‘Hooligan Sparrow’s Nanfu Wang On The Stacked Odds Of Exposing Corruption In China: “Every Day I Was Pretty Afraid”

By Antonia Blyth

Making a film about government corruption in China has to take guts, but what if you grew up poor in mainland China with zero filmmaking experience? 

What if the secret police began tailing your every move and national security officials harassed your family and friends? 

What if you had no idea how to use hidden cameras?
When Nanfu Wang made Hooligan Sparrow she had some serious odds stacked against her, but with the help of a pair of concealed-camera glasses, a microphone under her skirt and an immutable desire to document the truth, she created a film that made the Academy shortlist, and was given the Best Emerging Documentary Filmmaker award by the IDA.
It may not have aired in China, but Wang’s film following activist Ye Haiyan (‘Hooligan Sparrow’) as she protests the kidnap and rape of six school girls has received a great deal of notice in the rest of the world. 

As Wang says, “I feel really grateful that the story has so much response and exposure, especially in the current time in the US. It saddens me to see now the country that I lived in here is going through such difficult times as well and how relevant everything is – the right to protest, the right to information, the right to know. It’s very interesting.”

How did you decide to make this film?
It’s a long story. 

When I came to the US, I went to journalism school at Ohio University, but prior to that, when I was in China, I had not seen a documentary because I grew up in a small village in remote China and media was not accessible. 

In 2012 I decided this is what I’m going to do with my life. 

But at the time, I had never touched a camera and I didn’t know how to edit. 

I had no skills so I applied to New York University – a program called Using Documentary. 

I thought about going back to China to make a film and at the time, I was interested in many, many topics like the healthcare system. 

My father died when I was 12 and I wanted to expose the healthcare system in China because I felt like if we had a better system, he wouldn’t have died at such a young age—he was 33.
I also wanted to make films about the educational system in China because I didn’t go to high school or college in China. 

I started working when I was 16, so I fought really hard to get back to school.
Another topic that interested me was sex workers because, like I said, I grew up in a village and I had seen a lot of women from the village who didn’t have access to education and they end up becoming sex workers because they did not have skills, they did not have education and they were really discriminated against. 

So I wanted to make a film about the poorest sex workers in the country, but I also knew that it would be hard to get access to them. 

I’ve known Hooligan Sparrow – her name is Ye Haiyan – for a long time through social media, but I had never seen her in person at the time.
She was very proactive and she did a lot of radical activism by putting her own nude photos on the internet. 

And one thing that really attracted my attention was she did a free sex campaign where she went to brothels and offered sex for free to people to expose the living conditions of those sex workers and migrant workers who are usually their clients. 

The sex there was usually $2 per service so they are some of the poorest people.

I thought she would be the perfect person to introduce me to the sex workers. 

I contacted her through e-mail and phone and she said, “Come back to China and we can talk.”
When I got to China, she was planning a protest. 

There was a breaking news story about six school girls, aged between 11 and 14, who were raped by their school principal and a government official, so she wanted to do the protest. 

I initially decided to follow her to the protest and it was then that I knew that the story wouldn’t be about sex workers anymore, but what turned out is much more complicated and a much bigger story than I initially planned to make.

Did you know you would become a target for government surveillance once you began making a film?
No. 

My life was not political when I lived in China so I knew very little about the activist world. 

I was aware of the corruption in China but I didn’t know the scale of the surveillance. 

When I got here to go to the protest with her, she warned me. 

She said, “It’s dangerous. You could be arrested and you could be disappeared. You could just be found dead.” 

I thought it was a joke. I didn’t believe her that much. 

I thought it was a little exaggerated but then a week after I went to the protest, my family got the phone call from national security agents and that’s when I realized they took it really seriously. 

Then, a few weeks later, my friends were taken into interrogation simply to be asked whether they know me and whether they know what I was doing and where I was. 

We were followed by plain clothes officers, secret police. 

Everywhere we went they knew our whereabouts and they knew that we were going there and they’d be waiting there for us.

You used a micro-camera in your glasses and we see you putting your audio recorder under your skirt. How did you decide what would work best?
I started doing research on what hidden cameras are available and I found a lot on the internet. 

There are hidden cameras in a watch shape or in pens or a button, but because it was summer it was really difficult to hide anything because we were wearing less clothes. 

I cannot put on a watch and then constantly raise up my arm and take a look at a watch. 

That’s not feasible. 

So later I thought maybe glasses, that would be the most perfect because it’s on eye level. 

So I bought a pair and I thought nobody would notice but I was pretty naïve because the glasses were huge and were black. 

No young girls would wear those kind of ridiculous, large glasses. 

So, you can see in the film that eventually the police did find out that the glasses were a hidden camera.

How has making this film changed how you feel about your home country?
It’s like the movie The Truman Show. 

I feel like towards the end of the movie, all of a sudden you realize that your whole life in the past had been lies. 

I realized that there were activists like Ye Haiyan in China who were constantly depicted by the state media as criminals, but they are real people like us and are fighting for other people’s rights. 

I never expected that there would be so many secret police on the streets and I never expected that the government would go so far to silence anybody who was remotely connected to human rights activism or even just a person like me, who is trying to tell their story.

There are some really terrifying moments where you’re clearly frightened but you continue filming. When were you the most scared?
I think every day I was pretty afraid. 

One of the biggest fears was I didn’t know when they would break into the house. 

I didn’t feel safe even when I was in somebody’s house because they could break in anytime and I was worried about my footage constantly. 

I think the activists, they inspired me a lot because I know that they’ve been living in China for their entire lives and their lives are constantly under threat, harassment and fear but they still continue doing what they do.
Compared to them, my experience was quite temporary really, and I knew that I had the ability to leave if I wanted to, more than them. 

So their courage really inspired me. 

At the same time, I feel like I was the storyteller. 

I had the connection to the outside world. 

I know English and I almost felt like I was the only person that could get this story out and if I don’t tell this story, if I quit, then whatever happened to them, nobody would know.

Do you think you’re able to travel back to China?
It’s still unknown whether I can go back. 

I wish there is a black list that I can check. 

Am I on the list or not? 

But unfortunately there isn’t, or fortunately there isn’t. 

So I don’t know if I can go back and the only way to find out would be try to go and see what would happen. 

At this moment, I feel like I still want to evaluate, kind of assess the risks or the consequences when I’m ready to go back.
My family were visited by national security agents recently because the film has been getting a lot of exposure outside of China, and my family was told that they were monitoring what I say in media and whether it’s something negative about China. 

I had a debate, because I was really concerned about my family, but I also feel that if I stay silent, if I don’t say anything, then their tactics are effective. 

Then it’s helping them to suppress people and the only way that the change might happen is actually to say what I witness and what I disagree with rather than stay silent.

Have you had a chance to speak with some of the people in the film since it came out?
I showed a rough cut of the film to all of the main subjects before I finished it and now, they’ve had a few underground screenings in China. 

The main subject, Hooligan Sparrow, saw it and she wrote a long article about the film but then the next day the government deleted it. 

The same happened with a few media outlets who were brave enough to write about the film. 

Soon it was deleted. 

So the film right now is censored in China. 

No media outlets were allowed to report it. 

One of the other main subjects, Wang Yu, the lawyer, she’s still in jail. 

She was arrested in July 2015 and she was held for a year without any charge and in February of this year she was finally charged with subverting the government.

China's Rape Culture

Documentary “Hooligan Sparrow” shows how dangerous it is to protest against rape in China

By Joanna Chiu
"Hooligan Sparrow" holds up a sign that says "China’s women’s rights are dead."

The documentary film Hooligan Sparrow begins with Wang Nanfu, a fresh journalism school graduate, introducing herself while standing on a busy street. 

Seconds later, she is surrounded by a group of men. 

They egg each other on, threatening to smash her camera and daring her to continue filming. 

“This is the story I captured before they took the camera from me,” Wang says in a voice over.
The rest of the documentary is even more violent, but Wang’s subjects appear better prepared. 

When eleven people storm into the home of a Chinese women’s rights activist named Ye Haiyan, who also goes by the name “Hooligan Sparrow” (link in Chinese), Ye deftly fights off their attacks with a meat cleaver.
Hooligan Sparrow, Wang’s first film, was an official selection of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and debuts this month on the POV series on PBS and on Netflix. 

The severe harassment it documents of women’s rights activists is part of a broader clampdown on civil society in China. 

Last summer, police questioned or detained over 300 human rights lawyers and activists. 

At least a dozen are yet to stand trial.
Days before the attack on Ye’s home, during the summer of 2013 covered in the documentary, Ye had organized a small protest in the southern island province of Hainan, where she held up a poster saying, “Principal, get a room with me—leave the school kids alone.” 

A photo of Ye with her sign went viral, raising awareness of a spate of sexual assaults in China against schoolchildren. 

At the time, Ye was already widely known for volunteering to work for free in a brothel in order to draw attention to sex workers’ rights.
Like Ye, Wang is from a poor village in China. 

Wang taught herself English and won scholarships that allowed her to study journalism in Ohio and New York. 

She was planning on making a documentary about Chinese sex workers when Ye invited her to film their protest.
Their Hainan protest was aimed at a school principal and a local government official, who had taken six female students aged 11 to 14 to a hotel and raped them over a 24-hour period. 

The men claimed they thought the girls were sex workers. 

They were each sentenced to less than 14 years in jail, reflecting the fact that the punishment for “engaging in sex with underage prostitutes” in China used to be only five to 15 years in prison. 

The “prostitute” label was a criminal classification that legal experts said shamed child victims into silence and let rapists off the hook.
In the film, Wang follows Ye and her fellow activists as police and hired thugs chase them from town to town. 

In one chilling scene, only the sounds of Ye getting beaten can be heard. 

Wang is also followed and interrogated, with her camera jerking wildly as she tries to run away. 

All of this happened because a small group of women were successfully raising awareness, mostly through social media, about sexual assault cases.
Anti-rape activism wasn’t always so controversial in China. 

Before Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, authorities seemed relatively tolerant of advocacy around women’s issues, compared to causes such as religious freedom and land rights.
Female activists who are currently in jail include former primary school teacher Su Changlan, who faces up to 15 years in prison on the charge of “inciting subversion of state power.” 

Su is a former volunteer for the New York-based Women’s Rights in China group, and has campaigned for an end to violence against women, and assisted women who were forced to abort children to comply with China’s family planning system.
After shutting down Ye’s activism and driving Wang out of the country, authorities made an even stronger statement last year by arresting five young feminist activists, shortly before International Women’s Day on March 8. 

The five were planning to distribute stickers with slogans, including a call for police to arrest sexual harassment suspects, when they were detained.
“Ye can’t hold street protests anymore. She has trouble traveling because she is under constant surveillance, and her passport has been taken away,” said Wang, who is married to an American and lives in New York. 

“Police threatened my family and urged them to stop me from making my documentary. I haven’t tried to go back to China yet. I don’t know if it’ll be safe to go.”

Hooligan Sparrow: A Harrowing PBS Doc About China's Child Rape and State-Sanctioned Rape Culture

THE CHILLING STORY ABOUT THE CHINESE STATE’S INTIMIDATION AND VIOLENCE AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST YE HAIYAN
By Inkoo Kang

Even if your awareness of global news barely extends beyond the headlines, the phrase “government repression” pop ups with such frequency and ubiquity that it’s lost what little force it had in the first place. 

The POV documentary Hooligan Sparrow, premiering Monday, October 17, on PBS, restores to that neutral term the chilling fear and visceral paranoia it should instill, piecing together evidence of the Chinese state’s intimidation and violence against human rights activist Ye Haiyan through secretly recorded footage. 

A compelling biography, a tense mystery, an infuriating exposé, and a dread-filled experience all at once, it’s a must-watch for its diaristic chronicling of the heartbreakingly high costs of fighting against state-sanctioned rape culture.
Named after Ye’s nom de guerre, Hooligan Sparrow begins with a shockingly brazen crime. 

A principal absconds with six girls aged 11 to 14, who are sexually assaulted in a hotel room in a different town. 

Rapists are imprisoned for life or given the death sentence, while child sex trafficking garners a far lesser sentence of 5 to 15 years, and so the girls are paid $2,000 by the principal and labeled prostitutes by the police. 

Swooping in to combat this gross injustice are Ye and a small cadre of her fellow protesters, who hold up provocative signs like “Get a room with me; leave the kids alone” designed to go viral, even on the censored Chinese internet. 

The mysterious man who gets a little too close while recording the demonstration is terrifying enough. 

But they don’t compare to the videos Ye and her colleagues make just before going public. 

China's human rights activists are committed to mental hospitals, forced into detention centers, or worse. 

“To prevent [such fates],” one protester explains, “we do a testimony in advance stating that we won’t commit suicide.” 

Another pleads for her loved ones to look for her should she disappear after the rally.
For Hooligan Sparrow, filmmaker Nanfu Wang embedded herself with Ye, a divorced single mother, and her movingly resilient 13-year-old daughter, Yaxin, for several months. 

Visually, the portrait of mother and child are disrupted by the director’s own fugitive status after her affiliation with Ye made her a target of the government as well. 

But Wang’s first-person narration and outsider status within the accommodating but secretive activist community are assets to her thematically dense tale. 

Her naïveté shows, as when a police officer instantly notices that her glasses double as a camera. 

But the surreal dystopia that is Ye’s China comes into greater focus through Wang’s eyes, as the filmmaker discovers a foreign land within her country.
A few days after the child-rape protest, over a dozen people break into Ye’s apartment and beat her. 

A group of demonstrators — Ye thinks they’re paid by the government — stand outside her building to protest against her, while the police do nothing. 

That is, until they arrest Ye a few days after for assault. 

The activist fought against her attackers with a knife, and now an ostensible victim wants justice from her, though Ye and her faithful lawyer, Wang Yu, don’t know that other injured party’s name, the scope of his lacerations, or if the man whose photos are being used against Ye was ever in her apartment in the first place. 

No matter: Ye and her daughter are evicted. 

When they move 300 miles away, they’re dragged out of their new home and told by the local police there, “If I ever see you again, I’ll break your legs.”
The Ye family’s situation reaches more harrowing lows after that, but their story isn’t an altogether depressing one. 

Wang skimps on the activist’s personal history, but it’s clear that Ye strives for a full life, complete with lighter moments with her colleagues, a supportive boyfriend, and karaoke sessions with her friends and her daughter. (The teenager finds the parade of threatening policemen that regularly flip her life inside out “ridiculous.”) 

It’s rare that we want political docs to be more heavy-handed, but Hooligan Sparrow could bear to be, especially when the backstory behind the group rape of those preteen girls proves even more evil than the horrific surface details alleged.
Despite the brief running time (83 minutes), there’s much to nitpick about the film. 

Its framing device — about how Wang would get her footage out of China — is perhaps its least effective story line, and the timeline of events could use more firming up. 

The story flabs in the middle, as Ye, Wang, and their group are chased from one not-so-safe-house to another, and the intense focus on Ye’s travails neglect other key details, like the unexplained, months-long imprisonment of her attorney. 

But Hooligan Sparrow’s greatest limitation is the one shared by most documentaries: Now that we know about these atrocities, what can we do about them? 

Its filmmaker seems content to shoot and share. 

Our howling impotence demands more.