A baby has been born in China, four years after both his parents were killed in a car accident.

The boy, called Tiantian - Sweetie in Mandarin - was born in a hospital in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, “after his grandparents won a year-long court battle to use a frozen embryo”, says China Daily. A surrogate mother from Laos gave birth to the child in December, according to Chinese media reports.

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His late parents, Shen Jie and his wife Liu Xi, had been undergoing fertility treatment before their death in a road accident in East China’s Jiangsu province.

Following the crash, the parents of both Shen and Liu spent years trying to persuade the authorities to hand over frozen embroyos from the dead woman that were stored at a local hospital. They finally obtained a court order allowing them to obtain four of the embryos, before “smuggling them over the border to Laos and finding a surrogate mother”, The Times reports.

Surrogacy is illegal in China. The case was further complicated by the fact that “China does not have a legal precedent for the parents of couples inheriting their children’s embryos”, reports the South China Morning Post.

Even after the court ruling in favour of the grandparents, the hospital holding the embryos insisted it would only give them to another medical institute, “but no other Chinese clinic would take them because of legal concerns”, adds The Times.

Dr Ding Lijun, from the hospital that originally held the embryos, told China Daily that although hospital authorities were sympathetic to the families involved, they were cautious about handing embryos to individuals.

“There are thresholds for practicing every technology, and without the threshold, which we must strictly abide by, the technology runs the risk of being abused,” she said.

The grandparents finally secured the embryos after finding a hospital in Laos willing to impregnate the surrogate.

Hu Xingxian, Tianian’s maternal grandmother, said: “We named him Sweetie, because we hoped his arrival would bring sweetness to us after the bitterness.”

Their next dilemma is how to tell Tiantian about his unusual start in life. The boy’s paternal grandfather, Shen Xinnan, was quoted as saying that he only plans to tell Tiantan what happened to his parents when he is older, and that in the meantime, he will be told his parents are living overseas.

“For sure we will tell him what happened - what choice do we have?” Shen said.