Having 7 Children, Couples In China Were Fined Rp1.5 Billion

JAKARTA - A husband and wife in Anyue County, Sichuan Province, were fined 718,080 yuan or around Rp1.5 billion after having their seventh child and were accused of violating China's two-child policy.

However, the couple struggled to pay the fine because they only depend on the husband's surname to support the family, Liu, according to local media monitored by Antara, from Beijing, Sunday, December 27.

Liu asked the authorities to pay the fine in installments, but he was still unable to.

The couple lives in an area where residents are known to have more than one child.

The couple had their first female child in 1990.Then in the following ten years their children increased by six and the last one, a boy, was born in 2009.

The authorities then conducted an investigation in 2018 into suspicions of illegal childbirth and decided to waive the social security fee for the couple.

The local health authorities then filed a request to the court to overturn the fine decision because it was deemed incompatible with the current situation when the two-child policy was unable to boost the birth rate in the world's most populous country, which in recent years has experienced rapid growth.

Therefore, netizens in China also consider the fine sentence for the couple to be contrary to changes in the population structure in China.

Instead, netizens suggested that the couple should receive an award instead of a punishment because the new birth rate in China has been declining for decades.

The People's Congress of China (NPC) as a legislative body has proposed the repeal of the family planning policy.

One of them was proposed by Huang Xihua, an NPC member from Guangdong Province because he saw that many areas in China were loosening the policy.