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We don't yet have a complete online list of documents required for adopting from China. The documentation preparation has gotten much simpler in the past few years, however, and is mostly limited to the following.
All the documents must be notarized, certified and authenticated. This process can be very confusing, and discussions of it always seem to focus on the logistics (how to do it) without explaining the rationale, so here is a different approach to this subject.
The process of having documents notarized, certified and authenticated means that each document of your adoption dossier must have a notaries stamp, then county, state, federal (State Department) and Chinese embassy or consulate stamps attached before the document can be sent to China. Why? The reason is the concept of "chain of evidence". When your documents arrive in China (with the attached Chinese translations) the Chinese government needs some means of determining that the documents are authentic. Obviously, the Chinese authorities are in no position to determine if a birth certificate from you home county is authentic, so they rely on the "chain of evidence". The seals that are affixed starting from a local notary on up to the Chinese consulate are what validate your documents. At each level in the chain the officials are not certifying the document as authentic, for how would they know? What they are doing is certifying the legitimacy of the "seal" affixed by the previous level, e.g., the state office certifies that your documents have official county seals, etc. Since this guarantees that your documents were properly certified at each level, then the Chinese government can have confidence that the original documents are authentic.
That is why you must authenticate, now how do you do it? This varies depending on what agency you are using. Some agencies provide almost all of the authentication steps as part of their services. Others will charge you less and require that you do the authentication steps yourself. We hope to have more detailed directions on authentication of documents available soon.