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Wondering about any possible foundations for circumstances that could lead to dying rooms and/or a shortage of girls, a glance at history was revealing. This is from the ancient Chinese "Book of Songs" and dates back to between 1000 and 700 BC:

When a son is born,
Let him sleep on the bed,
Clothe him with fine clothes,
And give him jade to play...
When a daughter is born,
Let her sleep on the ground,
Wrap her in common wrappings,
And give broken tiles to play...

According to Gendercide Watch that song may have ended up being the first notes in a funeral march for many girls over the centuries.

A tradition of infanticide and abandonment, especially of females, existed in China before the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949," ... According to Ansley J. Coale and Judith Banister ... in [China in] the late nineteenth century interviewed 40 women over age 50 who reported having borne 183 sons and 175 daughters, of whom 126 sons but only 53 daughters survived to age 10; by their account, the women had destroyed 78 of their daughters.

The beginning of the PRC brought a "decline of excess female mortality after the establishment of the People's Republic ... assisted by the action of a strong government, which tried to modify this custom as well as other traditional practices that it viewed as harmful." Unfortunately, the one-child policy brought it back with a vengeance.

Referring to the 1997 WHO report claiming more than 50 million women were estimated to be "missing" in China due to institutionalized killing and neglect of girls as a result of the one-child policy as "the biggest single holocaust in human history", the Gendercide report is telling.

There is no shortage of references documenting what is clearly a case of female infanticide in China; all one must do is Google the topic and a one reliable source after another comes up.

A typical example is this from the UK's Tiscali Reference Encyclopedia:

Female infanticide in China
In China it is important to have boys, as only boys can carry on the family name and honour the ancestors. This preference for male children has led to approximately 10,000 female infants being killed in China each year (1996), and along with the abortion of female foetuses has resulted in a sex ratio of 131 males to 100 females (1997); worldwide the ratio is 105 males to 100 females. In rural areas of China it is even higher; in one county, the ratio of live male births to female in 1995 was 316 to 100. The ‘one child per couple’ policy has increased the traditional preference for male babies and the possibility of determining the sex of a foetus by ultrasound scanners (illegal in China) has led to an increase in abortions of female foetuses. By the end of the century it is estimated that there will be an excess of 90 million unmarried men.

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