When One Isn't Enough.

Hong Mei's 9-year-old daughter desperately wanted a younger sibling. Yi Yi would come home from school, cling to her mother's side and ask, "Why can't I have a little sister?" Hong and her husband, a private entrepreneur, finally decided to grant Yi Yi's wish. Nine months ago Hong (not her real name) gave birth to a baby girl. Though she now faces the task of registering the new baby--a process that involves paying a $12,000 fine and explaining to officials why she chose to break China's one-child policy--she says it was worth it because the "money is simply not an issue."

Other parents are making the same calculation. For two decades China has vigorously enforced its one-child policy by slapping harsh penalties on violators. But China's fast-paced economic growth of the 1990s left many families, especially in the booming coastal cities, flush with cash--enough, in fact, to pay fines that would have been well beyond their reach a few years ago. In Shanghai's affluent circles, it is not uncommon to hear of couples who have given birth to a second, or even a third, child and paid the fines as an afterthought. China's wealthy citizens are realizing that money, in addition to supplying material comforts, is giving them a way to assert their independence--including the ability to break one of Beijing's cardinal rules.

Last September authorities unveiled a new family-planning law that gives local governments more authority in how they deal with these "renegade parents." Fines--now called "social-compensation fees"--have been increased twentyfold in the past decade in some coastal cities. "In a booming economy, people are demanding more private rights," grumbles Gu Baochang, an official at the China Family Planning Association. "But that doesn't mean people can do anything they want."

Tell that to China's new middle class. As workers have moved into higher-paying private-sector jobs, they have become more affluent and mobile, making it harder for authorities to keep tabs on them. And years of government propaganda, constantly telling people one child is enough, hasn't seemed to have left much of an impression on people with means. Besides simply paying the fines, rich couples have found other ways to elude Beijing's ...