It has been called China's "behavioural time bomb", the unforeseen fallout from 35 years of the one-child policy. As a generation of coddled and adored only children enter their mid-30s, these "little emperors" and "princesses" (though they are predominantly male) are often ill-equipped for the real world.
Raised under huge pressure to succeed academically and financially, they are left to look after ageing parents and revered grandparents. The policy was officially abolished in 2015, in a bid, according to the Communist Party, to address the "challenge of an ageing population". But has China created a generation of adults whose values are skewed, lacking empathy and convinced of their own superiority?
While the party credited the policy with preventing some 400 million births – thereby helping China's now-booming economy – there's been scant exploration of the human toll; forced and sex-selective abortions, sterilisations, and hundreds of thousands of female babies, considered less desirable than males, who were given up up for adoption, or worse. Unsurprisingly, those children who survived were pampered and coddled like no generation before them.
Inside China, the "Little Emperor" phenomenon remains largely unexplored in the arts, but a new collaboration between experimental Chinese director Wang Chong and award-winning Sydney playwright Lachlan Philpott aims to examine this unfolding cultural dilemma.
As part of this year's Asia Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts (Asia TOPA), the pair collaborated on Little Emperors, opening at The Malthouse Theatre on February 14.
Set in Melbourne and Beijing, Little Emperors follows a brother and sister – the brother is the family's second child, kept "secret" from the authorities, while his sister is dealing with the fact that she is "Sheng nu", meaning "leftovers", a title given to women in their late 20s who remain unmarried. The brother is in Australia, supposedly studying, but is actually, in a meta self-reference, directing a piece of theatre called Little Emperors, for which he has grandiose visions that aren't working out.
For director Wang, Philpott's play is close to home. While he's known for his avant garde work with his Beijing-based troupe Theatre du Reve Experimental, Wang is also, by his own admission, a "spoilt" member of the one-child generation.
"Reading the play, I felt embarrassed – a lot of the lead character's life is the same as mine," he says. "But [that] means Lachlan caught the essence of this generation."
When Wang and Philpott paired up, Wang hadn't considered the subject as ripe for exploration, while Philpott had long been fascinated by it.
"It's one of the biggest social experiments – probably the biggest – in the history of humanity," says Philpott. "And it's so generational – if you look back in Chinese history at the importance of family and how much that engineered life… yet when you talk to people in China about it, like Wang, they're less interested."
Wang says that like many local issues in China, the policy hasn't been the subject of much analysis.
"In a lot of cases, you cannot publicly discuss or criticise government policy," he says. "When you can criticise it, it normally means that you have to criticise it. Now the one-child policy is gone, you have to adopt this critical view of it… 'it doesn't work really well with the economy', this is all the 'official' discourse now."
Philpott travelled to Beijing to work with Wang, and met dozens of children born under the policy – but it took time for many to open up.
"You see people in films or books offering up those stock socialist answers that people give to someone form the West – it really was like that," he says.
One Beijing teenager eventually told Philpott about her "secret brother".
"She was first born then her mum got pregnant and didn't want to get rid of the child, as was pretty common. So they had the child in Hong Kong and he was kept as a secret child, who didn't have an identity in China. Imagine being brought up like that – and there are thousands and thousands of these people born under the policy who could never have an identity because their parents couldn't afford the fines, or were too afraid to admit it."
The play explores this phenomenon of "secret" children alongside the "little emperors", and their lack of empathy, as well as their sense of self-importance.
Wang, 35, says the policy resulted in a generation that is fiercely competitive.
"In my high school, in our class there was only one girl who had a brother – and she was from the countryside," he says. "Everybody else was a single child – so we would compete in a very selfish way."
The play's central character gradually alienates himself from colleagues, friends and even his own family because of traits Wang has seen in his peers.
"Because we [only children] got the focus, we got the centre of the family, it's 'everybody has to like me!'. We are the hope of our families," he says.
Like his peers, Wang was groomed to become a high-earning professional – he completed a law degree, but discovered theatre and pursued that, to the (initial) disappointment of his parents.
"They supported me," he says. "But I know I am not independent enough in the sense that I always have my family in mind – I can always go back to them economically or emotionally. I don't worry, as an independent artist, who normally have a hard life in China, about my future."
The play doesn't offer any solid answers about the one-child generation but theatre, Philpott says, is about telling human stories.
"And to do that, you have to look very closely in detail at people and their stories. Putting this on stage though, has been difficult – I think the reason there hasn't been much art made about it yet is that the policy has just ended," he says. "It's a bit like war – you don't get much analysis of war for a while afterwards because you don't know the full impact."
Little Emperors is at The Malthouse Theatre, February 14-26. malthousetheatre.com.au