MCLC: Zhang Yimou fined 7.5 million yuan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Zhang Yimou fined 7.5 million yuan
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Source: NYT (1/9/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/world/asia/chinese-film-director-faces-fi
ne-for-exceeding-child-limits.html

Chinese Film Director Fined for Exceeding Child Limits
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — China’s most internationally known film director, Zhang Yimou,
and his wife were ordered by a government office on Thursday to pay a
$1.24 million fine for violating family planning limits by having three
children.

A district family planning bureau in Wuxi, a lakeside city in eastern
China where Mr. Zhang’s wife, Chen Ting, officially resides, announced the
7.49 million renminbi fine for “seriously” violating the rules, the China
News Service, a state-run agency, reported. The penalty followed months of
speculation in the Chinese news media about how many children Mr. Zhang
had fathered, why he had apparently eluded the rules that limit most urban
couples to one child, and why officials in Wuxi had found it impossible to
track down one of the country’s most recognizable faces.

The officials went to Beijing to try to find the couple and wrote to them
more than 10 times, the China News Service said, citing an unnamed family
planning official in the city.

“There was never any effective response, and this created some difficulty
for investigating and collecting evidence,” the China News Service report
said. “When the couple had the three children, they had not carried out
marriage registration procedures and did not obtain birth permit documents
from the population and family planning authorities.”

In November, the Communist Party leadership endorsed proposals to relax
family size restrictions slightly, so that more urban couples could have
two children. (The changes would not affect this case.) But Mr. Zhang,
famed for his ornate dramas, became the focus of a public uproar on the
Internet over why quite a few wealthy and well-connected Chinese people
had already been able to evade the one-child restriction.

Mr. Zhang and Ms. Chen are unlikely to face serious hardship paying the
fine, but poor rural residents can struggle to meet penalties for having
more than two children — the number usually tolerated in the countryside.
Two dozen Chinese provinces, regions and provincial-level cities have
disclosed that they took in a total of 20 billion renminbi, or about $3.3
billion, last year in “social support” fines for family planning
violations. Other provincial-level governments have refused to reveal how
much they took.

Mr. Zhang has acknowledged having a daughter from his first marriage.
Provincial family planning regulations would usually allow only one more
child for his new marriage with Ms. Chen. He had two sons and a daughter
with Ms. Chen before they married in 2011, the China News Service said.

Mr. Zhang, 62, began his career directing films in the 1980s, and was
later embraced by the Communist Party government as a symbol of homegrown
— and loyal — cultural success. He directed the spectacular opening and
closing ceremonies for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Mr. Zhang and his wife at first avoided publicly commenting on the
controversy. But after officials announced that the couple had violated
the rules, the couple expressed contrition. In late December, Mr. Zhang
told the official news agency, Xinhua, that he had fathered more than one
child to follow family expectations of creating male heirs to carry on the
ancestral line.

“Now when I think about it, it really was a huge mistake,” said Mr. Zhang,
who does not have a reputation for humility. “The brand I’d created for
myself with so much painful effort through my work was destroyed in one
blow.”

Despite their apologies, Mr. Zhang and Ms. Chen disputed the officials’
estimates of their past income, which were used to calculate the size of
the fine, a propaganda office in Wuxi said in December. But the family
planning bureau of Binhu District in Wuxi apparently rejected their claims
and handed down the fine, which must be paid in 30 days unless the couple
appeal.

Amy Qin contributed reporting from Beijing.