One Child

January 1, 2016

This timely investigative report, researched and written (excepting a minor update, not seen at time of review) before the recent dismantling of China's infamous one-child policy, clearly predicts its demise. Malaysian-born Chinese journalist Fong writes a compassionate account of a chilling social experiment of staggering impact. The Chinese Communist Party's quota on children was implemented to address poverty and enable economic growth, but its repercussions are profound. The 35-year practice has brought a severe, chronic baby shortage to the world's most populous country, along with a shortage of women, a great and growing disproportion of elderly people, and generations of children raised in a quirky social environment, subject to both great coddling and scarily lofty expectations. Coerced abortions and sterilizations, situations of baby trafficking, and other horrors have been perpetrated on a numbingly large scale, but Fong illumines individual grief and dignity. In her travels across urban and rural China, she meets a matchmaker, a barefoot doctor, an abandoned husband, a former family planning official responsible for hundreds of forced abortions, a crusader against corruption in China's adoption system, and numerous parents, grandparents, and children. VERDICT The vast ironies and evils of the one-child policy are hard to comprehend, but Fong's human-scale portrayal of individual stories, weaving in her own fraught journey toward motherhood as well, makes for an approachable and edifying treatment.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

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