1910 Poster - Orphan Train Movement

China: Door “Closed” on the International Adoption of Chinese Children! (6.9.2024)

After China’s Reform and Opening Up of the early 1980s, Americans adopted thousands of Chinese orphans, which on the surface became a good story in the history of Sino-US exchanges, but which was used by the US to cast all kinds of negative allegations onto the the Chinese Socialist System. Even before this – from the second half of the 19th century to the 1930s – there was also a social trend of large-scale adoption of Chinese orphans in the US, known as the “Orphan Train Movement”. This is odd – as the “Chinese Exclusion Act” was passed by the US government in 1882 – designed to keep all Chinese people “OUT” of the US! This was the first Act in history to exclude a group of people entirely premised on their “race” – and is an Act that has been subsequently used across the Western world as a template for all xenophobic legislation.