Other parents are making the same calculation. For two decades China has vigorously enforced its one-child policy by slapping harsh penalties on violators. But China’s fast-paced economic growth of the 1990s left many families, especially in the booming coastal cities, flush with cash–enough, in fact, to pay fines that would have been well beyond their reach a few years ago. In Shanghai’s affluent circles, it is not uncommon to hear of couples who have given birth to a second, or even a third, child and paid the fines as an afterthought. China’s wealthy citizens are realizing that money, in addition to supplying material comforts, is giving them a way to assert their independence–including the ability to break one of Beijing’s cardinal rules.
Last September authorities unveiled a new family-planning law that gives local governments more authority in how they deal with these “renegade parents.” Fines–now called “social-compensation fees”–have been increased twentyfold in the past decade in some coastal cities. “In a booming economy, people are demanding more private rights,” grumbles Gu Baochang, an official at the China Family Planning Association. “But that doesn’t mean people can do anything they want.”
Tell that to China’s new middle class. As workers have moved into higher-paying private-sector jobs, they have become more affluent and mobile, making it harder for authorities to keep tabs on them. And years of government propaganda, constantly telling people one child is enough, hasn’t seemed to have left much of an impression on people with means. Besides simply paying the fines, rich couples have found other ways to elude Beijing’s population controls. Some expectant mothers travel abroad to have their babies. The newborn is then granted a foreign passport, which exempts the parents from the one-child policy. Others say their fresh-earned cash has allowed them to buy the guanxi–or connections–with local officials to register a second baby under a different name. Says Wong Peihua, a mother of a 1-year-old who plans to have a second child, “I’m not ruling anything out.”
These parents question Beijing’s standard line that one child can make a family complete. “An only child is lonely. Two is more fun,” says one Shanghai father, who plans to have a second child. Some parents want more kids because they see so many spoiled only children, or “little emperors.” Others are simply trying for a boy after first having a daughter.
The central government’s new population edict will let local officials set their own penalties for violating the one-child policy, and experts predict they will vary widely. While fines for a second child in Shanghai are a flat $12,000, Guangdong province officials want to calibrate penalties to a family’s earnings, with fees at three to six times a family’s annual income. Last September, a couple in Jiangsu province paid $51,000 for a third child under the new local regulations. But some experts worry that so many different local solutions will only further muddle the message of a policy chock full of exceptions. For example, in an effort to adjust the imbalance between urban and rural birthrates, Beijing has already begun to allow urban couples to have two children if both parents are only children themselves. “There is no way the government could publicly announce [another] change in policy because they don’t want everyone having more than one child,” says one expert.
What works in Beijing’s favor is the fact that for the average Chinese family, the cost of raising two children remains prohibitively expensive. Hu Toque, the father of a 2-year-old daughter and a 9-month-old son, has his regrets. He says he has a “burden” that most of his friends don’t have, adding, “They think I’m weird. Or stupid.” If the ranks of China’s middle class continue to expand, though, so in all likelihood will the size of their families.
