As family planning policy enforcement becomes less important due to the policy loosening and the fact that people are increasingly satisfied with having smaller families, China's millions of family planning workers face budget cuts and redundancy. Some grass-roots family planning workers have been transferred to other posts, some have taken time off to have a second child and some have stayed on to ensure there are "better" births.
Only after he gets up in the middle of the night, drives for two hours until he reaches a field in the countryside miles away from his home, and turns off his car can Zhang Chen (pseudonym) begin his work - waiting around until daybreak and trying to spot any farmers burning the stubble left over after harvest, part of a government initiative to clamp down on this source of air pollution.
This is one of the errands Zhang has started running since he left the local family planning branch after 10 years of service, according to a recent report by news portal thepaper.cn.
In December 2013, China took the first steps toward relaxing its family planning policy, allowing all couples to have a second child if either parent was an only child. From January 1 this year onward all couples are allowed to have two children, ending the one-child policy that was initiated in the 1980s.
Zhang, 40, was one of tens of thousands grass-roots family planning officials who were put at risk of redundancy. But early this year, he was transferred to his current post with a township government in East China's Shandong Province.
At the gate of the government building where Zhang works, a red sign exhorts locals to build a "sanitary" town. Previously, a slogan outside the building called on residents to "create excellence with good family planning policy enforcement."
Like the other grass-roots officials who did this work in past decades, Zhang has witnessed the changes of the family planning policy and what it has done.
Changes
In 1999 Zhang became a township family planning worker and his day-to-day duties included taking women of childbearing age to have ultrasound scans, helping keep birth rates low and fining violators.
But now his job includes preventing stubble burning, checking on the recipients of minimum living allowance and entering the personal information of disabled township residents into an online database.
At the family planning office where he previously worked, half of the workers have left. Du Lili (pseudonym), the office's director, is busy but the other desks are all empty.
"Some workers have gone home to have their second child. I'm a bit busy," Du told the thepaper.cn.
Her job is no longer focused on keeping the birth rate low. She spends most of her time collecting data about the gender imbalance, administering subsidies to couples who have lost their only child, and managing prenatal and postnatal care, such as encouraging pregnant women to receive healthcare checks and providing them with health supplements.
She took her job at age of 19. The office minivan she used to drive from village to village to investigate one-child policy violations rarely moves now due to a sharp drop in field visits.
But unlike Zhang and Du, many other family planning workers are worried about being made redundant. As China loosens its family planning policy, their role has become less important and their departments have shrunk.
In late May, dozens of family planning officials in Gong'an county, Central China's Hubei Province, staged a protest in front of the county bureau of health and family planning, demanding better wages. They claimed their monthly salary had been cut to less than 2,000 yuan($303), half of what most grass-roots civil servants can expect to be paid.
In January, family planning workers in Xingning, South China's Guangdong Province, wrote a joint open letter titled "Please give family planning workers a way out," complaining about what they say is unfair treatment and layoffs. They said the changes which have taken place have made them feel like the proverbial "donkey which is killed the moment it leaves the millstone."
According to official figures released in 2009, besides the half a million people then working for local governments, at that time there were about 1.2 million people employed by village committees and 6 million in sub-village groups working to enforce the family planning policy.
Less pressure
To Ren Xianghua, an official from a development zone neighboring the township where Zhang worked, the two-child policy didn't help much in easing the tensions between family planning workers and residents. "Some villagers wrongly believe that the policy loosening means the birth restrictions have been totally lifted. The difficulty of collecting fines from violators still remains," Ren was quoted as saying.
Couples who have more children than they are allowed have to pay a fine based on their personal income and the average local annual income, with the fines often coming to three or more times the annual average.
