Hukou spells hope for children of scrap collectors
Print Edition
A COUPLE who make their living collecting scrap have been told their nine children can be registered in Pizhou City in east China’s Jiangsu Province, but may face fees estimated at 500,000 yuan (US$80,050) for violating the one-child policy.
Household registration, or hukou, would mean access to schooling and other benefits for the children.
Liu Xiangming, 58, and his wife Yin Mamei had their first daughter, Huanhuan, in Pizhou’s Liutun Village in 1993. Three years later they left their hometown and over the next 18 years collected scrap in Xuzhou and Suzhou.
Ignorant of birth control methods, the couple had another nine babies — four boys and five girls.
Huanhuan is now married while her youngest siblings are 2-month-old twin sisters, Beijing Times reported yesterday.
The large family didn’t attract the attention of family planning officials until their seventh child, a 5-year-old boy, drowned in a pool near their home in Suzhou on May 26.
Officials from Pizhou went to Suzhou on May 29 and drove the family back to Liutun the next day. Suzhou police arranged a van for them and the Suzhou government gave them 13,000 yuan (US$2,083) as a relocation allowance.
The couple said they had always hoped to come back home, but didn’t have enough money for the fare. Their farmland had been redistributed to others and their shack pulled down.
The family are now living with Liu’s brother.
The children’s education has always been a concern for Liu. Huanhuan didn’t continue her studies after kindergarten while his second and third children left school when they were in grade three, the paper said.
“It was too expensive. One semester cost me more than 1,000 yuan,” Liu said.
The local police said the children had birth certificates, so they could have household registration soon.
The local government would ensure the four school-age children went to school, said Yang Xiangyan, a local government official.
Yang added that Yin would be “restricted from having more children by effective means.”
Yin had a device fitted in a private clinic in Suzhou in 2008, but she got pregnant again and delivered twin girls this year.
Under Jiangsu’s rules, the couple could be fined nearly 500,000 yuan for their “extra” children. However, Yang said the couple couldn’t pay no matter how much they were fined. “What we should do is to help them live a better life,” Yang added.
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