The One Child Policy is a law in China which is aimed to control population growth.  This law restricts each urban parents to have one offspring only.  As a result, some parents prefer to have sons instead of daughters.  There are about 30 to 60 million "missing girls" in China because of the policy.  It was believed that female children were killed in the womb or after birth.  Recently, though, a team of researchers found that these "missing girls" may not have been killed after all. 

A Lot Of Female Children Are Unregistered At The Time Of Birth

Researchers John Kennedy of the University of Kansas and Shi Yaojiang of Shaanxi Normal University conducted a study about China's missing girls, and found that they were simply unregistered. 

"People think 30 million girls are missing from the population. That's the population of California, and they think they're just gone. Most people are using a demographic explanation to say that abortion or infanticide are the reasons they don't show up in the census and that they don't exist. But we find there is a political explanation," Kennedy said.

Kennedy and Yaojiang gathered information from villagers in rural China and used Chinese population data that spanned for a period of 25 years.  They discovered that families wait until a female child is 10 to 20 years old before they register. 

China Finally Abandon The One Child Policy

Just earlier this year, the most populated country in the world finally abandoned the One Child Policy.  However, a lot of people are still concerned about the effects of the gender ratio. 

"If 30 million women are truly missing, then there's going to be more males than females of marriageable age as they start looking for wives.  There is nothing more socially unstable than a bunch of testosterone with nowhere to go," Kennedy concluded.