On the chilly morning of October 20, a baby was abandoned in Dongzikou, in the suburbs of Chengdu, Sichuan Province. A number of people gathered at the site, but they all remained indifferent spectators. No one called the police to report that an infant was lying on the icy cement floor for three hours, and by the time an ambulance arrived the newborn child had already stopped breathing. 

There is no denying that baby dumping has become a grave social phenomenon that is drawing nationwide attention.

In general, the infants who are discarded are born out of wedlock, in violation of family planning regulations or with some physical deformity. The overwhelming majority are girls, victims of traditional ideas that value men and disparage women.

The child welfare hospitals in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region take in more than 2,000 abandoned babies each year, according to Long Zhihua, head of the Social Welfare and Social Affairs Division of Guangxi's Civil Affairs Department.

The discarding of girl infants has led to a severe gender imbalance in the autonomous region. The fifth national population census conducted in November 2000 shows that the newborn sex ratio is 126 boys for every 100 girls in Guangxi, while the national figure is 117 to 100. In Guangxi's Yulin City, the ratio reached a shocking 148 to 100.

"In rural areas, only men are regarded as pillars of a family. As a result, if a girl is born, in order not to violate the family planning policy, the parents either send her to other people or simply leave her at the hospital, so that they have the chance to have a second baby," says Liao Mingde of Guangxi Medical University.

The Nanning Child Welfare Hospital, the biggest of its kind in the provincial capital, reports that of the 100 foundlings it has accepted, only eight are boys.

In recent years, some people have seen an opportunity to make a profit from the unwanted infants. In one case of child trafficking in Yulin in 2003, a total of 118 newborns, including abandoned ones, were illegally sold.

Similar operations have been uncovered in Sichuan, Henan, Yunnan and Fujian provinces.

Part of the reason for the abandonment phenomenon is a perversion at the grass roots of the national family planning policy. Official policy states that if the first child born to a rural couple is a girl, they may have a second child. However, some local officials have turned this policy into an excuse for covert "penalty" collection: the more money you can pay, the more children you can have.

Local family planning workers are required to make quarterly visits to pregnant women, but in fact many of them do not. Thus, nobody knows exactly whether or not a pregnant woman has given birth, let alone the whereabouts of the baby.

Reducing the number of abandonments to some extent, but aggravating the gender imbalance, is the fact that some medical workers conduct unauthorized fetus gender assessments, which is responsible for the large numbers of abortions. Moves currently under way to curtail sex-selective abortions may backfire in the form of increased dumping of baby girls.

Loopholes in the Family Planning Law, Adoption Law and Penal Code have made attempted crackdowns on baby abandonment largely ineffective.

According to attorney Liang Biao of the Guangxi Huasheng Law Firm, in cases of rampant child trafficking the traffickers themselves were usually punished severely, but those who discarded their babies have seldom been held to account.

There are legal provisions requiring parents to rear and educate their children and prohibiting the maltreatment or abandonment of children. Nevertheless, the Penal Code fails to provide clear definitions, so that in practice it is difficult to mete out punishment to parents who dump their babies, says He Jialin of the Sichuan Hetai Law Firm.

In the countryside, where baby abandonment most often occurs, poor knowledge of the law also plays a role. Many rural parents do not know that they have actually committed a crime by discarding their own infants, says Professor Hu Guangwei of the Sichuan Provincial Academy of Social Sciences.

According to Long Zhihua, most abandoned babies are either sent to child welfare hospitals, illegally sold or adopted. To a great extent, Guangxi's baby abandonment issue has been resolved through international adoption. Long says that so far, 90 percent of discarded infants adopted in the autonomous region have gone to foreign nationals. In Sichuan Province, an average of 200 children are adopted by foreigners each year.

Domestic adoption should have been cheaper and easier, but the procedures are dismayingly complex. The rigid Adoption Law requires the would-be parents to be 35 or older and childless, and no one may adopt more than one child.

As a result, some local family planning administrations have assessed fines against single-child families who provide homes to orphans or abandoned babies. Legally, their benevolent act is considered "giving unplanned births."

Confirmation of an abandoned baby's identity is another red-tape obstacle to adoption. "Although the original intention of the policy is good, in practice in order to shirk responsibility the police who first find the baby don't want to leave their names. In that case, without a confirmed identity, the baby cannot be adopted by a child welfare hospital," says Kang Jinhe, vice director of the Social Welfare Division of Sichuan's Civil Affairs Department.

The resultant problem is twofold. First, black-market baby buying and selling run rampant in many places. Second, beds in child welfare hospitals are left unused.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs has seen to it that a number of child welfare hospitals have been established nationwide to accept abandoned babies. The Nanning Child Welfare Hospital, for example, has more than 500 beds. But most of its equipment lies idle, causing great waste, says Feng Chaorong, the hospital's president.

Sichuan is in a similar situation. The province's child welfare hospitals have a combined total of more than 2,000 beds, but have only received 1,794 abandoned babies so far, says Kang.

(Xinhua News Agency, translated by Shao Da for China.org.cn, January 10, 2005)