UN Wire Alert

Friday, April 21, 2000

CHINA: Rural Families Ignore One-Child Policy

More than 5 million Chinese children have not been registered with the government, creating what demographers call a "black population" and causing concern that this year's census will not record the country's true population. Rural families are ignoring the country's "excruciatingly tough" one-child family planning policy by having two or more children, the New York Times reports.

The number of illegal births has surged in some areas, experts say, partly because the family planning system has largely ended coercive techniques of the past, including mandatory sterilization or bulldozing homes of women who disobeyed the one-child policy. Rural families are allowed to have more than one child, especially if their firstborn is a daughter. The system now relies on education and family planning fees for women who have unapproved children.

Chen Shengli of the State Family Planning Commission said there are two types of people for whom fees are ineffective, "the richest, who just pay them and don't care, and the poorest, who can't pay them and don't care. Ultimately, if a couple really wants to have additional children, there's not really much you can do to stop them," he said.

Chen also said most families do not want more than one child. Since the one-child policy was adopted 20 years ago, the number of children born per woman has dropped from 5.8 in 1970 to 1.8 today.

Census May Not Be Accurate

Demographers, including Chen, estimate that the official population is roughly 1.26 billion, and they say they are confident this number will be confirmed after the November census. They reason the low urban birth rate balances the high birth rate in some rural areas, yet a Central Party Discipline Inspection Committee of the rural Guangdong region report says, "the population is seriously out of control."

Susan Greenhalgh, a University of California-Irvine professor writing a book on China's family planning policy, said, "My sense is that nobody knows the actual population of the People's Republic of China. And that makes it impossible to engage in the economic and social planning that China needs to do."

The State Family Planning Commission is starting to experiment with new ways to further encourage small rural families, such as low-interest business loans and discounted fertilizer for households with two or fewer children. "In the next decade, our focus will be impoverished areas, but this is a process that takes time," Chen said (Elizabeth Rosenthal, New York Times, 14 Apr).