Following its initial two-night premiere on Sundance TV, it aired as part of the BBC's China season in 2016, where it was shown over three sixty-minute episodes.

The series follows a girl called Mei Ashley (Katie Leung) who discovers that she has a brother, Li Jun (Sebastian So), that she never knew about and that he is due to be sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit.

[2][3] For its digital release on streaming platforms, it has retained the three-episode format presented here.

One Child is set in Guangzhou but was filmed in Hong Kong and Britain, as under Chinese law before anything is filmed all scripts have to be approved by the Chinese government but this law does not apply in Hong Kong as it is an administrative region.

We didn’t imagine that the scripts would be approved," "while the drama depicts a clear case of police corruption, the Chinese Government are making strides in tackling similar problems and that they have “nothing to fear” from the drama."