'One Child Nation' harsh yet needed
"One Child Nation" is a harrowing documentary about the cruel fallout of China's decades-long 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 both 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 such attacks of conscience are common? But the filmmakers...