China Sticking to One-Child Policy

Chinese nurses look after quintuplets at a hospital in Anqing, China Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2007. China says it will not loosen its so-called one-child policy, despite a top family planning official's acknowledgment Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007, that the policy was partly to blame for creating the problem of too many boy babies and not enough girls. (AP Photo/EyePress) CHINA OUT (AP)

Heather Terry, spokeswoman for Great Wall China Adoptions, said the new restrictions show China is committed to ensuring "only the best" for the girls given up for adoption.

China is "approaching (adoption), the way they approached their population problem: We need to tighten up a bit to get this under control," said Terry, whose agency is one of the largest in the U.S. that organizes adoptions from China.

Greenhalgh said that though sex selection was a problem in the past, "people's gender preferences are shifting where girls are at least as desirable as sons."

City-dwellers, most of whom will receive pensions upon retirement, depend less on their children for financial support, Greenhalgh said, so they are happy to have girls, whom they often consider better providers of emotional care late in life.

While popularly referred to as China's "one-child policy," the rule limits only 36 percent of the population to having one child, said Wang Guoqing, the family planning commission's vice director.

Most people, or 53 percent, are allowed to have a second child if their first is a girl. Poor farmers with a two-child limit account for nearly 10 percent of the population, while ethnic minorities _ who are allowed to have two or more children _ make up 1.6 percent of the total.

The complex policy reflects the greatly varied economic and social realities in different regions of China, Zhang said.

He said the government has begun studying the impact of a generation of "only children" _ since the late 1970s, nearly 100 million children have been born who will never have siblings.

"China's only boys and girls are certainly not as scary as some people say, like those who call them 'little emperors' or 'little titans' who can't tolerate authority," Zhang said.

"The majority of them have had a healthy childhood," he said. "You can see for yourself. Young people today are very energetic and creative." In addition, he said, they are likely to be better educated than children from bigger families, because parents need not divide their resources among many children.

"They are much better off than I was, being one of four kids," said Zhang, 62. "I envy them."

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AP Writer Sarah DiLorenzo contributed to this report from New York.