ABSTRACT
In 1980 it was noticeable that the new Marriage Law continued to incorporate prohibitions against infanticide as if it was relevant, but still in 1981 it came as something of a surprise to most foreign and Chinese observers when female infanticide became the subject of emotive headlines in the Chinese press. Then, the national youth newspaper ran the headlines ‘Save our baby girls ’ because it deemed it necessary to draw attention to the ‘numbers of baby girls abandoned and the sharp increase in female infanticide which had occurred in China in the 1980s ’.6 Once the media reported a sharp increase in female infanticide, the government charged the Women ’s Federation with initiating a nation-wide survey to investigate and document the scale of female infanticide and other forms of discrimination against female infants and their mothers. Some results were published which suggested that female infanticide was likely to occur where the birth of a daughter marked the end of the family line and, in the poorer inland regions of China, where there was a tradition of infanticide and where it was consequently scarcely thought of as a crime. In Anhui province, where the history of infanticide had given rise to large numbers of unmarried men over the age of forty years, a disproportionate number of newborn and young infants had died in the last few years. In some areas the ratio of female to male infants were reported to have dropped to a low 1 in 5, in one production team more than forty baby girls had been drowned in 1980 and 1981, and in another brigade, of the eight babies born in the first quarter of 1982, the three boys survived, three girls were drowned and a further two had been abandoned.7 Further comparisons with nearby villages had revealed that these patterns were not unique. In one of the counties, the percentage of male over female infants had risen from 3.2 to 5.8 per cent within the scope of one year, so that in 1980 the
percentage of males born was 53 per cent compared to 46 per cent female. In another county, the problem was shown to be yet more serious, for the percentage of males born had risen from 112.6 to 116.4 per cent between 1980 and 1981, so that in 1981 the percentage of males born was 58.2 per cent compared to 41.8 per cent female (see Table 9.1). A national newspaper drew attention to these trends in order to emphasise that the intolerable behaviour of drowning and forsaking baby girls is ‘still rampant in some rural areas ’ and ‘a major problem worthy of serious attention ’.8
