Some primary schools in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, are requiring parents to submit family planning certificates, including proof of contraceptive ring implementation in the mothers' wombs or tube ligation, in order for their children to enroll in the first grade.
A teacher from Jiahe Primary School in Baiyun district in Guangzhou on Thursday confirmed with a Global Times reporter posing as a parent that applicants need to submit the family planning certificate "by regulation." He said that the school has been asking for the certificate for years.
A family planning certificate was listed as one of the seven admission requirements on the website of Huangbian Primary School in Baiyun district. A teacher from the school told China National Radio (CNR) that the school wants to check whether the parents had followed the family planning policy.
This was not the first time that this unique admission requirement in Guangzhou came under spotlight.
A month after local media reported the requirement in July 2014, authorities in Guangdong Province issued an urgent notice, which said that schools requiring the certificate violated China's Compulsory Education Law and the practice should be banned.
An official from a local education commission in Guangzhou told CNR on Wednesday that schools should accept students without the certificate, adding that whether a student can receive compulsory education is irrelevant with how well his or her parents have followed the family planning policy.
"Requiring the certificate is just another way adopted by local government to control its population, as many non-Guangzhou applicants have to travel to their hometowns to apply for lots of documents that are difficult to get, " Huang Wenzheng, a former Harvard University assistant professor, told the Global Times.
Guangzhou's migrant population reached 8.5 million as of 2013, but the number of Guangzhou residents was 8.4 million.
