WASHINGTON (BP)--China has no plans to eliminate its infamous one-child, population-control policy, a top official of the communist regime said March 5.

"We will adhere to the current policy of family planning, keep the birthrate low, improve the health of newborns and adopt a full range of measures to address the gender imbalance in babies," Premier Wen Jiabao said at the opening of China's annual parliament meeting, according to the Agence France-Presse news service.

Wen's assurance that the nearly three-decade-old program would continue repudiated Feb. 28 remarks from Zhao Baige, vice minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

The one-child policy "has become a big issue among decision makers," she told reporters, according to The Times of London. "We want incrementally to have this change. I cannot answer at what time or how."

The rebuttal of Zhao's assertion was no surprise to Steve Mosher, an expert on China's coercive population control policy.

"These officials are very good at speaking out of both sides of their mouths," Mosher told Baptist Press. " tried to put the best face possible on the policy. When the foreign press read too much into it, they backed off."

Beijing instituted its one-child policy in the late 1970s in an effort to slow the birth rate of the world's most populous country. Penalties for violations of the policy have included fines, arrests and the destruction of homes, as well as forced abortion and sterilization. Infanticide, especially of females, also has been reported. Beijing now forbids physical coercion for abortion or sterilization.

The population-control policy appears to have helped produce a dramatic gender imbalance. Because of a preference for sons by Chinese couples, many have utilized ultrasound technology to choose sex-selection abortions in recent years. China had 120 males born for every 100 females in 2005, the United Nations Population Fund reported in October. The ratio was as high as 130 to 100 in some provinces, according to the report. The normal ratio is about 105 to 100.

Since 1986, the program generally has limited couples in urban areas to one child and those in rural areas to two, if the first is a girl, Mosher told BP. The government revised the policy in 2002 to permit a husband and wife who are both only children to have two offspring, he said.

An increase in the government's limit to two children would not solve the problem, said Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. Mosher documented the abuses against women under the one-child policy while living as a social scientist in rural China in 1979-980.

It "would not end the abuses," he said. "The problem with China's policy is not that it is a one-child policy or a two-child policy.... The problem is that the government is dictating to couples how many children they will have. That choice should be between a husband and a wife and God, not a husband and a wife and government bureaucrats."

China is seeking to "minimize the human rights abuses" of its government, which remains a dictatorship, Mosher said. The communist leaders will do what they want, "regardless of what the people think," he said. "If the people got to vote on this policy, it would have been abandoned 25 years ago."

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese are resisting the repressive policy, Cybercast News Service (CNS) reported earlier this year. In Hubei, one of China's 22 provinces, 93,000 people broke the one-child rule in 2007, the province's family planning commission reported, according to CNS.

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