China's leaders want more babies, but local officials resist

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

China’s leaders want more babies, but local officials resist

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
February 18, 2019

BEIJING (AP) — Facing a future demographic crisis and aging society, China’s leaders are desperately seeking to persuade couples to have more children.

But bureaucrats don’t seem to have gotten the message, fining a couple in a recent widely publicized case for having a third child against the strict letter of the law.

The move has sparked public outrage as people vent their anger at population control officials who are hungry for revenue and have long persecuted couples for violating the now-scrapped “one-child policy.”

“The country is doing all it can to encourage childbirth but the local governments need money, so we end with this sort of madness,” a columnist and political commentator who writes under the name Lianpeng said on China’s Weibo microblogging service.

“The low birthrate has everyone on edge, yet the local governments care only about collecting fees,” journalist Jin Wei wrote on her verified Weibo account. “I don’t know of any other nation that pulls its people in different directions like this.”

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/6515996536d74319a99a7d87247406a7

[mopinko]

1. i had the most interesting conversation recently about the impact

of the one child policy.

i volunteer for a hospice organization, and one of my jobs is mentoring new volunteers. out of 8 new folks at a recent orientation, 2 were from china. both students studying here, and planning to return to china.
they were both asking questions that wouldnt really occur to most folks here. interesting questions.
turns out both were thinking about the need for hospice care now that the parents w one child are getting old. it is something that was always a part of large, extended families. now that they are gone, they are faced w many problems.

i wonder how many of these families wish they could have their daughters back now.