I HOPE it will be a girl," said heavily pregnant Judy Wang, with a hand on her protruding stomach.

　　From the first day she found out she was pregnant, Wang has longed to bear a daughter.

　　However, going back 100 years, people would have thought her mad to want a daughter instead of a son.

　　The old situation has changed a lot in recent years in big cities like Shanghai. The "boy uppermost" ideology, which dominated the country for several thousand years, is becoming less and less popular with young urbanites.

　　"In my company, the number of those who want to bear a daughter is about equal to those who prefer a boy," Wang said.

　　She believes that daughters are more filial to their parents while sons easily forget their aged mother and father once they get married.

　　For example, Wang calls her mum every night to have a family chat while her brother very rarely has any contact and won't visit his parents except during major festivals.

　　Another factor is that girls' relatively docile nature causes much less trouble in the family than boys.

　　Although these virtues have always existed in girls, it is only in recent times that the Chinese people have started to shake off the old prejudice against baby girls.

　　"The conceptual change has something to do with less interference from society towards families," said Jin Yan, an expert on family issues.

　　An old saying has it that: "One is satisfied with his whole life so long as he gets a son". A family without a son used to be regarded as flawed and incomplete and the family would face a lot of discrimination and sneers from neighbours.

　　Today, with more and more people coming to realize that family life is one's own private affair and something in which others should not interfere, people are no longer keen on gossiping about the family affairs of their neighbours and this has led to a gradual lessening of the pressure to have sons.

　　'Virtuous' fertility

　　The traditional concept of female fertility was "early, many and male", meaning marry early, bear many children and make sure they are sons.

　　The great many wars in ancient times led every dynasty to encourage people to raise more children. Agricultural work needed large numbers of males in the rural work force. And the Confucian doctrine that "dereliction of filial duty comes in different forms, but having no offspring is the worst" was another subtle but strong influence on people's attitudes to fertility ideology.

　　In ancient times, mothers who failed to bear a son could be driven from her home despite that fact (then unknown) that it was the father who determined the sex of his child.

　　It was accepted in ancient times that a husband could have concubines if his wife failed to bear a son. And a wife was regarded as "virtuous" if she helped her husband find a concubine after she had failed to bear a son.

　　A proverb said that "A mother becomes noble for her baby son." So, daughters obviously did not bring such honour to their mothers.

　　On top of this, the traditional belief was that a couple needed to have a son to look after them when they got old, because a daughter would leave them to join her husband's family.

　　Another ancient saying, still widely accepted in the countryside, compared raising daughters to watering another family's fields.

　　Also in the old days, the right of daughters to visit their own parents was restricted.

　　Parents, seeing their daughter coming back home, would firstly asked her whether she had been driven out by her husband as daughters were not supposed to go back home except on some special festivals or similar occasions.

　　This is no longer the situation. Nowadays, sons mostly live apart from their parents after marriage.

　　Daughters in today's China are now shouldering at least as much responsibility for caring for their parents - if not more - as their brothers.

　　Rural stronghold

　　The various other values associated with bearing sons - such as carrying on the family name, adding to labour force in the fields and taking care of aged parents, are peeling off layer by layer.

　　"Although the basics for a marriage and family life doesn't change, the whole social background is different now," said Zhang Henian, a demographer at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

　　"The discrimination against baby girls is getting very thin among highly educated urban youth."

　　But in sharp contrast to this trend are rural areas, where the old ideology of only valuing male children is still firmly entrenched.

　　The fixation in the countryside on having a son is so intense that some mothers abort female fetuses and kill or abandon baby girls so as to try again for a son. This practice has led to a lopsided ratio of boys to girls and experts say this could one day leave tens of millions of men without wives.

　　"There's a long way to go before the old 'boy uppermost' ideology dies out in this country but the change in the big cities gives us great confidence to believe it will in the future," Zhang said.