China's male-dominated gender imbalance will not prompt the government to change its stringent family planning policy, state press reported yesterday.
"The major reason for China's rising sex ratio is the entrenched concept of `boys are better than girls,'" said Zhang Weiqing, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission.
He blamed the gender imbalance on the use of ultra-sound technology that allows families to identify the sex of fetuses and abort girls.
"Does the imbalance have something to do with family planning? Yes, but there is no direct connection," Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.
"Adjusting the family planning policy is not a fundamental solution to dealing with a rising sex ratio," he said.
China's family planning policy has tried to limit one child for every family, with rural couples allowed to have two children if the first child is a girl.
According to China's last census in 2000, for every 100 girls born, there were 117 baby boys. This compares with between 103 and 106 males born in other parts of the world.
According to a study issued by France's National Institute of Demographic Studies in October last year, if such birth rate ratios continue, China will have up to 25 million men with no hope of finding a female mate between 2015 and 2030. This could pose huge challenges to the government in maintaining social stability, the study said.
The shortage of women in some areas of China is further exacerbated by sex trafficking. Thousands of Chinese women are abducted by human traffickers every year in increasingly sophisticated underground operations.
Besides the tilted sex-ratio, China was already trying to administer the world's largest migrating population and had no alternative but to continue to enforce family planning, Zhang said.
"China will see its total population, working-age population and aging population all reach their peaks in the middle of this century," Zhang said.
He claimed China had prevented 400 million births since the nation began trying to control its population growth in the early 1970s.
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