Gender Imbalance

With more than 1.3 billion people, China is the world's most populous country. But population growth has slowed in recent years as a result of the one-child policy, in effect since 1979.Chinese couples traditionally prefer boys who, unlike girls, can carry on the family name and will look after them in their old age. Abortions of female fetuses are believed to be widespread, especially in rural areas. The Chinese government has reported that an already largely male population will increasingly outnumber women for years to come.

For centuries, Chinese families without sons feared poverty and neglect. The male offspring represented continuity of lineage and protection in old age.The traditional thinking is best described in the ancient

"Book of Songs" (1000-700 B.C.):

"When a son is born,
Let him sleep on the bed,
Clothe him with fine clothes,
And give him jade to play...
When a daughter is born,
Let her sleep on the ground,
Wrap her in common wrappings,
And give broken tiles to play..."

After the Communists took power in 1949, Mao Zedong rejected traditional Malthusian arguments that population growth would eventually outrun food supply, and firmly regarded China's huge population as an asset, then with an annual birth rate of 3.7 percent. Without a state-mandated birth control program, China's sex ratio in the 60's and 70's remained normal.Then in the early '80s, China began enforcing an ambitious demographic engineering policy to limit families to one-child, as part of its strategy to fast-track economic modernization. The policy resulted in a slashed annual birth rate of 1.29 percent by 2002, or the prevention of some 300 million births, and the current population of close to 1.3 billion.

‘We still have a lot of work to do. There's no road map yet on how to achieve the goal of normal sex ratio.’ - Dr. Gu Baochang, Population control expert