Many are still burdened with penalty fines, known as “social maintenance fees,” and their children remain un-registered as legal citizens, VOA reported. Fan Ziting, 36, is still dealing with the impact of the controversial policy and was among 30 couples who petitioned outside the health department of Guangdong province Tuesday, urging authorities to reconsider their situation. Fan had her first child in 2008, and three abortions afterwards. When she became pregnant again in 2014, she was torn. Knowing that family policies were loosening, she and her husband decided to go ahead with the pregnancy. The delivery of their second child last April came eight months before China completely lifted its decades-old one-child policy, allowing all couples to now have two children. In response, authorities fined the couple $28,500 – six times their annual incomes as factory workers. The local government also cancelled an annual incentive for not having a second child of some$1,530 for 10 years. Although the Fan family of four is the ideal model of what the government is now advocating, the Fan family’s situation has become a nightmare as they struggle to make ends meet. “The fines are too much and more than we can afford, which puts a lot of pressure on us. That’s also what keeps us from registering our second child [as a legal citizen],” Fan said. Before it was relaxed in early 2014 and officially terminated this year, China’s one-child policy was enforced at the provincial level and enforcement varied as it was within the local government’s discretion to impose penalties or forced adoption. Forced adoption was one of the reasons thousands of Chinese couples are said to have sought asylum overseas each year in the past two decades. In Zhejiang province, 29-year-old Dong Yulong faces a pending fine of $21,400 – four times of his family’s annual income – after his second child was born five days before the province was the first in China to allow couples (on January 17th 2014), one of whom is an only child, to have two children.]]>