By Shen Yang

“UK citizens have the right to live in a healthy, prospering environment. This is enshrined in our constitution. Stability and security come at a price. Your family quota has been exceeded. This pregnancy must be terminated. If you refuse to attend your clinic, then the procedure will be enforced.”

Eve Smith’s “ONE: One Law, One Child, 7 Million Crimes” immerses us in a dystopian future where a green-tech paradise conceals a family-planning hell. It builds on the very same premise that led to the One-Child Policy in China: in order to avoid famine and environmental catastrophe, births must be controlled no matter what. Only this time it happens in a future UK where climate tech and the eyes of an Orwellian government are omnipresent.

Interestingly, the book is narrated not from a victim’s perspective, but rather from that of an enforcer of the policy, Kai Houghton, who works for the “Ministry of Population and Family Planning”. The protagonist is firmly convinced that her work, investigating “birth crimes”, is for the good of the country, however, once she suddenly discovers she has an illegal, excess-birth sister, her entire life begins falling apart as she uncovers the dark reality beneath the government she so fervently supported.

As a survivor of China’s One Child Policy myself, I have witnessed many different facets of this controversial policy and I love how ONE brilliantly weaves all of them into a dark and compelling story: the family planning slogans, the misguided faith of government officials, the tactics employed by families to conceal their illegal children, the horrid ways excess children were disposed of, the few officials and doctors helping families save their excess-children, the stigma and legal vacuum associated with being illegal, and the unforeseen consequences that misguided birth control policies can have on a country on the long-term (to this day China still has millions of “missing women” and recently entered negative population growth).

What makes this book even more chilling is the fact that the One-Child Policy is not just some forgotten old practice from an authoritarian government. The Club of Rome, a well-known international think tank, advocated the implementation of a similar policy in Western countries in 2016 to mitigate climate change, ironically the same year China abolished it! With overconsumption, climate-related disasters, and mass migration constantly increasing, and governments worldwide slowly shifting toward the conservative side, the future described in ONE may not be so far away after all…

Even though the book is quite dark and some chapters outright unsettling, I couldn’t put it down and kept going, eager to see how the plot unfolded. Overall it’s well-paced, and its conclusion had me craving for more. I am very grateful to the author for acknowledging me on the final pages, and for being one of the first to popularize the one-child policy and the tragedy of illegal children through the medium of fiction.

ONE is coming on July 20th 2023, pre-order it below 👇