Bloomberg View: The Real End of China’s One-Child Policy
Adam Minter, a writer and author based in Asia

“…On Thursday, a court in Guangzhou ruled that the Family Planning Commission of Guangdong Province — China’s most populous — must disclose the specifics of its own [one-child policy violation fine] data within 15 days. … In some regions, local authorities allow officials who collect the fees to keep a certain percentage of them. The situation — whereby officials are incentivized to hunt down children for their revenue-generating potential — is both untenable and perverse. … The need is pressing: Three decades of population control has left China with a rapidly aging population and not enough young workers to support them. Under such circumstances, it’s counter-productive (as well as deeply unpopular) to allow thousands of bureaucrats to roam China in search of family planning violations. … Still, in contemporary China, nothing signals the end of a government career — even a powerful one — quite like a full public accounting of one’s finances. After operating for decades in the darkness, China’s family-planning agencies are about to learn how much harder it is to work out in the open” (4/2).