The scandal already seemed tailored for online celebrity and gossip sites: a glamorous Chinese actress was accused by her partner of abandoning two surrogate babies they decided to have together, leaving him stranded in the United States to care for them.
When his accusations hit the Chinese Internet on Monday, the outrage was not limited to gossip pages. The charges against the actress, Zheng Shuang, dominated online conversations and drew a fierce response from the public, state media and even a powerful Communist Party legal group on the topic of reproduction. China’s limits on people looking for surrogate mothers should be tightened, officials said.
In addition to the obscene details of celebrity separation, the scandal surrounding Zheng addresses sensitive issues for a country that has a troubled history with women’s reproductive rights and that remains largely linked to traditional notions of the family.
In particular, it revealed an undeniable fact: surrogate births have become a popular option for Chinese people willing and able to travel abroad to find birth mothers outside the country.
China prohibits medical service providers from offering substitute services, but does not prevent people from using them, said Yu Yuanjian, a lawyer specializing in civil and commercial legal disputes at the Joint-Win Partners in Shanghai.
The limits of reproductive techniques in general have faced growing skepticism on the part of those who point to China’s historically low birthrate and of women’s rights activists who condemn government laws that control their bodies.
Many of those looking for surrogate mothers are couples who have lost a child or have fertility problems, said Kelvin Ma, a partner at Shanghai Demei Law Firm. He said he worked with clients to review surrogacy contracts with overseas agencies.
“The clients I came into contact with are actually quite innocent,” said Ma, adding, “They really want a child and can afford it.”
Zheng’s lawyers and his former partner, a television producer named Zhang Heng, did not respond to requests for comment. It was not clear why they were using substitutes.
The scandal came to light through tapes of Zheng’s conversations that were posted online and widely circulated in Chinese media. Zheng’s father, Zheng Chenghua, said in his verified account on Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, that the recordings were just fragments and had no context. He did not respond to a request for comment.
At one point during the recording, at a time that drew particular anger in China, Ms. Zheng seems to express frustration because the pregnancies took several months and could not be stopped.
Zheng said online that Zhang was trying to force his daughter into an agreement to settle a $ 3 million legal trial she won against him for a loan she said he had not paid. Zhang is appealing the decision in a Shanghai court.
In her official social media account, Ms. Zheng, 29 – who just topped the list of China’s most popular actresses a few years ago – said her fight with Zhang, 30, was “a very sad and private affair for me”.
She found little sympathy. Luxury fashion label Prada said it canceled its contract as a brand ambassador, as well as a cosmetics company and a watchmaker. China’s top industry award committee removed Ms. Zheng from her 2016 title as “Best Actress in Modern Chinese TV Dramas” and the 2014 title as “The Ten Favorite TV Stars”.
On Tuesday, China Central Television, the main state broadcaster, issued its own condemnation to the surrogate on Weibo. “His contempt for life is hideous,” he said.
Without mentioning Zheng’s name, the network said the surrogate could lead to the arbitrary disposal of a fetus, for example, if the couple wants a boy instead of a girl. In the 1990s, China made it illegal to identify the sex of a fetus in an effort to prevent gender-based abortions, which resulted in millions more men than women due to traditional preference for boys.
That same day, the Communist Party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission accused Ms. Zheng of “taking advantage of legal loopholes” to organize a surrogate pregnancy.
Other official media have called for a total ban on rental pregnancies. A media outlet linked to the Chinese Women’s Federation, a state-sponsored group that tends to follow the party line, posted a video on why the practice cannot be legalized. Critics have argued that surrogacy allows the rich to exploit disadvantaged women who have few other options for making money.
But the scandal comes at a time when some people in China are rethinking these notions. The decline in the birth rate in China has led some women’s rights activists, academics and others to question the country’s restrictions on reproductive techniques, such as surrogate deliveries and egg freezing. Women’s groups also cite the horrors of the old one-child policy, which led to forced abortions and government interference in women’s reproductive choices to control the population, which is the largest in the world with 1.4 billion people.
Surrogacy has become more popular in recent years as changes in social norms, the relaxation of the one-child policy and the increase in infertility have led wealthy single women, same-sex couples and others to travel abroad in search of reproductive assistance.
According to The Initium, a digital media company based in Hong Kong, about 1,000 Chinese babies are born through IVF each year in the United States, where surrogacy laws vary by state. The practice has become so popular that China’s largest online booking company, Ctrip.com, offers subsidies to some managers to freeze their eggs.
In one of the recordings, Ms. Zheng tells her parents and Mr. Zhang’s that if she and Mr. Zhang get back together, they can still have children using their frozen fertilized eggs.
Amid growing public anger at Zheng, women’s rights groups have expressed frustration that Zhang is receiving less criticism. Women are often blamed for reproductive decisions made with their partners, said Feng Yuan, a women’s rights activist and co-founder of a non-profit women’s rights group in Beijing, leading to stricter restrictions on the services that women use.
“The main topic of the debate is about surrogacy, but Zheng Shuang seems to be the only target, and netizens avoid Zhang Heng,” said Feng, using a term for Internet users in China.