Amazon Documentary: One Child Nation

A 2019 doc on China's "one child" policy which lasted from 1979-2015, and created a huge hole in the normal population distribution, leading to not enough workers in China today and not enough children to take care of their elderly parents.  Consequently in 2015 the policy was changed to a "two child" policy.

But how, exactly, was the one child policy enacted and enforced?

That turns out to be a shocking discovery for this American filmmaker who left China at age 16.  When she returned to her village, she discovers midwives who readily admit to aborting full term babies.  Forced sterilizations.  Babies -- particularly girl babies -- left out in baskets in marketplaces or along the road, where they died more often than got adopted.  A staggering underground "orphanage" system that paid people to round up abandoned babies (mostly girls) which were then shopped to foreign buyers as "orphans."

Everybody hated the policy.  Villagers who refused to undergo voluntary sterilization were forced to undergo mandatory sterilization.  Mothers who had a second baby -- or worse, twins -- had their homes destroyed and their possessions confiscated.  All "for the good of society" which everyone understood -- but the actual enforcement on the personal level was cruel and inhumane.

Was it necessary?  Was it good policy?

Some interviewees state that without the reduction in population growth in the 1980s (because "everybody loves babies") China would have collapsed from starvation, or descended into cannibalism.  And although intensely cruel and tens of millions of babies died or were aborted before birth, the inescapable fact is that the wealth of China today, its world leadership in technology, its high standard of living are all due to the hated one-child policy.  Everyone sacrificed, usually against their will, for the greater good and the generation that followed is today reaping the rewards.

A harrowing and thought-provoking documentary. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," but humanity isn't wired to sacrifice for the greater good.