THE youngest of the 27 babies rescued when police swooped on a baby-trafficking gang in the central Chinese province of Henan was only ten days old, the oldest 18 months. Other infants had already perished from lack of care.

The gang matched buyers and sellers of babies across an area stretching from the booming east coast to the poor and mountainous southwest. Twenty-eight of its members were arrested.

The reports of the bust in yesterday’s Chinese newspapers were nothing unusual: the baby-trafficking business is booming in a country where the Government’s family-planning policy limits each couple to a single child.

Would-be parents are willing to pay up to £1,500 for a baby – more than the average annual income. That means that the traffickers can make hefty profits, although their costs are rising – possibly pushed up by an escalating police crackdown.

Two years ago in southwestern Yunnan province, poor families or single mothers were prepared to sell a prized baby boy for £40 or a girl for £15.

Today, a trafficker in that remote and poor rural region must pay £75 for a boy and almost £40 for a girl.

Thousands of children are bought or abducted every year in China, and sold to families that want more children, a servant or a future bride for an only son.

Last year approximately 3,500 children were rescued from their captors, according to reports in the state media.

Fuelling the trade is China’s strict birth-control policy. The “one couple, one child” family planning rule prompts some parents, particularly in the countryside, to kill baby girls and try again for a boy.

Some couples are prepared to buy a baby boy rather than risk giving birth to a girl. The business also offers a solution for families who want more than one child.

A purchased child that is registered as adopted does not trigger the large fines and other penalties imposed on families who give birth to a second baby.

The desire for boys is deeply ingrained in China, where the belief that only a son can carry on the family line and lead proper ceremonies of remembrance of ancestors dates back thousands of years. “Emphasise boys, disdain girls,” is a phrase commonly heard in conversation.

But the sale of babies is not limited to those wanting a son or a second child. One consequence of the one-child policy has been that boys now vastly outnumber girls — a result of abortions of unwanted female foetuses or of female infanticide.

That means that parents anxious to guarantee their son a bride prefer to leave nothing to chance and to buy a baby girl.

The traffickers have also found other lucrative markets among poor farmers who cannot attract a wife and want to buy a child bride, or among China’s burgeoning brothels.

Such are the profits that neither the sellers not the smugglers seem deterred by the harsh penalties. One man, identified only by his family name of Zhang, sold his newborn son for 9,000 yuan (about £700) to pay for lottery tickets. This year he was sentenced to ten years in jail and fined 5,000 yuan.

A court in Nanning, capital of the poor province of Guangxi, recently sentenced two men to death and 50 others to prison terms ranging from 18 months to life for taking part in a ring that sold babies across China.

The ring was caught after 28 baby girls, none older than three months, were found stuffed inside nylon holdalls on a long-distance bus. The babies had been drugged to keep them asleep while being smuggled. One died. The babies had been sold to the traffickers by hospital employees in a Guangxi town for between £7 and £14 each. Those children were taken in by an orphanage.

As for the latest 27 babies to be found, police are still seeking their families.

ONLY CHILDREN

• In 1979 Deng Xiaoping introduced the “one child” policy to try to limit the growth of a rapidly increasing population
  
• Couples still face fines for having second children, who have difficulty gaining permission for a place at school. When the policy was at its most strict in the 1980s, many women came under pressure to abort second pregnancies or to undergo forced sterilisation
  
• The rule has been relaxed since 2003. By some estimates it has reduced population growth by as much as 300 million
  
• One result has been an imbalance of boys to girls, with China’s ratio standing at about 118 males for every 100 females

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