China’s population crisis needs more help than just scrapping fines for having too many children
- China announced at the end of May families could now have up to three children in response to its shrinking population
- And officials announced last week that families in China no longer have to worry about being fined or being hit with other consequences for having additional children
Last week’s decision to abolish China’s 40-year-old policy of imposing hefty fines on so-called surplus births puts the final nail in the coffin of the country’s notorious family planning regime.
The fines started in the early 1980s and instilled fear throughout society to discourage births. They could immediately bankrupt a family.
In some provinces, the maximum fine was set at 10 years of the local average income for both the father and the mother, or a couple had to pay a one-off cash payment equivalent to 20 years of income.
In rural China, it was not uncommon for local family planning officials, or the country’s birth police, to take all the property they could from a couple for violating the rules.
The implementation in some places was so harsh that China has created a sizeable group of family planning refugees – those who left their hometowns to avoid forced abortion or financial punishment.
The rationale behind the fine, dished out because a baby would consume a certain amount of social and state resources that it was not entitled to, was ridiculed at a time when the country was in apparent need of more births.
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China’s family planning police across the country, however, were still fining couples up until the last moment in a telltale sign of how bureaucratic inertia and vested interests hijack national needs.
Beijing has also made it clear that other punishments concerning family planning policy violations, from discrimination in school enrolment to employment within the state sector, will be abolished.
China’s efforts to boost births should not stop here. Removing punishments is easy, but the real costly and challenging part is to introduce incentives
But at the same time, China’s efforts to boost births should not stop here. Removing punishments is easy, but the real costly and challenging part is to introduce incentives.
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have tried for years, if not decades, but the results have not been satisfactory.
It will be interesting to see what Beijing will do next to encourage the country’s couples – most of them who grew up as an only child – to have more children.
