Officials are concerned that while sex ratios are
                 even in cities, there are 8 boys to every 2 girls in
                 countrysides

                 By MARY KWANG
                      CHINA CORRESPONDENT

                 BEIJING -- Two thirds of China's only children born
                 since the government launched its one-child
                 family-planning policy 20 years ago are boys, posing a
                 threat to the country's stability.

                 Male babies make up over 80 per cent of the number of
                 births in the countryside, said a senior official with the
                 State Family Planning Commission.

                 Social problems, already rife, such as the sale of girls as
                 brides to peasants in remote regions, could worsen in 10
                 years as the countryside's first one-child generation hits
                 marrying age.

                 Mr Wang Qian, a deputy director-general of the
                 commission, said at a briefing yesterday that China had
                 60 million one-child families.

                 The majority of these households emerged only in the
                 last decade, he added.

                 Half of them reside in cities; the other half live in rural
                 areas.

                 He said the gender ratio of such only children in the
                 cities was even, implying that a huge imbalance existed in
                 the countryside. The sex ratio in China is now a warped
                 118.5 males to every 100 females.

                 Incidences of female infanticide, abortion of female
                 foetuses and abandoned girls are believed to be high.

                 The numbers are alarming enough to provoke
                 high-ranking officials into speaking out . They blame the
                 problem on the family-planning policy, traditional
                 Chinese preference for male heirs and need for males to
                 work on the farm.

                 Ms Jiang Yiman, the commission's director-general, said
                 Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing, Sichuan and
                 Jiangsu encourage rural families to have one child.

                 Nineteen other provinces allow a rural couple to have a
                 second child if the first-born is a girl.

                 The rest permit rural households to have two children,
                 regardless of the first-born's gender.

                 As a concession, most of the provinces and
                 municipalities let a couple who are only children
                 themselves have two offspring.

                 Mr Wang also highlighted other population trends in
                 China yesterday.

                 He noted that 5 per cent of Chinese women, in a recent
                 survey, said they did not want children.

                 Another trend was the large number of unmarried
                 women who had undergone abortions.

                 In big cities, one third of unmarried women had
                 terminated pregnancies; in Shanghai, the figure exceeded
                 60 per cent.

                       Adapted from The Straits Times, 1 Feb 2000.