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BEAR GRYLLS: 20 years ago, social worker Robert Glover

and his wife, Liz,

moved to Shanghai with their six young children.

Robert looked to spearhead the first-ever

joint social welfare venture

between the British and Chinese governments.

I was with the Chinese government people

and I didn't understand a word of what they were saying.

And then one chap stood up and he said,

"I want to tell you the meaning of your Chinese name."

And he said, "As many stars as there are in the sky,

you'll be father to children in China."

This is the story of eight million children,

a 3,000-year-old civilisation...

..and the birth of an idea.

Shanghai, China's wealthiest city.

Its skyscrapers are temples to the spirit of enterprise.

But its veneration for the family is rooted in ancient tradition.

20 years ago,

Ai Liang lived in an orphanage.

At the age of five, Ai Liang

became one of the first foster children in China's history.

And today her gratitude knows no bounds.

Sheng Weiqun and her husband Lao Wushen

decided to become China's first-ever foster parents,

after learning the details of Ai Liang's early childhood.

Ai Liang may be a happy and successful young mum today,

but when she was five

any of kind of future seemed an impossibility.

I don't think there was even a word for fostering.

There wasn't a word for adoption.

And...

there had been some very adverse publicity

in the UK and other countries

about the poor state of orphanages in China.

Countless children were growing up without hope.

But something utterly extraordinary was about to happen.

And it involved a former professional footballer from Norwich - Robert Glover.

Robert had moved from sport to social work

and his work with young offenders had won him a reputation

for ripping up the rule book.

When Robert learnt about the situation in China

he felt impelled to act.

Robert travelled to Shanghai at his own expense

and secured an invitation to a formal dinner

for local officials and international charities.

I sat next to this senior member of the Communist Party, retired.

And um, we got chatting and we got on quite well.

Some other foreigners were wagging their fingers

and telling them off, telling them they're doing it all wrong.

I was just enjoying the food. It was just lovely food.

And really I suppose I was just being sociable.

You know, I was in their country, I was their guest.

I just said, "I come with a heart to serve

to see if there's any way we could help."

The Chinese do everything through guanxi, which means relationship.

It's very much about food, it's very much getting to know and trust.

And face is very important in China.

You don't make anyone lose face, you know.

You keep their honour and face. It's very important.

Astonishingly, Robert's friendly approach

and genuine love of Chinese food,

achieved what the entire Western establishment

had failed to do for years.

There was some shuffling and the top guy said to one of the others,

"Get rid of the other guy and get Robert back for dinner."

The started asking me about why should children be with families.

How do we get there and how do we do this?

How does that work? How does this work?

So, just answering their questions

and the guy looks at me in the eye and says,

"Will you come back and help us?"

Like, "Wow."

This was Yan Mingfu,

a remarkable man, who was Chairman Mao's official translator

during his tense summits with Soviet premier Nikolai Khrushchev.

When Khrushchev mortally offended Mao by banging his shoe on their table,

it was Yan Mingfu's diplomacy

that persuaded Mao not to retaliate with a declaration of war.

Speaking in 2000,

Yan Mingfu recalled his first meeting with Robert.

As Deputy Minister for Civil Affairs,

Yan Mingfu held great sway with the government.

Robert made an impression

on the politicians

because...he's not a politician.

Everyone could see that Robert was not in this for what he could get

but what the children would get.

Robert feared he'd caused a diplomatic incident.

I'm sitting in my office thinking, "Was I really in China last week?"

The phone rings, picks it up and it's the Foreign Office saying,

"We want to talk to you." You're thinking, "Oh, no."

You always think, don't you, "What have we done wrong?

What went wrong in China?"

They said, "Well, look, if you're prepared to go and be their consultant,

they want you as their consultant

to advise the Shanghai government

on how to develop family placement

as an alternative to institutional care."

Robert's breakthrough would change history.

But it would come at massive personal cost.

We had a beautiful old farmhouse in Guernsey

just up the road from lovely beaches.

A field with chickens.

Robert and his family were the very heart of the close-knit community

on the small island in the English Channel.

The Glovers were certainly different

and exciting to be around.

You never knew what was going to happen next.

It was quite crazy because it was the whole herd of them.

Because they're all blonde, as well,

they're quite a...spectacle, if you like.

They were the life and soul of the party.

It was always just... (LAUGHS)

..just a laugh all the time.

They had a lot of love to show for young people

and for kids.

I mean, with somebody of Bob's stature,

he could come over as quite intimidating.

But he wasn't. All the kids just warmed to him.

They just thought he was like a big bear.

We both were saying, "We want to be effective somewhere."

We didn't want to just sit.

So, by the time China came along, we were pretty ready.

Although there was still lots of preparation to be done.

It was scary. I'd never been to China.

I didn't have a clue what it meant to live there

and actually to take our six children.

But the thing that made it feel more secure

was that we would be helping other children

that were in much worse conditions

and much worse situations than my children.

Dad said, "This is what we need to do. We need to move to China"

and I think I burst into tears.

When we left Guernsey

we felt strongly that we probably wouldn't return.

We didn't want to be looking back.

We didn't want to be thinking about the past.

So there was something liberating and something really rich

about giving everything away.

And as we did that and things went,

you start to focus on going forward rather than back.

And, you know, all we had left was our mattresses.

So the final bit was to go up

and have this little time together and set fire to our mattresses

and say goodbye to Guernsey.

It was, you know, goodbye.

And from that point, again there was this freedom, this liberty,

that just broke through that we were going to China.

It was a change point, it was a new direction.

Lois often talks about she cried a lot.

In some sense, for a little ten-year-old girl,

it was almost like going to give her life for this cause.

Living in Guernsey, you're a very small community,

compared to going, as the Glovers did, to Shanghai,

to a huge, bustling city with millions of people.

A huge challenge for a young family.

Yeah, I was upset they went.

The daily contact and...and...

the strong friendship that we had and have.

I knew that they were doing the right thing

but I don't think you realised how special that time was.

Before they could leave, Robert needed the final approval

from Lord Laming, the Chief Inspector of Social Services.

I thought to myself, "He doesn't know China very well,

he doesn't speak the language

and he's going to take six children with him

to a country where there's a one-child-per-family policy.

And I thought, "This doesn't seem to me to be practical."

But then I thought about it overnight and I thought,

"If this project changes the lives and the life opportunities

of, say, only 20 children, it has been worthwhile."

So I told the government I supported it entirely.

The family of eight would be travelling almost 10,000km

from a rural island with a population of 60,000

to the most populated city in China.

We didn't understand the language and we didn't understand what was going on.

I just remember arriving into China

and feeling so small and it being so big.

People used to come up and touch our hair...Mm...and we'd actually cry.

I remember us as a family of eight.

Six children, all blonde, and distinctly sticking out.

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

Daphne, a young graduate, was made Robert's personal assistant.

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

Rather than set up in a distant office,

Robert based his new charity, Care for Children,

inside Shanghai's biggest orphanage.

This was quite a...formidable sort of institution

with lots of different people, lots of different roles.

Lots of children in cots that weren't nurtured and weren't helped.

That was really tough.

They used to bring the children out

and tie them together so they could walk in a line and not wander off.

They had hardly any possessions.

So they had a tiny cupboard where they kept their stuff

and they had some books and a few little tiny toys.

Then you saw some of the older boys and how tough they were.Yeah.

And you knew that in their toughness,

they'd survived, you know.

For every one of those boys that survived, many hadn't.

One orphanage boy who survived the system then thrived through fostering

is 29-year-old Su Yiya.

Today he is one of the city's most sought-after coders.

Tencent is valued at over $500 billion.

It owns WeChat,

an app combining messaging, social media and mobile payment.

Su Yiya's prospects haven't always been this bright.

20 years ago, aged nine,

he was abandoned between a building site and a railway track.

The police took him to an orphanage,

where there was little hope of an education.

Care for Children found Su Yiya a foster family

and he visits them every day.

One of the things we know about children

is when they come into care

they've often gone through awful rejection.

They're feeling abandonment.

And what we have to do is to try and work with the family

around, "You know what? These children are hurt."

So often they will display quite abnormal behaviour.

It's a self-destruct button.

Robert and Liz haven't seen Su Yiya

since their charity arranged for him to leave the orphanage.

We are so happy to get to know about you after 20 years.

Do you remember the earliest memory you had going to your family?

(SPEAKS ENGLISH)

Mm.Aw!

Mm!Aw.

Yes.Yeah, yeah.Yeah.

Feel the love from your mother and father.Yeah.

Now, do you remember anything before you went to your family?

Tell us about some happy memories in your family.

Quite remarkable really.

Suddenly, out of this little boy, comes this bright spark

and seeing fulfilment in his life where he's actually feeling,

"Wow, I made it. I've done it."

Care for Children has placed over a million orphans with foster families.

But 20 year ago, as he set up his fledgling charity

in the Shanghai orphanage, Robert looked to have little chance of success.

This was my office where we...Yeah. ..went in through that door.I remember coming in here.

(CHATTERING)

The orphanage did not welcome Robert with open arms.

I was told I couldn't eat with the rest of the staff in the canteen,

so I had to have my...er... my lunch on my own.

There were a lot of vested interests

in Shanghai at the time,

in the orphanage system.

It was a business.

And we were breaking down that business.

The orphanage director asked me to give an overview of what foster care was.

And so I had a translator.

And I noticed very quickly, within three or four minutes, people were fidgeting

and going out to the toilet, answering their phones.

And then, you know, five minutes,

I could see people reading the newspaper.

And I think after about ten minutes of trying to do my presentation

there were some that actually started a card school at the back.

So... (LAUGHS) ..you know, it was very unnerving.

I think the...

expectations from China

were very high.

And I was fearful at that time

that Robert wouldn't be able to deliver on that.

It seemed like every time that we made a step forward

more obstacles would come in the way.

Progress seemed impossible.

But Robert's former career as a footballer

was to provide an unlikely breakthrough.

At sort of 15, I was asked to come and train with Norwich City.

Got sort of scouted again by Portsmouth.

Signed the same day as a young man called Chris Kamara.

And played against Celtic. That was kind of the highlight -

with Kenny Dalglish on the opposition.

Robert exported his skills from English football league

to the Shanghai orphanage.

The teenage boys often were being bypassed.

They weren't gonna get the opportunity to live in a family.

So I used to often take a ball into the playground

and, you know, teach them a bit of football.

It started with about five of them and it grew

to the point where we got permission that we could train them.

And then I wrote to my...my old team, Norwich City,

and they sent out the strip with yellow shirts,

green shorts and green socks.

And the training became a bit more serious then.

And we decided to enter them into the Shanghai Schools Trophy.

There were probably five boys that were deaf and dumb and some...

There was a boy who only had one arm.

So a lot of them had disabilities but they overcame that.

Very strong, very resilient.

In the final, they beat the American School 5-3.

Um...and it was a major achievement, really, for the orphanage.

Robert's astonishing victory with a team of disabled orphans

in an able-bodied competition

brought honour to the orphanage.

And that changed everything.

They knocked on the door and I went to answer it

and the whole of the staff group were outside

with madam, the director,

with my bowl with my name on.

Which, after six months, meant that they'd accepted me

and I could eat in the canteen with them.

Which I felt was a huge accomplishment.

Robert had finally won acceptance

from the orphanage - and the local press.

Hundreds of families in Shanghai signed up to the project within days.

One couple - Li Gongwei and Wang Wanbin -

fostered a five-year-old girl called Xu Peiwei.

Today, Xu Peiwei is a successful musician and artist.

She met with Robert and Liz at Shanghai's world-famous Bund.

Oh, I missed you so much!Aw!

(CHATTERS INDISTINCTLY)

It's great to see you, 20 years on. 20.Yeah.

You were five years old...When you went to the new family.

Like many orphanage children at the time,

Xu Peiwei had delayed development.

At five, she had the skills of a baby.

I have the husband...

Oh!..in Shanghai.

Wonderful!Mm.That's so good.

Shanghai's ancient street markets mix the old worlds and the new.

Events organiser Xu Guoqi and student Chen Feifei,

often spend their time exploring them.

They've been friends ever since they met at one of Shanghai's

first-ever schools for children with learning difficulties.

At school they both represented China at swimming and roller skating

and became Special Olympic champions.

Xu Guoqi spent the first five years of her life in an orphanage.

She would have stayed there had she not become

one of the country's first foster children.

The arrangement was made by Care for Children's

senior training officer Lucy.

Xu Guoqi and Chen Feifei

are still in regular touch with their teacher

and Special Olympic trainer Miss Dong.

They like catching up at one of Shanghai's traditional tea houses.

(CHATTERS IN NATIVE LANGUAGE)

The girls performed so well, they were chosen to represent China.

Robert and Liz Glover know nothing of Xu Guoqi's sporting success.

They last saw her 20 years ago

when she had serious disabilities

and could not speak or walk properly.

Bit anxious cos I remember this child

and I remember when she came from the orphanage

and she needed a lot of help. I really don't know what to expect.

(CHATTERING AND LAUGHTER)

(SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE)Oh!

Special Olympics.Ah!Ah.

Oh!

Wow!Yay!(CHUCKLES)

Amazing. Thank you very much.

(LAUGHTER)

An amazing family. That little girl, when she came out of the orphanage,

she couldn't speak, she couldn't walk

and she couldn't eat solid food.

And now she's a confident young woman.

She's an athlete. She's represented her country.

Really China should be proud of this family.

They are awesome. They are the heroes of the state.

While Robert was helping out youngsters in the orphanage,

his own family were adjusting to life in a Shanghai village.

Yes, it's so good to be back in a village like this.

Just so similar. Even the smells and the people.

It just makes me feel so happy to be back here.

We all look at the cities, but most of China is just like this.

To love China and to be in China, you have to love a place like this.

You have to. Cos you get to know the people and the people are amazing.

(SPEAKS MANDARIN)

Ah!

Our six kids used to love spending the weekends in the village,

you know, just doing what the Chinese kids did

and learning all different things

they'd never seen or heard of before.

I remember going into the village, and it feeling...

Just you felt so free to go and be in amongst them all.Yeah.

Like, their houses were open. You just walked through.

You had kids walking from place to place.

But there was just this safety about it, there was this freedom.

Compared to the West, where we can be quite shut off, it was the opposite.

You'd just walk through and there was just space to be with people.

We'd invite the villagers over,

especially in the early years in Shanghai.

We grew up as a minority, in many ways,

and that was, for us, an opportunity

to kind of explore culture in China.

Thinking back to the Chinese New Year celebrations,

they were amazing.

(LAUGHS)ANNA: I really remember the Chinese fireworks going off.

And they were so loud and there were so many of them.

And I remember a few of us children

just running across their fields pretending to be shooting each other

and diving from place to place. Yeah.

And I also remember these, like, red strips

of almost just gunpowder all down the streets.

They'd set them off and all they'd do was bang.

"Bang, bang, bang!"Just "Bang, bang, bang!"

(BANGING AND CRACKLING)

Looking back, I think they're a bit mad... (LAUGHS) ..in a way.

And there moments where I thought "Gosh, this is hard"

and even in my teenage years thinking,

"Has this not been a good thing?" Mm.

But now, looking back, I really do see it as a privilege

and to this day I would say my family are my best friends.

We're both mothers of our own families and so to think,

wow, picking up and taking your children to another nation,

yeah, for the sake of a cause or a desire on your heart

to see children in families,

you realise the sacrifice that went in more.

Family meant a great deal to Robert - and to the Chinese.

Family care is very important. Family life is very important.

Each member of the families are very intricate and detailed

and they were very pragmatic and practical.

I'll give you one instance. So in England

we tended to look at the one child.

You know, we'd place one child at a time.

In China, you've got, you know, maybe 1,000 children in the orphanage,

so they were sending out 10, 15 maybe 20 children at a time.

And I was like, "No, no, no, you can't do that!"

And "Why?", you know. The question would always come back, "Why?"

And now I look back, you know,

the fact they were placing ten children into one village

with ten different families that all supported and encouraged each other,

in hindsight you can see how,

pragmatically, that was quite practical.

The foster villages attracted global attention.

I feel like I've been a lot of places around the world.

and I just don't know that I've...

ever seen a more beautiful group of people.

I mean, you've got 70 families in this village

and they have taken in 160 special-needs children.

And you just try to imagine, where would they be if this wasn't here?

And many of them probably wouldn't have survived some of the orphanages

and you just see the life and the joy in these kids now.

I don't even know how to process it all.

Robert was fast becoming a major link between China and the UK.

Robert helped smooth the way for Virgin Airways' Richard Branson

to open the first London to Shanghai flight in 1999.

In return, Virgin ran an ad for Care for Children.

It featured a little orphaned girl called Ba Yue.

I think for Ba Yue, she'd been through this rejection,

this abandonment, this hurt,

experienced all this, and then gone into a family.

A loving mother, a loving father.

And I think when he died, she couldn't cope

with the grief, the loss, and I think she ran.

You know, whatever we feel when we lose a parent,

she was feeling it ten times more

because all the feelings of her childhood was coming back as well -

about the loss, the grief, the rejection, the abandonment.

That would have surfaced again.

Thankfully, her mother was strong enough

and the foundation was there to help her through that.

Ba Yue now has a successful career,

inspired by the company who brought her and her foster parents together.

News of Care For Children's success was spreading fast.

We knew there were many more children out there

and we were getting invitations from other cities.

And Beijing requested that I move from Shanghai

and become a national advisor to the central government.

'You're thinking, "What is going on?",

banging your head against the wall.

But people did want to try and make things work.

It was quite funny really. They had a one-child policy,

I was their senior consultant

for disadvantaged children and I had six children.

They laughed and we laughed. We all thought it was quite funny.'

I think the Chinese government must have recognised in him

exactly the qualities that I saw,

which was his sincerity, his genuineness,

his care for children, his enthusiasm for the job.

We rolled out initially to 15 provinces

and then 30 provinces of China.

And I think once that then started to roll out

and people saw the numbers and, you know,

how easy the success was in seeing children's lives transformed,

it turned out to be very productive in the long run.

Fostering was replacing institutional care in Beijing and Shanghai,

China's political and economic powerhouses.

But Robert's biggest challenge was to come in Chengdu.

Famed for its giant pandas,

Chengdu was founded in the 4th century BC

and is the capital of China's Sichuan province.

Tragically, it's also known for one of the worst natural catastrophes

of the 21st century.

It was 2008 and it was China's year

because it was going to be the Beijing Olympics.

And this earthquake struck

and it was just on an enormous scale.

We were down on the ground, day two,

and gathering information,

and you've never seen anything like it.

As far as your eye could see

there were just houses that were in rubble.

Doorframes left. It was really surreal.

And then meeting, you know,

parents, mothers, walking around,

distraught, looking for their children,

with pictures, asking have we seen these children.

Seeing little shoes that were left,

um, you know,

just lying by the side of the road.

People lost whole families. Like their mums, their dads,

their...their uncles and their aunties, their children.

So, you know, part of our job really

was to get alongside them and help them to pick up

and just to try to encourage them

in times of, you know,

great grief and remorse and shock.

Everybody was in shock.

Um...and then really with them

starting to connect with families.

But the good thing is all the kids were safe,

none of them were injured.

The charity placed the children with foster families.

One Chengdu orphan was Long Xianqiao.

But today, he's an expert baker.

Long Xianqiao teaches a weekly baking class

at Chengdu's rebuilt orphanage.

I'm an adopted child myself,

so I know from my own life the benefits that that brings.

But you multiply that then by thousands and thousands

and you can see how a whole society,

a whole generation, a whole nation

can be changed by that.

In 20 years, fostering has gone

from being an unknown concept to a national practice.

And it all began in Shanghai.

Today, Ai Liang's foster parents

have invited Robert and Liz Glover to their apartment

to celebrate the 20th anniversary

of one of China's very first family placements.

(CHATTING AND LAUGHTER)

To hear that from the parents

has made me feel like 20 years ago

it was worth us leaving the UK and coming with our six children

and being here and...

Yeah, it just made it feel all worthwhile.

I'm struggling a bit. (CHUCKLES)

'Growing up, I didn't have a father.'

There was clearly something missing in my childhood, in my adolescence.

And I can appreciate that these children

almost have nothing to direct them or guide them.

Who sets the family boundaries of security and love

and nurture and stimulation?

We know what institutions create -

dependant, dysfunctional people.

And I think that returning that generation

back into family life

will change the nation of China.

'There's been so many highlights along the way.'

Seeing the first children from the orphanage go into the families

and then seeing the transformation of that

and my children witnessing that.

We got to go along to the orphanages. We got to meet the children.

And to know that these children are now in

families that love them is... is amazing.

Care For Children has placed over a million orphans in foster families.

China, with such a huge population,

had the largest number of orphans,

practically all of whom have been...

..taken in families.

If it can be done in China, it can be done anywhere in the world.

On Tuesday 17th December 2019,

the UN's 193 member states

passed a resolution pledging to phase out orphanages

and to promote family-based alternatives.

Fostering orphans was a completely new concept in China

and challenged three millennia of social convention.

And it all began 20 years ago in Shanghai.

I was sat round a table with maybe ten people, Chinese people,

and they suddenly said, "Whoa, stop. We need to give you a Chinese name.

Cos if you're gonna be our consultant, you've then got to have a chop

and it's gotta go on the reports so we know it's from you."

They went into this conversation. I had no idea what they're talking about.

Talking for some time about what my name should be, you know.

Eventually one guy stood up and he said, um,

"We want to tell you the meaning of your Chinese name" -

cos that's really important in China.

And he said, "The meaning of your Chinese name

is 'as many stars as there are in the sky, you'll be father to children in China'."

That really hit me because um...

..many years previously, when I was in Guernsey,

a man came over to our church and he prayed with me and he just said,

"I just sense that God is saying you're going to be father

to as many children as there are stars in the sky."

And I thought, "How can you get that many children?

Have you seen how many stars are up there?"

But, of course, Shanghai.

There was my name and it was just like

now I know where I'm meant to be.

# MATT REDMAN: The Father's Song

# I have heard so many songs

# Listened to a thousand tongues

# But there is one

# That's sounds above them all

# The Father's song

# The Father's love

# You sung it over me

# And for eternity

# It's written on my heart

# Heaven's perfect melody

# The Creator's symphony

# You are singing over me

# The Father's song

# Heaven's perfect mystery

# The king of love has sent for me

# And now you're singing over me

# The Father's song

# The Father's song

# The Father's love

# You sung it over me

# And for eternity

# It's written on my heart

# Father #

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