2. Longitudinal fieldwork in a changing China

As clichéd as it may be, it does feel like writing a book is a labour of love that is similar, in some small ways, to parenting—in that the days can feel long but the months (before a deadline) pass quickly. As I mentioned above, Fred joined our family in a very timely manner, soon after I had submitted the manuscript for Orphan Relief in China and just before receiving its page proofs for a final review. Reading through those pages in those hazy newborn months, pages that were the culmination of a research journey I had started over a decade earlier when I first visited a foster home on the outskirts of Beijing as a volunteer, was a prompt to reflect on how I had changed as a researcher over the course of those years, and how the field had changed too.

My final trip to China to collect data for this book had been two years earlier, in the summer of 2017, when Fred’s older sister, Maggie, was herself a “babe in arms.” It was a relatively brief trip, but still a source of anxiety (some of which, in hindsight, I can identify as the general anxiety common to all new parents) in terms of both the emotions of meeting and reuniting with research informants and with their charges, and the logistics of ensuring that Maggie was safe, well, and fed. If readers will allow me to indulge in another cliché here—visiting the field hit me differently as a mother as it had when I was a postgraduate student. I was obviously (noticeably) much older; children inadvertently reminded me of this when they uniformly and spontaneously referred to me as Anna ayi (auntie) rather than my previous Anna jiejie (older sister). Hearing an upset child’s cry could lead to a physical maternal response, and seeing children in distress, children who looked to be the same age as Maggie, provoked a different emotional response than it had just a few years earlier.

China had changed too, with Xi Jinping steadily strengthening his political and moral authority over the party-state, and a growing sense of domestic and international unease about “hard strikes” happening in the west. As Xu Cheng and Shahla Ali note, in Orphan Relief in China, I present insights from care workers operating in the shadows of the law. As a foreign researcher, I relied on the generosity and grace of locals to help me navigate in that shadow myself—for example, my taxi driver, who spoke to officers at a rural checkpoint to explain why this hapless waiguoren (foreign national) had left her passport at her Beijing apartment, rather than keeping it on her person as required by law. Foreign researchers in China generally face unique challenges of access and security, but it seems inevitable that as the political terrain in China continues to shift, so too will the shape and impact of the shadow of the law on our work. Interestingly, there is no clear evidence, as yet, that the legal landscape for foreign researchers in China has become more repressive under Xi Jinping; ^{Footnote 2} however, Greitens and Truex have also found that, nonetheless, the overall perception of foreign scholars is that China’s research climate is recently becoming more constrained. ^{Footnote 3} Disciplinary conversations, including in the socio-legal school, about researching in a changing China will continue as scholars find mutual support in navigating the risks of research—risks that are “uncertain, individualized and not easily discernible from public information.” ^{Footnote 4}

3. The researcher’s place in the field

Both commentaries highlight the foregrounding of ethnographic fieldwork and story-telling in Orphan Relief in China. Perhaps some might disagree that this study, of a very particular social group—gu’er in private orphanages and their caregivers—is rightly characterized as ethnographic, but as another reviewer has noted, I have attempted to be down to earth and nuanced in describing this social sphere, ^{Footnote 5} and telling stories of lived experiences is an important aspect of that. As Xu Zheng and Shahla Ali note, individual stories are used to provide context for the broader meta-narratives of changing laws and policies, and interactional politics. ^{Footnote 6} But of course, this can cause internal conflict for the writer. Throughout my research, I have been concerned with the risk of contributing to the objectification of gu’er as the “unfortunate other.” ^{Footnote 7} Indeed, I preferred the Chinese term gu’er, or the literal English translation “lonely child,” to the English term “orphan” (despite its use in the title), which is experienced by some as pejorative and objectifying, defining a child solely by her parental status. ^{Footnote 8} But inevitably, in telling stories, to some degree at least, the children and informants whose stories I tell are cast as “objects rather than creators of anthropological knowledge.” ^{Footnote 9} This causes a moral tension, although Kirsten Bell has noted, in a passage that resonates with me, that

In our daily and mundane humanity, perhaps it is not so controversial to say that we are constantly perceiving and interpreting and reimagining the stories of others from our own perspective, for our own end of gaining knowledge and understanding our own place in the world. This is a tension that cannot be done away with, but must be inhabited with self-reflection, particularly when it comes to using the stories of others to do scholarly work of “humanitarian value.” ^{Footnote 11} There are other researchers in the field of Chinese orphan relief—I am thinking in particular of Kay Johnson and Leslie Wang—who have inhabited this tension beautifully, and in whose work I found a great deal of guidance and motivation. ^{Footnote 12}

A related point is the use of genuine, meaningful relationships for multiple purposes—the relationship between researcher and informant can be not only enriching in and of itself, but also something we rely on and leverage for scholarly ends. James S. Bielo has written of ethnography that, whatever else it may be, “it is about building, negotiating, losing, and celebrating relationships with fellow human beings.” ^{Footnote 13} Telling these stories requires, first, a relationship to be built—as Simpson has noted, in an ethnographic (or ethnographic-ish) approach, “to talk of ‘the field’ is to talk of an entity which is itself relational and not merely spatial.” ^{Footnote 14} Here there was an interesting symmetry between my role as a researcher and the organizations I was mapping—as to the latter, and as Xu Zheng and Shahla Ali note, Orphan Relief highlights how their prospects for survival were dependent on the cultivation of good webs of relationships with local officials. ^{Footnote 15} Similarly, the success or otherwise of my research in China was dependent upon fostering mutual trust with participants; in that process, I was mindful of being both an insider and an outsider in the field. ^{Footnote 16} Throughout, it was important not to lose sight of the relational nature of that field and the aforementioned moral tension that comes with storytelling in a field comprising people’s lives, including their traumas, losses, and loves.

4. Forever homes, gotcha days, and international adoption

Many of the stories in Orphan Relief in China were told with a view to painting a textured and sensitive (if necessarily incomplete, due to space and time constraints) picture of broader dynamics, including the movement of gu’er to and from different caregiving contexts. Another reviewer, Young Sun Park, has said that Orphan Relief in China generally depicts one such movement, international adoption, in a positive light; Park rightly points out that inter-country adoption is an extremely complex process and one that requires nuanced treatment. ^{Footnote 17} Other than pointing interested readers to the excellent work of Leslie Wang, cited above, I would also add that I have elsewhere given more attention to those complexities and nuances, ^{Footnote 18} which are worth touching on here also. The rhetoric of inter-country adoption has shifted dramatically since its inception in the wake of World War II; inter-country adoption continues to be infused with the (at-times problematic) rhetoric of “child rescue,” but with parent-driven or family-driven arguments strengthening, in a way that can come “uncomfortably close to casting adoptees as objects or commodities rather than subjects.” ^{Footnote 19} In the context of East to West adoption—and noting that the American international adoption culture is, to a large extent, dominated by evangelical Christians for whom adoption is also a route to faith membership—an added objection is the “imperialist” one, which characterizes inter-country adoption as an “exercise of influence and control by the more powerful nations who are seen as ‘robbing’ Third World countries of their children whilst confirming their inferiority and inadequacy.” ^{Footnote 20}

The obvious response to the “imperialist” objection is the paramountcy principle—that the paramount issue is whether international adoption serves the best interests of children, regardless of its potential “neocolonialist hue.” ^{Footnote 21} But as I noted in 2014, “frequently in humanitarian, child-centred discourse on adoption, the ‘best interests’ standard masks an underlying ideological inconsistency—are we saving children from being family-less/institutionalized, or saving them from third-world countries?” ^{Footnote 22} This was a point on which the foreign-run foster homes in Orphan Relief in China were generally very cognizant and reflective. As I discuss at length in the book, for foreign-run welfare providers, cultivating local legitimacy, despite their illegality, required navigating a complicating contextual factor: China’s historically rooted scepticism of the intervention of outsiders in matters of domestic welfare. As one of my informants described it, it was important for foster homes to send a clear message: we are helping the state to save children from abandonment; we are not trying to save children “from being Chinese.” ^{Footnote 23}

5. Concluding remarks

I am most grateful to Professor Amy Shee (chair) and to the committee members of the 2020 Distinguished Book Award of the Asian Law and Society Association for selecting my monograph from what was no doubt a field of very worthy contenders. I would like to acknowledge the late Dr Eric Herber, whose excellent work on Japan’s criminal justice system, Lay and Expert Contributions to Japanese Criminal Justice, was awarded the 2020 Honorary Mention. It was a pleasure to join in celebrating recent Asian socio-legal scholarship at the 2020 ALSA conference award ceremony, held virtually in September 2021 after Covid-induced delays, and in which Dr Herber’s wife participated. My thanks to Professor Kay-Wah Chan, president of ALSA, and the conference organizers for hosting this event.