Sorrow, anger over harsh policy
“One Child Nation” is a harrowing documentary about the cruel fallout of China’s decadeslong campaign to limit its population growth. A balanced examination of a controversial policy is of no interest to the filmmakers: This is a work made in sorrow and anger.
The policy, in which couples were allowed one child (a second was permitted in rural areas), was in force from 1979 to 2015, and its importance to the Chinese government was made clear in a relentless, unavoidable propaganda campaign that warned of the most dire consequences — including mass starvation and cannibalism — if the nation didn’t curb its reproduction rate.
Enforcement could be harsh, especially in the less populated regions, and had heartbreaking results. Women were tied up like animals and
dragged to forced sterilizations and abortions; houses of families that wouldn’t cooperate with sterilization were torn down; newborns were abandoned anywhere and everywhere, including at marketplaces; infants were in effect sold, with the connivance of officials, and put up for international adoption.
The documentary has two directors, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, with Wang appearing frequently in front of the camera. Wang had firsthand experience of the policy — she was born in China in 1985. (She now lives in the United States and is a mother herself.) The film depicts her return to the rural Chinese town of her birth, with her newborn son in tow.
She speaks with women and men who suffered as a result of the policy, and with those responsible for carrying it out. One former midwife says she performed 50,000 to 60,000 forced sterilizations and abortions, including fetuses that were born alive and killed. Now horrified by what she did, she refers to herself as an “executioner.”
Who knows if attacks of conscience like this are common? But the filmmakers make it clear that some who were involved have no regrets. One Communist Party member recalls that she was initially repulsed by the more gruesome aspects of her work in family planning (as she describes it) but put aside her qualms and would do it again. She shows off awards she won for her accomplishments in the onechild campaign.
One of the most articulate, and moving, interviewees is an artist, Peng Wang, who sadly recounts working on a piece involving trash and uncovering (and photographing) numerous fetuses in refuse heaps. Some of the fetuses he preserved in jars. He mentions one that appeared to be smiling, “as if he knew it would be miserable to be alive in China.”
Among the most distressing revelations: The common Chinese preference for male children — and we hear some very blunt enunciations of the sentiment — had the result that those who died after abandonment were most often girls. And many officials involved in enforcing the policy have no reluctance to offer up variations of “I was only obeying orders.” The policy came from higherups, they shrug, “What was I supposed to do?”
The film ends with a painful irony — the policy worked well enough that the Chinese are now being urged to have two children. The propaganda barrage is already under way. It’s hard to imagine that the enforcement will be equally brutal.
One former midwife says she performed 50,000 to 60,000 forced sterilizations and abortions, including fetuses that were born alive and killed. Now horrified by what she did, she refers to herself as an “executioner.”