BIRTH CONTROL Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s One Child Nation
The personal often sits at the centre of the political. In One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang & Jialing Zhang, 2019), the Sundance US Grand Jury Prize–winning documentary that takes a skewering look at China’s state-introduced one-child policy, this sentiment is manifested in palpably clear-eyed fashion. The film presents a deep-dive investigation of this 36-year-long scheme, cracking open the corrupt networks and top-down ideology that enabled its longevity and its impact on the citizens traumatised during its implementation.
The scale of the nationwide policy was enormous, setting a mandatory limit on the number of children born from 1979 to the end of 2015 – ostensibly having prevented 400 million births. But One Child Nation doesn’t succumb to simplistic, broad-strokes storytelling, instead opting for a more immediate and intimate approach. Initially flicking back and forth between newsreel propaganda footage and present-day interviews, the film eventually settles on capturing events from Wang’s perspective; her own curiosity and reflections about her upbringing become the documentary’s starting point for excavating the past. In an American hospital, Wang holds her firstborn baby boy in her arms, conversing with her mother in Mandarin about the complicated mechanics of the policy: how it was legitimised at the time, and whether, by today’s standards, it could be justified as a means of population control. Their discussion reopens wounds and draws out burning questions that she didn’t know still lived in her consciousness: ‘Becoming a mum felt like I was giving birth
