To see what China’s one-child policy has done to the most populous country on Earth, you just have to look around you, said acclaimed filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai.
“There is often one child now to six grown-ups. You have the four grandparents and two parents for one child. It’s a bit unbalanced,” the director added with not a little understatement.
So Long, My Son, which won its stars Yong Mei and Wang Jingchun the best actor award at the Berlin film festival earlier this year, plunges audiences into the ocean of pain and heartbreak the policy caused.
The tragic story of a couple whose only son is drowned in an accident is an epic account of how families were bent and buckled during the 36 years of the world’s biggest demographic experiment.
“It made me realize to what extent we as Chinese people lived through something that was completely out of the ordinary and unique in the world,” Wang told AFP just before the film opened in France.
“That is what pushed me to shoot the film,” said the director, who made his name in the West with Beijing Bicycle, a prize-winner at Berlin back in 2001.
“Generally speaking people in China don’t live for themselves, or put themselves forward,” he said.
We don’t control our lives
“We are not in control of our own lives” and everything can be changed by the “smallest directive from on high.”
“People do things for the collective, for the country. That is why every time there is a new policy, even one which has a huge impact on their lives, people tend to bend to it,” Wang stated.
When the one-child policy was first adopted in 1979, “people kind of understood” it was in the country’s economic interests, Wang said, with three-quarters of the population said to support it.
“Of course there were people who fought against it but after 30 years people had accepted it.”
Finally getting rid of it four years ago was “a good thing”, Wang argued, because “it allows people to be more in charge of their own lives, to have more freedom on what kind of family they want to build.”
But by the time it was replaced by a two-child policy in 2016, the single child family “had become anchored” in society, the new norm reinforced by the rise of the middle classes. The “rush to make money” has effectively sustained it.
“Even if people can now have more children, they opt not to have anymore because there is too much economic pressure,” he said.
Wang is one of the leading film-makers of China’s Sixth Generation that includes a wave of talented directors like Zhang Yuan, Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye.