Some 30 to 40 million men of marriageable age in China will be
relegated to lives as bachelors by 2020 if the practice of CT
gender screening in the embryo stage is not held in check, said Li
Weixiong, vice chairman of the Population, Resources and
Environment Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese
People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
"This is by no means a sensational prediction," said Li. "The
great disparities between male and female newborns pose a serious
threat to building a prosperous society."
"The imbalance between male and female has become more and more
serious, especially in the rural areas," Li said in a keynote
speech at a full meeting of the ongoing CPPCC annual session, which
opened in Beijing last Wednesday.
Li quoted the figures of previous population censuses: the
national newborn gender ratio was 100:108.5 in 1982, 100:111.3 in
1990 and 100:116.9 in 2000. However, the ratio reached as high as
100:130 in Hainan
and Guangdong.
Normally, gender ratios are 100:104 - 107.
"Such a serious gender imbalance poses a major threat to the
healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's
population, and could trigger such crimes and social problems as
mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution," Li
said.
The policy advisors attributed the grave situation to
centuries-old feudalistic ideas, sophisticated medical testing and
the lagging social security system in the countryside. Although
China has a maternity and child care law and family planning law
that forbid embryo gender screening, they have little effect,
according to Li.
He urged the government to adopt a combination of legal,
economic, educational and cultural measures to lower the birth
proportion of male to female.
(Xinhua News Agency March 9, 2004)