Chinese officials say Beijing will punish celebrities who ignore the country's one-child policy.
The official Xinhua news agency quoted city family planning chief Deng Xiangzhou Monday, as saying celebrities and the wealthy would be more heavily fined in the future for having more than one child.
Chinese media have reported several cases in which well-off people paid only minimal fines for violating family planning restrictions. Xinhua mentioned the case of soccer star Hao Haidong, who was fined only 68 hundred dollars for having a second child, despite having an annual salary of nearly 691 thousand dollars, one of the highest for a soccer player in China.
The news agency quoted a family planning official (Zhang Weiqing), as saying the number of celebrities who have more than one child is not large, but because of their fame, their behavior has a negative social influence.