on Sep. 19, 2025. Photo: Barry Lewis/Alamy
In a secluded shed, deep within the bamboo grove in a rural Chinese village, a woman gave birth to identical twin daughters. It was 2000, the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac – usually an auspicious time to be born. But this was also the time of China’s one-child policy, and the family already had two children. The twins were illegal. Despite the family’s attempts to keep them both, one twin was taken away by the authorities and sold to an American couple. They were told she’d been abandoned.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove is a compelling examination of China’s one-child policy by the American journalist Barbara Demick, who tracked down the stolen girl and eventually helped to reunite the twins. Meticulously researched and vividly recounted, the book exposes the extent of wrongdoing that took place at the height of the state’s campaign and its enduring impact not just on affected families, but on the psyche of the nation. Arguably the “defining policy of the Chinese Communist Party”, the one-child law was introduced in 1979 as a means to control the nation’s fast-growing population. But what began as a campaign of “gentle persuasion” soon developed into the “monstrous” machinery of Family Planning – the body tasked with enforcing the policy, which by the 1990s involved an estimated 83 million workers. Violators were fined or had their jobs and assigned housing taken away from them; women who had given birth were fitted with IUDs or forced to undergo sterilization; some men were given vasectomies. Those who refused to comply were forcibly suppressed. Abandoned babies flooded orphanages: state media reported rates of 100,000 to 160,000 per year in the 1980s and 1990s. When, in 1991, China opened its doors to foreign adoption, international demand led to the trafficking of babies overseas. By the time the adoption programme officially ended in September 2024, the country had sent about 160,000 children overseas.
Demick, who first covered the topic during her seven-year tenure as China correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing, examines the mechanics of this massive enterprise. As the policy progressed, fines and adoption fees became important sources of local revenue, providing powerful incentives for officials to crack down on illegal births and confiscate babies, many of whom were then sold by traffickers to social welfare institutions for profit. These initial chapters not only illuminate the cruelty and devastation that the one-child policy wrought on ordinary Chinese people, but also shatter the myth perpetuated by adoption agencies and international media that adoptees from China had been “heartlessly rejected” by their birth families; that all Chinese daughters were “like spilled water” and unwanted.
As in her previous books (Eat the Buddha: Life and death in a Tibetan town, 2020; Nothing to Envy: Real lives in North Korea, 2010; and Logavina Street: Life and death in a Sarajevo neighbourhood, 1996), Demick makes powerful use of personal stories. We hear about a seventy-year-old army veteran and Chinese Communist Party member who was tricked into signing away his family’s rights to their baby; an illiterate woman in her sixties who was imprisoned overnight after refusing to let go of her three-month-old granddaughter; and of course, the Zengs, the migrant worker couple from China’s central Hunan province whose twin daughter was stolen and unknowingly spirited across the world.
Demick serves as the initial go-between connecting Shuangjie, who was raised by the Zengs in China, and Fangfang, who grew up in Texas and is now called Esther. We’re also introduced to Marsha, the devout Christian who adopted Esther, a passionate believer in international adoption whose world is shaken when she comes to understand the truth behind Esther’s forced adoption. Some of the most tender parts of the book are about the twins and their families’ first encounters. We see Marsha showing the Zengs old family photos, the twins bonding in a cafe over both being able to roll their tongues. Demick also raises questions about nature vs nurture and the true quality of life in China and the US, challenging the assumption that international adoptees, particularly in western countries, are “better off” with their adoptive families.
At the time of the book’s publication, the twins have yet to meet again. Shortly after their reunion in China in 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic closed the world. Travel between China and the US is now more challenging, as relations between the two countries deteriorate. It’s another reminder of how political forces shape our everyday lives, and the importance of remembering such critical episodes of recent history lest they be “wilfully submerged” by those in power. As Demick notes, there isn’t anyone in China whose life hasn’t been touched by the one child policy: “It was all-encompassing, leaving almost everybody a victim or a perpetrator or both.” Beijing ended the policy in 2016, but its impact is irreversible: China now faces a shrinking population, declining birth rates and a nationwide gender imbalance skewed towards men.
