A private business owner surnamed Bao recently paid a fine of 1.01 million yuan (US$134,667) in Yueqing City, east China's Zhejiang Province, for having a second child.
China introduced the family planning policy in the late 1970s, encouraging urban couples to have one child while allowing a second child in rural areas if the first is a female.
The family planning policy aims to address the difficult situation China is in: a huge population of 1.3 billion and shortage of resources and energy. Analysts estimate China can support only 1.6 billion people with its own grain production.
This is just one of the many Chinese characteristics facing the top decision makers.
Although China has become the world's fourth largest economy thanks to decades of fast growth, it still ranked well below the 100th in terms of per-capita GDP.
Qiu Guiming, a 36-year-old farmer in Qiucun Village, Jidong Town of Shaoxing County in Zhejiang, has six brothers and sisters who were born in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was no family planning policy.
"It was difficult for us to get enough to eat and in the hardest times, the whole family had only one set of presentable clothing," Qiu recalled.
Qiu's first baby was a female. As a farmer, he was allowed to have a second child. Last year he had a son.
"There's no problem for us to support two children, as our living conditions have improved. But more children will throw us back into poverty," he said.
His 33-year-old brother, Qiu Guiyun, has chosen to have only one: a girl. "Now we live a better life, but to support a child is still not easy. Education costs alone are high,"
China believes family planning is an effective way to reduce poverty. Some UN officials regarded the policy as a great contribution to the global poverty relief efforts.
It was realized recently in China, however, that the policy might lead to a reduction in China's labor force and aggravate the aging problem. Since the late 1990s, most provinces have promulgated regulations allowing urban couples who are both only children to have second babies. This is seen as a "fine tuning" of the family planning policy. But for people choose to have more than one child illegally, like Mr. Bao, the penalties have become heavier. In Zhejiang, the penalties are two to four times the local average annual income or one to two times the annual income of the person who is fined.
In some provinces, the figure is as high as six times the annual income.
Making policies in line with actual conditions is an approach the CPC has taken, not only in population control but also in many other fields.
As a socialist country, China persists in making public ownership playing a dominant role in it economic system. But to boost the economy, the nation also allows diverse forms of ownership to develop side by side
To address global warming, the Chinese government has worked out a national scheme against climate change. Meanwhile, it maintains that as a developing country, it still has a long way to go before it realizes industrialization, urbanization and modernization and that it still has an arduous task to develop its economy and improve lives of its people. Therefore, it insists on taking different obligations from those for developed nations.
More than two years ago, China introduced a managed floating foreign exchange rate system after it had discontinued the former forex regime pegged to the US dollar. Most Chinese economists believe if the Chinese currency, Renminbi, appreciated by big margins and in a prompt way, the Chinese economy would be affected in an unbearable manner.
Maybe it is a bit difficult for foreigners to understand some Chinese policies in the beginning. As some western scholars have begun to see, China's reform is like navigation in an unmarked river. In practice, making polices in line with China's realities has helped the country to avoid reform failures in some other nations.
(Xinhua News Agency October 11, 2007)
