China says population in check

The authorities in China say their policy of allowing many couples to have only one child is helping to keep the country's population in check.

The government says the first results from a huge nationwide census put China's population at just over one-and-a-quarter billion - much lower than many independent estimates.

But a BBC correspondent in Beijing says serious questions remain over the accuracy of the figures.

He says tens of millions of people who have had more than one child are thought to have hidden them from the census takers for fear of being punished by the authorities. The population figures also reveal there are now one hundred and seventeen boys born in China for every hundred girls.

Chinese culture traditionally places more value in having boys, and a government official, the director-general of the National Bureau of Statistics, Zhu Zhixin, said some couples were terminating pregnancies if they thought their baby was a girl.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service