One Child Nation, BBC 4, Monday at 9pm
The organised and planned cruelty of humans can be astonishing.
Extremes of the left and right have created mass murder machines. The right brought us the Nazis, a world war and the Holocaust. The left gave us Stalin’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China.
Mao, through the appalling Great Leap Forward and later the Cultural Revolution, is estimated to have killed up to 40 million of his own people through state caused famine and direct killings.
Stalin stopped at somewhere short of 10 million, with three million dead in the gulags, another million killed in the Great Terror to wipe out ‘enemies of the people’, and five million lost in the murder of the Kulaks and a deliberately caused famine in the Ukraine.
While the suffering of China’s ‘one child policy’ is of a different order, it comes from the same ideology, that a central authority can order a better world to its collective will.
China’s birth restrictions were introduced in 1979, three years after the death of Mao, but didn’t completely end until four years ago.
It was state control taken to the extremes, where the Communist Party decided that each family was allowed just one child in the belief that there wouldn’t be enough food to provide for China’s increasing population.
Wang Nanfu’s film graphically explained the hideous consequences of flouting the policy in a totalitarian state.
One ‘family planning official’ in Nanfu’s own village explained how she alone was responsible for up to 60,000 forced abortions or sterilisations in her career.
In some provinces where a woman was found to be pregnant, no matter how close to birth, direct action would be taken.
“Many I induced alive and then killed. It was trembling … but I had no choice, it was government policy.”
She explained how women would be abducted, tied to stretchers and then dragged around “like pigs” for their forced abortion or sterilisation.
Women screamed, fought and “went insane” when they were captured.
Racked with guilt, the now 84-year-old has spent her retirement years helping infertile couples after a monk told her that every additional child she helps bring into the world would atone for 100 she had helped destroy.
In other areas, the policy was to bulldoze the family houses if you had a second child. Or later still couples were allowed to have a second child if the first was female.
Nanfu also talks to an artist who draws foetuses after taking a picture of a rubbish dump and only later noticing distinctive yellow sacks scattered around. When he looked closely they had tiny hands and feet sticking out.
Nevertheless, because of indoctrination and propaganda, many of the older generation still support “collective interests above all else.”
Nanfu’s own mother says unlimited births would have resulted in “cannibalism,” despite her own sister having a baby forcibly removed from her and adopted abroad at four weeks old.
Her aunt’s reaction was not unusual: “What’s to hate? Policy is policy.”
Another consequence of the one child policy was the abandonment of baby girls.
Nanfu’s uncle left his infant daughter in a market in the 1990s in the hope that someone would take her. They didn’t and after two days outside in the heat, without food or water, she died.
State operators realised that this was unnecessary and unwanted baby girls could be profitable.
It’s estimated that 130,000 babies were adopted overseas, including children forcibly taken from their parents.
One Child Nation is a disturbing and important film about the deadly dangers of utopian ideology. It is available on the iPlayer.
