Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses the pressures that drove Chinese leaders to adopt the one-child policy in the early 1980s.

In her review of The Lost Daughters of China, Susan Greenhalgh, herself an expert in China population studies, criticized Evans for sugarcoating the story of Evans's adoption of Kelly. According to Greenhalgh, Evans too readily accepted the image that Chinese officials wished to project—that the orphans were being tenderly cared for and were handed over to their adoptive parents with love. In Greenhalgh's view, this obscured the political dynamics that operate behind the scenes in China.

Rather than being lavished with love, the orphaned babies were in fact the victims of a deliberately coercive political policy that forced their abandonment and neglect.

In fairness to Evans, however, although she emphasizes the...