Letter from Beijing: Driving through rural China, the overwhelming number of children you see are boys, writes Clifford Coonan
In many a dusty town in the countryside, you see small boys wearing junior-size military uniforms surrounded by proud relatives, or little fellows running around wearing the split pants worn by Chinese infants instead of nappies.
But there are few little girls in evidence.
The preference among rural Chinese for sons over daughters has caused a potentially disastrous gender imbalance in the world's most populous country, and the government is now introducing a radical plan offering cash incentives to stop farming families aborting baby girls. The "Care for Girls" plan exempts hundreds of thousands of girls from school fees, gives tax breaks and free insurance to families until their daughters grow up, and provides families who choose to have just one girl with extra housing, employment and welfare privileges.
The government has long been aware of the problem of boys being preferable to girls, and the walls of many small towns are plastered with the slogan: "Daughters are as good as sons!"
Officially, an average of 117 boys are born to every 100 girls in China but in some areas this rises to 140 to 100 - an imbalance that could have huge implications for Chinese society in the future. The programme hopes to reduce this to a natural average of about 105.
"Attempts to address sex imbalance must take into account underlying factors, such as traditional preferences for sons, a poor productive force and a limited social welfare system," according to Mr Zhang Weiqing, head of the National Population and Planning Commission.
Mr Zhang says correcting the gender imbalance was only a short-term goal, with the long-term aim of promoting gender equality and creating "a favourable environment" for women at all stages of their lives.
Gender scanning of the foetus is illegal in China but a large black market flourishes, with a scan typically priced at 50 yuan, around five euro, if the child is a boy - and 30 yuan if it's a girl.
Rural Chinese prize their sons because they believe they are better able to provide for the family, work the land, support their elderly parents and carry on the family name - all very appealing factors in a country with little in the way of a social security blanket.
Daughters become members of their husband's family when they marry and move away, prompting the saying: "Raising a daughter is like watering someone else's fields".
The gender imbalance has filled China's classrooms with boys - and packed the orphanages with girls.
Experts estimate up to half a million children are abandoned each year, and 95 per cent of them healthy girls.
There are nearly 13 million more boys than girls under the age of nine and there are forecasts that by 2020, China there may be up to 40 million bachelors looking for a wife.
There is already a problem with a rise in the trafficking of women, as well as the sale of women as wives in the countryside, and a much-feared resurgence in female infanticide.
Some commentators believe a shortage of women in China, and in neighbouring India where attitudes to daughters are similar, could lead to warlike behaviour to divert the millions of unattached males, or "bare branches", as they are called in Chinese.
The skewed gender ratio is a relatively recent phenomenon - in 1982, the birth gender ratio was 108 boys for every 100 girls.
In the cities, where job prospects for women are often as good if not better than for men, the ratio is more normal.
China has operated strict family planning rules for the past 25 years that generally permit couples to have just one child, at most two. The government says the policy has averted 300 million births.
With a population of 1.3 billion and rising, there are tough penalties for those who break the rules, including fines of up to five times a family's annual income and even forced sterilisation.
If a farming family's firstborn is a girl, the couple is allowed to have another baby - a boy or a girl. But the bias towards boys means many parents decide to abort if the unborn child is found to be a girl. Officials at China's family planning ministry insist the 'one-child policy' was not to blame and pointed to South Korea, where 116 boys are born to 100 girls, but where there is no restriction on the number of children parents may have. Commentators say the plan marks a major reorientation of China's family planning programme.
It is currently run on a trial basis with 300,000 beneficiaries. But once it is extended through rural areas it will serve as a key part of an overall rural welfare programme, benefiting some 10 million people.
However, even with the 'Care for Girls' plan, the gender imbalance is unlikely to change all that much since the children born since the mid-1980s are already out there.
Which means the world needs to be ready for hundreds of thousands of Chinese bachelors, looking for love.
