Population Control Is Called Big Revenue Source in China

New York Times ^ | 26 Sep 2013 | Edward Wong

[rjbemsha]

BEIJING — Nineteen province-level governments in China collected a total of $2.7 billion in fines last year from parents who had violated family planning laws, which usually limit couples to one child, a lawyer who had requested the data said Thursday.

The lawyer, Wu Youshui of Zhejiang Province, sent letters in July to 31 provincial governments asking officials to disclose how much they had collected in 2012 in family planning fines, referred to as “social support fees.” He said he suspected that the fines were a substantial source of revenue for governments in poor parts of China.

Mr. Wu’s findings were first published Thursday by Beijing News. Mr. Wu opposes China’s one-child policy and has written on his microblog he is a Christian.

Parents in other parts of China have accused local family planning officials of abducting babies who are considered “extra” children in a household and selling them to orphanages, sometimes for $3,000 per baby.

[Mr. Wu] said the fee [the fine imposed for having an extra child] should be abolished altogether, and “it should be the family’s decision how many children to have.”

[jsanders2001]

And yet they still have one of the most massive populations in the world.

[Trailerpark Badass]

Hey, it’s government.

[tbw2]

It is a tax on a population that would otherwise be hard to tax, given limited income and property values.
Give us your savings or we kill your kids is also a heck of an enforcement mechanism.

[roadcat]

Years after hearing of an only-child coping with being such over several generations, I’m still trying to understand the thought of having no uncles, aunts, siblings and cousins. These kids only have parents and grandparents as family. No uncles, aunts or cousins. Strange.