China:China is trying to soften the propaganda slogans it uses to promote its one-child policy by making its calls to have fewer babies more on-message and less offensive.
Slogans such as "Raise fewer babies but more piggies", "Houses toppled, cows confiscated, if abortion demand rejected" and "One more baby means one more tomb" have been declared crude and counter-productive in the efforts to minimise births in the world's most populous nation.
The propaganda messages are painted on walls and houses all over China, but the government body charged with implementing the one-child policy, the National Population and Family Planning Commission, now believes the slogans are coarse and poorly worded and that they sometimes damage the government's image.
"If such low-quality slogans, which may cause public complaint and resentment, are not corrected and remain where they are, the country's family planning efforts in the new era will be hindered," a commission report said.
Instead, the commission has come up with 190 less alarming slogans, such as "Mother earth is too tired to sustain more children".
The one-child policy was introduced in 1979 in response to government concern that the ever-rising birth rate would put too much strain on already stretched resources.
The policy has led to boy children being preferred over girls and is commonly blamed for an alarming rise in the male-to-female ratio.
In most western countries, more girls are born than boys. In China the national census of 2000 revealed that 117 boys are born for every 100 girls. This has been attributed to sex-selective abortion.
As in many developing countries, farmers prize sons because they believe they are better able to provide for the family, support their parents and carry on the family name - powerful enticements in a country with little by way of a social security blanket.
In an effort to change this mindset, one new slogan says: "Both boys and girls are parents' hearts."
The one-child policy is often viewed in the West as an attack on human rights, but there is growing debate about the policy in China too.
The government argues that it has successfully slowed population growth to around 10 million people a year. China credits family planning laws with preventing 400 million births and boosting prosperity. There is now an average birth rate of 1.8 children per couple in China, compared to six children when it was introduced.
There are many exceptions. People in the cities can have a second child if both husband and wife come from one-child families and farm couples are allowed to have another if their first is a girl. Many ethnic minorities are allowed to have two children, and there are no restrictions on the number of children Tibetans can have.