“One Child Nation” lays bare China’s population choices

Nanfu Wang began “One Child Nation” as a way to rediscover her past. Ultimately, she documents the harrowing effects of the former Chinese policy. 

|
Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Nanfu Wang, co-director of the documentary “One Child Nation” and mother to a young son, draws attention to a propaganda billboard. China’s one-child policy was altered in 2015 in favor of a two-child approach.

Nanfu Wang, co-director with Jialing Zhang of the extraordinary documentary “One Child Nation,” was born in 1985 in rural eastern China before immigrating in her mid-20s to the United States. Her years in China coincided with the government-mandated one-child-per-family policy, instituted in 1979. Officially intended to ward off famine in a country of more than a billion people, the policy was not changed until 2015, by which time several million babies, mostly girls, were aborted, abandoned, placed in orphanages, sold off to Westerners, or left to die.

Wang returned to her village to document the repercussions of the policy because she wanted to understand its effect on both her family and the wider Chinese society. A first-time mother, she wanted to more fully comprehend herself.

The stories she documents, although most are recounted by the interviewees with an eerie matter-of-factness, are harrowing. An aunt tells how she turned over her baby girl to traffickers. Her uncle recounts abandoning his baby girl in an open-air market where, mosquito-bitten, she eventually died. Wang was one of the relatively lucky ones. She was her parents’ first child, and because boys are prized in China, some families, mostly in rural areas, were allowed a second shot at having a male baby. Often bribes were involved. Her guilt-ridden brother, five years younger, apologizes to her for having had career opportunities denied her.

The continual refrain Wang hears from her interviewees is “I had no choice.” Women who violated the policy were often forcibly sterilized, their homes bulldozed. Even within her own family, Wang is surprised by the note of resignation. Her aunt says, “I harbor no hate. It is my fate.” A family planning official, Jiang Shuqin, proudly shows off her certificate of commendation.

The most powerful camera subject, because she seems to embody both the brutal efficacy of the one-child policy and its tragic consequences, is the 84-year-old midwife, Huaru Yuan, who delivered Wang and was in charge of some 60,000 sterilizations and abortions. Yuan supported the policy, as did Wang’s family, but she says she lives to “atone for my sins.” “I was the executioner,” she says. Her home is decorated with hundreds of flags featuring photos of grateful families, post-policy, whose babies she helped to conceive. Wang wants us to know that Yuan, and many others like her, was also a victim.

Equally compelling are Wang’s interviews with Duan Yueneng, a trafficker, who details how babies were often discarded in trash bins, or by the roadside. He would sweep the area to recover those still alive. (The government quietly sanctioned these sweeps, often taking kickbacks.) He would then bring them to orphanages where they were sold for adoption to Western families, who because of forged documents, knew nothing of the babies’ true backgrounds.

A Utah couple, Brian and Long Lan Stuy, who have three adoptive Chinese girls, are prominently featured in the film’s second half. Their extensive database aims at matching Chinese adoptees with their birth families. But they are nonplussed by how few of the adoptees want to reconnect with their Chinese parents.

The cruel irony is that, because of the generational effect of the one-child policy, China is now a society in which the workforce cannot sustain a booming economy and there are not enough caregivers for the elderly. Whereas the film starts out showing us old propaganda billboards and clips exclaiming the glories of the policy – “Fewer children makes for a happier life!” is a typical chant – the same propaganda machine is now extolling two children as the mandated ideal.

Wang began this film as a way to rediscover her own past. It does far more than that. It will help ensure that the full tragedy of those years is not forgotten. Anyone who sees this film is not likely to forget.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to “One Child Nation” lays bare China’s population choices
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2019/0815/One-Child-Nation-lays-bare-China-s-population-choices
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe