Social cost of upbringing needs review

The second controversy is who should pay. According to the current enforcement practice, it is not just couples who breach the family planning policy that are required to pay. That is to say, lovers in a romantic relationship who have a child before entering into marriage, teenagers who get pregnant accidently, and a woman who has a child as a result of an affair with a married man have to pay the social cost of upbringing for their child, as do a couple who adopt another child besides their own. It looks like the policy has become a means of safeguarding the orthodox status of marriage and condemning sex outside marriage. Clearly, in this part, it has deviated from the original intention of the policy.

Finally, the unsupervised management of the money paid to local governments as the social cost of upbringing has incited discontent among the public. Based on the information disclosed by 24 provincial governments, the total amount they received in social cost of upbringing payments was 20 billion yuan in 2012 alone. The actual sum will be even more since some provinces have not disclosed their figures yet. Knowing the whereabouts of this money or what it has been used for is certainly essential. Especially since there have been reports that the money which is supposed to go to the national treasury in accordance with the State Council's requirement has been held back by local governments to pay salaries or benefits for employees, or fallen into the pockets of certain officials. In practice, due to the lack of an overall nationwide management system, it is almost impossible to trace exactly how much money is collected and where does the money go. So the cost of upbringing has becomes a grey area and fertile soil for corruption.

Obviously, the fate of charging the social cost of upbringing is closely tied to China's family planning policy. The policy has been loosened, but it is unlikely to be abolished completely in the foreseeable future. First, couples are obliged to conduct family planning according to the Constitution. In order to respect its supremacy and maintain its stability, the Constitution is unlikely to be amended any time soon. A possible solution would be to interpret family planning in a wider way. But that would need to be done by the Standing Committee of National People's Congress which is the only body with the power to interpret the Constitution, so it may take some time.

Second, China is still a country with a huge population and limited resources, which means that controlling the population remains necessary. Whether there would be a population explosion if the family planning policy was abolished is unknown, but it would be risky to drop it completely at a single stroke. The more prudent move is to loosen the policy bit by bit, for example, first allowing couples both of whom are a single child to have a second child, then extend it to couples where only one is the single child. Three or more children should still be banned.

In the near future, the social cost of upbringing will continue to be charged for violations of the family planning policy, but the system needs restructuring and closer monitoring. For instance, the central government should establish unified criteria for whom is to be charged and formulate a more detailed operating system to reduce the discretionary powers of local governments. In addition, those people that are currently charged purely from a moral judgment should not be required to pay -moral judgments should be left to the court of public opinion or the Marriage Law. Last, but by no means least, strict monitoring of the payments and regular auditing should take place and the people concerned should be accountable for it and there should be regular public disclosure of information to ensure that the system is transparent.

The author is a fellow at the research office of Shunyi district people's court in Beijing.