The opening montage of One Child Nation sets the tone of the documentary, cutting between grainy shots of military parades and slow close-ups of preserved fetuses with an unnaturally sunny glow. The documentary sustains its initial intensity in telling the stories of individuals affected by China’s one-child policy. From the start, director Nanfu Wang makes the issue personal, not only by allowing others to share their stories, but also by sharing her own.
In 1985, the Chinese constitution was amended to include the restriction of births to one per family, with an exception permitting rural families who had a daughter to have another child. Wang shares how becoming a mother changed the way she thought about this policy and drove her to create the documentary. Her story has many angles, and she explores her experiences as a daughter, older sister, and mother. Interviews with her family and others shed light on their own stories and subtly but powerfully shape Wang’s story.
Her uncle emotionally recounts the story of how he buried his infant daughter after being coerced into abandoning her in a market, and her aunt tells her with less emotion of how she gave her infant daughter to a human trafficker in hope of her eventual adoption. Wang’s brother speaks about his sadness when he realized that she stayed home so he could go to school, and her mother, holding her grandson during the interview, says to the child, “You have it so much better than your mom.”
The interview with Wang’s mother begins to shed light on why the policy was instituted. She tells the story of her own father, who suffered immensely during a famine and lost two children to meningitis and smallpox. She says that without the one-child policy, “There would [have been] cannibalism in China.”
In 1982, the population had reached one billion, and the country had doubled in population while struggling through a famine and cultural revolution. A popular slogan for the one-child policy claimed, “We are fighting a population war.” Wang retorts that it became “a war against its own people.”
The perspectives that best capture the power of the policy’s implementation in the documentary are those of two midwives who performed the forced sterilizations and abortions that were the tools of the policy’s implementation. The first midwife does not hesitate to admit that she performed 50,000-60,000 sterilizations and abortions. She admits that in many cases, it was too late to abort, and she induced and killed the children, saying, “I was the one who killed. I was the executioner.” She also describes the treatment of the women who were “tied up and dragged to us like pigs.”
This midwife’s account of her work is not one of pride, and after telling it, she explains the meaning of her two rooms full of red banners, each with a picture of a baby. Following the advice of a monk, she resolved to “atone for her sins” and help couples conceive with fertility treatments.
The second midwife tells another story. She is by far the most decorated “creator of familial bliss” among China’s family planning workers, and she does not hesitate to assert the necessity of the policy: “I would do this work again. If not for the one-child policy, the country would have perished.”
When asked about the women who were brought to her, she tells the story of one who fled from the doctors and officials, completely naked, and laughs as she recounts the officials’ question: “Where should we grab?” At the end of her interview, she echoes the same slogan: “We were fighting a population war.”
Jiaming Pang, an investigative journalist exiled to Hong Kong, connects Wang with families whose children were forcibly taken from them. One of the most poignant interviews featured a girl whose twin was taken; she knows that her twin is in America. They are in contact over social media, but the twin in China does not share her sister’s hope that she will one day return to the family. When asked why she doesn’t hope for this, she laughs, but her smile fades as she looks into the distance.
In the years it was enforced, the one-child policy took 400 million lives. At the end of the film, Wang highlights a recurring phrase in the personal statements: “I truly had no choice.” She claims that the one-child policy and American restriction of access to abortion are the same, though on the surface they seem opposite; both, she says, “take away women’s control of their own bodies.” The New York Times took this rather tacked-on statement and focused on it in their own review.
One of the greatest crimes of the one-child policy, however, is that it not only restricted choice or mandated the killing of innocents, but that it also profoundly changed the way people think about those innocents. In 2015, the one-child policy was replaced with a two-child policy, but the implicit message of the older regulation has persisted, and young people are reluctant to have more than one baby. This propaganda worked so well that China will soon have a different type of population crisis on its hands.
The story that Wang tells most successfully is one of the power of propaganda. The story-tellers to whom she gives platform have been themselves the primary targets of the propaganda. The success of the documentary is precisely this: Wang lets each story tell itself. The stories she weaves together, presented poignantly and intertwined with her own, need to be told, because “if memory fades, all that’s left will be propaganda.”
Editors note 10/01/2019 at 3:30pm: This updated version is an expanded version of what is found in the print copy.
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A must see!