'Fines' levied on excess births arouse suspicion

(Ecns.cn) -- For decades, China's national family planning policy has imposed heavy fines on couples who break the rules and have too many children, but, according to China Economic Weekly, how that money is used has long been a mystery.

Rough estimates place the amount of collected "social fostering fees" as high as 20 billion yuan (US$3.17 billion) a year, yet the government has never revealed where the money goes.

The National Population and Family Planning Commission responded by saying that social fostering fees are not fines, but compensation, since an extra child uses additional public resources, and that all of the money goes to the public coffers.

Abuse of standards?

Recent reports of the birth of the second son of Tian Liang, a Chinese Olympic diving champion, have sparked widespread curiosity over whether he will have to pay a fine for violating the one-child policy. Tian's wife had their son in Hong Kong, but the Shaanxi Provincial Government does not consider children born outside the mainland a violation.

The same case would face different treatment in Guangdong Province, however, where second children born outside the mainland are still registered as "additional," a clear example of how much the implementation of the policy varies from region to region.

In February of this year, Yang Zhizhu, a former university professor who was fired for having more than one child, discovered that his bank account had been frozen. Two months later, according to China Economic Weekly, all of his savings were removed.

Yang said he had been fined 240,600 yuan (US$38,111) for having an "unlawful" second child, an amount nine times as high as the per capita disposable income of urban residents in China. And although he was told that his younger daughter could legally obtain her registered residency, or hukou, Yang has refused to apply because of his outrage over what he calls an act of revenge for publicly criticizing the one-child policy.

According to the current population and family planning law, social fostering fees are set individually by each province and municipality. In Beijing, the standard is between three to ten times the per capita disposable incomes of either urban or rural residents, which means that Yang was almost fined at the maximum level.

Yang complained that flexibility of the standards for social fostering fees is a common phenomenon across the nation, and that people with connections in their local family planning departments can even bargain for reduced fines.

According to an unnamed official at the family planning department in Xinxiang of Henan Province, manipulation of the standards is quite common, and many parents of second children only pay 10,000 yuan or less for excess births.

Resistance

In China, there are about 13 million people who do not have residence registrations. Most of them are second children, and many of their parents have not paid social fostering fees for them.

Statistics from southwest China's Yunnan Province reveal that there were a total 335,600 second children born between 2002 and 2007, but the parents of only 266,600 of them paid the fines.

During that five year period, the provincial government raised 168 million yuan (US$26.6 million) in social fostering fees, but the amount to be collected should have been around 562 million yuan (US$89 million).

The same situation exists in many places across the country: people avoid paying because they do not have the money, or because they believe there is no reason to pay.

According to China Economic Weekly, some local governments have rolled out stricter measures to collect the fees, but are still confronted with resistance from many parents.

Criticism

For years, population experts have questioned the legal basis of the one-child policy, arguing that it is no longer in line with the country's population situation, especially in big cities where birthrates are very low.

The problem of an aging society is already before us, which presents China with enormous challenges related to economic structure and growth, healthcare and social security. This will not only affect the nation's sustainable development but also become a bottleneck for China's competitiveness.

In 2011, two-thirds of China's seniors aged above 60 were living with illness and 33 million were partially disabled or totally disabled, according to a survey conducted by the China Research Center on Aging.

Under such circumstances, many population experts say that easing the strict family planning policy would help solve these problems.

China began implementing the family planning policy in the 1980s, when the first fines were levied for delivering "unlawful" children. In 1994 the fines were renamed "unlawful delivering fees"; they became "social fostering fees" in 2000.