child sex ratios were already by far the highest in India in 1981, and indeed have been the highest since official censuses began to be taken in the late nineteenth century (Visaria 1969). They are the only Indian states with child sex ratios as high as those of the provinces in China’s East and Central South regions (Tables 2 and 3), though their rate of increase in masculinization during the 1990s was far lower than in these regions of China.

These two states comprise less than 4.5% of India’s total population, but contribute a very substantial part of the total masculinization of India’s child sex ratios. This makes it especially significant to find that reported son preference fell during the 1990s in these two states as they did across India, including in Gujarat, Maharashtra (Retherford and Roy 2003), and estimated sex ratios at birth in these two states may also have fallen somewhat in recent years (John et al 2008: Table 1.8).

There is an interesting parallel between the trends in the four Indian states that continue to show increasing masculinization of child sex ratios, and those in South Korea just before sex ratios began to normalize. Retherford and Roy (2003) found that in these four states, reported son preference fell during the 1990s even as the estimated sex ratio at birth rose. They attribute this apparent contradiction to the ease of sex-selective technology offsetting the reduction in son preference. This parallels exactly the trends in South Korea until the mid-1990s, when sex ratios at birth continued to rise despite the fact that reported son preference was falling (Chung and Das Gupta 2007). After the mid1990s child sex ratios began to normalize in South Korea, as the reduced son preference manifested itself above the countervailing effect of technological ease of sex selection.

As mentioned, the analysis of trends in India is hampered by the lack of quinquennial data, and the data for China suggest that the Indian trends would likely show clearer signs of decline were such data available.

# <u>Sub-national trends in China</u>

Turning to China’s provinces, we look first at the decadal census data for purposes of comparison with the trends in India’s states. The first two columns of Table 3 are drawn up to be comparable to the Indian data in Table 2. This shows little evidence of decline in the rate of masculinization of child sex ratios between the 1980s and the 1990s in China’s provinces.

However, when we include the quinquennial data in our analysis, we find much more evidence of change. Before turning to this, we need to recognize the limitations of the data. As discussed above, there are several sources of potential fluctuation in the data on child sex ratios in China, especially when examining quinquennial trends at sub-national level. For this reason, we examine not only the quinquennial trends, but also compare two sets of decadal trends: that for 1990-2000 (both derived from full censuses), compared with that for 1995-2005 (both derived from one percent sample censuses). Our conclusions in the following discussion give greater weight to the trends derived from similar data sources. Thus, for example, we conclude that a province shows signs of an 6