One Man Wanted Dozens Of U.S. Born Children

The real scandal in the Xu Bo surrogacy case isn’t the eye-popping headline number — it’s that no government agency, in the United States or China, was positioned to catch what was happening until a family court judge in Los Angeles stumbled into it almost by accident.

Key Points

  • A California judge denied a Chinese gaming executive’s parentage petition after discovering he was pursuing rights to four unborn children while already fathering or in the process of fathering at least eight more through surrogates.
  • Xu Bo’s company, Duoyi Network, disputes the higher tallies but has itself confirmed a striking figure: “over 100” children total, with 12 born through U.S. surrogacy.
  • A separate claim of roughly 300 children traces to an allegation from an ex-partner and lacks the documentary backing the other figures have.
  • The case exposes a structural gap: no U.S. registry tracks how many surrogates a single intended parent hires across state lines.
  • It fits a broader, recurring pattern of wealthy Chinese nationals using American surrogacy to circumvent China’s domestic ban — a trend now drawing scrutiny over citizenship law and industry oversight.

What the Court Actually Found

The verifiable core of this story sits in a Los Angeles family courtroom, not in a headline. Judge Amy Pellman denied a parentage petition brought by Xu Bo, a rare rebuke in an industry that rarely produces one, after the court’s own inquiry surfaced far more than the case in front of her. Xu was seeking parental rights to four unborn children; further examination showed he had already fathered, or was actively fathering, at least eight more through surrogates, with the resulting children being raised by nannies in an Irvine household rather than by any parent present in the country. That arithmetic — four pending, eight already underway — puts the court-documented total at roughly twelve, a number that will matter later.

Reporting also captured Xu’s own stated intentions, delivered by video link from China through an interpreter: he told the judge he hoped to eventually have about 20 U.S.-born children, preferably boys, to one day take over his business. Whatever one makes of the ambition, it was not a stray misquote — multiple outlets independently reported the same statement, and it is the detail that transformed a routine parentage dispute into international news.

The Dueling Numbers — and Why They Actually Converge

Here is where the story gets genuinely contested, and where a careful reader has to separate a documented finding from an escalating headline. After the Wall Street Journal’s investigation broke, Duoyi Network, Xu’s gaming company, pushed back hard, accusing the paper of deliberately distorting his words and disseminating false information. The company’s own clarified figure was that Xu has “over 100” children altogether, but only 12 were born through surrogacy in the United States. That is a strikingly candid admission for a company on the defensive — and it happens to align almost exactly with the court’s own tally of roughly twelve U.S. surrogate pregnancies. The Times later reported the same shape of the claim: 100 children total, only 12 conceived through American surrogates.

The far larger figure — around 300 — comes from a different and weaker source: an allegation attributed to a former partner, Tang Jing, without a corroborating audit, birth registry, or independent count behind it. It is plausible, but it is not established the way the twelve-child U.S. surrogacy figure is, and treating it as settled fact outruns the evidence. The honest framing is this: the U.S.-based surrogacy count is reasonably well corroborated by both the court’s findings and the company’s own statement; the global child count, whatever it truly is, remains a

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