Ten years after the transmission of The Dying Rooms, we were holding a fund-raising dinner for COCOA (Care Of China’s Orphaned and Abandoned), the charity that was started as a result of the film. At that dinner I was talking to Dorothy Byrne, Head of Current Affairs at Channel 4, and she suggested that we go back to China and see how things had changed. Two years later, Channel 4 broadcast the result of that investigation, China’s Stolen Children.

In the dozen years between the two films, China has changed dramatically. The Dying Rooms was about an unforeseen side-effect of the One Child Policy when it collided with the age-old preference for boys: girls were being abandoned in their thousands at the gates of China’s state orphanages, and under- resourced institutes were choosing to allow them to die of neglect to keep numbers down – ‘a policy of fatal neglect’ was the description Human Rights Watch used.

Girls are of course worth less, around half the price of a male child the same age, but market economics have dictated that it’s cheaper to buy a baby girl and bring her up to maturity and then marry her to your son

In 2007, we found that the situation has moved on. In the interim, the profit motive has arrived in China with a vengeance, and as Capitalism and Communism dance around each other, we found that there is now not only a price on the heads of China’s ‘little princes’, but also – to our surprise – on the heads of female babies.

Girls are of course worth less, around half the price of a male child the same age, but market economics have dictated that it’s cheaper to buy a baby girl and bring her up to maturity and then marry her to your son, than to risk that either he may never find a wife (an increasingly likely outcome, with 40 million more boys than girls growing up in China as a result of sex-selective abortion) or that you will have to buy a wife at a bride auction, for ten or twenty times the price you need to spend today on a girl baby.