(Chinese director Feng Xiaogang's new year's film 'Cell Phone' has sired a loyalty crisis among couples in China.)

Paternity tests are becoming increasingly common in China along with casual sex as suspicious husbands check on their wives' fidelity, a news agency says.

Applications for the DNA test, which in the West can cost hundreds of dollars, had risen 20 percent a year in one Beijing hospital, the state-run China News Service said.

It said there had already been 200 tests at the hospital by mid-September and there would have been many more if the cost were not so high.

"According to the investigation, most men do the paternity test just to find out whether their wives are loyal," it said.

The agency quoted a doctor as saying 80 percent of tests proved that the husbands were indeed fathers of their children.

Attitudes towards sex relaxed after China began Western-style market reforms in 1978.

The doctor also said the tests were the by-product of a more open society.

"With the increase in one-night stands, disloyalty within a marriage, relationships become vulnerable and people lose confidence of the loyalty of marriage," the doctor was quoted as saying.

(China Daily September 30, 2004)