Review: China's Lost Girls (2004)

This has been sitting in my Netflix queue for awhile, but I actually watched it the other day. It follows American families on their way to China to adopt little girls while examining the effect the one child policy along with the preference for males has had on China's population. This was one of those that caught my attention for no particular reason, but I'm really glad I watched it.

The emotional story is there, of course. Little baby girls abandoned in parks and on streets because their mothers need a boy, then adopted by American families. A mother discusses how her husband said he would send her back to her family if she produced a daughter and how she paid a fine to keep her second child, a girl, after giving her husband a son. The families include a couple that has one adopted Chinese girl already, and they show where she was left and we meet her foster mother. The entire thing is really touching.

More striking to me was the effects that the one child policy has had on China. I've read a lot of articles about how the divorce rate among young Chinese is very high, which is believed to stem from a culture of single children. But this looks at young children, a population of whom is overwhelmingly male. One of the most visible effects of this is that many of the children (male and female) are overweight. An interviewed teenager comments that their parents' generation suffered so much that they want to indulge their children. The word used repeatedly is "spoiled". There are concerns about how violence against women, prostitution, and forced marriages are already rising, and that it will happen more as the disparity continues to rise.

It's a really interesting examination of the policy through the eyes of the adoptive families who benefit from the one of the greatest efforts to curb population in civilized history.Worth watching, absolutely.