Over 20 provinces have renewed regulations on social maintenance fees imposed on parents who violate the relaxed national family planning policy issued January 1, with some provinces raising the previous standard fine on parents who have three or more children.
Standard fines in several provinces are linked with parents' income and occupations, the China News Service reported on Thursday.
But the 21 provinces all have different standards for social maintenance fees, and some provinces such as Central China's Hubei and Henan provinces, Southwest China's Sichuan Province and East China's Shandong Province call for fines that are triple the "base standard," which is defined as a family's per capita disposable income.
South China's Guangdong Province will levy fines that are three to six times the base standard.
A draft regulation amendment on social maintenance fees issued by the Beijing municipal government on Sunday stipulated that parents who have three or more children will be fined, while fines for parents with two children will be abolished.
The draft, published on the official website of the Legal Affairs Office of Beijing Municipality, abolishes the previous rule that parents ineligible to have a second child either in marriage or out of wedlock should be fined three to 10 times their per capita disposable income.
In some provinces, those who violate family planning regulations will not only need to pay social maintenance fees, but also will be punished in other ways, with especially heavy consequences for public sector employees. For instance, in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, public workers who violate the family planning regulation will be dismissed from their posts or punished by other means, while private sector workers are also subject to discipline by their employers.
The updates to the standard fines come after China's top legislature decided in December to relax family planning policies in place since 1982 that required parents who had two children to pay additional social maintenance fees.
China began allowing all couples to have two children on January 1, ending the decades-long one-child policy against the backdrop of a shrinking labor force and an aging society.
