INFANTICIDE

In China the traditional preference for male offspring, along with the central government's one-child-only policy (part of an attempt to combat overpopulation), have combined to create rising levels of female infanticide.

After seizing power in 1949 the Communist Party virtually eradicated the practice of infanticide by imposing strict punishments. In the 1980s, however, the government census began to show hundreds of thousands of missing baby girls each year.

The problem is most egregious in rural China where boys are valued as extra hands who will support their parents in their old age. Girls, who by custom move in with their in-laws after marriage, are viewed as damaged goods. If a baby if unwanted, she is abandoned, suffocated or drowned soon after birth.

The government itself may be partly to blame for the apparent resurgence of infanticide. Given the government's policy of one child per couple, rural parents often will dispose of a female baby and try again for a boy.

According to the Canadian Medical Association, a 1992 survey reported the sex ratio in China had reached 118.5 boys born for every 100 girls -- compared to 106 boys to 100 girls in the West.

In 1997 the London Telegraph quoted an obscure but official Chinese journal Theory and Time, which warned the male-to-female ratio in China has become so unbalanced that there will soon be an "army of bachelors" in China -- an estimated 90 million Chinese men in search of a spouse.