A GERMAN magazine claims to have fresh evidence that abandoned girls are being left to die in China's state orphanages.
An article in this week's Der Spiegel details the appalling conditions in which babies were deliberately allowed to starve to death in a 'dying room' in Harbin, Heilongjiang province.
Earlier this year a television documentary, Secret Asia - The Dying Rooms, produced by Britain's Channel Four, provoked widespread revulsion when it was aired in Britain and other countries. In response, a charity was set up and several countries considered boycotting the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing.
In June, Beijing produced its own video in which it claimed the documentary was 'a mean-spirited and deceitful fabrication' and denied the existence of the dying rooms.
However, the German magazine said it had evidence of a 'Children's Gulag' in Harbin, where this year at least 36 out of 50 children were officially recorded as dying of hunger and thirst.
'In a grim room as big as a dance hall, deformed and starving babies and small children lie in beds, really metal cages. Some lie in their own urine, naked or in filthy jackets.