There is growing opposition to China's one-child policy as a whole generation suffers the psychological impacts. Clifford Coonanin Beijing reports
Getting an ultrasound scan is a routine procedure during pregnancy in the West, but because of China's one-child policy - the biggest and most effective programme of population control the world has ever seen - screening the foetus is a highly political act.
Gender scanning is illegal, but a large black market flourishes, with a secret scan priced at €5 - if the child is a boy. If the baby turns out to be a girl, it costs just €3.
If it is a girl, parents-to-be will often abort the foetus, while experts estimate that up to half a million children are abandoned to orphanages each year - 95 per cent of them healthy girls.
Birth control is a huge public health issue in China. The origins were rooted in good intentions. The government was worried that the ever-rising birth rate would put too much strain on already stretched resources in the world's most populous country, so it made birth control mandatory in 1979.
The policy flies in the face of traditional Chinese values.
As in many developing countries, farmers prize sons because they believe they are better able to provide for the family, work the land, support their parents and carry on the family name - all powerful enticements in a country with little in the way of a social security blanket.
Raising a daughter is seen as bringing up a child for someone else, as she will ultimately be married off to another family.
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, with opposing voices getting louder.
The government argues how it has successfully slowed population growth to about 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 with six children when it was introduced.
And population officials point out that, although it is referred to as the one-child policy, 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 was a girl. Many ethnic minorities are allowed to have two children, and there are no restrictions on the number of children that Tibetans can have.
Such a huge experiment in social engineering has had a similarly large psychological impact on a whole generation of Chinese.
A survey of 7,000 Chinese youngsters showed that 60 per cent felt miserable during their childhood, the products of the "4-2-1 syndrome", where four grandparents and two parents all focus their attention on one child.
"I don't like the one-child policy, as it means that I am the only child in my home. I've felt lonely ever since my childhood, with no one to play with. All I have are my toys and my parents," says Li Jian, 24, from Beijing.
One 25-year-old blogger from Jiangsu province, writing under the name Monlit, says many of those born in the 1980s have psychological problems.
"Most of them are selfish, arrogant and foolish. They are 'number one' in the family, because their parents and grandparents indulge them too much. And to some extents, their psychological problems are becoming social problems," writes Monlit.
One 30-year-old Beijing woman says the first boom of single children meant that the burden of support was extremely difficult for them. "It's too much of a burden for them, and there are mistakes in the one-child policy. But from the government's perspective, it's necessary to control the birth rate," says Adel.
In the central and western provinces, where people are given more flexibility on the number of children they can have, there is a problem finding funding for schools and paying for healthcare.
The government wants residents in rural areas to have fewer babies as the medical system, education facilities and welfare system is not as well developed in the region.
There have been calls from the richer southern provinces to abandon the policy, because of a growing labour shortage.
The country also faces the threat of a greying population, but the government seems to be sticking to it, for the time being at least.
Last month, the State Family Planning and Population Commission held an online question-and-answer session to examine the future of the one-child policy amid growing pressure to change as China becomes an increasingly open and wealthier society.
Commission spokesman Yu Xuejun says the government will not change the policy before 2010, but concedes that there is a need for more flexibility.
"China is a huge country with very uneven social and population growth.
"Different regions have vastly different population problems," he says.
The population experts say the policy applies only to 36 per cent of the population, most of them living in the rich coastal regions such as Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Jiangsu, as well as the capital Beijing.
China's total population, including those of working age and those retiring, is expected to peak in the middle of this century.
The policy is commonly blamed for an alarming rise in the male-to-female ratio. In most Western countries, more girls are born than boys. But in China, the national census of 2000 revealed that 117 boys are born for every 100 girls in China, way above the normal level of 100 females to 104-107 males. This has been attributed to sex-selective abortion.
The skewed gender ratio is a relatively recent phenomenon - in 1982, the birth gender ratio was 108 boys for every 100 girls. In the cities, where job prospects for women are often as good if not better than for men, the ratio is more normal.
There are nearly 13 million more boys than girls under the age of nine and there are forecasts that by 2020, China may have 40 million bachelors, or "bare branches" as they are called in Chinese, looking for a wife. There is already a problem with a rise in the trafficking of women, as well as the sale of women as wives in the countryside, and a much-feared resurgence in female infanticide.
The government offers cash incentives to stop farming families aborting baby girls. The "Care for Girls" plan exempts hundreds of thousands of girls from school fees, and gives tax breaks and other privileges to the families. The programme hopes to reduce the gender imbalance to a natural average of about 105.
Parents who comply with the one-child policy receive state support and get free healthcare. There are tough penalties for those who commit the crime of having a second child, known as a "stolen birth" in Chinese, including fines of up to five times a family's annual income and even forced sterilisation. Their taxes are raised and they no longer receive free healthcare.
Health officials in the province of Hunan are planning to significantly raise the fines levied on people who break rules under the one-child policy.
The broader thrust of this change in the rules is political, because the new regulations are aimed in particular at Communist Party officials who flaunt the rules. There is growing unhappiness in China about official corruption, which the government fears could become politically destabilising.
There was widespread outrage at the revelation that almost 2,000 cadres and well-known public figures had broken the rules in Hunan, including a delegate to China's annual parliament, the National People's Congress, who kept four mistresses and had four children.