Message not getting through on more babies

Facing a future demographic crisis and ageing society, China’s leaders are desperately seeking to persuade couples to have more children.

But bureaucrats don’t seem to have got the message, fining a couple in a recent case for having a third child.

The move has sparked public outrage as people vent their anger at population control officials who are hungry for revenue and have long persecuted couples for violating the now-scrapped ‘‘one-child policy.’’

‘‘The country is doing all it can to encourage childbirth but the local governments need money, so we end with this sort of madness,’’ a commentator who writes under the name Lianpeng said on China’s Weibo microblogging service.

‘‘The low birthrate has everyone on edge, yet the local governments care only about collecting fees,’’ journalist Jin Wei wrote on Weibo. ‘‘I don’t know of any other nation that pulls its people in different directions like this.’’

The Wangs, the couple at the centre of the controversy, were ordered by authorities in Shandong province to pay a fine known as a ‘‘social maintenance fee’’ of 64,626 yuan (NZ$14,000) after the birth of their third child in January 2017. After various deadlines came and went, the family’s savings of 22,957 yuan were frozen last month, with the balance still due. –