China’s Holocaust of Children

The ‘one-child policy’ involved slaughtering hundreds of millions of babies.

By KYLE SMITH
One Child Nation movie poster (Chicago Media Project/Amazon Studios)

Using the aggressively bland term “one-child policy” is a bit like saying that 1942 Germany had restrictions on Jews. 

You may never have thought much about how a huge nation enforces a limit of one baby per family, but the horrifying details of China’s Holocaust of children emerge in a powerful documentary told by a woman whose family was one of the countless millions who suffered.
A girl born in 1985 in Jiangxi Province was named Nanfu, or man-pillar. 

The Wang family, like nearly all others in rural China, desperately wanted a boy, and when one didn’t arrive, her parents gave her the planned boy’s name anyway. 

After she was born, village authorities threatened to sterilize her mother, who wanted to try again for a boy, but instead struck a compromise. 

Some rural families were allowed a second child if the parents spaced the children apart by five years. 

While the mother was in labor, Nanfu Wang says in her documentary One Child Nation (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), her grandmother put a basket in the room and announced, “If it’s another girl, we’ll put her in the basket and leave her in the street.” 

Nanfu’s brother arrived instead.
It was no idle threat. 

As Wang discovers, this sort of thing happened all the time. 

And when you left your baby girl (it was nearly always a girl) in a market, or by the side of the road, here’s what happened: Nothing. 

No takers. 

Girls had no value whatsoever. 

When Wang’s uncle had a daughter, her mother recalls, he wanted to try again for the son. 

So the family climbed over mountains in the dark to take the infant to a market, where they left her on a meat counter with the equivalent of $20 in her clothes. 

The family would go back to check on her progress, of which there was none. 

Soon the baby was covered with mosquito bites. 

“For two days and two nights she was there,” recalls Wang’s mother. 

“She eventually died. Then we buried her.” 

Oh.

Chinese officials would use a variety of pressures to prevent women from giving birth. 

Sometimes sterilization would be presented simply as an option; you were free to refuse, but then the authorities would burn your house down or steal your pig. 

Other times women underwent sterilization by force, or suffered as their eight- and nine-month-old fetuses were aborted. 

A single “family planning” official recalls carrying out an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 sterilizations and abortions, sometimes inducing delivery and then killing the newborn. 

“I’d do over 20 [sterilizations and abortions] a day,” she recalls now. 

“Sterilization takes ten minutes.” 

In many cases the women had been abducted: “Tied up and dragged to us like pigs,” recalls another woman who served as a “family-planning official,” who says, “I initially thought forcing abortions was an atrocity.” 

But a Party official persuaded her that the more challenging a job was, the more willing she should be to take it on.” 

“Sometimes pregnant women ran away. We had to chase after them.” 

One woman “took off all her clothes and ran away naked.” 

But the “population war” had to be fought: “Our country prevented 338 million births,” notes a propaganda video. 

The word “prevent” is doing a lot of work there.
Today, one woman interviewed in the film who worked as a “family planner” works to treat infertility. 

“I want to atone for my sins for all the abortions and killings I did. There’ll be retribution for me. I was the one who killed. I was the executioner... The state gave the order but I carried it out.” 

A Chinese artist, Peng Wang, explains how he built a running theme for his pictures around the fetuses he repeatedly found in trash bags abandoned in dumping grounds.
When the adoption market started to boom in the 1990s, the calculus changed. 

Enterprising folks who were motivated by profit but were also heroes on a scale that dwarfs the 1,200 lives saved by Oskar Schindler began visiting the known baby-dumping areas and scooping up living infants. 

One man from Shenzhen estimates he collected 10,000 babies this way, building a network of tipsters such as trash collectors and taxi drivers whose jobs involved lots of roaming around the city. Orphanages were paying $200 for babies, no questions asked. 

Many Americans are parents of these adoptees today, and for those who have questions, a Utah company called Research China has been gathering data about the Chinese backgrounds of such children. 

The man interviewed in the film who saved so many lives in Shenzhen was charged with being a “human trafficker” and spent years in prison for the crime of not letting babies perish.

Chinese authorities decided to get in on the act. 

Why abort babies and throw them in the trash when you can wait till they’re born, then kidnap them? Propaganda promised citizens rewards for informing authorities of families that had more than one child. 

Orphanages were pleased to take the abducted babies, too. (An expert walks us through how orphanage officials would simply make up a fictitious backstory for each otherwise unexplained child and present the lies to eager prospective parents.) 

In 2015, China switched to a two-child policy, and the crisis ended. 

Or did it? 

Chinese parents have been conditioned to have only one child since 1980, and the number of births fell 5 million short of projections last year. 

An editorial in the Communist Party paper People’s Daily scolded couples with these words: “Not wanting to have kids is just a lifestyle of passively giving in to society’s pressures.” 

What’s Mandarin for chutzpah?
Toward the end Wang reminds us that we Americans are hardly without sin when it comes to the matters she discusses; don’t we interfere with women’s bodies too? 

That’s like saying, as WFB memorably put it, that “the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”

Barbaric Nation of Asia

One Child Nation: looking back at China's horrifying policy
Director Nanfu Wang discusses her shocking, award-winning new documentary and the dangers she faced while making it.

By Charles Bramesco

A found child advertisement, in a still from One Child Nation.

Authoritarian states have a quiet, insidious way of dressing up the immoral in the dowdy finery of the bureaucratically sanctioned. 

To an audience member sitting for Nanfu Wang’s harrowing new documentary One Child Nation, China’s former policy of permitting one infant per family (later amended to two, in the event of a first-born daughter) comes across as frightful stuff, at times borderline dystopian. 

A western audience would be shocked to hear the elderly speak so nonchalantly on such morbid matters. 

But Wang wanted to reveal the banality of this particular evil, to show how history can warp the perspective of those living through it.
“Before making this film, I had more judgment for the older generation, how they seemed to be closed-minded,” Wang tells the Guardian over the phone, not 24 hours before Amazon puts her film in American theaters for the widest release of the film-maker’s young career. 

“After finishing production, going through the process of conducting interviews and looking at the propaganda material, I started to understand why an entire nation of people would behave a certain way. I have more empathy towards the way that they behaved and the way that they think. They’ve lived their whole life in a society that discouraged or punished citizens who thought independently.”
In a sense, Wang took the one-child policy for granted in a negative capacity, just as her parents had taken it for granted as a way of life. 

It was a fact of the everyday for as long as she can remember; she was born in 1985, just a few years prior to her brother, meaning she was one flip of the genetic coin away from being left in a basket on the street. 

Wang grew up around the cheery murals championing the brave patriots contributing to the effort to stem overpopulation, and she began to see through them at a young age.
As she grew into adulthood, she put that facet of her past behind her, until two wrinkles of fate brought the one-child policy back to the fore of her mind. 

First, China revoked the controversial legislation in 2015, allowing happy couples to freely go forth and multiply. 

Second, Wang got pregnant herself, and instantly saw motherhood through fresh eyes. 

“I remember just two weeks after I found out I was pregnant, how protective I became,” Wang explains. 

“I was super aware of the dangers that could potentially face my unborn child’s safety and life. I wasn’t a very fearful person, but I noticed how much I was afraid for the life I was carrying. It was around then that I started thinking about other women who couldn’t protect their child, people who had to live every day under the fear of not knowing what would happen with their pregnancy. It was inconceivable for me to imagine living that life.”
Upon hearing that China’s government had painted the draconian policy as a humanitarian success – it claimed to have struck the laws only because they had performed their desired function, not due to the harm they caused – Wang wanted to rewrite the narrative. 

She had observed the gaps that the Chinese state intentionally created in its public’s awareness of the Tiananmen Square demonstration and the Cultural Revolution, and she didn’t want to see young people losing touch with this particular shame. 

“In China, the narrative about the one-child policy was overwhelmingly positive, and China’s influence has been growing outside of the nation,” she says. 

“The narrative has traveled. A lot of Western media has adopted the Chinese authority’s narrative, so hopefully, the film can provide a counter-narrative.”

Nanfu Wang. 

One Child Nation spans the personal and political, alleging that the political doesn’t get much more personal than when it’s dictating what is and isn’t allowed to happen inside your uterus. 

Wang started recording conversations with her parents and moved on to their contemporaries, learning how something as bureaucratic as federal mandates could have such a terribly intimate effect on those affected by them. 

“I asked my mom what it was like for her when she was pregnant with me,” Wang recalls. 

“She started telling me stories that I didn’t know, things I sort of knew but didn’t really remember or register. I processed what this all meant for the first time, and it got me wondering what else I didn’t know. I wanted to explore.”
But exploration, especially the kind that casts the government in a critical light, isn’t always so simply done in China. 

Wang took what might seem like extreme precautions, only to witness first-hand how gravely necessary they were. 

Jialing Zhang, Wang’s co-director and pal from back at NYU, would track her collaborator’s movements in China using GPS signaling while she stayed safe in the states. 

Wang avoided hotels, public transportation, and other situations that could require her to expose her identity. 

She recounts one nail-biter of a story in which an unsettling vibe cut a meeting with a former abortionist short, as both parties wordlessly parted at different, randomly selected train stops. 

“We had created emergency plans, with lawyers on the ground in China who would be willing to help us,” Wang says. 

“Even with that, there were several moments that felt scary.”
She continues: “We have not yet been contacted or confronted by the government. But we have noticed that there’s been censorship already. In China, they have a web site that’s an equivalent to IMDb, with people making their own pages for films in release. Back in January, when our film premiered at Sundance, the page that had been created for One Child Nation was taken down in a matter of days. If you click the title now, it’ll say ‘this page does not exist’. When Sundance announced their awards, China reported on the winners, and we were the only one missing from the list.”

An archival photo of Nanfu Wang and her brother used in One Child Nation. 

Getting away with it is getting away with it, however, and Wang has completed an incisive, edifying look into the darker corners of the national culture. 

One Child Nation represents a bold step toward rewriting posterity, of ensuring that the history books will remember the forced sterilization and cries of lost babies instead of the paintings of smiling three-person family units. 

At the same time, Wang remains unshakably focused on the human element, giving her interview subjects the chance to justify themselves. 

“Eventually, I asked myself what I would do if I was in their position,” Wang confesses. 

“What was scary was that I couldn’t say with 100% confidence that I wouldn’t have done the same thing.”

Wang recognizes that the biological instinct to procreate is hardwired into our DNA, so that even viewers exempt from the one-child policy still feel the resonating sting of its stakes. 

Having a family is a fundamental right, and Wang’s strife mirrors struggles playing out around the globe. 

“One Child Nation really shows what happens when a government takes away the power of choice from women,” she says. 

“Sadly, that’s not only happening in China; in the United States, women’s control over their own bodies is always being restricted. The other side of the one-child policy, of limiting the right to give birth, is limiting access to reproductive healthcare.”
Her work bridges the gap between the east and west, locating a universal common ground in bodily autonomy. 

In creating this connection, Wang hopes to diminish the trans-continental shock she felt at the outset of her own process. 

By making the world a little smaller, she hopes everyone watching her film can experience the same blooming of empathy that made this difficult project worthwhile for her. 

“Every time I make a film in China, it’s almost a process of unlearning what I’ve known in the past. It’s almost like I relearn these things about my history and country first, and then I let the viewers do the same.”
One Child Nation is out now in the US with a UK date to be announced

CHINESE TERROR

Inside China’s Horrifying Child-Killing Policy
The new documentary ‘One Child Nation’ examines China’s draconian, decades-long one-child policy, which resulted in countless abductions, forced abortions, and child deaths.

By Nick Schager

One Child Nation is a stark reminder that America isn’t the only country where a woman’s right to control her body has been under siege. 

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and premiering in select theaters on August 9 courtesy of Amazon, directors Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s heartrending documentary examines their native China’s one-child policy, which functioned as a systematic attack on its female population—and which resulted in collateral damage on an international scale.
In effect from 1979 to 2015, China’s policy placed strict guidelines on reproduction in order to curb population growth, which Wang’s mother proclaims (parroting the Communist Party line) might otherwise have led to famine and potential cannibalism. 

Urban citizens were limited to a single child, while rural inhabitants were, in the mid-1980s, granted the opportunity to have a second kid. 

The law outlined strict punishment for non-compliance: the destruction of homes, forfeiture of property and valuables, and steep fines. 

Those who suffered those penalties, however, got off easy, since local Family Planning Officials—empowered by the Communist Party—also had the authority to abduct women, tie them up, and force them to undergo sterilizations and abortions as late as eight to nine months into their pregnancies.
As the filmmakers detail in a series of stunning conversations with residents of Wang’s hometown (and similar provinces), those procedures entailed murdering infants after they’d been born. 

Artist Peng Wang presents photos of discarded fetuses he found in trash dumps, wrapped in yellow “medical waste” bags, as well as one deceased newborn that he kept in a formaldehyde-filled jar. Even in a doc rife with horror stories, these images are difficult to shake, underlining the unthinkably callous consequences of a strategy that the Chinese government proclaimed would double everyone’s standard of living.

Wang and Zhang’s film was motivated by the birth of the former’s son, as well as her upbringing in China (she emigrated at age 26 to the U.S., where she had her first baby). 

Rather than a straightforward textbook overview of the policy, One Child Nation is also a memory piece. 

Narrating action that’s been partly structured as an investigation into both her—and her family’s—past, Wang relies heavily on recollections about growing up during this propaganda-saturated period, when billboards, TV programs, and theatrical and music performances touted the policy as the means by which the country would forge a glorious path into the future, providing prosperity, unity and happiness for all who obeyed.
Alongside such heartening messages were pervasive spray-painted signs and children’s ditties that threatened nonconformists. 

For a population still reeling from the hardships of prior decades, and trained from birth to accept the Party as infallible and the master of people’s fate, abiding by these rules was difficult but not impossible. 

Anecdotes about women fighting back against forced abortions are occasionally heard in One Child Nation. 

Yet far more prevalent are tales about babies being placed in baskets and left on the side of the road or at markets, to be snatched up by passersby or, as was more often the case, to die of starvation and exposure.
That was going to be the fate of Wang’s brother until he turned out to be a boy—a micro example of the macro sexism that dominates China, where sons are prized for carrying on the family name, and daughters are thought of as expendable secondary figures destined to desert their clans (by marrying into other families). 

In that environment, disposing of female infants was no big deal—not that China stopped there. 

In the early 1990s, the country began allowing foreigners to adopt “orphans,” thereby creating a booming market for Chinese girls. 

What Wang and Zhang reveal is that overseas adoption quickly became a despicable trafficking racket in which Family Planning officials tore second children away from their homes and gave them to orphanages (for a fee), which then sold them to American and European families who ostensibly had no clue that they were perpetuating a kidnapping-for-profit paradigm.
In vignettes with Brian Stuy and Long Lan Stuy, the American parents of three adopted Chinese girls and the founders of Research China—an organization that identifies and reunites kids with their birth parents—One Child Nation lays out the extent to which the one-child policy victimized just about anyone who came into contact with it. 

That includes Wang herself, who expresses guilt over having been a patriotic youngster while one of her aunts was sending her cousin away with traffickers, and another uncle was leaving his daughter in the street to perish. 

For Wang, the film is a personal reckoning with traumatic history—a process also being undertaken by some of her policy-complicit interviewees, including a doctor who claims to have performed between 50,000 and 60,000 abortions and sterilizations, and now atones for her sins by running an infertility clinic.


With speakers habitually explaining their acquiescence to the one-child policy by claiming that they “had no choice,” One Child Nation proves a portrait of powerlessness in the face of an authoritarian government that demanded blind obedience, and didn’t care about the human wreckage caused by its demands. 

Wang and Zhang craft their material as a chronological journey, each step uncovering ever-more-depressing realities, and it culminates with a poignant passage about a young girl who was denied an adolescence with her twin sister after the latter was taken from their home and, shortly thereafter, adopted by Americans.
In this young girl’s countenance, growing sadder as she contemplates the gulf between her and her stateside sibling—whom she’s connected with over social media, albeit in a casual, detached manner—Wang locates a profound sorrow that dovetails with her own feelings about the relatives she lost to the one-child policy. 

One Child Nation’s coda reveals that the country now touts a two-child policy as the key to continued success. 

But in light of all that’s come before it, that notion feels like nonsense aimed at masking a continued top-down desire to regulate every facet of women’s lives.

'Hooligan Sparrow' filmmaker recounts how her documentary opened her eyes to China’s secret police

By Hugh Hart

When director Nanfu Wang learned that her debut film “Hooligan Sparrow” had made the feature documentary Oscar shortlist last month, she was of course excited but also a little anxious. 

Part political thriller, part travelogue, part character study, the film sheds unflattering light on China's secret police and, sure enough, within days of the Academy Award announcement, government authorities visited Wang’s family in China. 

Speaking calmly by phone from her current home in Brooklyn, Wang says, “National security people had been monitoring me and told my family to warn me not to say anything negative about China.”
Wang began ruffling bureaucratic feathers in 2013, when she spent the summer documenting the travails of activist sex worker Ye Haiyan, a.k.a. Hooligan Sparrow. 

Enrolled at New York University's news and documentary graduate program, Wang read on the Internet about Haiyan's campaign to expose conditions in the country's notorious $2 brothels and decided to tackle the topic.
The day she landed in China, Wang abruptly shifted focus to a disturbing scandal unfolding in Hainan province. 

There, six elementary school girls were sexually violated by their principal and another man at a local hotel. 

“Sparrow told me she was planning to protest the rape case and I realized at that point the story wasn’t going to be about sex workers anymore,” Wang recalls. 

“The rape case became the trigger for a film that's really about how far the government goes to silence dissent.”
Wang traveled light. 

In her backpack she carried a Canon DSLR camera, a small point-and-shoot, a pair of glasses embedded with a tiny camera and an audio recorder. 

It's all she needed to film the schoolyard demonstration where Sparrow brandished a sign reading, “Hey Principal, get a room with me and leave the kids alone.” 

Shortly after the protest, Wang documented a group of unidentified men removing Sparrow from the apartment she shared with her 13-year-old daughter. 

When Sparrow returned home, she was pressured to leave town. 

“From there, we were basically on the run,” says Wang, who immersed herself in the story to the point where she too became part of the action.
Hounded throughout five Chinese provinces, Sparrow and her resilient child eventually found refuge in a rural village. 

Meanwhile, Wang herself became a target of government surveillance. 

Standing outside a courtroom to film a hearing for human rights lawyer Wang Yu, Wang captured shaky hand-held footage of seeming civilians as they tried to grab her camera. 

Later, authorities questioned Wang for five hours and demanded to see her footage. 

The crafty filmmaker had already arranged for friends to smuggle her hard drives out of the country.
“I prepared a hard drive filled with a bunch of random landscapes that I'd filmed along the way, and that's what I gave to the authorities,” says Wang, who secretly recorded the interrogation. 

“The whole time they were questioning me, I couldn’t move and I felt like the recorder was burning my leg. Luckily, they didn't search me.”
Wang, who grew up in a small village, never even saw a documentary film until she moved to the U.S. at age 25. 

The making of “Hooligan Sparrow” opened her eyes to stealthy forces that had been hiding in plain sight throughout her youth. 

“It's like the movie ‘The Truman Show,’ where the guy realizes at the end of the movie his entire life was a lie. That's pretty much how I felt when I got involved in this protest and realized there were all these secret police on the streets monitoring people. Some of my old friends don't even believe what I tell them. They say, ‘You went to the U.S. for two years and now you come back and you're so critical!’”
After she returned to New York, Wang spent a year editing the raw footage, joined forces with executive producers Andy Cohen and Alison Klayman ("Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry") and watched “Hooligan Sparrow” become a sensation on the film festival circuit.
Looking back on her summer of living dangerously, she muses, “It was scary but from a documentary filmmaking standpoint, I'm grateful things happened the way they did. If I ended up making a story exactly the same as I imagined it at the start, that would be very boring. For me, this is the charm of documentary filmmaking.”

‘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.

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.