Obese foreigners are to be banned from adopting Chinese children, according to US adoption agencies.
US-based Children's Hope International said the new regulations were announced after a meeting this month in Beijing between the China Center for Adoption Affairs (CCAA) and international adoption agencies. Children's Hope said a range of restrictions would be introduced to reduce the number of foreigners applying to adopt.
"The CCAA says there are twice as many dossiers to adopt from China as there are orphans available for adoption," it said on its Web site.
"With the new requirements, the CCAA hopes to lessen the number of applicants so that the wait time to adopt will eventually become shorter than the current 15 months," it added.
Another US-based agency, Harrah's Adoption International Mission, said the CCAA also planned to increase the number of children available for adoption, although there was no explanation of how this would be achieved.
Single people will be ruled out and only couples who have been married for more than two years will qualify. The age range for would-be parents will be limited to between 30 and 50.
"The number of people applying for adoptions is soaring, but following the development of China's economy and society, the number of abandoned and orphaned children is less and less," a CCAA official said.
He denied that the new rules were partly designed to stop gay couples from adopting babies.
"We hope that these children can grow up in even better conditions which benefit their healthy growth and so we are putting in place stricter conditions," said the official, who declined to give his name. "We had a meeting with representatives of the adoption agencies last week and explained the gist of the new rules to them."
The new conditions set a bar on parents who have a body mass index of more than 40, according to Harrah's. If either parent is taking medication for anxiety or depression, they will be disqualified, and no family can have more than five children in the home, including the child to be adopted, it said.
The new rules come into effect on May 1, the agencies said.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
RSS