Overview

CCAA is an acronym for China Center of Adoption Affairs.  It is the organization within the Chinese Government that administers the international adoption program.  There are no independent adoptions from China, so all international adoptions pass through this office.  American adopters typically do not have direct contact with the CCAA but work through a U.S. adoption agency approved by the CCAA, which in our case is FTIA.

Structure

The CCAA is comprised of one office and eight departments. The following is a list of those departments accompanied by a brief description of their duties:

• Administrative Office
  Responsible for receiving and delivering adoption documents and information as well as coordinating the work of different departments at the CCAA.
• Adopter's Eligibility Review Department
  (a.k.a. Review Room)
  Responsible for verifying the qualifications of foreign adopters and agencies and certifying the authenticity of all submitted documents.
• Child's Inter-Country Placement Department
  (a.k.a. Matching Room)
  Responsible for matching adoptees with foreign adopters, notifying adoption agencies of matches (via referrals), and communicating with adoption registry offices in provinces in case problems arise.
• Domestic Adoption Department
  Responsible for the development of the domestic adoption program.
• Child-Raising Department
  Responsible for making recommendations on criteria and standards for child-raising in social welfare institutions.
• Archives Management Department
  Responsible for archiving adoption documents and other official documents.
• Information and Technology Department
  Responsible for constructing and maintaining the information network within the CCAA.
• Finance Department
  Responsible for receiving adoption service fees from foreign adopters, receiving and supervising donations for projects given by foreign governments and adoption agencies, and managing the financial affairs at the CCAA.
• General Affairs Department
  Responsible for managing real estate, running offices, and safeguarding and managing logistics.

Process

Once a dossier is received by the CCAA's Administrative Office, it is condensed to a registration form that is logged into the computer.  At this point the CCAA generates a dossier Log In Date (LID) and notifies prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) of their LID via the adoption agency.  The LID designates a dossier's place in line.  This is how families gauge their progress, or lack thereof, during the wait for a referral.  It is important to note that there exists only one, long, single file line in which all PAPs wait.  Neither a family's choice of adoption agency nor nationality influences their place in line.  Everybody waits in the same line just as people do at a McDonalds' drive-thru window.

The officials at CCAA then send the dossiers to the Review Room to be, not surprisingly, reviewed.  Each agency has their own review person.  As such, every agency assembles their dossiers to meet the preferences of their assigned person.  With any luck the reviewer will find a family's dossier to be both correct and complete and approve it.  If not, they will hold the dossier until all questions and concerns have been addressed by the adoption agency and PAPs.

The number of files each reviewer has for a calendar month varies according to the number of dossiers submitted by their agencies.  Some months one review person may have twice as many files to review as other reviewers.  In other months they may have only half as many.  So it is possible that one reviewer could temporarily find themselves several months ahead of other reviewers; he/she could realistically be working on April while others are still working on February.  Only when all reviews are finished for a particular month, however, will the CCAA notify the adoption agencies of that month's completion.   If PAPs with LIDs in that month haven't heard anything, they can safely assume they've passed review.

"Our children are not ours because they share our genes.   They are ours because we have had the audacity to envision them.   That at the end of the day or long sleepless night is how love really works."
~ Unknown

Then it's off to the Matching Room where the dossiers sit on overloaded shelves for an unbearably long time before being matched to a paper-ready orphans.  To help keep things organized, both orphanages and agencies have color-coded files.  Additionally, orphanages are grouped by province, and parents’ dossiers are grouped by adoption agency.  Just as in the review room, each matcher is assigned certain agencies and is responsible for communicating with those agencies.

The actual matching process is comprised of 3 steps:

1. Orphan dossiers are reviewed to make sure they are correct and complete.
2. Orphanages are matched to agencies by head count.  For example, an orphanage with 6 paper-ready children will be paired with an agency having 6 families in the current LID group.  Similarly, a group of orphanages could be paired with a single adoption agency (or vice versa) to match head count.   It's simply a matter of making the numbers work out so that families from any given agency won't be split up all over China.
3. Matchers begin pairing individual babies with PAPs.

The CCAA matchers supposedly try very hard to 'match' the children to families by carefully reading through the information provided to them about both child and PAPs.  Criteria for a match include the stated age preference of the PAPs, the stated gender preference, and just about any other commonality existing between the child and the PAPs in the current LID group including looks, personality, birthdays, and/or interests.  If a child likes music for instance, the staff member will look for family that has an interest or a job in music.  Other times a staffer just 'knows' a baby's face was meant to go with a certain family.  While there is a bit of logic and intuition employed in the matching process, there is no agonizing over whether or not a baby perfectly fits a family, so the matching does go pretty quickly.

Once matching is complete, the CCAA sends the referrals to the appropriate adoption agencies.   These agencies then pass along the referrals to the lucky families for review.  What happens next is up to each family receiving a referral.  If they accept the referral, the CCAA is notified, travel plans are made, and eventually proud parents come home with their long-awaited child.  On the other hand, if the PAPs reject a referral, the CCAA can either put their dossier back in the Matching Room or refuse them any further consideration.