Tianmen is China's test site for baby-boosting policies

A visit to the city offering more than $52,000 for second children.

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For decades, the ideal for the Chinese family involved two parents doting on their single, precious child.

At the maternity hospital in Tianmen, a city in the central province of Hubei, it does not take long to detect how the ideal is now changing.

Outside the hospital’s front doors, a statue depicts parents holding hands with their three young children next to a slogan: “More people, more blessings”. A dot-matrix sign over the entrance carries exhortations such as “Joy is plain as can be ~ babies one, two, three”. And throughout the hospital, cheery posters show families with multiple children swimming, skating and flying kites.

The government is well aware that this sort of messaging will only get it so far in its campaign to persuade people to procreate. Its bigger effort is financial. In what state media have described as the “Tianmen experience”, local officials have put together an array of cash allowances and incentives for new parents that are among the most generous now available in China.

Families having a second child can receive up to 287,188 yuan (S$52,500), while those having a third can get 355,988 yuan — mostly in the form of housing subsidies. These are staggering sums in a province where annual disposable income is barely 40,000 yuan per resident.

Several other cities around China have started to offer cash for families with second and third children, though not quite as much as in Tianmen, a city with a hard-driving local leadership.

In January, the central government also introduced an annual baby bonus of 3,600 yuan for the first three years of a child’s life. For a country that generally shuns “welfarism”, fearing that handouts will breed laziness, the cash given to families stands out as an exception.