More than 80 hospitals are grappling with the technology, compared to just 20 last year, according to the Beijing Youth Daily.

China has also set up some research centers in Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei Province, Beijing and other cities.

At hospitals on the provincial level the success rate of the technology is 25 percent, while the international standard is 30 percent.

Already 4,000 women have given birth with the help of the technology in China.

About 10 percent of China’s 230 million couples of childbearing age have problems with fertility, according to Professor Ruan Xiangyan from the Beijing Hospital for Gynecology and Obstetrics.

Test-tube baby technology involves putting sperm and eggs together in a test-tube in the hope they will develop into an embryo.

Since the technique was first adopted in Britain in 1978, the technology has seen three stages of development.

The first generation technology is used in cases where the woman cannot get pregnant because of problems with the Fallopian tube. China’s first test-tube baby was born in 1988 in Beijing after this technique was used.

The second generation technology involves injecting single sperms into eggs in cases when the sperm is not strong enough to carry out the fertilizing process itself.

This helps many men who cannot father children naturally because of a low and small quality of sperm. This process does carry risks of harming babies.

The third generation of the technology is to screen the embryos to see which ones are deformed or have hereditary diseases. In mid-November, a child was born at Ruan’s hospital in Beijing thanks to the second generation technology. It is the first time this particular technology has been used in Beijing.

In April last year, China’s first third generation test-tube baby was born in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.

(China Daily 01/02/2001)