The Fifth Floor: China's empty maternity wards

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Eunice Yang from BBC Chinese reports on the closure of over 400 maternity wards across China. Plus, South Korea's illegal tattoo parlours with BBC Korean's Yuna Ku, and why Ghana's traditional kente fabric has been recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage, with BBC Africa's Jelilat Olawale.

Yuna's documentary is part of the BBC 100 Women series. To find out more about the other inspiring and influential women on this year's list go to bbc.co.uk/100women. You can also follow BBC 100 Women on Facebook and Instagram.

Presented by Faranak Amidi. Produced by Caroline Ferguson, Alice Gioia and Hannah Dean.

(Photo: Faranak Amidi. Credit: Tricia Yourkevich.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.
0:07.8	This is the fifth floor.
0:11.5	The fifth floor, you knowssonous.
0:15.9	This is the fifth floor at Farnak Amidi Sobeth. This is the fifth floor at the heart of global storytelling with BBC journalists from all
0:27.7	around the world. I'm your host, Faranak Amidi.
0:35.0	You might wonder how journalists find their stories.
0:41.1	The truth is that a good story could come from anywhere, even from a casual chat with friends.
0:47.9	And that is precisely how my colleague Eunice Yang from BBC Chinese started looking into the story that we are going to talk about today.
0:55.0	Because she noticed that when someone announces they are pregnant, the common reaction from her Gen Z friends is...
1:02.5	Why? Like, it's just 100% pure shock, pure astonishment. Like, why are you doing this? Why are you taking this risk?
1:09.9	This might be a bit of a
1:11.8	joke among young people, but it reflects a general trend in society. Birth rates in China have been
1:18.3	falling for years, so much so that hundreds of maternity wards across the country are actually
1:24.5	closing down. To understand what is going on, we have to go back to
1:28.8	approximately 40 years ago when the government introduced the controversial method of controlling
1:34.8	its population. Here is Eunice again. In 1980s, China introduced the child policy as a reaction
1:41.9	to the booming birth rate because the country just cannot
1:45.7	support so many babies. Every family there has to be only one baby documented. So they're having a lot
1:53.1	of cruel birth control methods. It also resulted in a lot of human trafficking, kidnapping.
2:00.0	And however, it was abolished in 2015 because of the free-falling birth rate.
2:06.0	Watch how this has become the history.
2:08.1	So it was lifted in 2015.
	...

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