This Day, That Year

Item from March 11, 1988, in China Daily: Zheng Guizhen, 39, from Gansu province, watches her artificially conceived baby daughter sleep soundly after a cesarean section yesterday morning in a Beijing hospital. Zheng has named the first test-tube baby born on the Chinese mainland Zheng Mengzhu, meaning a "pearl in the making".

The baby weighed 3.9 kg and was 52 cm long ... A C-section guaranteed the safety of mother and child. Different opinions on whether a country with a population of 1 billion needed to do research into test-tube births kept China from the work until six years after the world's first test-tube baby was born ... China has 2.55 million women of childbearing age who are sterile.

Many Chinese husbands with reproductive disorders turn to sperms banks, which are increasingly available across the country.