Orphanages Let Thousands Of Babies Die, Study Says
Thousands of babies have been systematically starved to death or killed through neglect and abuse in Chinese orphanages, a human rights group charges in a well-documented report.
One baby girl, the report from Human Rights Watch-Asia said, was so hungry that she began to chew her own hand.
With official statistics and records, orphanage medical files, eyewitness accounts and secret government reports, the New York-based group depicts the practice of starving children to death to control an orphanage’s population.
According to the report, to be released Sunday, mortality rates at orphanages in some provinces were as high as 72.5 percent in 1989, compared to the 40 percent death rate at one of the worst Romanian orphanages that same year.
China’s State Council - its cabinet - issued a statement Friday saying it had “not yet seen this so-called report.”
“The accusations leveled against our orphanages … are completely baseless,” it said.
By drawing on government reports, orphanage medical files, eyewitness accounts and government statistics, the report concludes that China’s top leaders condoned starving the orphans.
In case after case, it shows how infants and toddlers who entered the Shanghai Children’s Welfare Institute in good health between 1988 and 1993 were slowly starved to death over days, weeks and even months.
The report recounts testimony that ward supervisors agreed collectively to allow some of their charges to die when new babies arrived. The reason: to make sure the number of children did not exceed the number of beds or the ability of the staff to care for them.
The report alleges that attendants did not directly feed some infants and instead left bottles of milk in their cribs. Some babies died slowly of malnutrition; others choked to death trying to feed themselves.
One such victim, identified as Sun Zhu, arrived at the orphanage in relative good health. A month later, she was little more than skin and bones. Two months later, “the baby was so hungry that she was trying to chew flesh off her hand,” the report said.
The report includes hundreds of pages of case histories and testimony from the Shanghai orphanage. Most material came from Dr. Zhang Shuyun, whose efforts to expose the abuses resulted in a government investigation the city’s leadership eventually dropped - apparently because of its human rights implications.
Supporting testimony came from Ai Ming, who grew up in the orphanage and secretly photographed babies in the “dying rooms” and the morgue.
According to the case histories, 15 children died at the Shanghai orphanage in just three days in December 1991. At least nine of the children died from hypothermia after attendants tied them to potty chairs for more than 24 hours in freezing weather.
The rights group also alleges that the orphanage director raped young girls, that children were forced into slave labor and sometimes beaten and tortured.