Hi everyone!
Welcome back for another week of reviews! We’re continuing our Streaming Sundays series with a review of the Amazon Original documentary, ONE CHILD NATION, which was released in theaters earlier this year, and is now exclusively available on Amazon Prime. It’s a strong contender for the award season and offers us a rare opportunity to examine the results of a grand social experiment. We’ll be back next week with a review of the second Scorsese film from Netflix this year, THE IRISHMAN, another great Oscar contender, but one I waited to watch after it was available at home. Because three and a half hours.
It’s Sunday, so that also means there’s another Patreon exclusive episode available at patreon.com/onemoviepunch. This week, I decided to re-cut and re-master a series of audio essays and dramas from last year, collectively entitled “Stories from the Fire”. It was one way that helped us process our wildfire evacuation last year, the second time for our family since moving to California. While you’re over there, please consider contributing monthly at any level. All contributions go to help paying our expenses and to help us grow with our audience.
Before the review, we’ll have a promo from our good friends at the Top 5 For Fighting podcast. Every week, Greg and Mike cover a host of topics, and when they disagree, you know they’re going to fight about it. Don’t miss their guest review here at One Movie Punch for ALIENS (Episode #604), where we tried to figure out what was going on, with mixed results. You can catch their podcast on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @Top5ForFighting.
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Here we go!
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Today’s movie is ONE CHILD NATION, the Amazon Studios documentary directed by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang. The documentary follows Nanfu Wang as she examines the history and effect of China’s one child policy after becoming a first-time mother herself. The film examines the reasons, benefits, drawbacks, horrors, and lasting effects of this grand social experiment.
No spoilers.
However, content warnings for violence against women and children, including some very difficult stories.
ONE CHILD NATION deals specifically with the implementation, enforcement, abolishment, and lasting effects of the one child policy in China, which lasted from 1979 through 2015. The policy was enacted after the previous and now current two child policy, with the aim at slowing population growth to prevent starvation and to raise overall standards of living across the country. 36 years later, widespread famine has been avoided and the overall standard of living has been raised across the country, but many sociological experts and political pundits question the link between China’s birth rate policies and the results later.
ONE CHILD NATION also seeks to question this correlation, from the perspective of Nanfu Wang, who was a second child born under the one child policy, exempted under one of the many loopholes that allowed roughly half of all families to have a second child. Nanfu Wang has since relocated to the United States, but returns to China to examine this policy from a number of different perspectives, and from her own perspective of being a mother to her first child. As such, ONE CHILD NATION is as much about Nanfu Wang discovering her own history and culture as much as it is about the policy itself, which is part of the reason ONE CHILD NATION is so effective as a documentary.
You can’t talk about the one child policy without talking about propaganda. My initial understanding of China’s one child policy was shaped largely by propaganda, in the form of mainstream media reports focused on forced abortions and sterilizations, and babies left in the markets to die, all shocking events that Nanfu Wang verifies and validates within her documentary. And it’s true, the government did send public health crews to communities for sterilizations and abortions, but the number of forced procedures is hard to calculate outside of anecdotal evidence from two different workers Nanfu Wang interviews, particularly when the policy itself had high support among the population. In fact, both workers look back on their efforts with very different points of view.
ONE CHILD NATION helps us understand the level of social acceptance of the policy, even from Nanfu Wang’s own family and community, citing the reasons for the policy almost universally. Stories of babies left in markets to die are definitely horrific, but only possible if entire communities walk past, not much different from folks who walk past the homeless in the United States, a situation China was trying to avoid. Or for that matter, the shocking number of “dumpster babies” that happened in the United States by women without access to safe abortion. But attempting to avoid one problem through social policy also lead to a host of other social problems, like sex-selective abortion, birth tourism, and hidden children living on the margins. Each of these negative effects is covered well by Nanfu Wang, with some surprising stories along the way, including one health worker’s self-guided attempt at social redemption.
I think the hardest thing for me to reconcile with the one child policy is its basis on some questionable science. Thomas Robert Malthus drove this fear of overpopulation in his 1798 work, “An Essay on the Principle of Population”, which basically says populations grow exponentially while food grows linearly, and when population outgrows food, we arrive at famine. It’s a simple principle that’s easy to communicate, but much more complex to understand. Malthus’ views require modification, given the rise of contraceptive practices, agricultural advancements in food production and distribution, and roughly two hundred years of data challenging that theory. I have no doubt that there is a connection between population and food consumption, but I also know there are other social and political factors that affect that relationship.
My one criticism of ONE CHILD NATION is that it doesn’t address this particular underlying idea, at least not directly. Malthusian ideas of overpopulation are also alive and well within so-called Western countries, often argued from positions of extreme privilege at best, and from positions of extreme racism at worst. Most of the concerns with overpopulation today have little to do with food and famine, and more to do with environmental degradation and economic hardship. Each person adds to the carbon footprint of the world through consumption, even if there are technologies to make consumption much cleaner and more efficient. Each person adds to the economic hardship for a family, especially in urban communities divorced from the ability to grow food, a key advantage of large, rural families.
I want to close with a generational look at a one child policy. After I saw this film, I spent the next couple of days sorting through it, sometimes in the car with my family on the way to school. My daughter, whose generation faces environmental devastation and perhaps the breakdown of economic systems, supports the idea of a one child policy, from a standpoint of long-term practical survival. ONE CHILD NATION is focused almost exclusively on whether anyone has the right to as many children as they want, which was also the focus of the propaganda in the United States about the policy. But what the film lacks is a focus on the responsibility that comes with bringing children into the world, which is also ignored in the debates about abortion in the United States. It’s also why I support a one-child policy, even if both my daughter and I are vehemently against the way it was implemented in China, while also having no social or moral judgment about multi-child families elsewhere. It’s a complicated issue, more complicated than the initial reasoning for a one child policy in China, but necessary for surviving on a planet with limited resources.
ONE CHILD NATION is a personal and social journey into the history and effects of China’s one child policy. Nanfu Wang explores her own upbringing under the policy and her new perspectives as a recent mother, focused mostly on the more horrific effects of the policy, but without diving too deeply into the underlying reasons for the policy. Documentary fans, or anyone curious about the effects of China’s one child policy, should definitely check out this film, but please heed all the content warnings.
Rotten Tomatoes: 99% (CERTIFIED FRESH)
Metacritic: 85 (MUST SEE)
One Movie Punch: 8.7/10
ONE CHILD NATION (2019) is rated R and is currently playing on Amazon Prime.
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