THE fight between Li Ming and Li Wei on their parents’ carpeted floor seems fair, on paper. According to their birth certificates, the two boys dressed in identical jumper suits are twins, born a mere 15 minutes apart.

They lunge at each other with fearless enthusiasm and within minutes Li Wei finds himself sweating in a headlock. It always ends this way.

“Li Wei is 20cm shorter and 8kg lighter,” Wang Qiaolin, their mother, said. “I don’t know why he still tries.”

Li Ming, 5, is, in fact, two years older than his supposed “twin”. To evade China’s one-child policy, his parents bribed a doctor to get a second birth certificate when he was born. They filled it out after Li Wei’s birth, using Li Ming’s birth date.

The Li family’s case is one of millions where the policy, first introduced in 1979, has broken down. According to Chinese estimates, only one in five youngsters is an only child. Faced with growing evidence that its population-control measures are being ignored, Beijing is aiming to switch to a two-child policy.

Yu Xuejun, a director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said: “For Chinese families, having two children is more suitable. There is no official policy change yet, but we are researching an adjustment to the population development strategy.” Some 250 experts are conducting government-funded studies, a move endorsed by President Hu Jintao.

In Qujing, talk of a rule change is being greeted with sighs of relief. “The local officials probably already know about our twins, but we can’t afford to pay a fine if they start cracking down,” Mrs Wang said. “I have heard of fake twins that are five or ten years apart.” Indeed, the authorities in Qujing, a remote town in southwestern China, are said to be aware of up to 1,000 cases of false twins.

Loopholes are exploited and officials hoodwinked nationwide. Some parents simply pay a fine of between £200 and £7,000 per extra child, depending on the region. Others move home to find a hospital that has no record of their first child.Bribery is also common, as is “parking” second children with childless relatives or friends.

Occasionally overzealous officials commit atrocities in the policy’s name, such as mass sterilisations, forced abortions and the killing of a newborn. But such cases are now rare.

Beijing had begun to ease the rules a few years ago. Second children are less frequently banned from hospitals and schools, while farmers may have a second child if the first one is a girl. City dwellers are granted the same right if they are from an ethnic minority, if both parents are only children or if the first child is killed or disabled. In September, the city of Shanghai removed financial incentives for childless couples.

That China is turning away from the one-child policy is as much a sign of the womb police’s failure as it is evidence of the policy’s overall success in the past quarter of a century. It has prevented 300 million births during the past decade and brought down China’s birth rate from 33 per thousand people to 15 by the end of the 1990s. Experts say that the resulting savings have helped to boost the economy.

China’s population is expected to peak at 1.46 billion in about three decades, when it is projected that it will have been overtaken by India as the world’s most populous nation. However, as the rate of births declines, it is facing the same problem that bedevils its competitors in the West — an ageing population and the resulting social security liabilities.

As China’s pensioner population rises from 200 million to 300 million in the coming three decades, the country will need more births, not fewer. That is precisely why President Hu wants to wind down the policy.

Mrs Wang had no doubts: “If Hu really does this, it could be the most popular decision he’ll ever make,” she said.

BIRTH CONTROL

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