While she starts out investigating the policy of forcibly restricting family size, this soon spawns traumatic recollections from her own family’s recent past. These stories, in turn, unleash a dizzying number of revelations from journalists, officials, parents, and activists about the widespread enforcement of sterilisation, child abandonment, and state-sponsored kidnappings.

With chilling clarity, Wang’s new documentary reveals how relentless propaganda brainwashed and terrorised countless Chinese citizens into committing unspeakable crimes against fellow villagers and family members. Through interviews with both victims and instigators, along with revelatory data regarding the sheer number of abandoned children (mostly infant girls), One Child Nation breaks open decades of silence on a vast, unprecedented social experiment that shaped—and destroyed—countless lives.