THE PRC CALLOUS, GET OUT!:

Television Review | ‘China’s Stolen Children’: Sold by the Thousands, Thanks to a One-Child Policy (NEIL GENZLINGER, 7/14/08, NY Times)

For the Chinese, the primary sport at the Beijing Olympics is likely to be spinning, in the public relations sense. That makes this just the right time for a documentary like “China’s Stolen Children,” Monday on HBO. The film reminds us that China still has serious problems and a government that doesn’t seem terribly interested in fixing them.

The film, by Jezza Neumann, examines parallel phenomena that appear to be linked to the nation’s one-child policy: children are being kidnapped and sold by the thousands, and parents are selling their children. The film, we’re told, was shot clandestinely, so it is perhaps not surprising that it feels fragmentary and incomplete. But if it is even remotely accurate, it captures a callousness toward life and family that is difficult to comprehend by the standards of the West, where the news media go into overdrive when a single child turns up missing.