Looking around a bustling hotel restaurant in Beijing on a Sunday afternoon, you'd half expect family-planning officials to storm in and raid the joint. 'Dad, I want ice cream,' shouts a five-year-old boy. 'Me too, dad,' his older sister chimes in, while the gurgling sounds coming from the high chair indicates his baby sister might also be in the market for some of Italy's fine gelato. Supposedly in the land of only children, this raucous clan is far from the only aberration from central policy on birth control that is dining in the restaurant. Several other families have two children, while only a few couples seem to have the state-sanctioned one. Since it was introduced in the late 1970s, the family planning policy has prevented up to 300 million births, officials say. In recent years, some efforts have been made to loosen the regulations: those from ethnic minorities can have more than one child, and rural dwellers whose first child is a girl can have a second. Also, in many jurisdictions, if an only child marries an only child, they are allowed to have two children. But, for the most part, the policy has been strictly enforced. Heavy fines, known as 'social maintenance fees', were the main punishments meted out. For most of the past generation, those penalties condemned even well-off families to lives of destitution. But these days, things are very different. The wealthy class is growing rapidly in mainland cities, and many can afford to shrug off what used to be a crippling fine. To get ahead of the average Zhou, the country's city-slickers are donning Armani, snapping up suburban villas, taking skiing holidays in the Alps and buying BMWs. Now many hanker after the ultimate accessory that exudes wealth and status: a back seat full of squabbling children. The cost of their 'social maintenance fee' seems to vary wildly. One taxi driver I spoke to was chuffed that he had struck the bargain price of 10,000 yuan for his second child, while a businessman seemed proud of having paid 150,000 each for his second and third. One of the greatest threats to social stability on the mainland is the growing disparity between rich and poor. Now we have another dimension to the issue: the have-loads-of-children versus the have-nots. Some are arguing that the fine should be changed to a percentage of a family's net wealth, to keep things fair. But, for now at least, the rich are enjoying the power that their relative wealth brings. The omnipresent party once managed to invade even citizens' sex lives: now people are happily paying the cadres to leave the bedroom, and shut the door on the way out.
