Duan Jianhua, a senior official from the Guangzhou Population and Family Planning Bureau, said on Wednesday that favorable policies for families with daughters will be extended throughout the city, in the southern province of Guangdong, later this year.

Families with only one or two daughters and no sons will enjoy benefits for their children's studies and healthcare should they have financial problems, including up to 10 percent reductions in education fees and medical costs.

The move aims to help address the prejudice many Chinese parents have against daughters, Duan said.

"By attaching importance to education and medical treatment for girls, we hope the policy will encourage people to be more positive about having a daughter," said Duan.

The policy is part of the long-running Care for Girls Project, which was launched nationally in September 2003 to promote a healthy environment for girls' development and to protect the interests of women.

Duan said the local policy was implemented last year in Huadu and Baiyun districts on the outskirts of the city, where the birth ratio of boys to girls is particularly imbalanced.

According to the fifth National Census, the sex ratio of newborns in the province was 130 boys to 100 girls. The national average was 119:100.

Since the implementation of the policy, the birth ratio of boys to girls in the two pilot districts has dropped from 127.5:100 and 123.8:100 in 2002 to 123.5: 100 and 116:100 last year respectively, said Duan. He also expressed confidence in achieving a normal ratio after five years.

"We hope people from all walks of life and governments at all levels will attach greater importance to the project, or we will suffer from an increasingly unbalanced birth ratio," said Duan.

Experts said the imbalanced birth ratio could trigger a lot of problems if not properly dealt with, hindering the city's social and economic development. 

(China Daily January 27, 2005)