The year Lu Qingqing was born, family planning in rural areas began to get strict. Two years later, it reached its peak. Couples who had a son as their first child were not allowed to have a second child, but if the first was a girl, they could have one more. Couples who were both only children, regardless of whether their first child was a boy or a girl, could have a second, but a third was absolutely forbidden.
If Lu Qingqing's parents didn't have a permit for a second child, they wouldn't have been able to have Lu Chen; they would have been fined into bankruptcy.
That year, the fine for having more children than allowed was one thousand yuan, and two years later, it increased to ten thousand yuan.
A ten thousand yuan fine in the early 1990s was astronomical. At the time, a regular truck driver transporting bricks for a day earned only five yuan.
