County denies campaign bid to raise cash
Print Edition
A CENTRAL China’s county has denied claims that it tried to raise cash through fines from violators of the family planning policy in a desperate bid to shore up its government treasury.
Lu Xianpo, deputy government head of Xiping County, Henan Province, claimed the county carried out a campaign against family planning violations to curb the growth of such cases in the past two years.
Xiping launched the campaign in late June, targeting some 17,000 government staff, Party members and public employees, according to Lu.
A report posted on the website of the Economic Observer newspaper on August 2 quoted local citizens who claimed the law enforcement campaign was all about raising cash to replenish a budget deficit in the county government.
However, an official with the county’s finance bureau refuted the argument, saying that financial revenue has been increasing annually since 2010 and grew 11.6 percent year on year in the first half of 2013.
The official, who declined to be named, said about 70 million yuan (US$11.3 million) had been raised to pay extra salaries of some 10,000 employees of state institutions based on their work performance. He denied reports that the county lacked money to pay their salaries.
The county’s annually collected fines on family planning violators stood at about 7 million yuan at most in the past, said Dai Jiping, a local family planning official.
Dai said the accumulated social compensation fees the county has collected since China’s one-child policy was introduced in the late 1970s would not reach 500 million yuan — the amount that some residents claimed was the target of the campaign.
Home to 1.34 billion people, China has kept the family planning policy for more than three decades. With about 94 million population, Henan now ranks China’s second most populous province, only behind Guangdong Province, according to the results of China’s demographic census released in 2011.
An urban family in Xiping would likely pay a family planning violation fine of 86,736 yuan in 2012.
But a primary school teacher said a family planning official in her township told her in 2011 that she could have a second child as long as they paid 20,000 yuan in penalty.
The teacher had a second child in 2012 after paying the penalty for which she did not get any receipt. She said she knew more than 10 similar cases but all of them paid different amounts as fines.
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