What price a Chinese
emperor? By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - The walls of Chinese houses in
even the tiniest villages in this
billion-plus-population country invariably display
slogans extolling the wisdom of "fewer births,
better quality of the nation". But a new
counter-wisdom is on the rise in urban China,
challenging the government's decades-old efforts
to control population growth.
Arguing that
single children grow to become spoiled brats with
no respect for parents or duty, China's newly rich
are opting to have
more
than the decreed one child. Family-planning
officials warn that the country might face a
population crisis if more rich couples continue to
ignore the one-child policy and raise large
families that were once the norm in pre-communist
China.
Under the controversial rules
introduced in 1979, couples face fines if they
have two or more children. But as the economy
booms and living standards rise, more and more
families in the cities find they can afford to pay
for what they now perceive as the privilege of
having more children.
The currently low
birth rate may be unsustainable and the risk of
"population rebound" is very real, National
Population and Family Commission director Zhang
Weiqing suggested this week.
The number of
rich people and celebrities having more than one
child is rapidly rising, Zhang said, citing a
recent survey by his organization. Almost 10% of
these high earners now opt to have three children
because large families are traditionally
associated with wealth and happiness in China.
This baby boom, however, has sparked
public anger that money and power can bend even
the strictest rules. The government credits the
one-child policy for checking population growth in
a country that already has the world's largest
number of people - 1.3 billion.
The fines
imposed on people who violate the policy vary from
place to place, but in wealthy coastal provinces
such as Guangdong in southern China they can reach
200,000 yuan (US$25,800) per child. There have
been reports of a Guangdong family paying 780,000
yuan to have several children.
Wealthy
people "make a mockery of the national policy by
showing that it can be rendered meaningless with
money", said a commentary in the English-language
China Daily. "Without being pressured by a kind of
complementary punishment, these violators may feel
proud of a supposed superiority based on their
wealth. And it is quite possible that more will
follow their shoddy example," the paper concluded.
The trend of rich people bypassing the
one-child rule comes at a time of rising social
tensions caused by the widening wealth gap between
haves and have-nots. A recent online survey by the
China Youth Daily newspaper found that more than
60% thought it was unfair the rich could enjoy the
"money for baby" privilege.
While the rich
pay money to skirt the rules, poor pregnant women
in the countryside risk their lives and those of
their babies by seeking back-alley deliveries to
avoid the hefty fines, according to a senior
health official.
"Some women who dare not
apply for financial aid with childbirth for fear
of being punished for having more than one child
choose to have their babies delivered at home or
in low-cost, but substandard, private clinics,"
Vice Minister of Health Jiang Zuojun told a
conference.
During the past two decades,
China critics have faulted the one-child policy as
a source of coercion and forced abortions. Couples
who have unsanctioned children have been subject
to heavy fines, job losses and forced
sterilizations.
But family planners have
worked hard to overhaul the draconian image of
their coercive system, setting up pilot projects
to make the policy less harsh and disruptive.
Enforcement of the one-child rule was relaxed in
the second half of the 1990s, with some rural
families allowed a second child if the first was a
girl or handicapped.
In rural China, the
traditional preference for boys endures, not the
least for practical reasons. As the social-welfare
system currently covers only urban residents,
rural families raise more children in the hope of
support during old age.
Wealthy couples in
the cities have less pragmatic but equally
long-term considerations in choosing to pay the
fines for raising more children. They worry that
the new generation of over-indulged single
children, known as "little emperors", are growing
up self-centered and rude, with little respect for
their parents or anything else.
"I find
that I can't instill any discipline in my
daughter," said real-estate entrepreneur Cao Li,
who works full-time and lets her parents raise the
girl. "She is spoiled, selfish and demanding, but
it doesn't help to discipline her only on the
weekends. The only remedy would be to have another
child and let my daughter learn to share and take
care of someone else."
Cao Li cannot
afford time to rectify the child-raising practices
of two sets of besotted grandparents, but she
earns enough to afford another baby. "It costs a
lot to bring up two children," she agreed, "but it
is still probably less costly than having only
one, which turns out to be a disappointment in our
old age."
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