Big Bumps in China's Baby Boom
Laura Robertson
CBN News
May 9, 2007
All of the ingredients are mixing together to produce a big baby boom for China, but the government's not too happy with these new developments and has vowed to stop this growing trend.
Zhang Weiqi, China's top family planning official, blames both the rich and rural poor for China's baby boom. Despite the heavy fines of about $26,000 for breaking the one-child Policy, a new survey by
China's National Population and Family Planning Commission indicates that about 10% of wealthy Chinese have three or more children.
Though this fact is cause for concern for Chinese officials, considering the fact that the number of "wealthy" people isn't identified, and 10% is a fairly small proportion, it's very likely that this subset of the population isn't the main cause of the baby boom. Instead, it seems to be the subject of resentment from some other Chinese who can't afford to have more than one child.
On the total opposite end of the spectrum are rural Chinese who are breaking the policy. Zhang said that young marriage ages of many rural Chinese is also helping the boom. Throughout China the average marriage age is 27 for women and 28 for men, but some are marrying much younger.
But the goverrnment seems quite willing to combat the trend of people breaking the one child policy through propaganda and stricter enforcement of the policy.
One article in the state-run Xinhua News talked of the health risks for "rule breaking" pregnancies.
Basically, for fear of being caught, rural women would rather have their child at home and suffer the consequences of inadequate medical care than pay the huge fines. The funny thing about this terminology, is that a "rule breaking" pregnancy of a Chinese multimillionaire would probably not be any more dangerous than any other birth.
The same day,
Xinhua News also ran a story on how Communist officials in Henan Province who break the one child poilcy will be banned from promotions. One day later,
another headline read: "Enforce family planning or lose your job," which discussed how members of Zhejiang Province will be fired for not enforcing the one child policy or other family planning policies.
Despite this new emphasis on the one child policy, it actually seems to contradict some of China's work on other social issues, like the growing gender gap, which has largely been due to sex-selective abortions. Caring for the growing elderly population is another challenge.
It would seem that these social problems would be of greater concern than the super wealthy who are ignoring the policy, officials who don't want to enforce the policy, or poor women who get pregnant and don't want forced abortions,.
So while the government continues to keep the population numbers down, it will be interesting to see how these other social problems, compounded by the one child policy will further evolve in China.
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