Many foreigners are in China now because this is the fastest growing economy (although it's slowing some). Yesterday we met with some people from the Beijing-Shanghai classic car rally (we might be in it next October) and the girl we had been talking to on the phone spoke pretty good English and her Chinese was so good that my wife thought she WAS Chinese. When we met her we found out that she is actually an Italian woman who has been in China working for about 4 years as a translator. She speaks 4 languages.
As far as the one-child policy it's always been fairly lax. In my wife's family she has two uncles who have 4 kids each. They are all 20+ now but back when they were having them, they could only "fine" them for their violations. Since they were peasant farmers they didn't have much and at one point they just took their couch as their "fine". Anyone who works for the government though, would lose their job if they had more than one child. Right now the policy has changed so that if both the mother and father were from one-child homes, they can have two children without penalty. Many of the poorer members of society will abandon their children especially if they have some form of deformity and most of those kids wind up in orphanages. In China life is not held in as high regard by the masses, yet families are still the strongest bond. Modern life is causing changes though and the young do not have as great a regard for the elderly as in the past.
