I'll study even harder. I'm a girl, but I can do something for the society when I grow up, said 12-year-old Xu Mei, after receiving stationery and 100 yuan (US$12) from officials with the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC). 

She was one of the 20 girls who got the present here Tuesday at the launching ceremony of NPFPC's campaign on caring girls and rewarding some rural households practicing family planning in the Three-Gorge Reservoir area, where China's largest water conservancy project is located.

The campaign is designed to cultivate an environment that treats male and female as equal and eliminate sexual discrimination, said Xi Xiaoping, director of the NPFPC's publicity department.

Sixty-one-year-old Lu Chaoquan, farmer in a northern Chongqing village, was also invited to attend the ceremony. The man who has only one daughter is one of the 41,000 farmers received financial rewards last year in the city.

"I'm getting old and my daughter is married. When I'm alone, I sometimes envy those who have a son. But now, with the government's reward, I am at ease. I'm pride to have a daughter," Luo said.

China has begun to implement a pilot project of rewarding some rural households practicing family planning since 2004. Rural couples with only one child or two daughters become eligible for a cash reward of no less than 600 yuan (US$72) each year when they are 60 years old. The reward will last for the rest of their lives.

In Chongqing, those who have only one daughter or whose only child died can get 240 yuan (US$29) more.

Caring girls and rewarding farmers following family planning policy aim to guide farmers to stick to the family planning policy to keep a low birth rate while addressing high sexual imbalance.

China's family planning policy launched in the late 1970s has helped check China's rapid population growth and reduced the country's population by an estimated 300 million. But the policy has also negatively impacted some rural families, which have fallen into poverty for lack of male laborers.

Government figures show that 117 boys are born in China for every 100 girls, while in some rural areas, the figure is approaching 150 to 100. Some families choose sex-selective abortion when the fetus is found to be a girl.

The rewarding system is not a temporary one. Instead, it is a long-term policy for addressing population issue in rural areas and promotes a coordinated development between population and socioeconomic growth.

Last year, more than 310,000 farmers in 10 cities of five provinces where the pilot project was launched received around 200 million yuan (US$24 million) in cash reward for having only one child or two daughters in their families.

The rewarding pilot project is expected to be extended to 23 provinces, 12 counties in Tibet and 22 counties or cities in eastern Shandong Province this year and cover the whole country next year.

At present, China's central budget covers some 80 percent of the reward allowances paid in China's less developed western regions, while in the better-developed eastern coastal regions all the reward money is paid from the local budgets.

(Xinhua News Agency June 22, 2005)