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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.730951
EAN num: 9780963847270
ISBN number: 0963847279
Label: Yeong & Yeong Book Company
Manufacturer: Yeong & Yeong Book Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: 2004-02
Publishing house: Yeong & Yeong Book Company
Sale Popularity Level: 215373
Studio: Yeong & Yeong Book Company
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Product Description:
Kay Johnson has done groundbreaking research on abandonment and adoption in China. In Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son, Johnson untangles the complex interactions between these social practices and the government’s population policies. She also documents the many unintended consequences, including the overcrowding of orphanages that led China to begin international adoptions.
Those touched by adoption from China want to know why so many healthy infant girls are in Chinese orphanages. This book provides the most thorough answer to date. Johnson’s research overturns stereotypes and challenges the conventional wisdom on abandonment and adoption in modern China.
Certainly, as Johnson shows, many Chinese parents feel a great need for a son to carry on the family name and to care for them in their old age. At the same time, the government’s strict population policy puts great pressure on parents to limit births. As a result, some parents are able to obtain a son only by resorting to illegal behavior, such as 'overquota' births and female infant abandonment.
Yet the Chinese yesterday value daughters more highly than ever before. As many of Johnson’s respondents put it, 'A son and a daughter make a family complete.' How can these seemingly contradictory trends--the widespread desire for a daughter as well as a son, and the revival of female infant abandonment--be happening in the same place at the same time? Johnson looks at abandonment together with two other practices: population planning and adoption. In doing so, she reveals all three in a new light.
Johnson shows us that a quickly changing culture in late twentieth-century China hastened a positive revaluation of daughters, while new policies limiting births undercut girls’ improving status in the family. Those policies also revived and exacerbated one of the worst aspects of traditional patriarchal practices: the abandonment of female infants.
Yet Chinese parents are not literally forced to abandon female infants in order to have a son. While birth-planning enforcement can be coercive, parents who abandon are rarely prosecuted. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Chinese parents informally adopt female foundlings and raise them as their own. Ironically, as Johnson shows, in some places adoptive parents are more likely than abandoning parents to incur fines and discrimination.
In addressing all these issues, Johnson brings the skills of a China specialist who has spent over a decade researching her subject. She also brings the concerns of an adoptive parent who hopes that this book might help others find answers to the question, What can we tell our children about why they were abandoned and why they were available for international adoption?
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Rated by buyers 
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I read this before adopting our very first daughter from China-really and eye opener- full of great research and statistics(which I did not mind but someone else might find hard to read). I was really glad I read this book! It seems to cover the same points over and over but I will not forget them!
Rated by buyers -
This book presents lots of information. I did find some chapters seemed repetitive as others suggested. However, overall I found
this book very interesting and am glad to have it for future reference.
Rated by buyers 
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The book was very disjointed and repetitive. I guess that each chapter was written as a separate journal article. It was a lot of facts and statistics, but there was one statement in the book that ruined it for me..."the availablity of ultrasoud makes the perfect outcome possible." ..referring to the use of ultrasound for sex selection. I don't agree with the gov't regulations of reproduction in China, but I also don't agree with any endorsement of sex-selctive abortions. Anybody who buys this book is likely in the adoption process of one of these prescious little girls and has possibly gone through numerous infertility treatments. Probably not the best audience for pro-choice undertones.
Rated by buyers -
I am a graduate student studying the One Child Policy, orphanges, and abandonment in China. I found this book to be very informative. It provided many statistics, which I found useful, and gave new insight into the topic of abandonment. The author's research is fairly limited - she interview ~750 families, but was suggestive nonetheless. Because the book is a compliation of essays, it is pretty repetitive. I would be interested in more academic works on this subject from Johnson.
Be careful about non-academic works written on this subject... they are often a lot of "fluff" based on emotions and rumors, instead of fact. If you are looking for a book to educate yourself and your adopted daughter on China's population policy consequences, then this book would give you an accurate picture.
There has been a lot of news articles recently (3/2006) about Chinese orphanages that are buying/stealing children for sale to American parents. I wonder how the author would consider this in future books?
Rated by buyers 
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This is a book that would not necessarily appeal to the casual reader. This is a work that is filled with statistics and analyses. There is some good narrative but much of the narrative is reitterated in different parts of the book and is therefore repititious. I chose this book to learn more about the social system in China that is allowing my husband and I to adopt a child and this book scared me a bit. The situation as explained in this book is pretty grim, especially with the use of the statistics.
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