One was seen pacing up and down saying: “I don’t want to lie down. It will just slow down the baby.”

Without giving a detailed explanation, the Government had announced that the 1.3 billionth inhabitant of China would be born in the Beijing Hospital of Gynaecology early yesterday.

Television cameras had begun staking out the maternity ward on Wednesday and party secretaries readied themselves for congratulatory speeches.

But the race was over before it really got started. At two minutes past midnight yesterday, Lan Hui, a 31-year-old employee of Shell in China, gave birth to a boy weighing 8lb (3.6kg). Zhang Tong, the father, said: “I am the happiest guy in the world and my boy will be blessed all his life.”

Within hours, his son’s picture appeared on front pages across the nation and the Government claimed that China would have an extra 300 million people were it not for the state’s one-child-per-family policy, which has been in place for the past two decades.

The newborn Zhang Yichi, whose given name translates as Speed, is destined to become a symbol of population control. He will learn what that means when he starts going to school, along with China’s other 240 million pupils, who are taught by 12 million teachers.

In his class, he will find that boys outnumber girls by almost 30 per cent: because of the cultural bias towards male heirs, girls in China are regularly aborted, abandoned or killed by parents desperate for their only child to be a boy.

When Yichi leaves school he will discover that, as a result, there are not enough brides to go round. For every 100 girls there are on average 120 boys, with some regions registering more than 130 boys.

An official from the State Family Planning Commission said: “We had hoped that the 1.3 billionth child would be a girl.” Apparently it had not occurred to them to stage manage things in the same way that they had determined that the 1.3 billionth Chinese citizen would be born in one of the capital’s best hospitals. In 1995, the 1.2 billionth Chinese baby was born on the same ward .

The fateful day when China’s population reached 1.3 billion was determined by the National Bureau of Statistics, based on the country’s current birth rate.

More than 16 million babies have been born in China every year since 2000, according to official statistics, and the country’s population is expected to increase by about 10 million annually, hitting a peak of 1.46 billion in the mid-2030s.

The rate of growth highlights the need to continue the controversial family-planning policy, which, in recent years, has become less coercive. “Experts say that, without government intervention, China’s population would today top 1.5 billion,” the English-language China Daily said in an editorial. “This has implications not only for China but the world as a whole.”

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