#nanfu wang

[oldfilmsflicker]

new-to-me #911 - Night Is Not Eternal

[pacingmusings]

Seen in 2021:

Hooligan Sparrow (Nanfu Wang), 2016

[haverwood]

In the Same Breath Nanfu Wang China/USA, 2021 ★★★★ Very heavy, very disheartening, very sickening too.

[365films-of-ninfula]

One Child Nation (2019)

[kellymagovern]

One Child Nation (2019) dir. Nanfu Wang & Jialing Zhang

[kansassire]

One Child Nation, 2019, Zhang Lynn/Nanfu Wang

[forfoxessake]

One Child Nation (2019) – Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang

{119} Movies Seen in 2020 - 4 Stars

I have always known about China's one-child policy. I have always known that they preferred boys over girls, and that girls were either left for dead or adopted overseas. I have always know China was a Communist country with a high population and many issues.

But even knowing all those facts seeing this documentary shocked me. It disturbed me profoundly. It's one thing to known, it's quite another to see many dead babies discarded as trash.

This is not even an overly complex or elaborate documentary, it's just someone going back home with a baby after many years, and seeing firsthand all the things she couldn't see before or didn't understand.

[gettothedancing]

‘One Child Nation’ Condemns Abortion Even If Its Director Thinks Not

Toward the end of the film, Nanfu says she is struck by the irony that she left a country where women were forced to abort for a country where governments restrict abortions. She says One Child and prolife policies only superficially contrast—at root they are both the same violations of bodily autonomy. Yet, Nanfu’s opinion notwithstanding, “One Child Nation’s” central message is not a celebration of autonomy. Rather, it is an exposé of evils of antinatalism.

Suppose that it became faddish among the Chinese people to grow out their fingernails very long, in a throwback to the practices of the nobility in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Suppose further that manual productivity and therefore GDP began to decline as a result, and the Chinese government enacted a policy forcing people to keep fingernails trimmed to one centimeter.

Such a One Centimeter Policy would be an invasion of bodily autonomy and a restriction of choice. But it would not generate the objective crisis of conscience that forced sterilization and abortion did. This is because a fingernail is merely a part of a human body.

While fingernail length is subject to various morally licit determinations, a policy requiring citizens to cut back overgrown nails to one centimeter does not involve any intrinsic evil, as opposed to (say) maiming a properly functioning organ could, since the functioning of the integumentary system is compatible with a range of fingernail lengths.

Suppose further that various states in America enacted modest pro-fingernail policies like cutting public funding to nail-cutting salons or banning trimming past the third centimeter. That would be a case of irony for the Chinese emigrant to America because, at root, pro- and anti-nail policies would both restrict bodily autonomy in morally indifferent matters, which in liberal democracies are more often left to individual choice.

The film provides absolutely no support for the idea that a godlike autonomous will is sufficient to radically confer value on indifferent fetal matter. No evidence is provided that such a choice makes any difference as to what kind of thing and unborn entity is: a genetically and functionally distinct organism of the species homo sapiens.

Even interviewees who defend the policy admit it involved mass killing of human beings. Everyone seems to know that it is scientifically and metaphysically impossible for the will to change what an unborn child is; it can only decide if it continues to be.