In some cases the desire for a son is so strong that extended families like Liu's pool their funds to pay the huge fine. He will not say if his wife ended up giving away or selling infant girls. But four years ago they finally had a son, happily enduring the fine.
But with such an investment at stake, they were ill inclined to take chances. "The reason we kept trying is, I wanted a son," said Liu, adding that he would never pay that kind of fine for a daughter. Eighty percent of trafficked babies are girls, said Yu. The rest are boys with a health problem or deformity.
While local residents are loath to talk about baby sales, some villages around Yulin have become rich from baby trafficking, Chinese researchers say. Middlemen earn several hundred yuan, about US$30, for procuring a child, and that money has built houses and bought tractors in villages that once relied on subsistence farming.
The mothers who sell daughters are mostly poor rural women who are trying for a son, or those who fear fines for having exceeded the permitted number of children. Such poor women frequently get no formal prenatal care, so the pregnancy goes undetected by outside authorities. They give birth at home, so the "illegal birth" is never registered.
Although baby smuggling is a widespread problem in this part of China, the case in March was unusual only because of the large number of babies involved, experts here said. The long-distance bus was headed for Anhui Province, but the babies are sold all over China.
The main market for the babies probably consists of childless city dwellers, said Yu, the sociologist. In surveys, urban Chinese families, who are more likely to have pensions and other means of support, tend to show a slight preference for girls, believing that they take better care of aging parents.
But some are sold to rural families who already have a son but want a daughter to help with the housework; others are sold for stranger purposes. Last August, the police in neighboring Guizhou Province arrested four traffickers with seven baby girls who were being sold to be reared as child brides for farmers in remote mountainous regions.
Because of the selective abortion of girls in China, some researchers estimate there are 111 males for every 100 females in the country, making it difficult for poor farmers to persuade women to marry into their villages.
Yu added that she had "seen documents to suggest that at least some were destined for adoption abroad."
It is not clear exactly where the baby girls intercepted in Yulin were headed, and the police here are not releasing information about the case. Apparently shaken by the discovery of more than two dozen nearly dead girls, President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) ordered an investigation.
"The case is basically cleared up, but we have special instructions from the Public Security Ministry not to release anything to the media yet," said an official from Yulin who said he was on the special task force but gave only his surname, Xie.
In the meantime, the 27 girls are living in a special sixth-floor ward of the Yulin No. 1 People's Hospital, where they have been named by the nursing staff. The oldest is now nine months old, getting ready to walk, but it is unclear where she will go.
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