Wu Guangqiang jw368@163.com LI XUE, 22, has led a “furtive” life since her birth in Beijing. With no such legal documents as identity card or hukou (registered permanent residence certificate), she has no access to education and she can’t travel or even visit a library. The saddest thing is: she can’t get married. The reason that Li suffers such unfair treatment is that she was born in violation of China’s one-child policy. Her mother had her after giving birth to her elder sister. She was expelled by her employer for breaching the one-child policy. Her unemployment made their family’s originally precarious life even harder; she and her husband are disabled and can hardly make both ends meet. Of course, even under the one-child policy, if Li’s parents had paid the fine, they would have had her legally registered, but they were too poor to pay the penalty of 5,000 yuan (US$781). Li is not alone. In Guoyang County, Anhui Province, 55-year-old Sunyuan Hua and his 36-year-old wife Wu Dishan have five children — three boys and two girls, born in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005 and 2006. Four years ago, a story published online featured pictures of the family and their living conditions. Their horrible conditions were beyond words. Their “home” was a dilapidated brick shack filled with waste. The husband earned an average of 10 yuan per day picking up trash. Thanks to some government allowances, they at least survived. But the children’s lives were anything but descent — they drank tap water directly, ate coarse food and did their homework and slept on a garbage heap. Poverty is the main culprit for the miserable plight of the family, but the children’s “illegitimate” status compounded and perpetuated the misery. By now, the children are between 9 and 15 years of age. I have no idea what their current conditions are, but I can’t be optimistic unless there is a major shift in the State policy toward the children born out of the State plan. According to data from China’s sixth nationwide census conducted in 2010, China has a staggering population of 13 million people without hukou, roughly accounting for 1 percent of China’s entire population. Based on a survey conducted in 2014 by a team led by Wan Haiyuan, a researcher at the Macro Economy Research Institute under China’s Development and Reform Commission, of the 13 million unregistered residents, over 60 percent are children born without State permission. The rest were born out of wedlock, abandoned after birth or became “illicit residents” for other reasons. For whatever reason, the existence of such a large army of “illicit residents” is not only causing untold suffering to the victims, who are stripped of the rights entitled to all citizens of the country, but is posing a serious threat to social stability and harmony as well. Legally, there should be no residents without hukou in China, as the Article 7 of China’s Regulations on the Household Registration, adopted in 1958, stipulates that the citizens of the PRC should apply for household registration for their child within one month after the baby’s birth, with no strings attached. But local governments across the country distorted the law or even completely ignored it. To fulfill the quotas of birth control, they tied the household registration to the applicant’s qualifications: those who gave birth to an extra child and failed to pay fines would not be approved for the household registration. For grass-roots family planning workers, they were between a rock and hard place when they were expected to accomplish the rigid goal of birth control yet had no other effective measures to prevent unplanned births. Obviously, this is one undesirable result of the one-child policy. Now that China has amended the policy, prompt and effective steps must be taken to fix this problem. The good news is that on Nov. 21, Guo Shengkun, chief of the Ministry of Public Security, said at a meeting that the ministry would work on a solution to this issue. (The author is an English tutor and freelance writer.) | 