Female infanticide in China

When Christian missionaries arrived in China in the late sixteenth century, they witnessed newborns being thrown into rivers or onto rubbish piles.

[2] The practice continued into the 19th century and declined precipitously after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China,[3] but reemerged as an issue after the PRC government introduced the one-child policy in the early 1980s.

[11] In 1845, in the province of Jiangxi, a missionary wrote that these children survived for up to two days while exposed to the elements and that those passing by would ignore the screaming child.

[16] In Chinese society, most parents preferred having sons, so in 1979 when the government created the One-Child Policy, baby girls were aborted or abandoned.

Early in the 1980s, senior officials became increasingly concerned with reports of abandonment and female infanticide by parents desperate for a son.

[4] Even when exceptions were made to the One-Child Policy if a couple had a female child first, the baby girls were still discarded, because the parents didn't want the financial burden of having two children.

[19] In rural households, which as of 2014 constitute almost half the Chinese population,[20] males are additionally valuable for performing agricultural work and manual labor.

[22] Banister (2004), in her literature review on China's shortage of girls, suggested that there has been a resurgence in the prevalence of female infanticide following the introduction of the one-child policy.

[24] According to the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), the demographic shortfall of female babies who have died for gender-related issues is in the same range as the 191 million estimated dead accounting for all conflicts in the twentieth century.

[30] In December 2016, researchers at the University of Kansas reported that the sex disparity in China was likely exaggerated due to administrative under-reporting and that delayed registration of females, instead of the abortion and infanticide practices.

The finding challenged the earlier assumptions that rural Chinese villagers killed their daughters on a massive scale and concluded that as many as 10 to 15 million missing women hadn't received proper birth registration since 1982.