Chinese Communist Party authorities “punished” 11 party officials and personnel in southern China’s Guangxi autonomous region in recent days for failing to crack down on a local couple who allegedly gave birth to 15 children over a 21-year period, the state-run Global Times reported Monday.
“A total of 11 officials and personnel involved in the case were punished, including the head of the Licun town in Rong county and the director of the local family planning station,” the newspaper reported on March 21.
The Global Times did not disclose details of the “punishment” inflicted on the regional Communist Party representatives. It did, however, reveal Beijing believed the government officials, including the leaders of the local family planning center, exhibited a “negligence of duty” by allowing the couple in question to have “an excessive number of children.”
China’s ruling Communist Party currently allows married couples to have up to three children after expanding the party’s notorious “one-child policy” to two and then three in 2016 and 2021, respectively. The Guanxi couple was reportedly not legally married, meaning they violated an additional norm of Chinese society.
“Previous revisions of national family planning policy have all stipulated that the right to start a family belongs to ‘a husband and wife,'” China’s state-controlled online magazine Sixth Tone noted in September 2021.
“Although some scholars argue that, under China’s Civil Code, ‘everything which is not explicitly forbidden is allowed,’ in reality, many provinces and municipalities regard out-of-wedlock childbirth as a violation of the family planning policy,” Sixth Tone observed.
The Guanxi couple additionally received poverty subsidies from the Guanxi regional government from 2015 to 2019, meaning the pair may have violated certain welfare laws within China through their illegal union and family expansion.
“The husband aged 76, named Liang Er, from Licun town in Rong county, and his wife Lu Honglan, aged 46, from Guizhou Province gave birth to 15 children, including four boys and 11 girls between 1995 and 2016,” the Global Times detailed on March 21.
“Lu reportedly gave birth to most of her children by herself at home. The huge family of 17 has been living on Liang’s single income from collecting the resin of pine trees. Between 2015 and 2019, the family also received poverty subsidies from the local government,” the newspaper revealed.
China’s ruling Communist Party has twice expanded its child allowances for married couples in response to the nation’s plunging birth rate. The Global Times published a separate article on March 20 suggesting China’s declining birth rate has been directly tied to the country’s decreased new marriage rate.
“A total of 7.63 million couples registered to get married across the nation in 2021, a record low for the past 36 years since 1986 when the Ministry of Civil Affairs started to release such statistics,” the Chinese state-run newspaper reported.
“He Yafu, an independent demographer told the Global Times on Sunday that the decline in the number of marriage registrations will inevitably result in the decline of the birth rate in China, since most children are born within marriages in China,” according to the publication.
The Global Times is published by the People’s Daily, which is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.