Mo Yan, who is to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, has been a strong critic of China’s one child policy. Jeff Koloze wrote a careful analysis of “Explosions,” one of her short stories.
“This paper reviews demographic considerations of abortion and the one-child policy in the People’s Republic of China which form the basis for contemporary literary works which concern abortion. After a brief discussion of other fictional works, the paper focuses on abortion passages in the short story ‘Explosions’ (1985) by Mo Yan. The literature is reviewed using formalist explication and aspects of reception theory.”
The entire text is available here on lifeissues.net.