Neither child trafficking nor baby buying in Chinese international adoptions are widely studied. No one can say for certain how many children are kidnapped in China each year, or what percentage of them end up being put up for adoption domestically or internationally. But the problem is a lot more serious than most people know, as I have come to learn over the last few years. In the process of making a documentary film on the subject, my wife and I have spoken to dozens of parents of kidnapped Chinese children, as well as adoptive parents in the U.S., who have come to believe their children were sold into adoption.

* * *

When Candis, an Ohio-based therapist (who asked that I use her pen name to protect the privacy of her daughter), decided to adopt a child, she chose China both because adopting from China can be a bit cheaper than adopting from other countries such as South Korea, and also because she thought the adopted Chinese kids she saw around the U.S. looked cute. "It was touted as the most stable program, the most above-board program," Candis says of the way the agency she worked with advertised its Hague-certified process, developed over 20 years to connect dozens of children with new parents annually. "Certainly they never ever mentioned trafficking."

Adopting a child from any country can feel like an endless process, especially for someone like Candis who at age thirty-six was extremely eager to become a parent. But when adoption day finally came, Candis didn't see anything to raise suspicion. She felt an instant connection to her new daughter, and everyone at the orphanage seemed friendly and warm. It was, quite literally, a dream come true. "They really know how to put on a show," she says. "The [orphanage] director took us to this lovely lunch and he stood up and talked and had tears in his eyes. He did a beautiful job." Candis and her daughter went home ready to start their new life together.

Rose Candis says that at first, things went smoothly -- at least, as smoothly as they can for a new parent of a young child. But at four years old, Erica began saying that she missed her birth mother. Then she asked, "Can you find her?" Candis genuinely didn't know, so she started looking online, and found an organization called Research-China.org that helps parents look into the origins of their adopted Chinese children.

Brian H. Stuy, a father of three adopted daughters and the founder of Research China, looked at Erica's documentation and gave Candis bad news: there seemed to be a good chance that Erica's adoption was connected to a kidnapping scandal in Hunan province. The story rocked the U.S. adoption community in November 2005 when Chinese journalists reported that infants from Hunan and several other provinces were being sold to several major orphanages in China, and that the orphanages then lied about the children's origins to adoptive parents. Looking at the numbers of adoptions coming from Erica's orphanage, the Qujiang Social Welfare Institute, in Shaoguan's Qujiang district, Stuy saw that adoptions dropped precipitously after news of the scandal broke and the government moved in to shut the trafficking down -- a sign that the orphanage had been involved. He sent Candis a link to a news story about it. "I started freaking," she said.