Since China’s One Child Policy was enacted in 1979, women all over China have been subjected to forced late-term abortions (some as late as nine months), forced IUD insertion, forced sterilization, police detention, and even the destruction of their homes.

Additionally, the Policy has created an unnatural gender imbalance – 32 million more men aged under 20 than women – which has lead to increased human trafficking of young boys and women, as well as a host of other problems.

But, as is true in many circumstances in China, money is buying the opportunity to have more children:

China’s One-Child Policy Undermined by the Rich [Telegraph (UK), 6/15/09]

• In China’s cities, the fines for having a second child can run up to 200,000 yuan (£20,000). The payment is intended to cover the schooling and healthcare costs of additional children.
   
• However, wealthy parents are now either paying the fines outright, finding a way around them, or travelling to Hong Kong where no permit is needed, according to the government.
   
• Between 2001 and 2008, nearly 78,000 babies were born in Hong Kong to parents registered as living on the mainland.
   
• There have also been thousands of cases of government officials circumventing the policy in order to have more children.
   
• Zhang Weiqing, the former director of the State Family Planning Commission, the office in charge of implementing the one-child policy, told the China Daily newspaper that there is now a huge shadow over the policy, and growing resentment from poorer families.
   
• “Due to the rising mobility of Chinese citizens and the social transformation from the country’s reform and opening up from the late 1970s, it has become tougher to regulate the policy,” he said.
   
• The cost of travelling to Hong Kong to give birth is around 80,000 yuan (£8,000). In response to the stream of women arriving at Hong Kong hospitals, the local health authority put a three-month ban on mothers from the mainland at the end of last year.
   
• It said the “maternity tourists” were costing Hong Kong millions of pounds and preventing it from offering adequate care to Hong Kong residents. A permanent ban on the practice is now being considered in Beijing, according to the China Daily.
   
• In addition, the government has gone on the offensive against public figures with multiple children, in order to set an example. “The fine is a piece of cake for the rich, the government had to hit them harder where it really hurt, at their fame, reputation and standing in society,” said Zhai Zhenwu, a sociology professor with Renmin University of China.
   
• Celebrities have been barred from public shows or television programmes and businessmen have been blocked from receiving government contracts.
   
• The one-child policy was enacted in the late 1970s to halt China’s soaring population growth and has cut the fertility rate from over three children in 1980 to 1.8 in 2008. Without it, China’s population would be some 400 million greater, it is thought.
•