You make it sound like something Chinese government purposefully did, when in fact, those people were simply never registered by their parents -- to avoid the fee for having a child above quota.
>The group was never officially registered on the country’s household registration record system, known as hukou, which is closely linked to a person’s legal identity. That means they didn’t officially exist—until recently. On Friday (March 24), China’s Ministry of Public Security, the government department in charge of hukou registrations, announced that they had helped register the 14 million.
That's not the case, aside from that, having ones papers taken was and is an almost mundane punishment used againts very ordinary people. There are way, way more such non-enpersonned people than just second children, children of single women, or children from marriages of other "non-persons."
It is just this time, with the social credit, the state has finally got balls to go after high class bourgeois from megacities, and lower end elites.
>The group was never officially registered on the country’s household registration record system, known as hukou, which is closely linked to a person’s legal identity. That means they didn’t officially exist—until recently. On Friday (March 24), China’s Ministry of Public Security, the government department in charge of hukou registrations, announced that they had helped register the 14 million.
https://qz.com/941240/china-keeps-finding-millions-of-people...