Female infanticide in China

China has a history of female infanticide which spans 2,000 years. When Christian missionaries arrived in China in the late sixteenth century, they witnessed newborns being thrown into rivers or onto rubbish piles.^[1][2] In the seventeenth century Matteo Ricci documented that the practice occurred in several of China's provinces and said that the primary reason for the practice was poverty.^[2] The practice continued into the 19th century and declined precipitously during the Communist era,^[3] but has reemerged as an issue since the introduction of the one-child policy in the early 1980s.^[4] The 2020 census showed a male-to-female ratio of 105.07 to 100 for mainland China, a record low since the People's Republic of China began conducting censuses.^[5] Every year in China and India alone, there are close to two million instances of some form of female infanticide.^[6]