2019.08.13 一个孩子的国家

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One Child Nation Reveals the Human Costs of an Infamous Chinese Law
The hit Sundance documentary investigates the grim consequences of China’s family-planning policy in empathetic and intimate terms.

By Brandon Yu

Amazon Studios
AUGUST 13, 2019
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Early on in Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s new documentary, One Child Nation, an 84-year-old midwife is asked how many babies she has delivered throughout her career. She brushes the question aside and instead spills out a startling admission. “I really don’t know how many I delivered. What I do know is that I’ve done a total of between 50,000 to 60,000 sterilizations and abortions,” she says.

The scene that follows is astonishing, not only for plainly illustrating the horror and scale of the film’s subject—the far-reaching consequences of China’s one-child policy—but also for the exceptional nature of the confession. “I counted this out of guilt, because I aborted and killed babies,” the midwife, Huaru Yuan, continues. “Many I induced alive and killed. My hands trembled doing it.” Since retiring, Yuan has dedicated her life to treating families struggling with infertility, as a kind of spiritual penance. But retribution will one day come for her, she says, her voice bereft of self-pity.


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Yuan’s words set the tone for the rest of the film, which investigates a huge network of human-rights violations in empathetic and intimate terms. The movie, which took home the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and opened in select theaters on Friday, is framed in part as a personal essay from Wang. Born in China early during its one-child-policy era, the 33-year-old co-director was largely ignorant of its implications until she herself became pregnant and was spurred to examine the law’s history. The realities of the policy are described by various people who were tangled in its web: a former village official tasked with enforcement, an ex–human trafficker who sold infants to orphanages, and members of Wang’s own family who relinquished their newborns.

During the 35 years when it was in effect, from 1980 to 2015, the one-child policy was often framed by the international media as a notable example of a strict government known for emphasizing the country over the individual. Despite moments of scrutiny, coverage of the rule in recent years—in both a heavily censored China and abroad—has mostly consisted of narratives quantifying the policy’s economic and demographic effects, rather than exploring the details of how it was carried out. Many commentators have characterized the law as an austere but reasonable sanction: At the time of the policy’s adoption, China’s government forecast widespread famine as the country’s population neared 1 billion people. As a result of the estimated 400 million births prevented, the standard of living in China has consistently climbed.


But the logic of pragmatism seems absurd, almost irrelevant, in light of the human costs laid out in One Child Nation. “In those days, women were abducted by government officials, tied up and dragged to us like pigs,” Yuan, the midwife, recalls in the documentary. She describes traveling the country performing sterilizations and abortions, most of which were coerced by family-planning officials. Parents who resisted were detained, their homes demolished, Yuan says. The most haunting scene of the film is wordless—a nearly unbearable sequence of images revealing what appear to be full-term fetuses discarded in garbage heaps.

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As One Child Nation continues, the trail of horrors it depicts becomes long and winding. When China opened its doors to international adoption in 1992, many state-run orphanages became sites for human trafficking. Through her interviews, Wang learns about how newborns from families who violated the policy were kidnapped by family-planning officials and sold to orphanages, a detail that was repressed by the government (in the film, Wang speaks with a journalist who was eventually forced to flee to Hong Kong because of his reporting). To this day, many adoptees—and their families—find learning the truth about their origins nearly impossible.

A significant number of the babies sold were abandoned by their families or given to “matchmakers” for adoption. Many of the infants were girls given up by parents who hoped instead for a male child to carry on the family name. In one scene, Wang’s uncle recalls the loss of his newborn daughter, who was left on a meat counter in a market and died two days later when no one took her. Another of Wang’s relatives talks about how she gave away her own daughter to a human trafficker, fearing the child would die if abandoned.

Throughout One Child Nation, Wang never indicts her subjects, nor is her interview technique one of coaxing out truths. “These individuals did not have a choice. [Zhang and I] didn’t want [audiences] to look at them and think they are just evil or backwards or stereotypical,” Wang told me. Indeed, the stories in the film are complicated. Wang’s uncle says his mother demanded that he give his daughter away, threatening to commit suicide or to kill the baby herself before taking her own life. “I thought I could save her life by giving her away. But she ended up dead,” Wang’s uncle says, a sadness welling in his eyes. The moral calculus behind these situations—nurses performing forced abortions, families abandoning newborns, and traffickers (many of whom were saving babies from certain death) selling them—may seem muddied, but One Child Nation seeks to cast the state as the sole and true perpetrator.


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The film argues that its subjects are victims themselves: Their trauma and pain are just as real as the harm they admit to carrying out, and their actions didn’t occur in a vacuum. “It takes a lot of courage, but also a lot of information, for someone to recognize the right and the wrong when the order is coming from above,” Wang told me. Having grown up in China’s Jiangxi province, she said her own initial perspective on the policy was warped by an immense propaganda machine. Songs, media, and “the background of life” were plastered with messages about the one-child rule’s inherent righteousness.

It’s no surprise, then, that members of the generation before Wang—those who witnessed and endured the early stages of the law—display a kind of cognitive dissonance. “All the people who resisted and suffered, if you ask them today—my mom, my grandpa, and my aunt, my uncle—everyone would still say the policy was necessary and eventually positive,” Wang said. Throughout the film, these older folks return to the same sentiment. When asked if she hates the policy, Wang’s aunt, who also expresses longing for the daughter she gave away, says, “What’s to hate? Policy is policy.” An old village official, who recoils at his memories of the law in action, echoes this answer when Wang asks whether its implementation was cruel. “It might be cruel. But policy is policy,” he says. “What could we do?”

When the state strips a population of its agency, there is little room to consider individual ethical imperatives or personal conscience, One Child Nation suggests. What’s left is a stoic refrain—Policy is policy—that might sound to viewers like a way of coping. At the end of these conversations, Wang and Zhang often leave the audience with lengthy shots of their subjects in silence, as if the quiet is a reminder of what they must live with.


For some, the repression that One Child Nation delves into may feel remote. But the matter of individual agency pulls U.S. audiences into the film’s implications. “I’m struck by the irony that I left a country where the government forced women to abort, and I moved to another country where governments restrict abortions,” Wang, who lives in New Jersey, narrates toward the end of the documentary. “On the surface, this seemed like opposites. But both are about taking away women’s control of their own bodies.” The line is a brief and isolated bit of commentary on American politics, but the comparison is striking after what viewers have witnessed.

The story that One Child Nation tells is about the past. In 2015, the country adopted a two-child policy, a change that prompted renewed reflections on the human- and reproductive-rights violations carried out in the law’s name. Outdated, propagandistic slogans on buildings in China have been scrubbed and replaced by signs celebrating the paradigm of the two-child household. But the film—traces of which have been censored online in mainland China, Wang said—insists that what happened shouldn’t be forgotten, especially as familiar tactics of violence and disinformation are replicated in service of other national measures. The movie seeks to be an essential historical document—and a kind of warning to audiences both in China and elsewhere. History can repeat itself, Wang told me, in eerily similar ways and in places we might not expect.

Brandon Yu is a writer based in Oakland, California.




一个孩子的国家》揭示了一项臭名昭著的中国法律所带来的人类代价
这部热门的圣丹斯纪录片以感同身受的方式调查了中国计划生育政策的严峻后果。

作者：布兰登-于

亚马逊工作室
2019年8月13日
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在王男栿和张嘉陵的新纪录片《一个孩子的国家》中，一位84岁的助产士被问及她在整个职业生涯中接生了多少个婴儿。她把这个问题抛在一边，而是说出了一个惊人的事实。"我真的不知道我接生了多少个。我所知道的是，我总共做了5万到6万次绝育和堕胎手术，"她说。

接下来的一幕令人震惊，不仅因为它清楚地说明了影片主题的恐怖和规模--中国独生子女政策的深远影响，而且还因为其忏悔的特殊性质。"助产士Huaru Yuan继续说："我是出于内疚才计算这个数字的，因为我堕胎并杀死了婴儿。"很多人被我活生生地引产，然后被杀死。我的手在颤抖着做这件事。" 自从退休后，袁华茹将她的生命献给了治疗与不孕症斗争的家庭，作为一种精神忏悔。但她说，报应总有一天会降临到她身上，她的声音里没有自怨自艾。


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袁的话为影片的其余部分定下了基调，影片以感同身受和亲密无间的方式调查了一个庞大的侵犯人权的网络。这部电影在圣丹斯电影节上获得了美国评审团大奖。这部电影在今年早些时候的圣丹斯电影节上获得了美国评审团大奖：纪录片，并于周五在选定的影院上映，其部分内容是王小波的个人文章。这位33岁的联合导演早年出生于中国的独生子女政策时代，在很大程度上对其影响一无所知，直到她自己怀孕并被刺激着去研究该法律的历史。这个政策的现实是由不同的人描述的：一个负责执行的前村干部、一个将婴儿卖给孤儿院的前人口贩子，以及王晓明自己的家庭成员放弃了他们的新生儿。

在1980年至2015年的35年里，独生子女政策经常被国际媒体视为一个以强调国家而非个人而闻名的严格政府的一个突出例子。尽管有审查的时候，近年来对该规则的报道--无论是在受到严格审查的中国还是在国外--大多是对该政策的经济和人口影响进行量化的叙述，而不是探讨它是如何实施的细节。许多评论家将该法律描述为一种严格但合理的制裁措施。在该政策通过时，中国政府预测，随着中国人口接近10亿，将出现广泛的饥荒。据估计，由于阻止了4亿人的出生，中国的生活水平一直在上升。


但是，从《一个孩子的国家》中阐述的人类代价来看，实用主义的逻辑似乎是荒谬的，几乎无关紧要。"助产士袁女士在纪录片中回忆说："在那些日子里，妇女被政府官员绑架，被捆绑起来，像猪一样被拖到我们这里。她描述了在全国各地进行绝育和堕胎的情况，其中大部分是由计划生育官员胁迫的。袁说，反抗的父母被拘留，他们的房子被拆毁。影片中最令人不安的一幕是无言的--一连串几乎令人无法忍受的画面，显示出似乎是被丢弃在垃圾堆中的足月胎儿。

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随着《一个孩子的国家》的继续，它所描述的恐怖线索变得漫长而曲折。当中国在1992年向国际收养开放时，许多国营孤儿院成为人口贩卖的场所。通过采访，王晓明了解到违反政策的家庭的新生儿是如何被计划生育官员绑架并卖给孤儿院的，这一细节被政府压制（在影片中，王晓明与一位记者交谈，他最终因报道而被迫逃往香港）。时至今日，许多被收养者和他们的家人发现几乎不可能了解他们的身世真相。

很多被卖掉的婴儿都是被家人遗弃或交给 "媒人 "收养的。许多婴儿是被父母遗弃的女孩，他们希望有一个男孩子来继承家族的姓氏。在一个场景中，王的叔叔回忆起他刚出生的女儿的损失，她被放在市场的一个肉类柜台上，两天后，由于没有人收养她而死亡。王的另一个亲戚谈到她是如何将自己的女儿送给人贩子的，因为她担心孩子被遗弃后会死亡。

在整个《一个孩子的国度》中，王晓明从未指责她的对象，她的采访技巧也不是哄骗真相的。"这些人没有选择。[张和我]不希望[观众]看到他们，认为他们只是邪恶、落后或刻板印象，"王告诉我。的确，影片中的故事很复杂。王的叔叔说，他的母亲要求他把女儿送人，威胁要自杀，或者在自杀前亲手杀死孩子。"我以为把她送人就能救她一命。但她最终还是死了。"王的叔叔说，他的眼睛里涌现出一种悲伤。这些情况背后的道德计算--护士实施强制堕胎，家庭抛弃新生儿，以及人贩子（其中许多人从死亡中拯救婴儿）出售婴儿--可能看起来很模糊，但《一个孩子的国家》试图将国家作为唯一和真正的犯罪者。


1975年大白鲨男士T恤
官方授权的《大白鲨》装备。100%环纺棉预缩针织软T恤。
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这部电影认为，其拍摄对象本身就是受害者。他们的创伤和痛苦与他们承认实施的伤害一样真实，他们的行为并不是在真空中发生的。"需要很大的勇气，但也需要很多信息，当命令来自上面的时候，一个人要认识到正确和错误，"王晓明告诉我。她在中国的江西省长大，她说她自己最初对政策的看法被一个巨大的宣传机器扭曲了。歌曲、媒体和 "生活背景 "都被贴上了关于独生子女规则的内在正义性的信息。

因此，王永庆之前的那一代人--那些见证和忍受法律早期阶段的人--显示出一种认知失调，这并不奇怪。"所有抵制和遭受痛苦的人，如果你今天问他们--我的妈妈、我的爷爷、我的姑姑、我的叔叔--每个人都会说这个政策是必要的，最终是积极的。在整部影片中，这些老人都回到了同样的情绪。当被问及是否讨厌这项政策时，王的姑姑也表达了对她送走的女儿的渴望，她说："有什么好讨厌的？政策就是政策。" 一位老村干部，在回忆起法律实施的过程中感到后怕，当王某问及法律的实施是否残酷时，他也是这样回答。"它可能是残酷的。但政策就是政策，"他说。"我们能做什么？"

一个孩子的国家 "认为，当国家剥夺了一个人口的代理权时，就没有什么空间来考虑个人的道德要求或个人的良知。剩下的是一个僵硬的反驳--政策就是政策--在观众听来可能是一种应对的方式。在这些对话结束时，王和张经常给观众留下他们的对象在沉默中的长镜头，仿佛这种安静是对他们必须生活的提醒。


对于一些人来说，《一个孩子的国度》所探讨的压抑可能感觉很遥远。但个人机构的问题将美国观众拉进了影片的影响中。"住在新泽西州的Wang在纪录片的结尾叙述道："我被一种讽刺所震惊，我离开了一个政府强迫妇女堕胎的国家，而我搬到了另一个政府限制堕胎的国家。"从表面上看，这似乎是对立的。但两者都是关于剥夺妇女对自己身体的控制权"。这句话是对美国政治的简短而孤立的评论，但在观众目睹了这一切之后，这种比较是惊人的。

一个孩子的国家》讲述的故事是关于过去的。2015年，该国通过了二胎政策，这一变化促使人们重新反思以法律名义进行的侵犯人权和生殖权的行为。中国建筑物上过时的宣传口号已被擦掉，取而代之的是庆祝二胎家庭模式的标志。但是这部电影--其痕迹在中国大陆的网上被审查，王说--坚持认为所发生的事情不应该被遗忘，特别是在熟悉的暴力和虚假信息策略被复制到其他国家措施中时。这部电影试图成为一份重要的历史文件，也是对中国和其他地方的观众的一种警告。王晓东告诉我，历史可能会重演，而且是以极其相似的方式在我们可能想不到的地方重演。

Brandon Yu是驻加州奥克兰的一名作家。