Original subtitles

This is China's showcase children's institute, the Shanghai Orphanage.

Visitors are encouraged, not least to show how much China cares for its

abandoned children.

However, this film revealed the pattern of severe abuse and fatal neglect in its

recent past.

The severe degree of neglect, abuse, extending sometimes to outright torture

staff, is well documented.

Dr Zhang brought out official records of government investigation into these

cases. We also have numerous audio tapes narrated in full by the victims

themselves.

The pattern of evidence available to us on ill -treatment in state -run

children's institutions is sketchy, but the Shanghai case is the best documented

case we have seen so far.

What's new and startling is that, in this orphanage at least, it appears that

institutionalised murder was practised over a period of time, that it was

deliberate and it was systematic.

The lengthy investigation carried out by Human Rights Watch includes a secret

report that shows senior government officials, including a member of China's

ruling Politburo, were fully aware of the high death rates and abuses in the

orphanage and yet did almost nothing to help the children.

This is now undeniable.

It's a matter of official Chinese record, in fact.

Therefore, the authorities will not be able to maintain that this is not a

problem. It is undeniable.

At the same time as Human Rights Watch began their research into the Shanghai

orphanage, we were starting out on a journey across China to look into

of dying rooms in the country's state orphanages.

Allegations we repeatedly put to the Chinese government, but on which they

consistently refused to comment.

This film brings together the full story of our investigative journey and the

revelations about the disturbing past of the Shanghai orphanage.

In early 1995, unconfirmed rumours were circulating of the existence of dying

rooms in some of China's state orphanages.

Three of us set off to discover and document the truth.

We enter China undercover as orphanage workers, each carrying parts of a secret

camera that was only assembled once we were in the country.

China is the world's third largest country and supports almost a quarter of

world's population.

According to the Chinese authorities, there are around 40 ,000 orphanages

the country.

Our first destination inside China was the city of Wuhan, the capital of the

central Chinese province of Hubei, 650 miles to the south of Beijing.

We headed for the main orphanage.

knowing that any babies abandoned in the city or surrounding area would end up

here.

We planned to shoot as much as possible with a hidden camera and only use our

cover story if we were stopped.

However, women in white coats were on to us almost immediately and we were taken

to the orphanage director's office for questioning.

Eventually she accepted our cover and we were given the official visitors tour.

We witnessed the arrival of the orphanage's latest baby, a healthy girl

few days old.

We are now sending this baby to her.

From now on, she will be identified only by her luggage label.

This gives her name, her approximate birth date and the day she was brought

birth date orphanage we visited.

Even so, the last time figures were officially published, this province

two deaths for every five babies admitted.

We found in an officially published volume put out by Ministry of Civil

in Beijing, the civil affairs authorities are the ones responsible for

orphanages in China, a statistical yearbook from 1990 in which

full... Details of the death rate in orphanages around China were included in

statistical table.

Now, what these show is that the death rate on average is almost 60 % around

country.

The year these figures were compiled, Fujian province reported that their

orphanages had 109 admissions and 109 deaths.

Already, there are more than 1 .2 billion people living here.

And across China, 21 million babies are born every year.

So there's a desperate need to control the population.

This is the largest population in the world on a very small quantity of land.

And the Chinese state has known for many years that if they didn't limit the

population or reduce it, that by the middle of the next millennium...

there would be a fight for food and a general starvation.

The response of the Chinese Communist Party to this problem was to introduce

1979 the one -child -per -family policy, a law which states that urban families

can have no more than one child and which has proved to be highly

around the world.

The American Congress keeps millions of dollars away from Chinese birth control

programs because the UN is very touchy about it. It gets raised all the time by

official visitors to China. The Chinese state denies it is a big problem,

although, of course, it is a red -hot, dangerous, internationally sensitive

matter.

Under the one -child policy, each time a woman wants to try for a baby, she has

to apply for a sheng ou jian, a birth permit.

Without such a permit, any woman who becomes pregnant is likely to face

from her local cadre to abort.

In China, we have credible reports of women being arrested

for the crime of being pregnant, of women being locked up.

incarcerated until they submit to an abortion of women being aborted or

sterilized during the course of other medical procedures without their

foreknowledge or permission of their husbands being arrested or placed under

house arrest or actually imprisoned until their wives submit to abortions of

babies being killed at birth by means of a lethal injection into the

fontanelle that is the soft spot of the child's skull

Of homes actually being destroyed of couples who resist sterilization or

abortion. The list of human rights abuses in China's one -child policy is

lengthy. A woman who already had one child when the police discovered she was

pregnant without permission told us about her enforced abortion.

The gum is enough.

She wants to make other one.

And now she has a baby in her body for five months. So the policeman found this

lady, took this lady to a hospital, took the baby from her. They put the

medicine inside,

so the baby is dying.

And it kills the baby? Kills the baby, takes the baby out.

I have talked to a woman who has got pregnant for nine months already.

But she was found by the authority.

She said, I have only about five days later I will born the baby.

But the authority forced to take abortion at once.

The baby took out, was killed, and the mother was sent back to her home. But

since she was in bad health condition, after two days she died.

With China's population feeding the 1 .2 billion mark, The government knows that

as well as its family planning program, there is a further need to restrict the

growth of the population.

In February of 1995, the party general secretary himself, Jiang Zemin,

made a speech in which he said that China's population was still increasing

rapidly. He set a new goal for China's population of 1 ,300 million by the year

2000.

What this means is tremendous coercion on women

to submit to abortions and sterilizations.

And I think it also means that however overcrowded China's orphanages are now

with baby girls, that that problem is likely to get worse, very much worse, in

the near future.

From Wuhan, we travelled 600 miles west to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, a

province roughly the size of France, with a population of over 100 million.

Here, we found toddlers tied to bamboo seats, with their legs splayed over

makeshift potties.

All girls, of course, unless they are handicapped boys, but healthy boys is

never abandoned, ever.

We wanted to confirm the information we'd been given, that it is

girls that are rejected, so we checked the gender of every baby we could.

She's got three pieces of string down her body, across her chest, across the

middle, and down by her feet.

This is plastic.

And then there's two layers of thick material.

And it's sort of almost like a bodice around the body.

And underneath, it's very constricted, very tight.

And she's very wet inside.

Another little girl.

The government's one -child policy.

dictates only the number of children a family may have.

It says nothing about the preferred sex.

Each family, in a sense, is limited to only one child.

Then the gender becomes a very important concern to each family.

The celebration between the boys and the girls is very different.

For example, for the boys, when they were just born out, there were

Yeah, but the girls never, never will do. And girls are called Lai Di or Zhao

Di. That means boys come, come, come, boys come.

And there are more than 6 million women in China called Lai Di and

Zhao Di. So you can see the common belief of hoping, of expecting boys.

There is the problem in China now of the survival of the parents.

When a girl marries, as the Chinese say, she marries out, she disappears into

her husband's family, and her duty, traditionally, is to care for her

-in -law. So especially if you're in the rural part of the country, where 80 %

of the population lives, and there's no social security of any kind, you're

really looking starvation and misery in the face.

if you don't have a grown son and his wife to look after you when you're old.

Then as soon as they get into their teens, they marry and leave their family

join their husband's family.

What the one -child policy has meant is that in the game of birth roulette, you

only get one chance to have a son.

In the rural areas, where sons are especially prized, the policy was

the 80s to allow a second child if the first baby is handicapped or a girl.

However, to benefit from this concession, a woman still has to get a

permit from her local cadre.

With the pressures so high to keep the birth rates down, permits for a second

child are often very difficult to come by, increasing the likelihood that

unwanted daughters will simply disappear.

There is an increasing...

imbalance in the sex ratio in China. You go into a Chinese village today, you

will see very many more little boys running around than little girls. Where

the little girls?

They've been killed in utero, they've been killed after birth, or they've been

abandoned and left to die on a road somewhere.

Some of them may die of hunger.

Some of them may be picked up by the gangs to become beggars in the street,

some of them may be lucky to be sent to the office.

From Sichuan, we travel south to Nanning, the capital of Guangxi, a

so miles from the border with Vietnam.

Here, we found only an adolescent girl in a white coat watching over the

children.

We were led into the baby's room by a handicapped child, and the smell hit us

first.

Sour milk, urine, and unwashed bodies.

Contact with a child as early on as possible is terribly important.

I think everyone saw this in the Vietnam War when lots of babies were abandoned

and left in these huge orphanages and just a bottle lying in a sort of a

mechanical arm, you know, jammed into their mouth.

The children just grew up totally lifeless because there was no nurturing,

was no physical contact.

It's terribly important just to be held, to be comforted from as early on as

possible.

I have worked as a volunteer in different kinds of orphanages.

You can see how lifeless, in some cases, the children really are because they

just don't have that human contact. And it's because, I guess, there's a

shortage of manpower and time and resources and one person is left to care

far too many babies.

Orphanages in China maintain a kind of caste system between different types of

orphans.

In the strict sense, in Chinese law, are those whose both natural parents are in

fact dead. They are the only inmates of the orphanages who strictly are

recognized as orphans. Most of the children and infants in orphanages are

abandoned children.

Ordinary Chinese couples, if they have one child already, because of the strict

one -child policy, are actually barred under the adoptions law from adopting an

abandoned infant.

What it means in practice is that there is very little chance that abandoned

infants in China will ever be able to leave the orphanage.

just alongside this corridor there was an orphanage pharmacy full of medicines

and yet this child's gangrene was being ignored

a

white coat appeared in the

courtyard saw us and headed off in the direction of the admin block we knew it

was time to go

The Chinese government has a duty to control its population, but equally it

a duty to take care of the innocent victims of that control.

We'd already witnessed disturbing levels of neglect in several orphanages and

had been made dramatically aware of the influence of the state's one -child

policy and its tragic collision with China's age -old preference for sons.

But even more haunting images lay ahead of us.

As we continued our journey across China, local people often confirmed the

strict way that the population control policy is sometimes enforced.

This is an extraordinary example of a cultural collision.

What you have is the destruction of females at one end of this society, at

young end.

and then the abduction, the kidnapping, and the obtaining of women at the other

end, in order that the men can have wives, in order that those people can

have some more boy children.

In the next decade, when the sons of the one -child policy come of age, China

will face a demographic disaster.

As Shanghai's Wenhui Daily said, by the end of the century, our country will

have a great hoodlum army of 70 million single men.

The Chinese government itself is now worried and is trying hard to promote

equal values of boys and girls.

At Huangshuo Orphanage in Hubei Province, we found infants starved of

nutrients of warmth and affection.

Unattended and bored, they spend their days tied together in a potty bench.

With no stimulation other than the occasional thump from an older inmate,

action they all have in common is a relentless rocking motion.

This child arrived in a basket when he was only a few days old.

Since then, he has known nothing else.

Now totally institutionalized, with hands and feet tied, he sits in sodden

trousers.

While we were filming, a local Parsi official arrived.

He'd been told there were foreigners in the orphanage.

This was by far the most difficult moment we'd faced.

Kate intercepted him before he saw us filming and, via our interpreter, set

our story.

We were expecting a cold and formal reception as we'd walked in unannounced

with no official permission.

Instead, he completely accepted our cover and proudly showed us the

new dining hall, built with a grant from central government.

Our hosts were keen to point out that more funds were needed to complete and

furnish the building and that any contributions would be gratefully

Even with extra cash from the government and charities, they told us that there

was a very high turnover of staff and no formal training for the workers.

You customarily find in orphanages, nurseries with 40 or 50 babies, where

are on duty only a couple of people. Two individuals, however industrious, can't

possibly care for that many infants.

And so neglect takes place as a matter of course.

According to the orphanage director, 400 babies have been dumped here in the

past year.

Yet when we looked around, we could see no more than a dozen.

We asked an aid worker where the babies disappeared to.

To my experience, two possibilities.

One is they passed away because of illness, or another possibility which is

adopted. But I would say this is a small number. Usually if they are gone, I

would feel very sad to ask because I'm afraid to know the answer.

And they would say they're just gone.

And I say, what do you mean gone?

They died.

That's it.

Most of last year's babies arrived in the steaming summer months when viruses

spread quickly.

They ended up in this building.

With newborns, five to a cot in temperatures of over 100 degrees.

One in every five died.

The 80 or so lives that ended here in 1994, passed unnoticed,

unremembered, and unmourned.

The

Chinese

Communist Party has ultimate say over everything that happens in China.

It could very easily improve conditions in China's orphanages by increasing

funding and increasing staffing.

That it chooses not to do so is a tragedy for the Chinese people,

these little baby girls, many of whom will not live to adulthood.

So far, every orphanage we'd seen had been funded and managed by the

We'd found out that there are some privately run orphanages in China.

and we wanted to see if the conditions were the same.

Things were very different.

Here, the local children looked into the courtyard with envy.

This sanctuary survives solely on charitable donations that come almost

from within China.

There appeared to be no more money here than at the state orphanages.

It's the way things are run that's different.

Each child is informally adopted by parents, who are given rooms in the

all the families live together under the same roof.

The atmosphere was so welcoming that we stayed well into the night and joined

the children for their lantern festival.

I don't know.

The final stage of our journey across China took us to Zhaoqing, just outside

Guangzhou, one of China's richest cities, less than two hours from the

with Hong Kong.

At first, we thought that only disabled children lived here.

as we could neither see nor hear any babies.

Then from under one of the towels drying on a cot, we heard a cry.

The staff told us that this baby's health was normal.

In fact, she was suffering from severe impetigo on her head, vitamin B and C

deficiency, and acute liver failure.

Whilst we were filming, we made a grim

discovery.

There was a room here where a baby girl had been left to die ten days earlier.

The staff preferred not to enter the room, waiting instead for one of the

children to report the infant dead.

We asked her name and were told Mei Ming.

This means no name.

It was the second time in her short life that she'd been abandoned.

She's waiting to die.

Mei Ming gave up her fight for life four days after we filmed her.

Her parents had abandoned her and when we telephoned offering our help, the

orphanage at first denied she had ever existed.

The Chinese government sent a statement reacting to the facts revealed

in the film.

They denied the existence of dying worms in China and claimed our footage to be

a vicious fabrication and a contemptible lie.

The Chinese government is extremely sensitive to criticism from the West in

areas because of traditional Chinese considerations of face.

So now the Chinese government refuses to admit that there are abuses.

in its state -run orphanages or in the one -child policy as a whole because

they're afraid of losing face.

At the same time as we were secretly filming in central China, Human Rights

Watch Asia was involved in a detailed and top -secret investigation of the

Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute, a showcase establishment that welcomes

hundreds of visitors from around the world every year.

Dr Zhang Shuyuan joined the senior staff of the Shanghai orphanage in 1988.

However, she soon discovered that the orphans were suffering brutal ill

-treatment.

After a five -year struggle to get help for the children from within Shanghai,

she finally fled from China, carrying with her secret documents and

Our involvement with Dr Zhang Shuyun began in late March when I met with her.

What she told me in the course of that day, frankly, even after my 15 and more

years of involvement in China human rights work, shocked me.

I was very disturbed at what I saw.

According to officials, this orphanage has around 500 inmates.

And despite the fact that Shanghai is arguably China's most prestigious

orphanage, Human Rights Watch estimates that the total death rate in the late

80s and early 90s was as high as 9 out of 10.

During this time, few visitors were allowed inside the orphanage unless they

an official appointment.

This left the orphans totally in the hands of the staff.

Other abuses included torches developed during the Cultural Revolution, the

motorcycle position and the airplane position.

Children would be forced to stand in these positions for long periods, and

be beaten if they moved.

Ai Ming spent 19 years in the Shanghai orphanage.

He was abandoned by his parents as an infant after suffering an attack of

which left his legs partly disabled.

If you moved or disobeyed those rules, what happened?

Official records from this time show that of the children that died, four out

five were dead within a year of admission.

Some of these children were deliberately selected to die by the staff in order

to keep the number of inmates down to a certain level.

Nursing staff would meet periodically and informally decide, when there had

new admissions, how they would lower the population within the ward.

And they would identify individual children who would, as it were, be

for...

Henceforth, they would be denied food or put on starvation rations, in some

cases denied water.

And this process was known by the staff as 救地解决 in Chinese, which means summary

resolution.

The allegations of summary resolutions is just devastating.

It's wanting to claim that a child may have been left to die.

of neglect in an orphanage, but to report that an orphanage has a

policy of starving children to death is just profoundly shocking.

The process of gradual starvation is just about the most painful and

that they could adopt.

However, by doing it that way, what you find is that it

provides a basis

on which they can then maintain that these are natural deaths, wasn't our

The medical records of children targeted for summary resolution set out their

decline in meticulous detail.

As weeks pass, the doctors record the reduction in their body weight together

with the diagnoses of first, second and finally third degree malnutrition.

Ai Ming saw many victims of summary resolution at the orphanage.

Ai Ming took photographs of some of those sentenced to summary resolution.

Jian Shun was a deaf mute.

His medical records show that when he was admitted, he was healthy.

After several years in the care of the orphanage, his records show he died of

malnutrition.

During the last 12 days of his life, he received no medication or pain relief.

We showed the photographs that Ayming took in 1992 to a professor of

paediatrics from an American university.

His immediate reaction was, these children have died of malnutrition and

dehydration.

His comment was, if they're going to eliminate these children, why don't they

it humanely?

Why don't they just... terminate them in some way when they bring them in.

By the early 90s, rumours about the orphanage's regime had reached the

levels in Shanghai.

A series of inquiries were set up.

One government team recorded an extensive list of the abuses they

witnessed.

The Bureau of Supervision Investigation team in late 1991 personally

witnessed... more than a dozen young children tied to potty chairs in

temperatures, wearing thin shirts and cotton pants.

The result was that within a several -day period, nine of those children

Another report, marked as a state secret, confirms extensive abuses in the

orphanage and calls for immediate action.

It was circulated to a few very senior officials in Shanghai.

First on the list is Wu Bangguo.

Shanghai's Communist Party secretary at the time.

Wu Banguo was made a vice premier of China in 1995.

A protege of China's president, he is a member of the Shanghai faction,

currently dominating the Politburo.

Following the investigation, there was some change in the management, but

mortality rates are still around 50%, and a ban on critical media coverage of

the orphanage still exists.

Also, the contrasting treatment of the doctors' group and those in charge at

orphanage will hardly encourage others to speak out.

No -one was punished.

No -one has ever been punished for any of these horrendous calculated abuses at

the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute.

To the contrary, those most directly responsible, including the former

have been promoted.

Han Wei Cheng, the man in charge of the orphanage throughout this period, is now

head of social welfare for the whole of Shanghai.

Dr Zhang is now living in exile, the price for blowing the whistle in China.

This is the

result

of our four or five years of reporting.

It's very painful.

It's not surprising that this story was covered up.

Politics in China is about the pursuit of personal power, probably the same all

over the world. And tragically, the fate of a few orphaned children isn't high

on people's priorities.

Since we entered China a year ago, 20 million babies have been born.

The state has to control population growth.

but it also has a duty to look after the thousands of babies who end up in its

care.

Few people in China dare question the fate of the unwanted ones.

For most, it is too great a risk.

The hope has to be that international pressure will force the government to

carry out a root -and -branch reform of the entire orphanage system.

If this evidence reflects a broader pattern... then clearly we are talking

an area of darkness in Chinese institutional life.

It's incumbent that the Chinese authorities shed light in that area,

investigate cases of this kind in an open and systematic way and take action

remedy these abuses.

The only way that foreigners can improve the condition of females in China

and of orphans in general, is to know about this.

The Chinese are great violators of human rights. We all know about their gulag,

about the numbers of political prisoners, about the number of

In fact, we're talking about a much, much larger number of people, i .e., the

females in China.

Now, these people are culturally and in other ways deprived of their human

rights. So this has to be raised with the Chinese state just as actively.

as your favorite political prisoner.