THE Chinese ambassador to Ireland has repeated her criticism of the recent Channel 4 television documentaries on Chinese orphanages.
"Dying rooms do not exist in China," Ms Fan Huijuan told the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs in Dublin yesterday.
The documentaries, which were commissioned and funded by Channel 4, represented an attack on China's family planning policy, the ambassador told the committee. It had failed to distinguish between state policy land individual cases.
China had helped to formulate the UN convention on the rights of the child, and such full protection, covering orphans and the disabled, was reflected in Chinese law, she said, speaking through an interpreter.
Taking issue with claims made in Return To The Dying Rooms, the ambassador emphasised cultural differences in child-rearing practices. In China, some children were tied to chairs for a time while parents did their housework, she said.
However, this was not the only kind of maltreatment of children. In Britain, children were "encircled in chains" to protect them from fireplaces.
The Channel 4 documentaries represented an attempt to attack Chinese family planning policy, when "every country had its own problems". She had recently read in British newspapers about abuses in child care. "Problems of orphanages exist in every country in the world," she said.
The development of children was considered to be one of the top priorities of government policy. It had set up and supported more than 40,000 welfare institutes, including orphanages, and had also established a national coordinating committee on women and children.
In recent years, some four billion Chinese yuan had been spent on social welfare institutions, and funding had increased by 50 per cent in the last two bears.
Generally, welfare institutes provided adequate adoption, educational and medical services until children reached the age of marriage and could have their own families, she said. In areas where conditions were "not so good", adopt ions took place in a "dispersed and decentralised manner".
There was no problem about foreign nationals adopting Chinese orphans, the ambassador said in reply to questions from the committee chairman, Mr Alan Dukes (FG, Kildare). She had recently met two Irish non-governmental organisations, International Orphan Aid and Health Action Overseas, and had invited them to visit China.
Welcoming possible co-operation with Irish agencies, Mr Dukes said that adopt ions could be revoked under Chinese law, which caused difficulties with the legal status of such adoptions here. This was a matter under discussion with relevant members of government.
