All About My Sisters: The Legacy of the One Child Policy

The real villllains who made Wang Qiong’s family so miserable are never seen in her debut documentary. That would be the Chinese Communist Party that enacted and harshly enforced the notorious One Child Policy. The policy has been somewhat loosened in recent years, but the trauma it caused Chinese society will take generations to heal. Her family’s pain and guilt are as raw as ever, as Wang intimately documents in All About My Sisters, which opens today in New York.

Wang has two sisters, the elder Wang Li and the younger Zhou Jin. Arguably, the latter is lucky to be alive, but she doesn’t see it that way. Already having two daughters, technically one over the limit, their parents first tried to abort Zhou. When she was born anyway, they then abandoned her to her death, before remorse drove them to reclaim her. Still hoping to eventually have a son, they foisted her off on Wang’s aunt and uncle, whom Zhou assumed were her parents throughout her early childhood.

Incidentally, Wang’s other uncle was the village official primarily tasked with enforcing the One Child policy, through scorched earth techniques. Eventually, Zhou learned the truth of her origins, but she never really considered Wang’s parents to be her parents—and they are all keenly aware of it. Indeed, they immediately fall into their regular pattern of guilt-tripping and disapproving finger-wagging whenever they are together. Often, Wang segues from documenter to documented, as she tries mediate between Zhou and the rest of the family.

All About My Sisters so uncomfortably tragic, it is often nearly unbearable to watch. Yet, it is hard to pass judgment against Wang’s parents for the mistakes they made, because they were caught up in a rotten system, of the CCP’s perverse design. Millions of infant girls were abandoned to their deaths and millions more were aborted for reasons of gender selection. Wang’s parents were some of the few who tried to undo some of the horrors, at least to some extent.

Sundance ’19: One Child Nation

From 1979 to 2015, there was a regime very much like that in The Handmaid’s Tale, but instead of prohibiting abortions, they mandated them—along with involuntary sterilization (of mothers, not fathers). When China’s notorious One Child Policy was in full effect, the Communist government relentlessly intruded into bedrooms and families’ lives. The draconian mandate has been relaxed to a “Two Child Policy,” but the guilt and emotional pain persists for the parents who were forced to comply. Filmmakers Nanfu Wang & Jialing Zhang expose the resulting trauma, both on a national level and within Wang’s own family throughout One Child Nation, which screens during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

As a poor rural family, Wang’s parents were allowed to have a second child, as long as they were at least five years apart, but it was still strenuously discouraged. She quite pointedly remembers the shame she felt in school when it was discovered she had a sibling. However, when Wang had her baby boy, she started to reconsider all the propaganda she had been fed during her youth.

As the New York-based Wang starts to ask questions of her Chinese family, she discovers unknown cousins who were abandoned (ultimately, to their death) and a profound sense of shame amongst nearly all her relatives. Being good documentarians, Wang and Zhang do not stop there. They follow the trail, interviewing the village headmen and family planning apparatchiks who enforced the policy. They also challenge preconceptions of the human traffickers who effectively saved thousands of abandoned infants by “selling” them to orphanages, which supplied the lucrative Western adoption market.

One Child Nation addresses a lot of hot-button issues, including the role of human traffickers in China, the pervasiveness of state propaganda, the overwhelming cultural gender preference for boys (and the inequalities that come with it), and the systematic deception of Chinese orphanages that lied about the background of their charges and often split up twin siblings. Yet, every topic arises organically out of the filmmakers’ investigation. This is a tight, focused film—it just happens to have an awful lot to say.

Wang’s Hooligan Sparrow might just be the gutsiest documentary ever made, so it is a heavy statement to call One Child Nation a worthy follow-up. It might sound like it is old news to the half-informed now that the Communist Party is flogging its Two Child Policy, but she and Zhang make it crystal clear how profoundly the One Child Policy damaged China’s social fabric.

Frankly, this is sometimes a difficult film to watch. The images of cast-aside fetuses and babies will surely break your heart and possibly turn your stomach (wisely, these are incorporated sparingly—just enough to establish the truth). Very highly recommended (especially for Women’s March participants), One Child Nation screens again this afternoon (1/28), Thursday (1/31), and Friday (2/1) in Park City, as part of this year’s Sundance.

One Child: China’s Injustice System on SundanceTV

The Chinese Communist Party has no shortage of criminal laws, but you wouldn’t call it a justice system. The guilty can freely buy their way out of prosecution and the wronged often spend decades fruitlessly petitioning the government for redress. Overturning an unjust capital conviction is not merely difficult, it is downright Kafkaesque. Nonetheless, that is the position a British adoptee finds herself in when she agrees to help her birthmother try to save the brother she never knew in the two-night mini-series One Child (promo here), which premieres on SundanceTV this Friday and Saturday.

Mei Ashley was put up for adoption as an infant, because she was a girl. Happily raised by her provincial middle class parents, Jim and Katherine Ashley, she is a rather well-adjusted, thoroughly English astrophysics student, until she gets a call out of the blue from China. Having traced her from the orphanage, journalist Qianyi implores her to come to China to help save her brother Li Jun. He happened to be at the wrong club on the wrong night, when the entitled son of a Guangzhou oligarch killed a Nigerian trader while on a drug-fueled rage. Ordinarily, his father would simply pay off the victim’s family, but since the Nigerian government demanded a prosecution, Li Jun was framed in his place.

Inconveniently, Ashleylacks the connections Qiangyi hoped for, but she comes to Guangzhou anyway, neglecting to explain the full circumstances of the trip to her protective parents. The first meeting with her birthmother is highly awkward, but when she visits her brother in prison, they share an instant connection. Much to the abject horror of the local British consular officer, Ashley gets involved with a group of dissident attorneys, hoping they can overturn Li Jun’s death sentence. To do so, they will have to convince eleven Chinese witnesses and four Nigerians to recant their testimony.

Screenwriter Guy Hibbert shows a keen understanding of the ruthlessness and arbitrary application of principle in the Party’s courts. There are scenes that directly echo Zhao Liang’s devastating documentary Petition, while the ticking clock generates just as much suspense as any well-executed (an unfortunate choice of words) death-row thriller. Yet frustratingly, One Child comes to a screeching halt whenever it cuts back to Mr. and Mrs. Ashley for another session of their hand-wringing.

Katie Leung plays Mei Ashley as a reasonably down-to-earth fish-out-of-water, without becoming annoyingly helpless. As Qiangyi, Linh Dan Pham is a smart and intriguing screen presence, while Junix Inocian steals scene after scene as Mr. Lin, a dodgy private investigator. Kunjue Li will also make some viewers wish human rights attorney Cheng hua has more screen time. However, Mardy Ma delivers the real punch to the solar plexus as Ashley’s achingly distraught birthmother, a true proletarian repeatedly victimized by the Party’s policies and corruption.

Frankly, when the Ashleys are not whining, One Child is a tight, tense, and topical international legal drama.  Although One Child does not belabor the titular policy, the pain and guilt it causes are reflected with great sensitivity in every one of Ma’s scenes. It is also an opportune reminder how dangerous it is to practice law in an honest and independent manner under the CCP. Just ask Ai Weiwei’s former lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, currently in prison, awaiting prosecution on highly specious charges. One Child gives viewers a sneak peak at the sort of challenges his defense team will face. Highly recommended as a gripping indictment of corruption and a complicated portrait of a post-“One Child Policy” family, One Child parts one and two air this Friday (12/5) and Saturday (12/6) on SundanceTV.

Doc Fortnight ’14: Mothers

Granted, motherhood is an endeavor that always requires courage and conviction, but the level exhibited by Chinese mothers resisting mandated sterilization is something else entirely. Documentarian Xu Huijing captured the local cadres of provincial Ma village going about their shocking business in his very personal expose, Mothers (trailer here), which screens as part of this year’s Documentary Fortnight at MoMA.

As Xu explains in his brief opening narration, he would not be here today if the Communist Party had had its way. He was a second child conceived in the fourth year of the One Child campaign. Like his mother, Rong-rong has already had a second child and paid a hefty fine as a result. She has also paid several subsequent fines for not consenting to mandatory sterilization.

Zhang Qing-mei, Ma’s “director of women’s care,” and thug-turned village deputy Zhang Guo-hong can no longer tolerate her disobedience. They have to meet the quota of fourteen sterilizations handed down from high. The problem is Ma is running out of fertile women. To make matters worse, women who voluntarily request such a procedure do not count towards the quota. Shamelessly, in full view of Xu’s camera, Deputy Zhang will brazenly harass Rong-rong’s grandmother and direct the local school to expel her children to put pressure on the fugitive mother.

The manner in which the Zhangs conduct “family planning” will make most jaws drop, but the real kicker comes when they complain about the village’s dwindling number of marriages and children enrolled in the local school. Hello McFly, that’s what happens when you sterilize everyone. Their village is slowly dying, yet they double-down on the very policies so obviously responsible.

Mothers clocks in just short of seventy minutes, but it is loaded with incendiary moments. Frankly, it brings to mind A Handmaid’s Tale, even including the dystopian religious fervor, courtesy of Zhang Qing-mei, who bizarrely likens Mao Zedong to a saint and a divine emperor. The mind reels.

Recently, the Communist government has promised some flexibility in One Child enforcement, but broad reforms still seem unlikely (just ask the great filmmaker Zhang Yimou). In any event, the policy has already wrought tremendous emotional damage that will reverberate for decades. You can see it clearly in Mothers. A bold work of cinematic journalism and a gripping human interest story, Mothers is highly recommended when it screens Monday (2/24) and Thursday (2/27) with Leslie Tai The Private Life of Fenfen (another worthy selection) during MoMA’s 2014 Doc Fortnight.