At every step of his journey, Kongzi combines his own speech and emotions with quotations from Chinese poetry. As he meditates on the injustice of his murdered son, he utters a cry of misery: "My son, my son! Make your way back to us. ‘Summer wildfires cannot destroy the grass, For in the spring, soft winds will restore it to life . . .' I cannot believe that in this immense country there is no space for my male descendant." Kongzi's poetry displays an interior resistance to the regime, against which he is otherwise powerless.  

The novel reads like a criminal indictment of the Chinese regime and the one-child policy. The author illustrates his familiarity with the social and economic toll that the policy has wrought, and the terror and displacement that Chinese families have undergone to protect and raise their children. 

The links between the policy and its sister ills — the increase in human trafficking and the selling of children (primarily girls and  the handicapped), a culture of rape and the objectivisation of women, and the loss of ancient culture, values and beliefs — is emphatically demonstrated. The dehumanisation that arises in a country that must be complicit in such activities, while its people are forcibly denied knowledge of and access to their cultural heritage, is painfully revealed. Kongzi becomes increasingly crass and aggressive, both towards his wife and  the rest  of the world. As his values are shattered, the brutality with which he pursues his objectives increases. Meili, too, pursues an increasingly materialist world, aiming to make money and achieve social status, for its own sake. 

Meili and Kongzi represent the experiences of millions of Chinese. Since the beginning of the one-child policy, there have been more than 336 million abortions and 220 million sterilisations, many of them forced. Infanticide and the abandonment of children are on the rise: 100 million girls have gone missing from China. The government trafficks women from neighbouring countries to serve as prostitutes or forced brides. The unimaginable scale of this human catastrophe is forcefully portrayed.

By humanising this horrendous national experience through the eyes of one family, Ma Jian has produced a novel that enters into the personal and family violence which has shattered homes and hearts across China for two generations. His is an important voice that has already paid the price for dissent and commitment to truth, by exile from his homeland and a ban on his books within China.  Jian is in the company of the many noble men and women who have gone before him, risking everything to expose a lie, and  transmitting the reality of human suffering at the hands of an ideology that continues to oppress the Chinese people.