One child policy and Chinese pragmatism

Quite a few of our Chinese students have siblings. We were intrigued to find out about the loop holes in the one child policy and thus dared to asked about it.

In fact, there are many ways around it (apart from the obvious one, which is paying a lot of money for the second born):

Firstly, if you're a farmer in China and your first born is a girl, you get a second "chance" to try for a boy.

Also, if one of your parents belongs to a minority group - and there are 56 of them - the family is allowed two children.

Thirdly, in the early 80s it became so obvious that there won't be enough women in society that couples with a son were encouraged to try for a girl. That only lasted for a very short while.

Kelvin, the older son of such a "case" told us the following: "My parents wanted a girl, and the government wanted girls. That's why my baby brother has got a girl's name". While we couldn't help but bursting out laughing, the other eight people around the table just nodded in understanding.