Focus on China’s family planning laws

Focus on China’s family planning laws

Ananth Krishnan

Officials accused of selling babies abroad

Each child was sold for around $3,000

BEIJING: Government officials in southern China have been accused of selling up to 80 babies taken from families who violated family planning laws in a scandal that has reignited the debate on China’s family planning policies and their enforcement.

Local government officials in Guizhou province in southwest China illegally seized babies from families who broke family planning rules and sold them to adoption agencies overseas for up to $3,000 for a child, the Southern Metropolis newspaper reported this week. Six government officials were on Saturday “punished” for their role in the scandal, said State-run news agency Xinhua.

According to China’s laws, most parents in urban areas are allowed to have only one child, while those in rural areas are allowed to have two children. Families who have more than two children face a number of fines and administrative penalties. But the laws do not allow government officials to take babies away, and only orphans or abandoned babies can be brought to State-run orphanages.

Six government officials in Zhenyuan county in Guizhou were accused of “misleading” parents into giving up their children and forging documents claiming the children were orphans, the Southern Metropolis newspaper reported. The government-run orphanage in Zhenyuan had given up 80 babies for adoption overseas since 2001 for around $3,000 for a child. In many of the cases, the parents of the children were alive. “According to our investigation it is true that babies who have parents were forced into the orphanage and then abroad,” said an official from the Zhenyuan county family planning bureau. The Guizhou case reflects the difficulties the Chinese government has faced in regulating and enforcing family planning laws since they were first introduced in the 1970s. Dozens of cases of violations by authorities including forced abortions and officials charging excessively high fines are reported every year. In 2002, the government passed a Family Planning Law aimed at curbing violations and better protecting people’s rights.

But the high fines imposed on families remain a source of anger particularly in rural areas, and fines are often as much as four times the average annual income of many farmers. Last year, hundreds of farmers protested in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, which neighbours Guizhou, accusing officials of charging five times the officially mandated amount.

Lu Xiande and Yang Shuiying, two farmers from Zhenyuan, were among those parents whose children were sold for adoption overseas. Their fifth daughter was taken away by local officials when they said they could not afford a $3,000 fine as they earn around $700 a year. A local government official agreed to waive the fines if they gave up their fifth daughter to the State-run orphanage, but the girl was then given to a family abroad for $3,000.

The success of China’s family planning measures has itself become a matter of much debate in recent years. Government officials say the measures have in three decades prevented an estimated 300 million births, but population experts have increasingly begun to question the demographic consequences of the measures and say China is now facing an ageing crisis. “People think that having a 300 million reduction is a good thing, but we should remember that a decrease will not be evenly distributed across the population,” says Feng Wang, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine.

He estimates that by 2043 almost half of China’s population will be over the age of 48, placing a considerable burden on a shrinking workforce. Concerned with declining fertility rates, the Chinese government has in recent years begun to relax family planning norms, and rather ironically, has now begun to incentivise families to have more than one child in some provinces.

.