In 2008, France 24 International News provided an example of how the Chinese families could get around the one-child policy and reported how one Chinese couple wanted to have more than one child and how the couple used loopholes to have three.
The mother’s first child was a boy, and she was desperate to have a girl.
Since fines are less for a second child if delivered in a remote province, the couple moved south from Shanghai.
However, the mother discovered she was pregnant again soon after the birth of the second child, a girl.
The doctor told her that because of her health she couldn’t have an abortion.
Due to where the children were born, she was told her children would not be allowed to attend school in Shanghai. The mother was upset because she said rural schools were not as good as urban schools.
At the time, she also resented the fact that wealthy Chinese businessmen, television and movie stars often avoided the one-child policy because they have money to pay the fines. Ten percent of rich Chinese have three children and this practice is spreading among the upper-middle class.
Explaining how wealthy Chinese got away with it, Peng Xizhe, dean of social development and public policy at Fudan University, said, “In the Maoist era everyone was controlled by his work unit. It’s over now. Many workers are independent.”
Then in late 2013, China declared it was relaxing its one-child policy. The Guardian.com reported, “Experts say this only underlines a looming demographic crisis in China: low fertility rates, a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking labour force.”
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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