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BEIJING — Standing nervously outside the ultrasound clinic at Beijing Maternity Hospital, Zhang Na confesses her secret hope.
The 25-year-old expectant mother is desperate to learn the sex of the unborn child she has been carrying for seven months. In this land of female infanticide and ultrasound sex selection, Zhang explains why:
"I hope it's a girl," she says shyly through a translator.
"Because I'm afraid that if I have a boy, he won't be able to find a wife when he grows up."
Little wonder that Zhang worries about her child's marriage prospects. The latest statistics reveal China is missing as many as 40 million girls, most of them aborted in the two decades since ultrasound tests became widely available here.
The implications are stark: Over the next 15 years, as China's ultrasound generation reaches adulthood, up to 40 million young men — more than Canada's total population — face the prospect of perpetual bachelorhood.
The Chinese even have an expression for men who cannot marry and procreate: guang gun-er, or "bare branches" that fail to bear fruit on the family tree.
That scenario has alarmed demographers and policy-makers who worry about the fallout from legions of unmarried, unemployed men running amok over the next two decades.
China has experienced social upheaval in the past whenever gender imbalances were similarly skewed, and analysts cite a growing epidemic of wife-kidnapping and baby-snatching.
"Such serious gender imbalance poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution," warned Li Weixiong, research director at the National Population and Family Planning Commission.
"This is by no means a sensational prediction," he told China's top political consultative conference earlier this year.
The normal sex ratio at birth around the world is about 105 males for every 100 females.
In 1982, a few years before affordable ultrasound tests became the norm in China's countryside, the sex ratio was a relatively normal 108 boys per 100 girls.
But by the year 2000, China had achieved a lopsided ratio of 116.9 boys born for every 100 girls — the highest gender gap on Earth. In some southern provinces, notably Guangdong and Hainan, the ratio approaches a remarkable 130 males for 100 females, according to government figures.
The trend persisted despite a 1994 law banning the disclosure of gender in ultrasound tests, legal restrictions having failed to deter parents from indulging the powerful social conventions that favour boys over girls.
Another factor is the significantly higher mortality rates experienced by young girls up to age 5: 39 per 1,000 girls, compared with 30 per 1,000 boys, according to a 1995 sample.
The unprecedented gender gap — and the ferocious competition for brides that may follow — has panicked mothers like Zhang.
Mothers who might otherwise have hewed to Chinese tradition and hoped for a son must now rethink their assumptions: What use is a son if he remains unwed, unable to perpetuate the family line?
Like most Chinese parents, Zhang had wanted a boy at first. The preference is pronounced in the countryside, where a son can labour harder in the fields and look after his parents in old age, whereas a daughter leaves the household upon marriage.
But when Zhang learned of the fallout from so many other Chinese mothers aborting their female fetuses, she had second thoughts.
"Initially, I wanted a boy," she confides, placing her hands protectively over her swollen abdomen. "But I've changed my mind. I've seen television programs again and again describing this horrible situation."
Indeed, China's media have latched on to a topic that was taboo only a decade ago, describing the potential chaos from gangs of young men stealing women and babies. Foreign experts also have raised the alarm, cautioning that the Communist leaders' preoccupation with tough birth-control laws has blinded them to the problem of sex selection.
In its defence, the government argues that its so-called one-child policy has prevented 300 million births in a country already overpopulated by 1.3 billion people. Indeed, officials argue that the term itself is a misnomer because most rural families are allowed to try again for a son if their firstborn is a girl, and because ethnic minorities face no limits.
They say the one-child policy has been unfairly scapegoated, noting that long-standing cultural prejudices — rather than recent Communist policies — have had greater impact on the gender gap. But many analysts say local officials were only too willing to tolerate abortions of female fetuses if it helped keep the number of births below target.
"The one-child policy is the root cause, because people have less choice," says sociologist Li Yin He of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "China is still a male-dominated society, so there's a preference for boys."
Whatever the past traditions, the future consequences are what preoccupy policy-makers today. In a society consumed with maintaining social order and ruled by a Communist party that brooks no dissent, the spectre of an army of unemployed, unmarried men is deeply troubling.
The government's response also will have significant implications for China and the rest of the world, says Canadian political scientist Andrea Den Boer, who teaches at the University of Kent in England.
"There will be instability ... increased crime and large outbreaks of violence," predicts Den Boer, who recently co-authored a book on the subject, Bare Branches.
"This can only get worse."
She argues that a massive floating population of perhaps 150 million migrant males, many of them unmarried, will tempt the government to become increasingly authoritarian rather than democratic, in order to keep a lid on any troubles.
Den Boer notes that "over the last couple of years, the Chinese government has paid attention to the problem."
At the China Population and Development Research Centre, there's little doubt the distortions are a recipe for instability.
"Young people are troublemakers if they have no wife and family," explains deputy director Xie Zhenming.
"If they can't find wives, they will kidnap them. It's already happening in China and it's going to become a more serious problem in future."
In fact, the government disclosed this year that police had freed more than 42,000 kidnapped women and children from 2001 to 2003. As the gender gap grows larger, demand for underground trafficking is destined to increase.
But Xie's concerns go beyond the plight of unmarried men. He is equally disturbed by the "lower status for women" manifested by such a massive gender gap, noting that "the male-dominated culture in China goes back several thousand years."
As 5,000 years of tradition combined with the high-tech capabilities of ultrasound, male-female ratios have skewed as never before, he says.
Enterprising doctors and determined parents have consistently defied the law, often exchanging signals like winking or tapping the table to avoid any incriminating communication. With good connections or a modest bribe of as little as $8, the results can be teased out in rural facilities where enforcement is difficult.
China has been producing more than 10,000 ultrasound machines annually for the past decade. They can be found in every corner of the country, often in the hands of unethical, entrepreneurial doctors working at private, profit-making clinics.
"In lots of hospitals, doctors still do it," says Xie. "Even though they deny it, that's a lie."
Research shows that the vast majority of aborted fetuses — more than 70 per cent — are in fact female. A 1999 report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation estimated up to 750,000 female fetuses are aborted annually after gender screening in China.
Despite the admonitions, farmers in the countryside know how to get the information they want. As a consequence, so-called "bachelor villages" are sprouting across rural China.
"If you want to know the sex of your child, you have to have guanxi (connections) and pay money at a private clinic," says farmer Han Fusong, 31, as she leaves the Beijing hospital to return to her village in the countryside. "If you know the doctor very well, they'll tell you."
But in the nation's capital, the prohibitions are strictly enforced. Pregnant women are greeted at the ultrasound clinic by an imposing display of wall posters warning them not to ask about the gender of their fetus and urging them to greet girls as a gift of nature.
The intense propaganda campaign unveiled last month proclaims: "Nature decides whether it's a boy or girl," and "Boy or girl, let it be."
Ultrasound specialist Dr. Ma Xiao-qing, who performs dozens of exams daily, says mothers often want to know but never find out at her facility.
"If it's a girl, some people think of abortions, so that's why it's necessary to put these posters up here," Ma says as she looks out over the ultrasound ward where expectant mothers are lined up. "But if they really want to know, they can always find a way."
Alongside the propaganda posters is a new government initiative announced last month to change public attitudes toward female babies.
Dubbed the "Girl Care Project," it has set an ambitious public target of 2010 for closing the gender gap between males and females at birth.
The campaign will teach "equality between men and women and promote the value of having fewer and healthier children," says Zhao Baige, vice-minister of the family planning commission.
As an added incentive, parents who have only one child, or two daughters, will receive supplementary social security payments as "compensation" for the perceived loss of income from not having male offspring as wage-earners to support them in their old age.
Siri Tellier, the United Nations Population Fund's representative in Beijing, calls the government's aggressive response a breakthrough compared with past attitudes.
"I think it's fantastic that they're tackling it very openly, because 10 years ago they were saying it's not a problem," she says. "They are certainly going all out."
The challenge is not only to prevent a surplus of unmarried men, but also to change the underlying attitudes that undervalue women. Without such soul-searching, the gender gap might never be closed.
"It's not just a question of young men being unable to marry, but why don't the Chinese want girls in the first place?" Tellier asks. "How do you change attitudes?"
