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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]