Estimates show that from this year onward, more than 10 percent of Chinese men of marriageable age will remain unmarried because they won't be able to find suitable women for marriage. Media reports say that leftover men are concentrated in the countryside where young women tend to migrate to towns and cities to work or to get married.

The gender imbalance at birth can be attributed to couples' preference for boys as well as the family planning policy. Over the past three decades, China has focused on controlling the population by maintaining a low fertility rate and, in the process, ignored the imbalance in the gender ratio and the population's age structure.

Although the traditional preference for boys is mainly to blame for the gender imbalance, the one-child policy for most Chinese couples has also had a role to play in creating the situation that the country finds itself in today. Besides, couples have grossly misused the ultrasound technology to identify and abort female fetuses.

Having realized the problems, we need to take measures to solve them. For example, the family planning policy needs further adjustment. Eligible couples who can afford to have two children should be encouraged to do so by being educated about its advantages for their children as well as the sustainable development of the country.

Based on the trials of allowing couples to have a second child in four cities - Enshi in Hubei province, Yicheng in Shanxi province, Chengde in Hebei province and Jiuquan in Gansu province - Yi Fuxian, an expert in demographics, found that for every girl below four years of age, there were 1.12 boys in the pilot cities. This contrasts with the national average of 1.19 boys for every girl.

Allowing couples to have a second child can restore the gender ratio to a certain extent. But we should be careful with the encouragement policy, for simply allowing people to have more children cannot solve the gender imbalance problem.

The family planning policy reform - allowing couples one of whom is an only child to have two children - can correct the skewed gender ratio at birth, but only to a limited degree. It cannot necessarily restore the gender ratio at birth to normal.

We have to learn from successful practices of other countries, too, and enact laws to ban identifying the gender of fetuses and strictly implement them to stop female feticide.

The health and family planning authorities have the obligation to set up a comprehensive mechanism and to strictly implement the laws and regulations. A new work assessment system, aimed at promoting gender equality and optimizing the demographic dividends, should be established to prompt officials to focus on a balanced and sustainable population development.

The author is a professor at the Population Research Institute of Peking University.

(China Daily 12/03/2013 page9)