"One Nation Child" when China killed its children

If you are a Chinese citizen, you probably won't be able to tell a story about your own past without going against your country's policies. In China, where the most personal decisions are governed by the country's general laws, the public is inevitably mixed, according to Chinese director Nanfu Wang, who became pregnant.

Thousands of miles from her country, in the United States of America, where she now lives, carrying her head has brought memories of her own past. The pregnancy experience in her was not like the experience of pregnancy anywhere else in the world. In China, from 1980 to 2015, the state implemented a one-child policy that criminalizes having more than one child per spouse.

Under this policy, the news of pregnancy was received in her small town with a mixture of joy and anxiety. Parents and neighbors rejoice at the idea of ​​another spirit coming to life, but they wholeheartedly call for that spirit to come in the body of a male rather than a female. If this is the second pregnancy in the family, panic alone prevails. Only one of the two will happen; either the woman will be aborted forcibly, or she will give birth and her baby will be killed immediately after birth. "It was after my pregnancy that I began to think about the one-child policy and all those women who had lost the minimum safety for their lives and those of their children," she says. "With safety, they lost all certainty about the future of their pregnancy and their babies if they were born."

In order to convince the people of its anti-human policy, it started from a speech that starts and ends with fictional scenarios. The increase is intact. On the other hand, she was thrown into her imagination through the giant propaganda machine she runs into rosy images of a well-off life that everyone would enjoy if everyone hears, obeys and gives birth to one child as ordered by the authority.

But the propaganda with its wild scenarios turned a blind eye to reality, and did not even give us a glimpse of the lives of flesh and blood people who lived under the one-child policy, leaving the question of what actually happened hanging in the air unanswered. Director Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang set out in their film One Child Nation, and through a combination of interviews, photos and self-interviews, offset a horrific reality.

One Child Policy: From forced abortion to child trafficking

"One Nation of the Child" was not Nanfang Wang's first directorial experience; in 2016, she filmed her "Howling Sparrow," a state blackout that raped a group of officials for underage girls. Due to the political tone of the film, Wang was pursued by the police and some of her friends and family members were arrested for questioning. [1] That experience strongly influenced the way Wang decided to direct her film, "One Nation Child," so that to preserve her personal safety and the safety of those around her, she decided to start a journey to investigate the effects of the one-child policy from her nearby circles, and conduct her dialogues only at home. Away from public places. [2]

This decision, which stems primarily from practical considerations, has had a difference in the content and style of the film. He narrowed Wang's initial research circle and moved it first to personal spaces, and the houses where the conversations were conducted added a degree of intimacy and honesty to the conversation. Horan Yuan, the midwife of the village that gave birth to all her women, was overwhelmed when Nanfu asked how many children she had brought to life, replying to her by another number: “I don't remember how many children I was born, what I know is that I had 50,000 to 60,000. Abortion and sterilization. After a moment of heavy silence, she continued: “My guilt prompted me to count them. I was killing children, many of whom were alive and I killed them. My hands were trembling and I was doing this.” None of the women aborted or sterilized by Yuan wanted to do so, but "state officials at the time kidnapped and handcuffed the women and dragged us like cattle."

In her search for salvation from guilt, Yuan tended to work in the treatment of infertility, so that life blows to other children instead of those she killed. This did not save her from her sense of the gravity of what she did. She knows that the punishment of heaven will one day fall on her. But her feelings of remorse and guilt are not comparable to that of Shihao Wang, the uncle of Nanfu who let his first child die so he could try to have a male.

In the darkness of the night, Shihao left his baby to his mother and sister, Nanfu's mother, to take her in a small basket to a distant village market, and at the butcher's shop he left her. For two days the child remained there, no one nostalgia for her, no one took her home to feed her and shelter her, no one approached her except the insects that devoured her face, and on the third day, her meager body lost the ability to continue life and died. Shihao looks at Nanfu with eyes floating over rivers of tears that don't flow and tries to justify: “My mother threatened me that she would strangle the girl to death and then kill herself if I didn't leave her.”

Nanfu's cousin was more fortunate than her cousin. She was born after 1992, when China opened its doors to international adoption and emerged from a trade that would open the door to many: trade in children. In this trade, fathers gave their children to smugglers, who in turn sold children to orphans.

Of course, the state did not miss out on profiting from that trade. Instead of aborting the women, family planning officials waited for the woman to give birth and then kidnap her baby and then put him in an orphanage that he would sell to a foreign family for $ 10,000. Kidnapping and selling did not stop infants. Many poor families had the same fate. Thus, the journey of investigating the real effects of the one-child policy of Nanfu from the spaces of parents and relatives, to the detection of deep corruption circles at the state level.

Throughout this investigative journey, all those interviewed by Nanfu share the same desire to reveal. As film director Jialing Zhang said in her interview with us at Maidan , it was the first time that some could talk about what happened. After the talk is over, Nanfu's camera is still hanging on the faces, watching the confused smiles of some as they turn into a sad silence, and depicting the eyes that fear the confrontation as they look at a distant hammer. In this silence and in those looks, feelings are immune to the words Vtlot silence, and there remains one question poses itself implicit in all of this: Who is responsible for so much pain?

Blood is repudiated by everyone

In China, every person has been going through a long process of self-discipline since his birth, his decisions are not up to him, and his personal interest must be the last thing to think about, only the interest of the group above everything else, the group or the state or whatever the big entity to which he belongs Only the government has the right to determine moral standards, right and wrong.When the government considers that infant killing, fetal abortion and forced sterilization of women are in the public interest, all these acts in the public consciousness turn out to be satisfactory despite their ugly and incompatible with the most basic standards of humanity. [3] [4]

“In China, there is not much awareness of personal rights, especially in older generations. Everyone sees himself as part of something bigger than him, part of a family, school or institution,” said Jialing Zhang. This gives space for the violation of private life, which is what happened in the one-child policy. We are told that this policy will be applied for the common good and economic development, so everyone will have to sacrifice their family or want to have many children and only one child. ” It did not stop there, but as we saw in the film, embryos were killed because the masses believed that economic reform would only take place on their fragile bodies.

Pang Wang himself, one of the few who opposed the one-child policy at its height, said in a Nanfu interview with the film: "All these crimes are due to the indoctrination of all doctrines for many years." The public above all "or" the party does not defeat ", this indoctrination destroys the humanity and conscience of the individual, thinking: as long as this is the party, it must be true.

Thus, the state becomes the fundamental determinant of the moral compass of the people, and the direction to which it refers is overflowing with the masses. This explains the views of many of the older generations whom Nanfu spoke to in the documentary, who, despite their suffering as a result of this policy, continued to see it as beneficial to the country. It is, of course, not enough for the State to enact a law to infiltrate into public consciousness, to make its orientations known to all, and to transform them from solid orders into a general culture, which propagates its propaganda machine to the masses. "Propaganda in China is not as superficial or naive as some might think, on the contrary, it is very sophisticated and complex," she says. "The best artists in all fields are working on it. Her ideas don't surprise you crudely. The movies and series you watch. In the end, your way of thinking changes without even realizing it. "

"One Nation Child" .. Memory struggle against oblivion

Not only does the state control individuals, their conscience and the public's awareness of the masses, but their control extends even more seriously to history itself. They erased it completely, becoming bloody chapters in the past as if they were not.

"In China, the authoritarian government retells history according to its own narrative, changing many facts to match the official version of events. As a result, many younger generations in China know nothing about the Tianmen Square protests," Nanfu said in an interview. "All these memories are lost or erased, because those who lived in them either died, were arrested or exiled." “The one-child policy is a modern one. It only ended in 2015, but we are already seeing how the government is trying to erase its effects, and in five years the effects of the propaganda we have documented in the“ one-child nation ”are likely to be wiped out. In ten years, people will remember about the one-child policy only what the government says about it. [5]

Therefore, despite the termination of power, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang decided to create a "one-nation nation" for the same reason that plastic artist Ping Wang decided to keep the embryos he found in the landfills, photographed and painted, in order to fight oblivion. Each of them tries in its own way to use its tools to leave a document for future generations of an erased past from now. Its mistakes. They are fighting with the power of a special conflict, a conflict that they know they are losing in the present, but they continue and bet on the future, documenting yesterday so as not to resurrect tomorrow, it is a conflict that Milan Kundera brilliantly summed up when he wrote: "Memory struggle against oblivion. [6]