RICH BEIJINGERS who opt to pay a fine in order to have more than one child in defiance of the one-child policy will face higher charges under new rules, city authorities say.
There is much dissatisfaction among lower earners that the wealthy can simply pay the fine to have another child and Deng Xingzhou, director of Beijing’s family planning commission, said the new rules were aimed at addressing these concerns.
Under the one-child policy, imposed in 1979 to curtail population growth, most families are limited to one child.
At present, couples who have more than one child in Beijing have to pay a social fostering or maintenance fee between three and eight times their annual disposable income. The new rules will increase the amount that high-earning couples have to pay.
Family-planning policy had to be tightened in the capital because Beijing’s population was growing so strongly, he said. The numbers of migrant workers arriving in the city was also pushing the population higher.
Government forecasters expect China’s population to peak at about 1.5 billion in 2032. Beijing’s population of 17 million is growing by about 500,000 a year.
An online survey by the Tencent website showed that nearly 70 per cent of people are angry that celebrities and rich people are having more children.
Many see it as emblematic of the rich-poor divide in China.
There are other measures in place to stop rich people spending their way towards having more children, such as ruling them out of winning national awards, denying them free education and health benefits, or even naming and shaming them in the media.
While the family planning experts are worrying about Beijing becoming more populous, the temporary annual migration from the city for the lunar new year has begun.
In what is humanity’s biggest mass migration, millions of Chinese migrants began to head for their homes in the countryside for Chinese new year later this month. Train tickets are in short supply as usual, and scalpers are selling tickets at vastly-inflated prices in the stations.
Chinese new year, or spring festival holiday begins on January 26th and is the biggest of two “golden week” holidays, giving migrant workers their only chance of the year of returning to their home provinces with gifts for the family. Last year bad weather trapped hundreds of thousands of migrants in the cities of the south.