Clan Culture, One-Child Policy and Child Trafficking of Illegal Adoptions in China

Child trafficking is an increasing visible global concern for bringing numerous family tragedies worldwide. For decades, social scientists have continued digging the underlying causing factors of child trafficking in order to introduce effective policy interventions. Yet, existing studies are mostly limited to conjectures of casualty, but little direct evidence has been provided to support the conjectures. Here we manually collected over 18,000 cases of self-reported child trafficking for illegal adoption in China during 1960-2000. By matching the trafficking data with culture and policy data, we proved a common long-standing conjecture in the science community that both the strength of clan culture (proxied by genealogies) and the One-Child Policy (proxied by fine rate for violating the policy) are positively associated with the demand of trafficked children in China, at the prefectural level. We further confirmed the association from empirical test of the normal adoption, which has the same incentives with illegal adoptions. Our findings suggest that culture and policy have complex interactions and might cause unexpected social consequence. Our results support that the cessation of the birth control policy in China could help reduce the child trafficking rate and family tragedies.