The grey walls of Chinese houses in even the tiniest villages 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 grave population crisis if more rich couples continue to ignore the official 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 per cent 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) per child. Chinese press, for example, has reported the story of a Guangdong family which had paid 780,000 yuan ($100,000) in order to have several children.

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. 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 health officials.

During the past two decades China critics have faulted the one-child policy as a source of coercion. 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. — IPS