POPULATION-CHINA: Paying Up for Extra ‘Little Emperors’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, May 9 2007 (IPS) - The grey walls of Chinese houses in even the tiniest villages in this billion-plus 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 the country’s population growth.

Arguing that single children grow to become spoilt 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 are warning the country might face a population crisis if more rich couples continue to ignore the strict one-child policy and raise large families that were once the norm in pre-communist China.

Under the controversial rules, introduced by communist rulers in the late 1970s, couples face fines if they have two or more children. But as the country’s 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 country’s currently low birth rate may be unsustainable and the risk of “population rebound” is very real, suggested National Population and Family Commission director Zhang Weiqing 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 organisation. Almost 10 percent of these high earners are now opting to have three children because large families are traditionally associated with wealth and happiness in China.

This baby boom among China’s new rich, however, has sparked public anger that money and power can bend even the strictest rules in the country. The government credits the one-child policy for checking the population growth in a country that already has the world’s largest population, currently at 1.3 billion.

The fines imposed on people who violate the policy vary from place to place, but in wealthy coastal provinces like Guangdong in south China it can reach 200,000 yuan (25,800 US dollars) per child. Chinese press for example, has reported the story of a Guangdong family which had paid 780,000 yuan (100,000 dollars) in order to have several children.

“They (wealthy people) make a mockery of the national policy by showing that it can be rendered meaningless with money,” noted a commentary in the English-language ‘China Daily’ in March. “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 China’s haves and have-nots. A recent online survey by the ‘China Youth Daily’ newspaper showed that more than 60 percent 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 recent conference on women and children.

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 sterilisations.

But China 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 being allowed a second child if the first was a girl or handicapped.

In rural China, the traditional preference for boys still 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 here as Little Emperors, are growing up self-centred and rude, with little respect for their parents or anything else.

“I find that I can’t instil any discipline with my daughter,” says real estate entrepreneur Cao Li, who works full-time and lets her parents raise the girl. “She is spoilt, 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 having another baby. “It costs a lot to bring up two children,” she agrees, “but it is still probably less costly than having only one, which turns out to be a disappointment in our old age.”