"Policy is policy."

We saw One Child Nation last night, which is a documentary about China's "one child" policy that it maintained from 1979 to 2015. On the one hand, you can look at a government attempt at strictly controlling human behavior and laugh at the folly of it. On the communist side of the scale, it's akin to the Soviet Five Year Plans, wherein everything would proceed in perfect lockstep order in terms of demand, production, and pricing; all of it under the guise of keeping things in that perfect lockstep on account of heroic patriotism toward the state. In China's case, no one was going to keep people from screwing (cue abstinence proponents...) and no one was going to keep people from wanting more children; especially male children.

On the other hand, you can look at the much darker aspects of said foolish policy, which played out in the form of forced sterilizations, child abduction, and mass corruption by government apparatchiks, who made money off those activities and more. The film delves into all of that, emphasizing the fact that this wasn't just about people not being able to have the families they wanted or the simpler corruption of wealthier people being able to afford the fines for deviating from policy. This was about human trafficking. This was about the abrogation of women's rights to make decisions about their own bodies. This was about people profiting off the sale of other humans.

Director Jialing Zhang and director/narrator Nanfu Wang (above) were both born under the policy and decided to make a film about it when Wang became pregnant and she began to consider the different circumstances surrounding the birth of her child, as opposed to those that surrounded her own. Unlike many documentarians, given the omnipresence of the policy, Wang didn't have to seek out the story or find good candidates to interview. She could instead return to her own village and interview those people that knew her and knew her family and examine how they were directly impacted and how it changed their lives.

One of the most brutal consequences was the intersection of the policy with the longstanding cultural preference for male children in order to maintain the family name. As one of Wang's relatives mentions: "A boy continues the family. A girl just gets absorbed into someone else's family." Prior to the communist takeover, it wasn't uncommon for people that were hoping for a male baby and were disappointed by the arrival of a girl to simply abandon that child and let it die of exposure. This became even more prevalent in rural (and less wealthy) areas in China, the residents of which couldn't afford to pay the fines for having multiple children. Female babies would be placed in the local market, with the common wisdom being that, with more passersby, someone may be willing to pick up the child. If that child were "lucky", she would get picked up and handed off to one of the state-run orphanages for money. If not, she'd end up like millions before her throughout history, while people hurried past and pretended not to notice the corpse being fed upon by maggots.

But profiteering played its role even when parents weren't willing to so callously abandon their children, as government officials would threaten multi-child families with dire consequences unless they handed over their offspring to those officials who could then make a tidy sum by handing off those kids to the orphanages. Wang took a moment to stop in and inquire with a separated twin in her village who was the victim of this kind of corruption. Her sibling is now in the US and has been located by a volunteer organization, attempting to identify the origins of many of those adopted by well-intentioned families in the West.

A running theme of the interviews which the directors then stop to highlight is the passive acceptance among all of the actors and victims of the policy: "What could we do?", they said. Indeed, Wang's mother gives the quote that titles this piece: Government policy was government policy. The law was the law. This was how things were and no one would speak against it. One has flashes of Nuremberg in these comments, where everyone simply accepted the sale of children, the screaming women being put under the knife, the tiny bodies in the streets as market customers hurried past. Everyone knew what was happening, but no one was willing to stand up and point out the ashes in the air. At the very least, many of those she interviewed were willing to acknowledge the shame of what they participated in and allowed to happen.

But another theme stuck out to me in the audience reaction at the Michigan Theater. When they showed footage of the propaganda used to encourage cooperation with the policy, there were many chuckles and audible snorts of contempt. The implication was obvious: "How could people be taken in by these ham-handed dances and songs, cheering on the 'best families have only ONE child!'?" But when you're given the message constantly about what best serves the state's interest, it becomes easier to accept. People laugh at the grotesquerie of glorious sunbeams arcing past the angelic workers in Soviet artwork, too, but they don't stop to think about how they just accept the reciting of the pledge of allegiance or the playing of the national anthem before every sporting event, in addition to the military flyovers, or how that kind of constant pressure to accept the flag and the military and the "perfection" of the American system is every bit the same kind of propaganda as anything the Chinese state tried to instill in its own people. Is the worship of the military and its excursions around the world as damaging as a policy that encourages people to profit from the trafficking of children? It's worth a thought. To Wang's enormous credit, she takes a moment to cite the fact that the denial of basic rights to women in China under the policy is simply the other side of the coin to the same thing happening in the States, of which she is now a resident, over the issue of abortion and birth control. The final note of the film mentioning that Beijing is now using similar propaganda to promote the new policy of restricting families to two children ("Our chief weapon is surprise... fear and surprise... Our TWO weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency... Our THREE weapons are...") is where we begin to shift from tragedy to farce. If you can find it, One Child Nation is definitely worth the look.