Programme Index

Discover 11,128,835 listings and 278,128 playable programmes from the BBC

Storyville

One Child Nation

Duration: 1 hour, 22 minutes

First broadcast: on BBC FourLatest broadcast: on BBC Four HD

Thirty-five years of relentless propaganda and harsh brutal punishments left the Chinese people living in fear of their country's one-child policy. That rule, which was abandoned in 2015, has left the country with an ageing population and tens of millions more men than women.

The documentary's directors, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, unmask the tightly held, hidden secrets of how the Chinese government enforced its one-child policy and explores its devastating effect. Wang, a new mother now living in the US, travels back to the rural village she was born in and speaks to midwives, village leaders and journalists, revealing chilling stories of forced abortions, sterilisation, abandoned babies and state-sponsored kidnappings. Her own family share the grim choices they were forced to make in order to avoid harsh punishments from the state.

With new information on tens of thousands of abandoned and kidnapped children (nearly all of them infant girls), One Child Nation breaks open decades of silence on a vast, unprecedented social experiment that shaped - and destroyed - countless lives. Show less

Contributors

About this data

This data is drawn from the data stream that informs BBC's iPlayer and Sounds. The information shows what was scheduled to be broadcast, meaning it was/is subject to change and may not be accurate. More