BEIJING: Celebrities and wealthy people flouting the one-child norm in the Chinese capital would be slapped with a higher fine than common citizens, a family planning official said.
Nearly three-decade old China's family planning policy limits most couples to one child in urban areas and to two in rural regions. But celebrities and the rich have drawn media and public criticism for getting away with the violation simply because they could afford to pay fines.
Celebrities and wealthy people would be more heavily fined for giving birth to more than one child, Deng Xingzhou, head of the Beijing Municipal Commission on Family Planning told a meeting of the municipal political advisory body.
The commission was discussing the amount of penalty Deng was quoted as saying by the official news agency.
The Beijing commission also plans to write family planning violation records into the personal files of celebrities in the national credit system which could affect their ability to borrow.
A joint survey conducted by China Youth Newspaper and QQ.com found that 44.6 per cent of 7,917 respondents said celebrities and the affluent could afford to breach the rule, regardless of the fine, and 61.1 per cent said this was unfair.
"Celebrities and well-off people should not have any privileges for having more children," Zhang Weiqing, director of the State Commission on Family Planning, told a meeting in Guangdong Province last year.
He said he believed that the number of celebrities who have more than one child was not very large, but because of their fame, their behaviour has a negative social influence.
Couples violating the one-child norm can be fined up to 10 times the local per capita income, although actual fines are often lower. In Beijing, the per capita annual income for urban residents was 21,989 yuan in 2007. Sources said the fine in Beijing now is around 100,000 yuan.
Fines differ from person to person and place to place and are collected by the district-level family planning commissions. Media reports often speculate on the penalties imposed on celebrities.
Media reports said that Hao Haidong, a football star who is one of the highest paid players with annual salary of five million yuan, was fined 50,000 yuan (about $6,850) for having a second child.
China, the world's most populous nation with more than 1.3 billion people, says its family planning policy has helped it prevent 400 million births.
