John Kennedy of the University of Kansas and Shi Yaojiang of Shaanxi Normal University have released a study claiming that the births of many of the girls may, in fact, simply not have been registered.

“People think 30 million girls are missing from the population. That's the population of California, and they think they're just gone,” said Kennedy, an associate professor of political science, according to the university website.

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“Most people are using a demographic explanation to say that abortion or infanticide are the reasons they don't show up in the census and that they don't exist. But we find there is a political explanation.”

Local officials, they argue, were complicit in the concealment to retain support from villagers, and maintain social stability.

“There is no coordination between cadres saying 'we're all in agreement,'” Kennedy said. “Actually it's just very local. The people who are implementing these policies work for the government in a sense. They are officials, but they are also villagers, and they have to live in the village where they are implementing policies.”

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China finally abandoned the one-child policy this year after more than three decades, allowing everyone to have two children. But there is still widespread concern about the lagged effects of a seriously skewed gender ratio on society, with young males said to vastly outnumber women. These findings could also allay some of these concerns.

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“If 30 million women are truly missing, then there's going to be more males than females of marriageable age as they start looking for wives,” Kennedy said. “There is nothing more socially unstable than a bunch of testosterone with nowhere to go.”

The pair apparently stumbled on their theory when interviewing a villager in China’s northern Shaanxi province in 1996. The man had two daughters and a son and referred to the younger daughter as “the nonexistent one.”

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Since the mid-1980s, villagers could legally have a second child if the firstborn was a girl.

After more interviews showed the practice to be widespread, the researchers then compared the number of the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010.

They discovered 4 million additional people, and of those there were approximately 1 million more women than men.

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“If we go over a course of 25 years, it's possible there are about 25 million women in the statistics that weren't there at birth,” Kennedy said.

The 2010 Chinese census found the sex ratio at birth was 118 males for every 100 females. Globally the average is about 105 males for every 100 females.

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Kennedy said the findings also question the idea that Chinese villagers were willing to kill their daughters on a massive scale. But even if the report might be seen as positive for China, Kennedy said it was until recently too politically sensitive to publish, especially for his Chinese co-researcher.

The findings are published this month in the journal China Quarterly.