A Chinese couple has paid a record fine of 1.3 million yuan (£133,000) in order to avoid the country's one-child policy and have a second baby.
China has had a one-child policy since the end of the 1970s, enforced by the country's nosy network of neighbourhood committees and some 300,000 family planning officials
The unnamed couple from the southern city of Rui'an welcomed a daughter in February after having a son in 1995. The authorities in the city said they had levied the enormous sum after deciding the couple could well afford it.
"They found the couple were rich in assets, and were either running or were shareholders in several businesses," reported the City Express newspaper. "The figure stunned the couple, but they paid the fine," it added.
China has had a one-child policy since the end of the 1970s, enforced by the country's nosy network of neighbourhood committees and some 300,000 family planning officials.
China has boasted in the past that the policy has been directly responsible for reducing its population by as many as 300 million to 400 million people, a claim that has been disputed by some academics.
However, the policy has never been evenly enforced. There are exemptions for ethnic minorities, for families where both parents were single children themselves, and for couples in the countryside whose first child is a girl.
In addition, a growing number of rich families now choose simply to pay the fine, which is a multiple of between three and ten times the average after-tax income of the city where they live.
Aspirational advertisements in Beijing, including propaganda posters from the local government, often now show families with two children, rather than one.
In Wenzhou, roughly half of all families now have two children, according to the local government. In recent years, ten other families have paid fees of more than one million yuan.
In 2000, these fines were renamed as "social fostering fees" and are supposed to represent the added cost to society of the extra children.
The fees have become a significant, and rapidly growing, source of revenue for the government.
The website of the People's Daily, the official party mouthpiece, estimated in 2010 that they were as high as 20 billion yuan (£2.05 billion) a year, and He Yafu, a demographics analyst, calculated the government had made as much as 2 trillion yuan since 1980 from the fines.
The National Population and Family Planning Commission has said the social fostering fees are not fines and that all of the money goes to the public coffers.
"In most cases, it is up to the Family Planning bureau to decide on the size of the fine," said Chen Fugui, a 48-year-old tea trader from Quanzhou who has paid fines to have four daughters and one son. "I paid 3,000 yuan for my son, after two daughters, but that was 19 years ago. I paid 50,000 yuan for my youngest daughter, seven years ago. I think if they think you can pay a lot, they try to aim for the largest sum possible," he said.
"Of course, if you have good contacts with the local government, you can avoid the hefty fines. Of course the Family Planning people are looking to line their pockets, but they do not want to upset everyone locally, especially anyone big or rich. I think 50,000 yuan is a fair sum, but a million is too much. Maybe the government wants to set an example, but in fact this sort of example never actually stops anyone," he added.
Families who refuse to pay the fines will not obtain any registration documents for their children, leaving them unable to get a proper job or medical care. In some cases, officials have confiscated babies.
Recent scandals involving the one-child policy saw Tian Liang, a gold medal-winning diver at the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games, stripped of his position at a provincial swimming administration for having a second child in Hong Kong. It is not clear if he has had to pay a fine levied on him.
Meanwhile, there was public anger at a rich couple who had hired surrogate mothers to bear them eight children, which they then put in the care of a gaggle of nannies. "In this society, if you have money you can have miracles," one commentator wrote on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
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