By DPA
Beijing : The Chinese government plans to levy higher fines on wealthy parents who flout its controversial family planning policy, forcing them to pay according to their income level, state media said Saturday.
The National Population and Family Planning Commission announced the tougher punishment after “increasing public concern that some wealthy people violated the policy because fines weren’t high enough to be a deterrent”, the official China Daily newspaper said.
The commission said members of the ruling Communist Party, government officials and public figures should take the lead in following China’s family-planning policy.
Public figures who “severely violated” the policy would be “exposed and punished in accordance with the law”, the newspaper said.
Urban residents who breach the policy by having more than one child risk having a black mark against their bank credit rating, it also said.
The report gave no details of the level of fines that would be imposed.
Yu Xuejun, a spokesman for the family planning commission, said in July that only 36 percent of Chinese families were still prevented from having more than one child, following relaxations of the policy to take account of demographic changes in recent years.
Experts believe that China’s population of 1.3 billion would have swelled to about 1.7 billion without the one-child policy, which was introduced in the late 1970s.
However, the implementation of the policy has been controversial, especially in rural areas.
In many rural areas, couples are allowed to have a second child if their first child is a girl, reflecting the traditional dependence of parents on their sons for their old age.
Some local officials have imposed heavy fines on people who violated the policy and in some areas have used compulsory abortions, sterilisation and other harsh measures to enforce the policy.
About 11 percent of the population, many of them from minority groups, are allowed to have two or more children.
Yu said China did not want the current birth rate of 1.8 per couple to fall, as the population needed to stay “in harmony with the economy, resources and environment”.
He said there would be “no major changes” in family planning policy before 2010.