Hong Kong at centre of banned China gender test

HONG KONG: Shady middle-men are openly advertising on Chinese social media to smuggle blood samples of pregnant women to Hong Kong to skirt the mainland’s ban on gender testing, an investigation has found.

The business thrives on a well-organised underground network that serves the huge demand for illicit sex-selective abortion in mainland China – driven by limits on family size and an entrenched cultural preference for sons.

Chinese authorities vowed to crack down on the trade in 2015.

But dozens of blood smuggling agents are openly advertising services on the Twitter-like platform Weibo and on websites, despite China’s proven ability to scrub digital content.

Gender testing -- except on medical grounds -- is outlawed in China, where sex-selective abortions have helped create a surplus of about 31.6 million men, with some 115 boys born for every 100 girls last year.

Gender testing is legal in Hong Kong, with some clinics apparently turning a blind eye to the origins of the smuggled samples.

Three agents contacted by an AFP reporter posing as a customer offered to arrange in-person appointments with medical testing labs or transport blood samples to Hong Kong for around US$580 (RM2,430), promising results starting from six weeks into pregnancy.

Some mainlanders take the legal option of travelling directly to Hong Kong for gender testing.

“I have three daughters already. To be honest I want a son,” a 39-yearold man surnamed Wang said outside a lab in Kowloon where his wife was getting her blood tested.

He added that he and his wife would terminate the pregnancy in China if it turned out be a girl.

It is illegal to mail or transport blood samples out of China without a permit, but Hong Kong only outlaws importing blood samples if a person has reason to suspect that it contains an infectious agent.