Barbaric Nation of Asia

One Child Nation: looking back at China's horrifying policy
Director Nanfu Wang discusses her shocking, award-winning new documentary and the dangers she faced while making it.

By Charles Bramesco

A found child advertisement, in a still from One Child Nation.

Authoritarian states have a quiet, insidious way of dressing up the immoral in the dowdy finery of the bureaucratically sanctioned. 

To an audience member sitting for Nanfu Wang’s harrowing new documentary One Child Nation, China’s former policy of permitting one infant per family (later amended to two, in the event of a first-born daughter) comes across as frightful stuff, at times borderline dystopian. 

A western audience would be shocked to hear the elderly speak so nonchalantly on such morbid matters. 

But Wang wanted to reveal the banality of this particular evil, to show how history can warp the perspective of those living through it.
“Before making this film, I had more judgment for the older generation, how they seemed to be closed-minded,” Wang tells the Guardian over the phone, not 24 hours before Amazon puts her film in American theaters for the widest release of the film-maker’s young career. 

“After finishing production, going through the process of conducting interviews and looking at the propaganda material, I started to understand why an entire nation of people would behave a certain way. I have more empathy towards the way that they behaved and the way that they think. They’ve lived their whole life in a society that discouraged or punished citizens who thought independently.”
In a sense, Wang took the one-child policy for granted in a negative capacity, just as her parents had taken it for granted as a way of life. 

It was a fact of the everyday for as long as she can remember; she was born in 1985, just a few years prior to her brother, meaning she was one flip of the genetic coin away from being left in a basket on the street. 

Wang grew up around the cheery murals championing the brave patriots contributing to the effort to stem overpopulation, and she began to see through them at a young age.
As she grew into adulthood, she put that facet of her past behind her, until two wrinkles of fate brought the one-child policy back to the fore of her mind. 

First, China revoked the controversial legislation in 2015, allowing happy couples to freely go forth and multiply. 

Second, Wang got pregnant herself, and instantly saw motherhood through fresh eyes. 

“I remember just two weeks after I found out I was pregnant, how protective I became,” Wang explains. 

“I was super aware of the dangers that could potentially face my unborn child’s safety and life. I wasn’t a very fearful person, but I noticed how much I was afraid for the life I was carrying. It was around then that I started thinking about other women who couldn’t protect their child, people who had to live every day under the fear of not knowing what would happen with their pregnancy. It was inconceivable for me to imagine living that life.”
Upon hearing that China’s government had painted the draconian policy as a humanitarian success – it claimed to have struck the laws only because they had performed their desired function, not due to the harm they caused – Wang wanted to rewrite the narrative. 

She had observed the gaps that the Chinese state intentionally created in its public’s awareness of the Tiananmen Square demonstration and the Cultural Revolution, and she didn’t want to see young people losing touch with this particular shame. 

“In China, the narrative about the one-child policy was overwhelmingly positive, and China’s influence has been growing outside of the nation,” she says. 

“The narrative has traveled. A lot of Western media has adopted the Chinese authority’s narrative, so hopefully, the film can provide a counter-narrative.”

Nanfu Wang. 

One Child Nation spans the personal and political, alleging that the political doesn’t get much more personal than when it’s dictating what is and isn’t allowed to happen inside your uterus. 

Wang started recording conversations with her parents and moved on to their contemporaries, learning how something as bureaucratic as federal mandates could have such a terribly intimate effect on those affected by them. 

“I asked my mom what it was like for her when she was pregnant with me,” Wang recalls. 

“She started telling me stories that I didn’t know, things I sort of knew but didn’t really remember or register. I processed what this all meant for the first time, and it got me wondering what else I didn’t know. I wanted to explore.”
But exploration, especially the kind that casts the government in a critical light, isn’t always so simply done in China. 

Wang took what might seem like extreme precautions, only to witness first-hand how gravely necessary they were. 

Jialing Zhang, Wang’s co-director and pal from back at NYU, would track her collaborator’s movements in China using GPS signaling while she stayed safe in the states. 

Wang avoided hotels, public transportation, and other situations that could require her to expose her identity. 

She recounts one nail-biter of a story in which an unsettling vibe cut a meeting with a former abortionist short, as both parties wordlessly parted at different, randomly selected train stops. 

“We had created emergency plans, with lawyers on the ground in China who would be willing to help us,” Wang says. 

“Even with that, there were several moments that felt scary.”
She continues: “We have not yet been contacted or confronted by the government. But we have noticed that there’s been censorship already. In China, they have a web site that’s an equivalent to IMDb, with people making their own pages for films in release. Back in January, when our film premiered at Sundance, the page that had been created for One Child Nation was taken down in a matter of days. If you click the title now, it’ll say ‘this page does not exist’. When Sundance announced their awards, China reported on the winners, and we were the only one missing from the list.”

An archival photo of Nanfu Wang and her brother used in One Child Nation. 

Getting away with it is getting away with it, however, and Wang has completed an incisive, edifying look into the darker corners of the national culture. 

One Child Nation represents a bold step toward rewriting posterity, of ensuring that the history books will remember the forced sterilization and cries of lost babies instead of the paintings of smiling three-person family units. 

At the same time, Wang remains unshakably focused on the human element, giving her interview subjects the chance to justify themselves. 

“Eventually, I asked myself what I would do if I was in their position,” Wang confesses. 

“What was scary was that I couldn’t say with 100% confidence that I wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

Wang recognizes that the biological instinct to procreate is hardwired into our DNA, so that even viewers exempt from the one-child policy still feel the resonating sting of its stakes. 

Having a family is a fundamental right, and Wang’s strife mirrors struggles playing out around the globe. 

“One Child Nation really shows what happens when a government takes away the power of choice from women,” she says. 

“Sadly, that’s not only happening in China; in the United States, women’s control over their own bodies is always being restricted. The other side of the one-child policy, of limiting the right to give birth, is limiting access to reproductive healthcare.”
Her work bridges the gap between the east and west, locating a universal common ground in bodily autonomy. 

In creating this connection, Wang hopes to diminish the trans-continental shock she felt at the outset of her own process. 

By making the world a little smaller, she hopes everyone watching her film can experience the same blooming of empathy that made this difficult project worthwhile for her. 

“Every time I make a film in China, it’s almost a process of unlearning what I’ve known in the past. It’s almost like I relearn these things about my history and country first, and then I let the viewers do the same.”
One Child Nation is out now in the US with a UK date to be announced

CHINESE TERROR

Inside China’s Horrifying Child-Killing Policy
The new documentary ‘One Child Nation’ examines China’s draconian, decades-long one-child policy, which resulted in countless abductions, forced abortions, and child deaths.

By Nick Schager

One Child Nation is a stark reminder that America isn’t the only country where a woman’s right to control her body has been under siege. 

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and premiering in select theaters on August 9 courtesy of Amazon, directors Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s heartrending documentary examines their native China’s one-child policy, which functioned as a systematic attack on its female population—and which resulted in collateral damage on an international scale.
In effect from 1979 to 2015, China’s policy placed strict guidelines on reproduction in order to curb population growth, which Wang’s mother proclaims (parroting the Communist Party line) might otherwise have led to famine and potential cannibalism. 

Urban citizens were limited to a single child, while rural inhabitants were, in the mid-1980s, granted the opportunity to have a second kid. 

The law outlined strict punishment for non-compliance: the destruction of homes, forfeiture of property and valuables, and steep fines. 

Those who suffered those penalties, however, got off easy, since local Family Planning Officials—empowered by the Communist Party—also had the authority to abduct women, tie them up, and force them to undergo sterilizations and abortions as late as eight to nine months into their pregnancies.
As the filmmakers detail in a series of stunning conversations with residents of Wang’s hometown (and similar provinces), those procedures entailed murdering infants after they’d been born. 

Artist Peng Wang presents photos of discarded fetuses he found in trash dumps, wrapped in yellow “medical waste” bags, as well as one deceased newborn that he kept in a formaldehyde-filled jar. Even in a doc rife with horror stories, these images are difficult to shake, underlining the unthinkably callous consequences of a strategy that the Chinese government proclaimed would double everyone’s standard of living.

Wang and Zhang’s film was motivated by the birth of the former’s son, as well as her upbringing in China (she emigrated at age 26 to the U.S., where she had her first baby). 

Rather than a straightforward textbook overview of the policy, One Child Nation is also a memory piece. 

Narrating action that’s been partly structured as an investigation into both her—and her family’s—past, Wang relies heavily on recollections about growing up during this propaganda-saturated period, when billboards, TV programs, and theatrical and music performances touted the policy as the means by which the country would forge a glorious path into the future, providing prosperity, unity and happiness for all who obeyed.
Alongside such heartening messages were pervasive spray-painted signs and children’s ditties that threatened nonconformists. 

For a population still reeling from the hardships of prior decades, and trained from birth to accept the Party as infallible and the master of people’s fate, abiding by these rules was difficult but not impossible. 

Anecdotes about women fighting back against forced abortions are occasionally heard in One Child Nation. 

Yet far more prevalent are tales about babies being placed in baskets and left on the side of the road or at markets, to be snatched up by passersby or, as was more often the case, to die of starvation and exposure.
That was going to be the fate of Wang’s brother until he turned out to be a boy—a micro example of the macro sexism that dominates China, where sons are prized for carrying on the family name, and daughters are thought of as expendable secondary figures destined to desert their clans (by marrying into other families). 

In that environment, disposing of female infants was no big deal—not that China stopped there. 

In the early 1990s, the country began allowing foreigners to adopt “orphans,” thereby creating a booming market for Chinese girls. 

What Wang and Zhang reveal is that overseas adoption quickly became a despicable trafficking racket in which Family Planning officials tore second children away from their homes and gave them to orphanages (for a fee), which then sold them to American and European families who ostensibly had no clue that they were perpetuating a kidnapping-for-profit paradigm.
In vignettes with Brian Stuy and Long Lan Stuy, the American parents of three adopted Chinese girls and the founders of Research China—an organization that identifies and reunites kids with their birth parents—One Child Nation lays out the extent to which the one-child policy victimized just about anyone who came into contact with it. 

That includes Wang herself, who expresses guilt over having been a patriotic youngster while one of her aunts was sending her cousin away with traffickers, and another uncle was leaving his daughter in the street to perish. 

For Wang, the film is a personal reckoning with traumatic history—a process also being undertaken by some of her policy-complicit interviewees, including a doctor who claims to have performed between 50,000 and 60,000 abortions and sterilizations, and now atones for her sins by running an infertility clinic.


With speakers habitually explaining their acquiescence to the one-child policy by claiming that they “had no choice,” One Child Nation proves a portrait of powerlessness in the face of an authoritarian government that demanded blind obedience, and didn’t care about the human wreckage caused by its demands. 

Wang and Zhang craft their material as a chronological journey, each step uncovering ever-more-depressing realities, and it culminates with a poignant passage about a young girl who was denied an adolescence with her twin sister after the latter was taken from their home and, shortly thereafter, adopted by Americans.
In this young girl’s countenance, growing sadder as she contemplates the gulf between her and her stateside sibling—whom she’s connected with over social media, albeit in a casual, detached manner—Wang locates a profound sorrow that dovetails with her own feelings about the relatives she lost to the one-child policy. 

One Child Nation’s coda reveals that the country now touts a two-child policy as the key to continued success. 

But in light of all that’s come before it, that notion feels like nonsense aimed at masking a continued top-down desire to regulate every facet of women’s lives.