NEWS//One Child Nation

Beginning November 8, Amazon Prime will air One Child Nation, a documentary on “the devastating consequences of China’s One-Child Policy through the stories of those who lived through it.”

A documentary about China’s one-child policy

One Child Nation won top honors at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival for documentary filmmaking and catapulted directors Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang to international fame.

Variety.com describes the film as a look at “state-enforced sterilizations, kidnappings, and other brutal means of preventing Chinese citizens from having more than one child. This policy lasted from 1979 to 2015, but the movie makes it clear that the trauma from the social experiment to make it illegal for couples to have more than one child, endures. Wang [the film’s director and narrator] delved deep into her own family history to tell that story.”

A family’s experience with the one-child policy

Among other stories, the documentary examines how the One-Child Policy impacted Nanfu Wang’s family. Wang was the firstborn in her family. Her gender made her a disappointment to her parents since a son could better support them in old age. Since her parents lived in a rural and less populated area, they were allowed to have a second child five years later. That is when her brother was born.

In his review of the film, Peter DeBruge asks, “But what if her mother had gotten pregnant a year or two earlier? Or what if the second child had been a girl?” His answer: “A visit to the local midwife, Huaru Yuan, reveals what so often happened: The 84-year-old estimates that she performed between 50,000 and 60,000 sterilizations and abortions. (Later we learn how would-be mothers were abducted and forcibly restrained for these procedures.) These days, as if to atone for her “sins” — as she sees these actions executed on orders from above — Yuan exclusively treats patients with infertility.”

A reviewer’s admonition

During the 35 years this policy was in place (currently, Chinese law allows most couples to have two children), the government enforced the systemic sterilization of mothers, full-term abortion of unsanctioned pregnancies, and seizure and forced adoption of children born in violation of the rule.

Little wonder DeBruge chides the world for the “little thought we have collectively put into what the policy entailed— an oversight this provocative and personal documentary aims to rectify, or at least reframe, by using Wang’s family back in China as a window into how millions more were impacted.” 

Sources: Variety interview with Director Wang Nanfu, Peter DeBruge review of One Child Nation