Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

The number of people adopting children in China is increasing. The number of abandoned and orphaned children are decreasing...perhaps because China's economy and society are becoming more developed.

Only one child orphaned in China’s devastating earthquake this year has won adoption so far. The process of finding new homes for 88 children whose parents have been confirmed dead or who have no relatives able to care for them has been hampered by bureaucratic red tape and by age-old prejudices against the disabled.

A new film set to air on the UK's Channel 4 next week is causing all sorts of stirs in the Middle Kingdom as it shows evidence that upwards of 70,000 children are abducted a year, destined for parents willing to pay for a (usually male) child.

Sure, the kids gripe and the work is hard, but there's a lot of benefit in giving these children a taste of the backbreaking labor that most Chinese people engage in on a daily basis.

As they paraded cheerfully into the Bird’s Nest stadium in their brightly coloured cultural costumes, the 56 smiling children were described as coming from China’s 56 ethnic groups. The supposedly ethnic minority children were actually all from the dominant Han group.

“The cycle of poverty can only be broken through education. Poor peasant farmers struggle to pay the annual school fees for their children to go to primary school but very, very few can afford the higher costs of sending the children to Junior Middle School or beyond. We know that if the children can learn to be comfortable with foreign visitors and speak some English they will be able to get work. Volunteer English Teachers...

Danwei gives a rundown of the Net response to the 'slave labour' case that has been the storm in Chinese news this week. For anyone just tuning in, brick kilns in Shanxi province were found to be using slave labour (including abducted children) to make their stackable product.

This Danwei article also contains the original note from the father's of the children that was sent to the central government and sparked the investigation in the first place.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of children have been snatched from their families in China, a Sky News investigation has found.

And families who have had children taken claim the authorities are covering up the abductions.
(more links at bottom of article)

A classroom video from a Tibetan primary school in Qinghai. Am I crazy, or are these kids out of f#%@in' control!?