The global average is 106 boys to 100 girls. Even so, there are about 750,000 girls born in China each year who are unaccounted for. The lucky ones find their way to the White Swan Hotel. But many foreign social workers have reported seeing midwives in backward rural areas keeping a bucket of water by the woman in labour. If the baby is a girl, or if the woman already has a child and is unable to pay the right bribes, the baby will be drowned at birth, as apparently happened in the village of Caidian, in the central Hubei province.
Many parents do manage to get around the law without killing or abandoning their children.
The birth may be reported in official documents as a miscarriage and the child will be sent to relatives in remote areas where officialdom is less efficient. But this solution costs money in bribes. About a million handicapped babies are abandoned each year by parents determined their one allowed child should be healthy. After 20 years of the one-child policy, the disparity between the number of young men and young women in China is now a serious problem. By some reckonings there are 70 million men in China who will never be able to find a woman to marry.