Couple aiming to sue officials over their child’s legal status
Print Edition
Wan Changru’s 6-year-old daughter collects passes — for her dance school, English lessons and other extra-curricular classes, anything bearing her name that she can pretend is an identity card.
The girl is unregistered because her parents broke China’s one-child policy by having her and they can’t afford to pay a 200,000 yuan (US$30,713) fine to allow her to gain legal status.
However, with the government’s announcement in October that it would allow all married couples to have two children, Wan and her husband have decided to take family planning officials to court to get her registered without paying the fine.
Wan’s daughter is one of nearly 14 million unregistered people across China, most of them a legacy of China’s 35-year family planning policy that limited most urban couples to one child, though rural couples were allowed to have two if their first was a girl.
Those who are unregistered lack a hukou — a household registration entry in a small family book and on a police computer system. Without a hukou, a person has limited access to health care, education and other benefits, and cannot get a permanent ID card.
“Now that the country has relaxed the one-child policy, I think it’s time for us to call upon the public to realize that there are still a large number of marginalized people in China who have no hukou,” said Wan, a 42-year-old housewife.
Last year, China announced a cautious reform of the hukou system by allowing urban areas to give migrants a residence permit with some social benefits, or a local hukou if they meet a city’s own residency requirements. Shanghai and Shenzhen are experimenting with registering migrants based on a points system related to educational background and their employment history in the city, for example.
In Beijing, some districts allow unregistered children to go to school if their parents have a Beijing hukou and can prove the children are theirs. That’s how Wan’s daughter is able to attend school.
“The real trouble comes when my daughter gets ill,” said Wan. “Almost all hospitals in China require an ID card to register medical treatment, so when she’s ill, I can only take her to the small community clinics near our home.”
The penalty in Beijing for having a second child is a “social compensation fee” that is three to 10 times the average annual disposable income for a household with two children — which was 44,000 yuan last year. Families with higher-than-average incomes were charged even more.
Wan said her case has been accepted by the court and she is waiting to be notified of a hearing date. “I simply cannot afford to pay such a large sum of money,” Wan said of her 200,000 yuan fine.
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