How a British man took fostering to China and helped more than a million children

On his first visit to a Chinese orphanage, a boy of around six years old came up to Robert Glover and grabbed hold of his hand. He was dressed in a grubby T-shirt and shoes several sizes too big. He wasn’t upset or crying; he just hung on determinedly and didn’t want to let go. When it was time to leave, Glover had to gently prise himself free.

“I was surprised at how deeply the encounter affected me,” he says in his new book, As Many As The Stars, an account of his extraordinary quest to move thousands of China’s children out of bleak, overwhelmed institutions and into families. “In those few moments that small boy represented to me all the abandoned and orphaned children of China, clinging to hope.”

Following that day in Changsha – Mao’s birthplace – where he visited the orphanage out of professional interest during a long-dreamt of trip around China, Glover returned to Britain. He quit his job running a local fostering programme and moved to Shanghai, accompanied by with his wife, Liz, and their own six children. He was convinced he had found his mission in life: to rescue those unloved children, whose lonely existence was an unintended consequence of the China’s one-child policy.

“In years of working in institutions I’d come to know in my heart that a child is better off in a family, even if it isn’t perfect,” he says. “Children need the love and security that a parent can give, a parent who loves and protects and battles for them.”

That sentiment lies behind education secretary Gavin Williamson’s demand this week that councils end their obsession with finding “the perfect ethnic match” when placing children with families. Some 2,400 children in Britain are in care, waiting for adoption – with black and minority ethnic children waiting longest. Just 1,800 potential families have been approved, the result, Williamson says, of a “bureaucratic system with too many boxes to be ticked” and too many lifestyle judgments.

Glover agrees: “Where you can you would aim to match children to their ethnicity but you really need to get these children into good families.” He says. “It is really important to take each child’s circumstances into account because each child has specific needs, but I think anyone would be in support of Gavin Williamson where so many children are left in residential care and missing out on family life.”

The former-professional-footballer-turned-social-worker won an invitation from the government in Shanghai in 1998, to advise on childcare policy and find homes for the 700 children in Shanghai’s main orphanage. Care for Children, the charity Glover set up, has since placed more than a million Chinese children with families.

The impact their life chances has been astonishing. On a recent trip back to Shanghai while being filmed for a documentary (to be shown on Netflix US), Glover met Xu Guogi, a young woman born with cerebral palsy, who was found on the floor of an orphanage aged five; she was unable to walk, wearing nappies and still fed like a baby, on porridge and milk. Placed with a loving foster family, she has thrived, representing China at the Special Olympics where she won gold medals for roller skating and swimming. She told Glover she would be forever grateful for his help and gave him one of her Olympic gold medals in thanks.

Xu Peiwei, who was adopted around the same age, didn't know colours or shapes and is now a successful pianist. Xu’s foster mother told Glover how happy she was to have had a second chance at family life as she and her husband had been devastated when their only son went off to university: “It all came back to life when she cried or laughed or was naughty. We had a family atmosphere again.”

It was that compelling need on both sides that proved the key to rectifying the unintended consequences of the one-child policy. “There were children who would thrive with love and parents who ached for another child. We were able to bring them together,” says Glover. “The family is very richly embedded in Chinese culture so it was a win-win.”

In the early days, though, his dream of rescuing China’s orphans must have seemed outlandishly ambitious. State institutions were overflowing and the issue was politically sensitive. The government’s one-child policy meant that healthy boy children were prized – as they would grow up to support their parents – and girls, or disabled children, regarded as “small happiness” and frequently discarded.

A scathing documentary had shown the world the terrible conditions in which these very vulnerable children were living and the Chinese felt they had lost face. A senior government official seems to have lighted on Glover’s offer of help, sensing his non-judgmental enthusiasm: “Other were their wagging fingers at the Chinese. For us, the important thing was working with the government, positively, to bring about change.”

There were few foreigners in Shanghai and no word in Chinese for “foster care”. Glover knew hardly anyone in China and his own attempts at speaking Mandarin were haphazard: the first time he stayed in a hotel he accidentally ordered breakfast for 10.

There were plenty of obstacles, but he found strength in his Christian faith, convinced that God had given him this task to complete (though he stresses his faith is personal, Care for Children is entirely secular). Getting people around to his way of thinking took some doing. The first time he spoke to the assembled staff at the orphanage most pointedly studied their phones or looked out the window.

He soon became a familiar figure in Shanghai, thanks to his extraordinary brood of tall, blonde-haired children; Rachel, Lois, Megan, Anna and twins Joel and Joshua (now aged between 35 and 27). In the land of the one-child policy – introduced in 1979 to slow China’s rapid population growth – a family with six children was a novelty.

“One day soon after we arrived we decided to go for a picnic. We were sitting by the river eating our sandwiches when we got the sense of being watched,” he says. “We looked up and there were about 400 people, all taking photographs. That sort of thing went on for a long time. The twins, especially, drew attention as twins were seen as a blessing. Everywhere we went people wanted to touch them and ruffle their hair.”

Glover's own father was missing from the picture. He left when Glover was two years old and his parents divorced. They had no contact as he was growing up and proving to be a talented footballer. He trained at Norwich City and briefly played professionally for Portsmouth before his career was cut short by injury.

A job as a sports coach and house father at a school for maladjusted boys (as troubled children were called then) set him on the road to a new career in social work. Most of the children he worked with from then on, either as a residential care worker in children’s homes in Norfolk and later as head of fostering in Guernsey, had ended up in a home because of family problems – usually addiction or alcoholism, sometimes sexual abuse – rather than anything bad they had done themselves. “It didn’t alter the fact that, once in residential care, whether good or bad themselves, they soon started to pick up bad traits from others,” he says.

Even more worryingly, some children would eventually seem to feel safer inside an institution than out. “To me, that was not a good state to be in,” he says. The most glaring example was a boy called Gary, a likeable young rogue who seemed to hate being in the home while he was living there and kept running away. But on Christmas Eve, a few months after he had left for good, aged 17, Glover received a phone call asking him to come to Norwich police station.

Gary had put a brick through the window of Marks & Spencer. When Glover asked why, Gary explained that he had been living in an old car. He had barely any food and was freezing cold, so he had decided to try to get sent to prison: “At least in prison it’s warm. And there’s TV.”

When Gary was found dead on the streets of Norwich two years later, Glover felt the system had failed him. Placing children with families wasn’t always perfect but it was way, way better than keeping them in institutions, a belief he took with him to China.

Now settled back in Norfolk, where he grew up – and where he and his wife are restoring an old farmhouse, large enough to gather their ever-expanding family – Glover, 63, retains his links with China and is overseeing the transfer of Care for Children’s training and research materials online as a resource for the Chinese government.

His initial brief was to find homes for the 700 children in the main orphanage in Shanghai. The programme was such a success it was soon replicated throughout China’s many provinces.

“When you bring in a new concept the Chinese are capable of understanding very quickly,” Glover says. “If they can see where something is going to work, they make it happen.”

He is not a politician, he stresses – several times – but he feels the antler-locking among major nations means the Chinese don’t always get sufficient credit for what they have achieved.

“I got there just as China was opening and to bring 500 million people out of poverty, as China has, it’s absolutely brilliant and we witnessed that. When we got the Shanghai some of it was still boggy marshland. Now it’s like Manhattan.”

When Glover signed his initial in Shanghai in 1998, he underwent an important ceremony: being given a Chinese name. The assembled members of the Civil Affairs Bureau conferred for about 20 minutes, then one of the officials got to his feet.

“The meaning of a person’s name is very important in our culture,” he said. “Yours means this: ‘As many stars as there are in the sky you shall be a father to children in China’. Your name shall be Lao Ba Ba. Something like Old Father.”

It was meant as a compliment. With hindsight, and more than a million children in families, it sounds like a prophecy.

As Many As the Stars: A story of Change for Children in China (Hodder & Stoughton) is out now. Buy yours for £16.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514