An opinion piece in the New York Times hits the nail on the head in regard to the proposed new adoption regulations coming up in China, supposedly imposed in response to a drop in the orphan population.

While it's all well and good to want to think that a nation of 1,313,973,713 people would have the welfare of its small citizens at heart, this may not be the case on a planet we inhabit, and it could just be to someone's advantage to tilt the info wagon more than a bit to get the bits they want seen separated from those they'd rather not be examined too closely.

So ...

Can China be running out of orphans? Does the 6,493 that were adopted by American families in 2006 make such a dent in the numbers of children without families that there are none left wanting?

... as China increasingly asserts itself on the world stage and prepares to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, allowing Westerners to adopt thousands of infants each year would fit the image it wanted to project. I suspect not, and China’s new restrictions lead me to believe that national pride is more important than getting these children into loving homes.

The issue of abandoned and institutionalized children remains a taboo subject in China, a problem the government does not even acknowledge exists. The impulse to hide it seems to stem partly from embarrassment and partly from fear of revealing the grave human rights abuses the one-child policy has produced; surely, watching a parade of well-off foreigners cart off thousands of babies would make the Chinese authorities understandably uncomfortable.

It's been mighty handy for a very long time to tout the Chinese program as squeaky clean and hold up their Hague compliance as an example of what's right, but is it accurate, or just the result of good PR?

Continued ...