One Child Nation (2019)
Directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang. Motto Pictures.
Babies left to die in the elements, women tied up and forced to undergo sterilisations — One Child Nation, a new documentary that won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize this year, pulls no punches in documenting China’s extraordinarily cruel family planning policy that lasted more than three decades. In order to avoid a population explosion, the party dictated that couples were allowed to have just one baby, or two in some regional areas. Combined with a strong cultural preference for boys, the policy lead to suffering on a mass scale.
Chinese-American filmmaker Nanfu Wang frames the horrors of the policy, at least initially, through the ways in which it changed her own family. She is a new mother herself, so it’s a powerful device. Her mother sits bouncing her beloved grandson, confirming that if Wang’s younger brother had been a girl, she would have given the child away. Wang’s uncle’s testimony is particularly striking. When his wife gave birth to a girl, his mother demanded he get rid of the child, threatening to kill herself and the baby if he did not. He left the infant at the local market, hoping a stranger would take her home. After two days the little girl, Wang’s cousin, died.
Wang does not sugar-coat the shocking nature of their revelations, but nor does she judge those she interviews. Her examination of the depravity of the situation is frank, but not gratuitous. Towards the end of the film, she deftly ties together the theme that runs through many of her discussions with the family planning officials and midwives who performed thousands of forced abortions and sterilisations, neighbourhood officials who enforced the law and members of her own family. “Policy is policy” and “there’s nothing I could do.” Both victims and perpetrators, she paints a picture of a population so deeply indoctrinated by the brutal ruling party and so unused to exercising their own will, that the only way they are able to live with the tragedy is blind acceptance.
As Wang notes, since 2015 China has encouraged families to have two children, but no more. All the same propaganda techniques are being used — slogans are painted on buildings, ‘One is too few, two is just right.’ But her brave film is an important recording of the brutal ramifications of the one-child policy and a warning against governments that seek to exercise control over the most intimate and personal parts of family life.
