People prefer boys to girls, why abandon baby girls?

Although the saying "tiger poison doesn't eat children" is widely circulated in Chinese folk proverbs, in fact, in our long history, there has been a bad habit of "drowning babies" for a long time. Throughout history, this bad habit was most prevalent in the Qing Dynasty. There are three main reasons: ① poverty, ② preference for sons over daughters, ③ sudden increase in population due to lack of contraceptive measures < P > During the prosperous period of Kanggan, the social stability, economic prosperity and sudden increase in population far exceeded the load of the ecosystem, but the Qing Dynasty went downhill after the prosperous period of Kanggan. In the early years of Guangxu, the Qing empire did not emerge from the aftermath of the two opium wars. Although the Qing government repeatedly banned smoking, a large number of farmers still used large areas of land to grow poppies, which made the already tight grain reserves worse. At this time, the drought spread rapidly in the inland provinces of China, especially in Shanxi. Many people had to live on bark and grass roots, and their living conditions were extremely bad. The children born were unable to feed, so they could only drown, and the wind of drowning infants was rampant for a time.