Kidnapped children sold to sterile couples or to work as slaves – traffickers go unpunished by authorities
LONDON (RushPRnews) 01/04/09-Through the personal stories of several men, women and children whose lives are impacted by the stolen-child black market in China, the HBO documentary China’s Stolen Children brings viewers face-to-face with a crisis brought on by the controversial one-child policy, implemented in 1979 to slow the country’s explosive population growth. As narrator Ben Kingsley explains, “The Chinese government doesn’t want the outside world to know about the crisis facing China’s children, so this film had to be made entirely undercover. The film crew posed as tourists, moved hotels every three days, and changed SIM cards after every phone call.” Remarkably, the subjects all agreed to appear on-camera, although several interviews are held in darkened cars or out-of-the-way locations to avoid detection. The result is a harrowing look at an illegal but largely uncontrollable practice that has reached epidemic proportions.
The film is a powerful indictment of the unforeseen impact of the world’s largest experiment in social engineering. One man, Detective Zhu, works full-time to locate missing children, with modest success. His latest case involves Chen Jie, a boy kidnapped at 5 while under his grandmother’s care (his heartbroken parents hire Zhu to track him down). Also profiled are Wang Li, a trafficker who once sold his own son; Jong Jang, one of the lucky few stolen children to be rescued; and Way Ling, a mother-to-be who, at 19, is too young to be legally married, and who now faces a dilemma: whether to pay exorbitant fines to keep a baby born without identity or rights, or sell it through a broker like Wang Li. While thousands of heart-wrenching tales like these unfold each year, Zhu laments that authorities seem more concerned with keeping the crisis quiet than tracking down stolen sons and daughters.
Legal abortions are commonplace for Chinese families in the one-child era. Moreover, with ultrasound machines allowing parents to determine gender at 4-5 months, many first-time pregnancies are aborted if the fetus is female. This selective (and illegal) practice is the result of China’s traditional preference for sons; here and in other Asian cultures, brides migrate to husbands’ families, leaving their own parents to fend for themselves in old age. Because of this, parents covet male babies. In the one-child era, as many as 40 million baby girls have been selectively aborted – creating a gender gap that has left millions of men with little hope of finding wives. And while the black market for male children remains robust, there is a growing demand for girls as well.
A 2008 BAFTA Award winner for Best Current Affairs program, China’s Stolen Children marks the directorial debut of Australian-born Jezza Neumann, who also shot and helped edit the film. It was produced by Kate Blewett and Brian Woods, who have co- directed and produced a number of socially conscious projects over the years, including the Emmy® and Peabody Award-winning The Dying Rooms for Cinemax, which (ironically) deals with the neglect of abandoned babies in Chinese orphanages. In 1998, they probed the exploitation of children over four continents in HBO’s Innocents Lost, which won an Emmy® and a Robert F. Kennedy Award for International Television.
Credits: HBO Documentary Films presents A True Vision Production in association with Channel Four. Producers: Kate Blewett & Brian Woods; Filmed and Directed by Jezza Neumann; Editing: Reg Clarke, Jezza Neumann and Brian Woods; Narrator: Ben Kingsley. For Channel Four: Supervising Producer: Mark Roberts; Executive Producer: Kevin Sutcliffe. For HBO: Senior Producer: Nancy Abraham; Executive Producer: Sheila Nevins.