One Child Nation is a 2019 documentary on China’s One-Child Policy that lasted from 1979 to 2015.
10 out of 10 stars. This is truly a groundbreaking, heartwrenching documentary about fields of hundreds of thousands of babies being murdered and left by the roadside or in fields of garbage.
First, let me say this film is graphic. But it needs to be. Just as the first photos of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps were so shocking they were almost unbelievable, so are these. But they are real.
Second, if I could give artist Peng Wang a hug, I would. In the late 1996 he started doing a photography art piece focusing on the huge dumps of garbage around China. And he came across something absolutely shocking–fields of dead babies. His photos are included in this documentary and I’ve included some of them in this review. They are graphic. They are real. It must have taken an enormous amount of strength to photograph them. Thanks to him, this piece of history is documented.
From 1979 to 2015, China instituted the One Child Policy that forbid any couple from having more than one child. To police the citizens, the government appointed village doctors who were mostly women to kidnap women, wrap them in blankets and hog-tie them, transport them to the abortion clinic, induce labor, kill the infant that was born, and sterilize the mother so she couldn’t never get pregnant again. Each village doctor performed between 50,000 and 100,000 of these forced abortions which were actually government-sanctioned murders of infants. Since most of the women of China wanted more children, they hid from their pregnancies from the village doctors. As a result most of the babies that were killed were born living and full-term at 8 to 9 months. It wasn’t until the mothers were 8 to 9 months along that they began to show and were reported by their neighbors. These dead babies were then disposed of all over China for 35 years. On most days during those 35 days, there would be an average of 9 to 12 dead babies on any given street. By the time Peng Wang started photographing garbage dumps and discovered these fields of dead babies there were dozens of them, piles of dead babies reaching hundreds of feet in the air and lasting for miles.
10 out of 10 stars. China converted to the Two Child Policy in 2015. The fields of dead babies still remain and if the Two Child Policy follows the same methods, they’ll grow larger.
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