A call went out yesterday for young volunteers to assist with an initiative designed to protect the rights of girls. The program was launched at Tsinghua University and a total of 200 students from various universities in Beijing have joined as volunteers.

The program was launched to coincide with the 17th World Population Day which is today and has the theme "Taking Action with and for Young People." In China the slogan "Love Girls and Take Action" has been adopted.?

Better efforts must be made by Chinese authorities and society to protect the rights of girls, officials and experts said at the launch ceremony.

China has 119 boys born for every 100 girls while the global ratio is 103-107 boys to every 100 girls, according to official statistics.

A major reason for the gender imbalance is the abuse of medical ultra-sound technology which permits families to identify the sex of the unborn and abort females.?

"Thanks to the family planning policy China has prevented 400 million pregnancies since the 1970s which has helped make a good population environment for China and the world," said Zhang Weiqing, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

However, the gender imbalance has become more and more serious in the past few years because many families, especially those in rural areas, prefer to have boys, he added.

China has to stabilize the low birth rate in future years because, even when maintaining the present levels, its population is expected to peak at about 1.46 billion by 2030.

Favorable policies and support must be given to families in rural areas which have 80 percent of the country's population, said Pan Guiyu, president of China Family Planning Association.?

Generally speaking couples are only permitted to have one child. In rural areas, however, if a first child is a girl a couple can have a second child. But if the second born is also female they can't have a third.

Pan said the desire to have a boy was due to the fact that China was still a developing country where farming communities depended a great deal on male labor.?

Another reason, she said, was that farmers have no form of insurance or social security. They wanted to have males because traditionally men could earn more money and support parents when they became old.

With this in mind it was hard for them to relinquish the wish to have a boy and very difficult to prevent them from aborting girls, Pan said. Government and society must give more support to farmers in these situations, she added.

China has 80 million one-child families.

Such families are fragile because if a child dies mothers are often too old to start a new family or have been sterilized, said Pan. It can result in huge strains being placed on families.?

According to the country's fifth national census in 2000 at least 210,000 people aged between 7 and 22 died. And half of them were from one-child families.

A pilot program, which started in 2004, was expanded to 23 provinces last year to support these families, Pan said.

Under the program rural residents, who are 60 or over and have only one child or two daughters, are eligible for payments of 50 yuan (US$6) every month for the rest of their lives.

The program is expected to expand nationwide this year, Pan added.

(China Daily July 11, 2006)