Americans Lauren and Harrison Smith met in China as students, and discussed their desire to adopt from the country early on in their relationship. As soon as they reached the minimum age of 30, the couple put together their applications and submitted for inspections of their home in Kunming, the capital of south-west China’s Yunnan province, where they lived with their two-year-old daughter.

“In September 2019, we saw our son’s picture for the first time and were able to submit a letter of intent to adopt him,” Lauren told the Guardian.

The boy, who the couple named Benaiah, had been given up by his parents at the age of 15 months, after suffering a head injury. Lauren assumed the parents had loved him in that first year of life but didn’t have the capacity to care for him. The couple received all approvals except permission to travel and collect Benaiah. But before the Smiths were able to continue with the adoption process, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, they were forced to return to the US. Months of delays stretched into years.

“In our years of waiting, we have created family traditions for our son … He has come to know us as mama and baba and knows his sisters as jiejie and meimei,” said Lauren, referring to the Chinese terms for older sister and younger sister.

Then, on 4 September, Lauren got a call that changed everything: “My phone started to ring, I looked and saw it was our adoption agency case worker and my heart started to race. ‘This is it!’ I thought, but as soon as I heard her voice I knew this call wasn’t a call of good news.”

The call reported that a Chinese government spokesperson, answering a question from a journalist, had just confirmed that after 35 years the country was ending international adoptions of Chinese children. Only those applicants who had been approved for travel to collect their child would be finalised.

The spokesperson, Mao Ning, did not explain the decision other than to say that it was in line with the spirit of relevant international conventions. “We express our appreciation to those foreign governments and families, who wish to adopt Chinese children, for their good intention and the love and kindness they have shown,” Mao added.

The news confirmed what some had suspected was coming for years, after watching a decline in the number of children being put up for adoption, combined with an increasingly closed-off China which is trying to reverse falling birthrates.

For couples midway through the adoption process, the announcement was crushing.

“Corinne met our six children [through video calls], saw her home and the room that we had prepared for her, and experienced the excitement our children felt in preparation for her arrival,” said Anne and John Contant, about the young girl with special needs they were matched with in 2019.

“Our daughter is turning nine years old next month. She should have been home almost five years ago. We are still just as committed to bringing Corinne home now as when we were matched with her in the fall of 2019. Our family is devastated by China’s announcement.”

‘A variety of emotion’

An estimated 160,000 Chinese children were adopted by foreign parents over the three-and-a-half decades it was allowed, with more than half of them going to the US.

China’s adoption programme was primarily driven by the one-child policy which, for decades, enforced strict limits on Chinese parents. Pregnant women were forced to have abortions, children born in breach of the limits were taken from parents unwillingly, and baby girls were disproportionately abandoned by couples in a society that heavily favoured sons. Many Chinese parents had no idea their child had been adopted out to overseas families. In other horrifying cases children were kidnapped and sold to welfare institutes that organised overseas adoptions in what had become a profitable industry.

Cindy Zhu Huijgen, the Dutch journalist who asked Mao the crucial question in the press conference, said hearing the answer felt “cathartic”. Zhu Huijgen was adopted herself by Dutch parents in 1993.

“But any relief I feel is tempered by knowing that China’s government will probably never fully acknowledge the system’s abuses,” she wrote in the New York Times.

Xavier Huang, a Chinese adoptee and development manager at the Nanchang Project, told the Guardian there was “such a variety of emotion” among Chinese adoptees in the wake of the announcement.

“The reality for many people is that regardless of how loving and happy the family these adoptees grow up in, there are a series of huge traumas that we all experience,” they said. “The feeling of being treated as other, being approached as other. We feel a deep pain and grief at having to reject that part of ourselves.”

Huang said they feel a lot of joy and hope “to know these children who need homes have the prospect of staying in their communities with other racial peers”, but also more isolated knowing there will be no more people like them.

“My first reaction was ‘Good, no more children will have to experience what I did,’ because being removed from your birthplace, culture, heritage, and people is such a cruel and unusual life sentence. But then anxiety started to kick in,” wrote one adoptee in a testimony published by the Nanchang Project, a US-based organisation that helps adoptees try to connect with their birth families.

“It just feels odd. I know the one child policy is over, but to think other possible adoptees don’t get the chance is sad to me. Being adopted was one of the best things to happen to me,” wrote another, Molly Brown.

‘I hope and pray he is told he is loved’

A key concern among observers is what will happen to the children with disabilities and special needs, who in recent years formed the largest proportion of international adoptions. Between 2014 and 2018, 95% of the more than 12,000 adoptions by international couples were of a child with special needs.

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says “there is an absence of interest in China in adopting those kids”. That makes international adoption one of the only routes for disabled children to have a real family, Huang said.

In 2019, Chinese officials said it had been difficult in the past to convince Chinese couples to adopt older children or those with disabilities, but that was starting to change. Wang Jinhua, director of the social affairs department at the time, said “more and more domestic families are beginning to adopt children with mild disabilities or orphaned children who have recovered from illness”.

But Huang says not enough has been done to make it easier for local families to adopt the 98% of children in welfare institutions who have greater needs.

“What is at stake, is the future of those more than 50,000 kids who now live in the state orphanages … And as a result of the [ban on] international adoption, they will be condemned in those institutions until 18 years old, and then after that, we don’t know.”

Details are scant about when the cancellation was decided, and what will happen now to the children and prospective parents still in the system. Early signs of a bureaucratic slowdown of international adoptions are littered among the stories of those affected. A temporary pause was attributed to the pandemic, but several couples told the Guardian of other measures that couldn’t be explained by Covid restrictions.

Some said that permission to video chat with the child they’d been matched with was gradually restricted, and eventually banned. Others had not been able to send gifts or supplies to the child or the institute caring for them in more than a year.

The Contants said all communication with Corinne’s orphanage was cut off over a year ago.

The Smiths said biannual video calls with Beniah were replaced by occasional photos from the orphanage, and soon they were no longer getting photos or updates. Eventually were blocked from sending supplies and gifts.

“We have received no pictures or information on him since three pictures in March 2022,” said Lauren.

Observers have reported some governments, including that of Spain, have lobbied Beijing on behalf of couples left in the lurch by the announcement. It is not clear what the Chinese authorities’ plans are for those children who had been matched with families and had gotten to know them.

A voluntary list of US couples who were in the process of adoption before the announcement show dozens of children aged six to 17, most of whom already know about their prospective parents, according to the submissions. Most of the couples in the list said they received their letters of acceptance in 2019 or 2020, and all say they wish to continue with the adoption if it’s possible.

For now, the Smith’s say they have still not been able to speak to Beniah, now eight years old, but they hope he has been they have not abandoned him.

“I do not know what will be communicated to him in regards to his adoption”, said Lauren. “I hope and pray he is told that he is loved and adored by now three precious sisters who will never forget him and that it breaks us deeply to not be able to hold him or even see his sweet face.”