Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I was born in China in 1985.

A time when China's population crisis was making headlines

around the world.

There are more than a billion Chinese.

That one, big statistic, more than anything else,

is at the heart of that country's huge economic problems.

By the middle of the next century, if China's families have

an average of three children, there will be starvation.

However, with one child per family, the standard of living doubles.

So now there's a desperate effort under way to control the population.

To limit families to just one child.

Chinese officials are using fines, economic incentives and propaganda.

Billboards like this one are up all over the country.

They have a long way to go.

Six years before I was born, China launched its one-child policy.

I grew up seeing reminders of the policy everywhere.

They were painted on the walls, printed on playing cards...

..calendars,

matches,

snack boxes,

posters,

all of them blended into the background of life in China.

I never thought much about what it meant for me, or anyone,

until I learned that I was going to be a mum.

HEARTBEAT

Our baby was born seven weeks early.

I was not prepared.

Right after he was born, the nurses took him away from me.

The separation and fear for his health was traumatic.

12 days later, I was finally able to take him home and hold him.

Becoming a mother felt like giving birth to my memories.

A rush of images from my early life came back to me.

I thought of my own parents and the name they gave me.

They chose the name Nanfu before I was born.

Nan means man, and Fu means pillar.

They hoped for a boy who would grow up to be the pillar of the family.

When I was born a girl, they named me Nanfu anyway,

hoping that I would grow up strong, like a man.

I remember the plaques the government hung on all

the front doors in my village every year,

signifying each family's commitment to the Communist Party's values.

Each plaque was decorated with stars,

indicating how well a family performed.

Including a star for whether the family had no more than one child.

Our family always missed that star.

I remembered being sent to middle school in the city,

because our village only had an elementary school.

Most of the city kids came from one child families.

Whenever someone found out that I had a brother, I felt embarrassed,

as if our family had done something wrong by having a second child.

FIRECRACKERS EXPLODING

Bringing him back to my village for the first time

showed me how traumatic it was just to become a parent in China.

Visiting the village kindergarten where my mum teaches,

I remembered that we had textbooks about the one-child policy

since we were kids.

I used to think that I knew everything there was to know

about the one-child policy.

But now, I wondered if the thoughts I had were really my own,

or if they were simply learned?

I asked my neighbour to take me to see the former head of my village,

who was in charge when the one-child policy began.

He was one of the people my grandpa argued with

about sterilising my mum.

NANFU LAUGHS

CYMBALS CLASH

SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Men like Liu Xianwen worked all over China to promote

the one-child policy.

Since before I could even speak,

I was surrounded by messages praising the policy.

There was TV...

..theatrical performances...

..and even children's songs.

And just like everyone else, I joined in the choir.

This was me performing propaganda songs.

We all had the same make-up, the same dresses and the same mentality.

As I was leaving, I asked my neighbour, who went with me,

if he could take me to meet some women

who were affected by the policy.

MUSIC PLAYS

That night, I decided it was best to speak to someone I know.

So I went to see the local midwife, who delivered all the babies

in the village, including myself.

She was happy to see me.

She showed me photos of my grandma,

who used to be in the same propaganda band with her.

On the wall, there was a long list of infertility disorders.

Next to it were flags people sent to thank her

for helping them have babies.

NANFU GASPS

My village is one of many thousands across the country...

..and every village had midwives and family planning workers.

Each year, the government would punish or reward them

depending on how many babies were born in their territory.

INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

She was standing right behind Wen Jiabao,

the country's premier at the time.

Received like a national hero,

Jiang's story was told again and again by the state TV.

"We are fighting a population war" was a common slogan

used by the government during the one-child policy.

China started a war against population growth,

but it became a real war against its own people.

My grandpa is 83.

He lived through wars, famines and revolutions.

My own parents weren't much better off.

My father died of a brain haemorrhage when he was 33...

..and his short life was more about survival than finding fulfilment.

None of my family questioned the policy

or how it was implemented.

The government used music and TV to show people

a better life that they could imagine themselves living,

as long as they followed the rules.

I wish I could say something to my mum.

Like most people in China, she believes the policy

was necessary for China's survival.

But I wondered if people like her really thought

it was worth the sacrifices each family made.

Coming back here, I realised that I don't even have

a photo of my grandpa and me as he only ever took photos

with his two grandsons.

GATE SQUEAKS

When my mum was born, her parents named her Zaodi,

which means "bring me a younger brother soon".

CHATTER

She later helped her younger brother abandon his daughter in the market

so he could try again for a son.

I wish I could say that my uncle was the only one in our family

who felt he had to abandon a child.

The large number of abandoned babies created

opportunities for human traffickers all over China.

In my village, we called them matchmakers,

because they took unwanted babies and found homes for them.

Talking with my aunt about matchmakers triggered a memory

I had of a national news story from a decade ago,

where an entire family was convicted of selling babies to orphanages.

At the time, it seemed cruel and evil that someone could

sell babies like that, but now I wondered if the government's version

of their crime was true at all.

I tracked down the ex-trafficker Duan Yueneng in Shenzhen.

Duan spent four years in prison but now works as a security guard.

The day I was there, he was on his break,

scavenging furniture from a company that was going out of business.

The number 10,000 sounded high to me, but I had no way to verify it.

I asked him to show me exactly how he did it.

ANNOUNCEMENT OVER TANNOY

He used to take a train almost every day between Guangdong province,

where he would find babies, and Hunan province,

where he would sell the babies to the orphanages.

1992 was the year that China began

its international adoption programme,

allowing foreigners to adopt Chinese orphans.

But demand from orphanages grew so fast

that Duan's family had to find help.

YUENENG DUAN:

MEILIN DUAN:

YUENENG DUAN:

Until my aunt told me this story about her abandoned daughter,

I never knew that I had a cousin.

Now I was filled with questions. Where could she be?

And where are the children Duan sold to orphanages?

One family in America has been trying to answer these questions

for 18 years.

There are entries showing that these kids either came from

the Duan family, from Wuchuan or from, you know,

outside family planning, and that's just...

It's astounding that of the hundreds of kids that this orphanage

adopted internationally, less than a handful of them

actually seem to have been legitimately found.

The rest were brought in by people. I know...

Long Lan and her husband Brian co-founded Research China,

a paid service that tries to connect adopted children

with their birth families in China.

Their search started with their own children.

Why adopting from China was so popular

among international families?

The main thing is that the China programme from the beginning

was extremely predictable.

You knew, practically down to the penny, how much money you were

going to need to bring to China, you knew where you were going to be

on every day, you knew what forms you were going to sign.

Everything was 100% orchestrated.

How much was the average total cost to adopt from China?

Generally between, say, $10,000 at the very least

to $20,000, $25,000.

So we did research, submitted our dossier

and adopted Meikina in 1998, April 4th.

And it was, in every sense of the word, a life-changing experience.

And we said, "Boy, we need to go on that ride again!"

Now, look at the camera! One... Come on!

One, two, three...

For most of Meikina's life,

they thought they knew exactly how she came to them.

I'd actually started researching in China in about 2000

and interviewed this finder.

And the detail and the experience that she painted for me

struck me as completely legitimate.

For ten years, I was convinced that that story was accurate.

And then, finally, Long said, "You know, maybe we should go back

"and I should meet this finder and talk to her myself."

So she went back, found the woman I had interviewed,

and the woman kind of got a little bit nervous and she said,

"Have you spoken to the orphanage?

"I actually had nothing to do with your daughter's finding.

"Our names were just put on the paperwork for the adoption.

"We didn't find your daughter."

And when Long called me and told me that, I was like,

"Wow, that is amazing,"

because now I recognised that the orphanage had prepped

the finder before I'd even got there in 2000 and said,

you, know, "Give them a good story,

"make something up, just make them feel good."

And that's what happens in the majority of cases

when Western families go to China,

and they give the same story over and over and over again.

I can't find them...

Talking with Long Lan, I realised

I was following the path she had already discovered.

She had reached out to Duan and his family many years before I did.

She has a copy of all the records from Duan's trial.

She also interviewed Duan's mum, who passed away several years ago.

She was the first person in the family

who sold babies to orphanages.

And so the orphanage will hire...

Not officially hire, but will create a recruiting network of doctors,

midwives, foster families, whatever,

you know, anybody that can locate

and bring children into the orphanage.

When those children come into the orphanage,

then of course the orphanage then needs to fabricate their

information, say, "Oh, yeah, let's pick the third middle school today."

You know? And they'll tell the adoptive family,

"Your child was found at the third middle school,"

when, in fact, they were never actually found at all.

So what the orphanages will do is they'll make an agreement

with their local police station and say, "OK, we're going to bring

"over these finding reports, and we need you to stamp it and sign it,

"and we'll pay you 50 yuan or whatever for each one that we do."

The finding ads are published in newspapers that nobody ever reads,

you know? Basically, they're just a photo with some information about

the child - their gender, their health status,

where they were supposedly found, how old, their birth date and so on.

And then, at the bottom of the finding ad, it says,

"The birth family has 60 days to retrieve the child

"or the child will be submitted for adoption."

Looking at the finding ads in the newspapers,

I wondered about each baby's story.

If they weren't orphans,

were they given to matchmakers like my own cousin?

I found many sets of twins.

Most of them probably were separated...

..and they don't even know that they have a twin somewhere in the world.

When you take that information from all the children

and you collate it together, you can begin to see patterns.

This is the location that the orphanage told

the adoptive families where their child was found.

And so you can see orphanage gate, civil affairs,

orphanage, civil affairs, orphanage...

It's clear that, you know, they're making up the information, because

they're using the same locations over and over and over again.

It used to be that family planning would come in

if you had an over-quota child and they'd bash down your house

or they'd take a pig or, you know, do something.

Once the orphanage joined the international adoption programme,

that changed.

And so now they saw kind of a win-win situation going,

where the family planning would go in and take the child

that wasn't registered, turn it in to the orphanage,

the orphanage would reward the family planning officials

and then adopt that child internationally.

I lived in China until I was 26,

but I'd never heard that government officials were confiscating babies

during the one-child policy.

I was shocked when Brian said the story was uncovered years ago

when I was still living in China.

This was me back then.

Throughout my life, I was taught to believe the love of my country

was equal to love of the government and the party.

Now, when I look back at this time in my life,

I'm amazed at my ignorance.

The Chinese government exerted a lot of influence to suppress the story,

threatened the newspaper, threatened the reporter...

The reporter ended up having to leave China, you know,

because of that kind of stuff.

I e-mailed the journalist, who is in exile in Hong Kong,

and asked him if he could meet me.

He agreed, but only if we meet in a hotel,

because he didn't want to reveal his address.

Pang had extensive evidence.

He and a colleague had taken cameras to Hunan province in 2010.

The government had targeted families in Longhui county,

one of the poorest places in all of China.

DOGS BARK

Growing up, I saw signs like this everywhere.

Then he showed me footage of Shuangjie Zeng.

He told me that Zeng had a twin sister

who was taken away from the family.

In Hong Kong, Pang wrote a book titled The Orphans Of Shao.

He used the twin girl's picture on the cover.

It couldn't be published in China.

An English version was published

with the help of a US non-profit organisation.

Since Pang's report was published in 2011,

the situation of the families in Shaoyang is basically the same.

There has been no accountability for the people responsible.

DOG BARKS

I told Lan the story about my aunt and my missing cousin.

She said she might be able to help.

After meeting with my aunt, Lan kept travelling around China,

gathering DNA from families to test for matches with children abroad.

One thing that struck me

was that everyone we spoke to said the same things about the policy.

As I heard the answer again and again - "I had no choice" -

I realised that you could ask anyone in any part of China

about how the one-child policy affected them,

and all of them would say the same thing.

I was so angry, even with my own family,

that there wasn't more to be said or done.

There was such a shared sense of helplessness.

It reminded me when every major life decision is made for you,

for all your life, it's hard to feel responsible for the consequences.

Long Lan and Brian started testing the DNA samples

she brought back from China.

They didn't find my cousin, but they did discover a match.

A girl in the United States who is a DNA match to a family in China.

This is the list of all the DNA that we've got.

All of it comes into GEDmatch Genesis database.

So that, that's a free database that allows us

then to compare our DNA with all the DNA in the database.

I was going through, Lan was doing some work

and I was just going through, and I go through

each of the matches to see if there was any that were close matches.

And we got to one of the birth families, and it matched to a girl.

Of course I immediately reached out to the adoptee,

sent her an e-mail and let her know that

if she wanted more information, she could write us.

And then she wrote back and said, "Thank you for reaching out to me.

"At this moment I do not want information

"regarding my birth family.

"I'm not really interested at this time."

Lan told me that it's actually very common that adoptees

do not want to contact their birth families.

This also included the children she located from Hunan province

who were kidnapped and sent to orphanages by the government.

After leaving Utah, I decided to take another trip to China

with my son.

I wanted to follow up with the twin girl whose sister is in America.

I brought the book written by the journalist in Hong Kong.

While there was no DNA match for Zeng and her twin sister,

her story had already been made public.

An American journalist located her twin sister in the United States.

While the American family did not want to be interviewed,

Zeng and her twin sister connected through social media.

Many years ago, I felt embarrassed for having a brother.

But now I feel lucky that I had someone to grow up with.

I want my son to have a sibling like I did.

But I want that decision to be my own.

I'm struck by the irony

that I left a country where the government forced women to abort

and I moved to another country where governments restrict abortions.

On the surface they seem like opposites,

but both are about taking away women's control of their own bodies.

The one-child policy lasted for 35 years.

Now there aren't enough young people in China

to work and care for the elderly.

So China is introducing a new family planning policy.

The signs painted all over my village have been changed.

Every trace of the one-child policy is being erased.

But the memory of what the policy really was

survives in the minds of the people who lived it.

If these memories of the one-child policy fade away,

the only thing left will be propaganda.