By Richard Ades
From 1979 to 2015, China enforced a rigid policy that forbade most couples from having more than one child. The rule was intended to reverse the country’s exploding population growth, which was seen as a threat to plans for economic development.
One Child Nation, a documentary directed by the Chinese-born Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, shows that the policy’s effects were long-lasting and horrifying.
With the help of archival footage, the film depicts the propaganda campaign China used to urge its people to abandon their tradition of large families. Billboards, theatrical performances and even playing cards helped to spread the message that population control was the key to prosperity.
As a result, many supported the policy, though some did so only out of fear or a sense of duty. Others tried to evade it and suffered disastrous consequences. Wang, who moved to the U.S. six years before giving birth to her own son, returns to her native village with camera in hand in an attempt to learn just what those consequences were.
Perhaps because she is seen as a local rather than an outsider, Wang is able to uncover some startlingly raw emotions.
A former village chief says he enforced the policy only because he had to, adding that he refused to take part in forced sterilizations of women after their first child. A former midwife feels guilt for performing such sterilizations—and for performing mandatory abortions so late in the pregnancy that, in her mind, they amounted to murder.
But not everyone feels such guilt. A woman who was lauded by the government for her role in “family planning” says the policy was justified despite its cost in misery and lives. “It was like fighting a war,” she says, according to the translated subtitles. “Death was inevitable.”
It quickly becomes apparent that the policy was complicated by many couples’ patriarchal wish for a son who could carry on the family name. Parents of girls often tried to evade the law, sometimes going so far as to abandon their daughters. The documentary traces the cost in terms of dead babies and a lucrative market for the adoption of Chinese “orphans”—a market in which government representatives were likely complicit.
One Child Nation is full of such shocking revelations. If it doesn’t attain the emotional arc of an effective work of fiction, it’s partly because some of the most painful details arrive early or midway through.
By the end, the film’s focus has shifted to a Utah couple’s attempt to connect Chinese children with previously unknown siblings who were basically sold on the foreign adoption market. It’s a worthy effort, but it’s one giant step removed from the nightmarish ordeal their parents went through in the name of progress.
Rating: 3½ stars (out of 5)
One Child Nation (rated R) opens Aug. 23 at the Gateway Film Center in Columbus.
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