China’s two-child parents in protest to have fines cancelled

Chinese parents who had broken the country’s one-child law have protested outside the family planning commission in an attempt to have their fines cancelled now that all couples are allowed to have two offspring.

For decades, China limited most urban couples to one child and rural couples to two if their first was a girl.

Couples who exceeded the limits were ordered to pay a fee.

To pressure them into paying, some local authorities refused to register the child if the parents didn’t pay up, which limited the child’s access to education, health care and other benefits.

Some parents of unregistered children stood in a line outside the gates of the national family planning offices yesterday, holding banners with slogans including: “They are all our motherland’s flowers and should not be treated differently.”

One protester, Wan Changru, said the roughly 20 people included parents and grandparents of unregistered children and that they wanted officials to cancel their fines.

“Now that every couple can have two children, all kids should be treated equally, no matter whether they were born before or after the policy change,” said Wan, who is also taking officials to court to try to get her six-year-old daughter registered.