The Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs and the Matching Process

All international adoptions in China are overseen by one government office in China, the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA). There is no independent adoption from China; American adopters work through a U.S. adoption agency approved by the CCAA. Once your dossier is received by the CCAA, it is logged into the computer. The officials at CCAA then review your dossier for any issues; finding none, they then match orphanages with available babies to groups of adoptive parents from different adoption agencies. Orphanages have color-coded files, and agencies have color-coded files. Orphanages are grouped by province, and parents’ dossiers are grouped by sending adoption agencies. They match orphanages up with agencies like this: if this orphanage has five babies, and this agency has five families in a travel group, or if these two orphanages are in the same province and have a total of 10 babies, and this agency has 10 families in a travel group, then those babies and those families will be matched with one another. The CCAA will match larger traveling groups with orphanages with large groups of babies so that families in one traveling group won’t be split up going all over China. They then match individual babies with each family in the travel group. The workers at CCAA supposedly try very hard to ‘match’ the children to families by reading carefully through the information provided to them about the adopting family and the information provided to them about the available children. Amy Eldridge, with Love Without Boundaries, toured the CCAA in 2003 and later wrote about her visit: “I asked if they ever matched a family and a baby according to looks or baby’s personality. They told me that they would often try that, but the way it works is that a woman at the computer will have a stack of babies[’ files] and a group of dossiers on the computer…The woman told me that if she reads on the baby’s file that the child likes music, she will quickly look at the families to see if any of them have a musical interest or job. If they match like this, it is almost always by job or hobby. Sometimes they said a baby’s face just was meant to go with a certain family. So there IS a little bit of ‘picking’ versus just ‘child one with family one, child two with family two,’ but it isn’t someone agonizing over whether or not a baby fits a family. It goes pretty quickly.” According to the Rumor Queen, “they first look for something that stands out: a matching birthday, a baby who looks a lot like a parent, or a baby who likes music and a parent who teaches music. Some have stated that they use[] Chinese astrology.” They also consider the age of child requested by the adoptive parents in making the match, but this is just one of the factors used in making the match as the CCAA believes it is creating families, not filling orders. However the match finally occurs, I firmly believe you are matched with the child you were ‘meant’ to have!