Globalization’s Children: How the 90s Shaped a Generation of International Adoptions

May 2025

As President Trump implements steep tariffs, reversing a decades-long position of free trade and internationalism, we are reminded that time is not linear. Today’s backlash blurs how global integration in the nineties did not just transform economies or supply chains, but also transformed families.

Behind dominant humanitarian narratives, the rise of international adoptions during the late nineties was also a story of economic policy, demographic engineering, and geopolitical power. As China increased its manufacturing, implemented the one-child policy, and opened its markets to the world, American families adopted tens of thousands of Chinese children. These adoptions did not occur in a vacuum–adoptions from Vietnam and Korea made the blueprint for Chinese intercountry adoptions decades earlier. This essay traces how a globalized world produced not only goods, but also families like mine, unformed and formed by the same forces.

The end of the twentieth century witnessed an acceleration of globalization that has shaped our present. Communism ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the Cold War ending in 1991, with twenty-five countries in the communist bloc integrating into the global economy. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1992, lifting tariffs on most goods produced in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Technological innovations like the internet and mobile phones expedited global communication and the financialization of the economy more deeply intertwined global financial infrastructures (Zahra 2025).

During this time, China began to manufacture more as companies desired lower labor costs. Cheaper labor markets, like China’s at the time, are a key feature of globalization. By definition, globalization is the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked by the free flow of trade and capital. It relies on comparative advantage, a core economic concept from the nineteenth century that states if someone can produce goods at a lower relative cost than you can, let them. Thus, gains can be made through trade when a government specializes in making a good, allowing more total goods to be produced. With this economic framework, countries began to send labor overseas. With an open door, China welcomed manufacturing: China’s share of global manufacturing production increased from 2.7% in 1990 to 7% in 2000, and their share of world manufacturing exports more than doubled from 1.9% to 4.7% over the same time period (Crafts 2004). China’s increase in manufacturing not only generated national economic benefits but also lifted many people out of poverty. China’s national poverty line estimated that the rural poverty population dropped from 250 million in 1978 to 28 million in 2002, decreasing by roughly 90% (Angang, Linlin, and Zhixiao 2005). As China joined the global economy and saw improvements in key economic and social metrics, it also created new policies that would allow for the freer exchange of people, not only goods.

International adoptions from China opened in 1992–the same year NAFTA was signed–paving the way for me and thousands of others. The context for international adoption lies in China’s speculation that curbing population growth would lead to better economic growth. China previously encouraged families to have many children in the 1960s, until the 1970s when fears of overpopulation influenced policy. In an act of demographic engineering, Chairman Mao Zedong introduced the one-child policy in 1979, lasting through 2015. Because of patriarchal attitudes and a cultural premium on male children (they will care for the family), more female children were abandoned. Within this context, China turned to international adoptions. Contrary to public belief, many families in China were willing to adopt abandoned female babies. However, China required adopters to be 35 or over, which severely limited the number of families who could adopt in the 90s (Johnson 2002). Adoption restrictions aimed at preventing parents from abandoning female children in favor of producing a male child resulted in an increase of child abandonment while decreasing the number of families who could legally adopt in China (Johnson 2002). At the time, official orphanages had too many children and not enough resources. International adoption facilitated more support for under-resourced orphanages while leaving family planning policies untouched. International adoption in China has been an institution created to prioritize transnational adoptions over domestic adoptions. While China turned to international adoptions, during the same period, the United States was forming cultural ideas and legal policies on adoption.

The promotion and formalization of domestic adoption, specifically same-race adoption and adoption of disabled children, at the end of the twentieth century in the United States created the cultural groundwork for how Americans viewed family: who is deserving of family and what kind of child is worthy of adoption. In 1981, Chicago Reverend George Clements created the “One Church, One Child” movement to recruit black adoptive parents for black children; Reverend Clements essentially promoted intraracial or same-race adoption, implying some importance in parents raising children who are the same race as them. Alongside the pool of adoptable children, I sense that cultural globalization partially deprioritized same-race adoptions. As people on opposite sides of the earth could reach each other at light speed and goods could accelerate across borders, how could a person not parent a child from halfway around the world? Further, Federal support positioned adoption as altruistic. In 1987, the Reagan Administration created the Interagency Task Force on Adoption to promote adoption, specifically encouraging adoption by pregnant women and to support the adoption of disabled children (PBS 2003). When adoptions from China became available, borne from widespread child abandonment, America was already primed with the cultural attitude that adoption was a moral obligation.

In addition to primed cultural attitudes, contemporary adoptions facilitated in the nineties were deeply influenced by the United States’ involvement in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The Displaced Persons Act, key post-World War II legislation in 1948, enabled 200,000 refugees to come to the United States, including 3,000 orphans. In 1953, in the wake of the Korean War, Congress extended 500 special visas for orphans to be adopted by U.S. servicemen. That same year, the Refugee Relief Act allowed 4,000 more visas for orphans to be given over the next three years; there were still more children waiting to immigrate, even with the additional visas (PBS 2003). Holt International, the oldest agency that facilitates adoption, emerged in response to the Korean War. In 1956, Harry and Bertha Holt created Holt International Children’s Services, a Christian non-profit adoption agency. They adopted eight children from Korea and pioneered transnational adoption. Televised nationally, the Holt family spurred interest among Americans to adopt Korean children. In 1957, Congress removed all quotas for orphan visas (Kirk, Forbes, and Young 2024). In 1975, the United States military airlifted 3,300 children in Operation Babylift, most of whom were adopted by families around the world, facilitated by Holt International (PBS 2003). These early waves of adoption provided foundational cultural and legal precedent for intercountry adoption.

As China ended the one-child policy in 2015, shut down intercountry adoption in 2024, and the United States turns inward yet again, an era ends–not just in trade, but in family formation. Families severed and made by adoption are real, and so too are the policies that made adoption necessary. Now, after decades of draconian family planning laws, China provides financial subsidies for families to have more children (Luo 2023). I and thousands of others were a byproduct of a country launching itself into the global economy. At what cost did China gain its geopolitical power and economic prosperity? Perhaps the answer remains closer to the traces that remain: me and thousands of others adopted during globalization’s peak are proof of a moment that happened.