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Books

The long shadow over China’s only children

As Xinran’s Buy Me the Sky reveals, China’s one-child policy has resulted in a grotesquely distorted population tortured by guilt

13 June 2015

9:00 AM

13 June 2015

9:00 AM

Buy Me the Sky: The Remarkable Truth of China’s One-child Generations Xinran

Rider, pp.320, £20, ISBN: 9781846044717

This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase, let alone unpack it. It closes at the opposite end of the social scale with a small girl squatting on a plank over a village cesspit, watching the maggots seething and squirming far below as they struggle to climb the sides of the pit towards the light.

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