National Two-child Policy
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Chinese School Imposes Birth Quota and Timeline on Female Teachers
By Frank Fang The Chinese regime has adopted a two-child policy, but the local school authorities in a province in central China are still making it nearly impossible for female teachers to have a second child. “If you don’t follow the school’s birth control regulations, the school will move you to a new position,” said Jia Hongbin, a union director responsible for birth control measure at Zhongmu No. 1 Senior High School in Henan Province, in an interview with Henan Television on April 3. “And if you get transferred to another work unit, there will also be risks,” Jia added. Union director Jia’s statement was no idle threat. A six-month pregnant former teacher at the high school told Henan Television that she was reassigned to work in the school’s supermarket because the school had already hit the pregnancy quota by the time she was expecting. “The school is already finding excuses to get rid of some teachers,” the unnamed teacher said. Ms. Zhang, a teacher at the school, said that only 16 teachers were allowed to have a second child in the first school semester of 2016, and an additional 15 others in the second semester. The quota, according to documents Mr. Zhang showed Henan Television, was determined by teaching subject, and older teachers would be given priority over their younger colleagues. “Younger teacher will need to wait for about five or six years for their turns” said Ms. Zhang, adding that school administrators warned female teachers at the school that they could be fired if they were found to be pregnant outside the allotted time frame. And if a teacher can’t conceive within the set time frame, “she would be stripped of her right to get pregnant,” Ms. Zhang added. “Having babies is a very natural thing. And we teachers feel very uncomfortable and are angry with the school’s regulation.” In addition to verbal threats, the school had also asked its female teachers to have a pregnancy check-up once every three months, another female teacher told Henan Television. When asked if the school regulation had violated the national two-child policy, Jia Hongbin the birth control director said that even if there was a violation, it couldn’t be helped because they could not possibly keep the school running if its female teachers kept on getting pregnant.
Cost of foreign cancer drugs to be halved in Chinese public insurance pilot scheme
Five expensive trademarked drugs from overseas, used to treat diseases including cancer, could soon be covered by public insurance on the mainland. The development follows a public outcry over a case in which leukaemia patients were unable to afford potentially life-saving medicine. Li Bin, minister of the National Health and Family Planning Commission, said negotiations on bringing down the cost of five trademarked drugs had reached a “breakthrough”. “These drugs are expensive. After negotiation the price drop was very significant and in general could cut more than 50 per cent of the price,” Li told reporters on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress. Ma Xiaowei, deputy minister of the commission, said it would include the five drugs in the public insurance catalogue. The catalogue denotes what drugs are eligible to be covered by public insurance payments. Including the five drugs in the catalogue means that patients deemed in need of the drugs by their doctors would pay a smaller proportion of the costs. He said the commission was also considering how to fast track the importation of drugs used to treat 20 kinds of critical illnesses. “We are trying our utmost to solve the problem of unaffordable and unattainable drugs and to achieve an important breakthrough by 2020,” Ma said. Li did not identify the five drugs. However, his announcement comes a year after Hunan (湖南) authorities dropped a high-profile lawsuit against Lu Yong, a leukaemia patient who helped more than 1,000 fellow sufferers buy a cheap generic cancer drug from India. The patients, suffering from chronic myeloid leukaemia, had been struggling to afford Glivec, a Swiss-made drug that would have cost them more than 23,500 yuan (HK$28,000) a month. Lu turned them to Indian-produced generic alternatives not registered in China that were therefore considered counterfeit under the law. Lu’s arrest in Yuanjiang, Hunan, caught the media spotlight when his fellow patients came to his defence, saying they could not afford Glivec and without Lu’s help would have been waiting to die. Public health experts were quoted in reports as saying the authority should help those who could not afford the drugs. Meanwhile, Li said 13 provinces and cities had amended local family planning laws and by March would be allowing all couples to have two children, in accordance with the national two-child policy. The commission estimates the policy will increase the labour force by 30 million by 2050. Ma urged mainland women to stay in the country to seek help with assisted reproductive techniques rather than go abroad for such services. He said 432 institutes across the country were authorised to carry out the procedures and had experience in 700,000 cases.
China Regulatory Brief: Two-child Policy and China Advance Pricing Arrangement Annual Report
Guangdong Officially Implements the Two-child Policy On December 30, the Guangdong provincial government approved and issued its local “Population and Family Planning Regulations,” which took effect on January 1, 2016. The new Regulations amend the rules that are inconsistent with the national two-child policy, abolishing the late marriage and late childbirth additional holidays and extending its additional maternity leave to 30 days. This means that any female employee that gives birth in accordance with the laws and regulations (be it one child or two children) in Guangdong are entitled to a maternity leave of 128 (China’s base length of maternity leave is 98 days). Meanwhile, the paternity leave for the husband is increased from 10 days to 15 days. While the key points of China’s maternity leave are legislated at the national level, a significant part of the system is regulated at the local level, as is common with many matters concerning human resources and social security. Guangdong is the first province in the country to revise the local maternity leave rules after the two-child policy was implemented nationwide. Shanghai has also announced that couples that are registered after January 1 will no longer be entitled to the late marriage holiday. China Advance Pricing Arrangement Annual Report (2014) Released On December 18, the State Administration of Taxation (SAT) released the “Annual Report on China’s Advance Pricing Arrangement (2014)” in both Chinese and English. The report introduces China’s APA system, implementation procedures as well as practical development, covering the statistical data and analysis of APAs signed between 2005 and 2014. An advance pricing agreement (APA) is an ahead-of-time agreement between a taxpayer and a tax authority on an appropriate transfer pricing methodology (TPM) for a set of transactions at issue over a fixed period of time. China Releases Online Payment Regulations On December 28, the People’s Bank of China issued the Measures for Administration of Online Payment Business of Non-Banking Payment Institutions, which will become effective on July 1, 2016. The Measures put more restriction on online payment businesses and online transfer businesses carried out by non-financial institutions. The Measures divided the personal payment accounts into three types. All of the three types of accounts can be used for consumption and transfer, but only Type III accounts can be used for investment. The new regulations also put a maximum purchasing limit on online payment accounts. For example, customers of Type I accounts will be allowed to transfer/purchase only RMB 1,000 worth of goods or services starting the date they open the account. Fujian FTZ Abolishes Filing Procedures for Taiwan Companies On December 22, the Fujian free trade zone (FTZ) released an announcement (Gong shang ge zi [2015] No.208) that allowed Taiwan residents to set up a company (excluding a franchise) in the zone without going through the foreign exchange record-filing procedures. Along with the announcement, the FTZ also released a list of 129 industries where Taiwan companies are allowed to invest in. The 129 industries include crop farming, food and beverage manufacturing, advertisement (not including publishing the advertisement) and certain commercial services.
Knowledge Graph
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1 The universal two-child policy will likely add an average of 2.5 million newborns per year, unleashing 75 billion yuan ($11.8 billion) in additional consumption, said a scholar of Peking University.
2 The statement said the China's aging trend would be actively addressed by the national two-child policy, and that it would continue to stick to the family planning policy as a basic State interest.
3 Since the implementation of the national two-child policy, many employers have approached the federation to clarify rules on maternity leave.