New | CCTV presenter Chai Jing "flew to the US to give birth to baby daughter"
A renowned CCTV reporter-turned-author is reported to have given birth to her first child in the United States.
A renowned CCTV reporter-turned-author is reported to have given birth to her first child in the United States.
Southern Entertainment Weekly reported this morning Chai Jing, a celebrity China Central Television reporter known for her outspoken blog, was seen before the Chinese New Year holiday at the baggage reclaim area in Beijing Capital International Airport with her newborn baby girl.
A source told Southern Entertainment Weekly Chai had already flown to America during last year’s National Day holiday and had been expected to give birth at the end of October.
Chai has had a low profile since July when her news magazine programme Insight was suspended, despite her first book becoming one of the top 10 bestsellers in the mainland last year.
“The programme will be suspended for a while due to CCTV’s special arrangement for the summer vacation,” the programme posted in its official microblog in July.
A source confirmed to Southern Entertainment Weekly in July that Chai had been pregnant for over six months and is married to renowned photographer Zhao Jia.
“It is unknown how she was able to pass the [security] checkpoint with a pregnant belly. But the halo of ‘the embodiment of press freedom and conscience’ and ‘the goddess of public intellectuals’ has probably granted her with a special access to an American Visa,” today's report reads.
The exposé was met with a mixed reaction on Sina Weibo.
Many microbloggers, including lawyer Wang Peng from Beijing, posted sarcastic remarks.
“It seems that central television is also infected by the born in America fever,” Wang wrote.
Others like online editor Wangxi20 and journalist Liu Xiangnan took Chai’s newborn baby girl as evidence of the Chinese voting for the US with their feet.
“Chai gives birth to her child in the States, Sima Nan [a conservative scholar] brought his family to the States, and top officials also sent their children to the States. Both the left and the right wing in China have voted for the States with their feet, no matter if they pretend to be anti-America or not,” Liu, the former reporter with the Economic Observer posted.
“All the best with Chai’s newborn baby," Wangxi20’s comment read. “A country can ask its citizens to ‘love the nation’ as long as they are free to leave it. Or it is a prison.”
According to the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, a child born in America has US citizenship.
The number of babies born to Chinese mothers outside mainland has boomed in the past decade.
ABC News reported last week 71 per cent of babies born in Saipan, a US territory four hours away from China by plane, are born to Chinese mothers.
The rising number of pregnant Chinese women living in Los Angeles also triggered a protest in 2012, when dozens of people protested against a neighbourhood birthing centre used by pregnant Chinese women. Meanwhile, the number of babies born to mainland parents in Hong Kong rose from 620 in 2001 to more than 44,000 in 2011, prompting the Hong Kong government to introduce a zero-births quota policy since the start of last year.
