Wealthy Chinese pay to circumvent one-child policy
BEIJING – A Chinese couple has paid a record fine of 1.3 million yuan ($212,000 Cdn) to avoid the country’s onechild policy and have a second baby.
The unnamed couple from the southern city of Rui’an had a daughter in February after having a son in 1995. The authorities in the city said they had levied the enormous sum after deciding the couple could afford it.
“They found the couple were rich in assets, and were either running or were shareholders in several businesses,” reported the City Express newspaper. “The figure stunned the couple, but they paid the fine,” it added.
China has had a one-child policy since the end of the 1970s, enforced by the country’s network of neighbourhood committees and some 300,000 family planning officials. It has boasted in the past that the policy has been directly responsible for reducing its population by as many as 300 million to 400 million people, a claim that has been disputed by some academics.
The policy has never been evenly enforced. There are exemptions for ethnic minorities, for families where both parents were single children themselves and for couples in the countryside whose first child is a girl.
In addition, a growing number of rich families now choose simply to pay the fine, which is a multiple of between three and 10 times the average aftertax income of the city where they live.
Aspirational advertisements in Beijing, including propaganda posters from the local government, often now show families with two children, rather than one. In Wenzhou, roughly half of all families now have two children, according to the local government. In recent years, 10 other families have paid fees of more than one million yuan.
In 2000, these fines were renamed as “social fostering fees” and are supposed to represent the added cost to society of the extra children.
The fees have become a significant, and rapidly growing, source of revenue for the government. The website of the People’s Daily, the official party mouthpiece, estimated in 2010 that they were as high as 20 billion yuan ($3.26 billion) a year.
The National Population and Family Planning Commission has said the social fostering fees are not fines and that all the money goes to the public coffers.
“In most cases, it is up to the family planning bureau to decide on the size of the fine,” said Chen Fugui, a 48-yearold tea trader from Quanzhou who has paid fines to have four daughters and one son.
Families that refuse to pay the fines will not obtain any registration documents for their children, leaving them unable to get a proper job or medical care. In some cases, officials have confiscated babies.