Playing With the Old Blood Rules

For centuries, a healthy Chinese brood dominated by male children was considered the best form of social security. It still is in many rural areas, where boys can work the fields alongside their parents and won't transfer their earning potential to their in-laws after they marry. After the one-child policy was implemented in 1979, such sentiments led many Chinese parents to do whatever they could (including resorting to female infanticide and selective abortions) to make sure they had boys. As a result, the male-to-female birth ratio in China today is about 1.18 to 1, as opposed to the standard ratio of 1.03–1.07 to 1.

In China's modernizing cities, however, many young couples now recognize that daughters are better caregivers. "Girls are more thoughtful," says Feng Xiaotian, a sociologist at Nanjing University. Not for nothing are girls known in Chinese slang as tie sheng xiao mian ao, or "a thin padded jacket," owing to their perceived ability to provide parents convenience and warmth. As a result, an online survey conducted by the China Youth Daily in early 2007 among 2,603 people from 29 provinces and cities found that more respondents would now choose to have a daughter (29 percent) than a son (28.4 percent). This change hasn't shown up in national birth statistics yet, and the sample set wasn't entirely representative (since Chinese who participate in Web surveys tend to be more liberal and well educated than average). But the numbers represent a stunning shift all the same.

Many Chinese who are too old to bear daughters of their own, meanwhile, are finding other ways to acquire them. Adopting adult children—which was common in feudal times—is becoming prevalent, says Nanjing University's Feng. Take Wu Shaoqiu and his wife, a retired couple living in the central city of Wuhan. After their kids immigrated to the West, they decided they needed "someone to stay and talk" with them, says Wu, 75. So in 2006, he attended a meeting, cosponsored by the city government and a local newspaper, where lonely elderly couples were introduced to prospective adult "daughters." There he met Fang Fang, an executive, whom he brought home to meet his wife. "She brought flowers [and] called me 'Papa' and my wife 'Mummy'," Wu says. Fang Fang soon joined the family—as did two other women she brought along. On weekends and holidays, all three women, who are in their 40s and married, now visit the couple to cook and clean, and maybe play cards or surf the Web.

Wu and his wife never offered any financial compensation to the women; he says they're happy to act as surrogate children "for the good of society." But in other cases, the terms are more explicit. Tian Zhendong, a retired construction expert, also in Wuhan, says he and his wife felt "lonely and lost" after his son moved to Canada. So he published an ad titled "Elderly couple desperately seeking daughter," promising successful applicants would inherit the couple's apartment. To his surprise, 100 people applied, though the couple abandoned the talent search after their son objected.

Attacking things from the other side, the Chinese government has been trying to quietly liberalize the one-child regime for decades. Since the policy's introduction, rural families, who make up more than 60 percent of the population, have been allowed to have a second child if their first was a girl, and ethnic minorities have been allowed to have two or more kids. And since 2000, provincial governments have allowed only-children who married other only-children a second child as well, to prevent what's known as the "8-4-2-1" syndrome, where a single couple has to support four parents and eight grandparents. Authorities in wealthy cities such as Guangzhou and Beijing have begun publicly urging only-children couples to take advantage of this exception.

Yet finding takers is proving complicated. Many young Chinese urbanites, like yuppies everywhere, don't want more than one kid; some don't want any. A Beijing survey late last year revealed that 52 percent of adult single children didn't want to have more than one child, and more than a quarter said they preferred the DINK lifestyle: double income, no kids. That's a big problem for a city with an estimated 2 million only-child adults.