Outsourced Children is the “first systematic analysis of the lives of institutionalized youth in the PRC” (p. 4), particularly those orphaned due to parental death or abandonment. Leslie Wang's in-depth study is an important counterweight to the sensational exposés in Western media in the 1990s about infant neglect in China's state-run orphanages epitomized by “dying rooms,” whose continued existence Wang does not deny but demonstrates to be unrepresentative of China's entire child welfare system (pp. 9–12).
After the damning news coverage and international approbation, the Chinese government gradually opened to investment by foreign charitable organizations and international adoption agencies. Wang thus rightly situates her study of China's child welfare system—inclusive of orphanages and adoptions—within a global framework that highlights the multidirectional, transnational exchanges of “people, resources, and knowledge” and objectively assesses the consequences (p. 15). For example, healthy girls are most desirable for adoption by Western couples and so pass...
