New One-Child Documentary Highlights The Evil Of China’s Communist Party By Ben Weingarten for The Federalist
Students of history right up to present-day Venezuela know that economic central planning inevitably results in poverty and misery. A harrowing new documentary on China’s one-child policy shows that this rule holds true for familial central planning as well—but in the case of parents and their children, the devastation extends far beyond the material to the moral and spiritual realm. “One Child Nation,” a Sundance-winningfilm coming to select theaters this summer, asks us to stare this man-caused disaster in the face before the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whitewashes it away.
The film is the work of two Chinese filmmakers, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, who were born in the 1980s near the dawn of the policy. “One Child Nation” is a story of life and loss, brainwashing and corruption, and man’s capacity to engage in unimaginable cruelty at the point of a government gun. It is a story in which human traffickers represent some of the only protagonists, saving the lives of babies otherwise left for dead in marketplaces and on roadsides, lest their parents face the wrath of the authorities.
The putative rationale for the policy, according to news accounts featured in the documentary, is the belief among the ruling CCP that China could not sustain rapid population growth, or people would starve to death. With some exceptions for sparsely populated areas, the CCP threatened families having more than one child with expropriation, property destruction and, where necessary, forced sterilization, abortions, and even the outright murder of newborns.
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Authorities and family planning officials recount dragging pregnant women from their homes, kicking and screaming, to force upon them the procedures to end their babies’ lives. All told, the Chinese government claims the policy “averted” the births of up to 400 million people. This dystopic social engineering is hailed as a success.
The impetus to study the one-child policy came to Wang after the birth of her first child. Realizing her ignorance of the critical social policy during the era in which she was raised, Wang, who received her film education in the United States, returned to her native China and the rural village where she grew up. There, she interviews family members, authorities who had been responsible for enforcing the one-child policy, and one of the “family planning officials” responsible for implementing the orders. These characters paint a soul-crushing picture.
