The events in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove unfold under the shadow of China’s coercive population-control regime, which was implemented from 1979 to 2015.

China’s one-child policy was a political mandate justified by a specific set of scientific and economic theories popular in the late 20th century. Chinese leaders were influenced by a revival of ideas from British economist Thomas Robert Malthus, who argued in 1798 that population growth would always outpace food production, leading to perpetual famine and poverty. These fears were amplified globally by Paul R. Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 book, The Population Bomb, which predicted that hundreds of millions would starve to death and advocated for drastic population-control measures.

This alarmist mindset deeply influenced Chinese Communist party technocrats, who saw lowering China’s population as a forward-thinking solution to the country’s economic stagnation. Rocket scientist Song Jian provided a seemingly rational, data-driven approach to determine the state’s demographic calculations. The state enforced this policy through a powerful bureaucracy known as the Family Planning Commission. This organization “dwarfed the police and military in manpower” (24), with an estimated 83 million people working for it by the 1990s. Its agents were empowered to levy crippling fines, demolish homes, and carry out forced abortions and sterilizations. This apparatus created a climate of pervasive fear that directly shapes the narrative: Communist cadres confiscated the toddler Fangfang because her family violated the policy.

In reality, the laws governing childbirth were complex, confusing, and selectively enforced. They also intersected disastrously with cultural preference for sons. The abuses were so widespread that they incited real-world resistance, such as the legal challenges mounted by the blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who filed a class-action lawsuit in 2005 against officials in Shandong province for forcing thousands of late-term abortions and sterilizations. However, even when the system’s unintended consequences, abuses, and problems came to light, the Chinese government could not end the one-child policy—it had become a central tenet of Communist party rule, so admitting that it had failed would endanger the authoritarian regime’s grip on power. This political context illuminates why families like the Zengs resorted to subterfuge and why their eventual efforts to seek justice through a “Petition Signed in Blood” were both an act of profound courage and a perilous challenge to an oppressive state apparatus (59).