China: A New World Order review – are we conniving with a genocidal dictatorship?

This documentary dared to do what politicians the world over would not, asking tough questions of Xi Jinping’s totalitarian rule 

By Stuart Jeffries

Is Xi Jinping ... creating a personality cult? 

The drink Mihrigul Tursun’s captors offered her was strangely cloudy. 

It resembled, she said, water after washing rice. 

After drinking it, the young mother recalled in China: A New World Order (BBC Two), her period stopped. 

“It didn’t come back until five months after I left prison. So my period stopped seven months in total. Now it’s back, but it’s abnormal.”
We never learned why Tursun was detained – along with an estimated one million other Uighurs of East Turkestan colony, in what the authorities euphemistically call re-education centres – but we heard clearly her claims of being tortured. 

“They cut off my hair and electrocuted my head,” Tursun said. 

“I couldn’t stand it any more. I can only say please just kill me.”
Instead of murdering one Uighur mother, China is attempting something worse – eliminating a people. 

“There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben Emmerson QC. 

“That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?” 

This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is what is happening to the Islamic people of East Turkestan. 

“This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. 

“That’s a genocidal policy.”
Independently verifying Tursun’s treatment is scarcely possible, but this documentary heard claims of similar treatment in the colony.

A teacher and Communist party member told how she had been sent to teach Chinese at a detention camp for 2,500 Uighurs. 

She claimed not only to have heard detainees being tortured, but also to have learned from a nurse that women were given injections that had the same effect as the drink Tursun took. 

“They stop your periods and seriously affect reproductive organs,” she said.
What its critics call concentration camps, Beijing describes as “vocational education and training centres” resembling “boarding schools”. 

We cut to official footage of drawing, dancing and in one room a class singing in English “If you’re happy and you know it, shout ‘Yes sir!’” 

Which, while not proof of genocidal policy, was grim enough viewing.

But without doubt, since 2013 when Xi Jinping became president and there was an attack in Tiananmen Square in which Uighurs killed five people and injured 38, Beijing has cracked down on what it perceives as an Islamist threat from the province. 

That crackdown has included using smartphones and street cameras to create a surveillance state for Uighurs.
Should Britain roll out the red carpet to a country charged with crimes against humanity, of undermining freedom of speech and democracy in Hong Kong, of crushing freedom movements in Beijing, of – it was suggested here – creating a cult of personality around Xi the likes of which have not been seen since Chairman Mao? 

“Better we engage with them so we can influence them,” said the former chancellor George Osborne.
But does the UK have any influence? 

Certainly not as much as we did in in the 19th century when, instead of trying to charm them into trade deals, we militarily subdued the Chinese. 

“Very few countries have any leverage at all,” said Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign secretary. 

The rest of the world shrinks from criticising China’s human rights violations because we’re awed by its economic power and how we benefit from it, argued Panetta.
This first of a three-part series did what politicians dare not do, namely to raise hard questions, not just of Beijing, but of us. 

Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might, that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal dictatorship? 

The Chinese refer to the 19th century as the Century of Humiliation. 

Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness.
One day in 2015, while Xi was being charmed by the Queen and David Cameron, a bookseller from Hong Kong set off to see his girlfriend. 

Suddenly, Lam Wing-kee recalled, he was surrounded by 31 people. 

He spent the next five months in solitary confinement and was released only after he admitted to selling illegal books. 

“I am very remorseful,” he told his captors, clearly under duress. 

“I hope the Chinese government will be lenient to me.” 

The books he had mailed from his shop to customers in mainland China included those critical of the constitutional change that allows Xi to remain president for life.
Forget morality, it’s time for more cloudy drinks. 

While Lam Wing-kee sat in solitary, Cameron and Xi went to the pub for ye venerable nightmare of ye photo-op. 

Neither waited for their pints to settle, for clouds to resolve into clarity. 

Instead, both precipitately drank what, had the cameras not been there, I feel sure, neither would have touched. 

An emblem of Sino-British relations in the 21st century.

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.

Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower review – a Hong Kong schoolboy takes the fight to China

A rousing documentary profiles Joshua Wong, the adolescent activist who found fame with his protests against the Chinese government

By Gwilym Mumford

Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong, who is profiled in Joshua: Teenager vs Superpower.

Joshua Wong, the student who risked the wrath of Beijing: ‘It’s about turning the impossible into the possible’

The Joshua of the title is Joshua Wong, an unassuming Hong Kong schoolboy who decided to pick a fight with the next global superpower, and won, at least initially. 

In 2011 14-year-old Wong and his Scholarism movement managed to defeat an effort to make China’s communist National Education curriculum mandatory in Hong Kong schools through the power of peaceful protest. 

It was the first victory an activist group managed in the territory since it came under Chinese rule in 1997.
If Wong had cashed his chips in there and then his story might have made for a pleasing if fairly minor documentary. 

But, as this absorbing new Netflix film shows, he instead got involved in a far more significant battle: over the democratic future of Hong Kong itself.
In 2014 Scholarism became part of the wider Umbrella movement, the Occupy-style group set up to protest a refusal by China to allow Hong Kong to elect their own leaders. 

Officially the country is afforded a relaxed position within the One China policy, permitted to maintain its present capitalist form for 50 years as part of the handover deal made between China and the UK. 

Yet, there has been a perceived ratcheting up of influence by Beijing in recent times, prompting a more robust response from those opposed to China’s control, particularly from younger citizens like Wong who see Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy as central to their identity.

Joshua Wong.

Teenager vs Superpower does a solid job of contextualising this larger ideological battle, with talking heads and archive footage, but it’s always clear that the focus here is Wong. 

He’s a remarkable figure perhaps because, on the surface he seems so unremarkable -- a gawky teen in oversized clothes from a lower-middle class background who nevertheless manages to rouse people with his energy and plain speaking. 

His ‘wunderkind’ status helps too of course – one commentator here compares him with Joan of Arc for his ability to enter a complex adult conflict and resolve it with youthful simplicity.
While Teenager vs. Superpower is often as in thrall to Wong as his followers, director Joe Piscatella does also allow for some dissenting voices who see Wong’s celebrity presence as detrimental to the larger movement. 

One accuses him of hijacking the protests and there’s a sense that his adolescent impetuousness might cost him dearly in the end. 

Rallying cries like “it’s time for total war” are unlikely to be received warmly by those in Beijing, and Joshua is aware of the parlous situation he’s created for himself when, at one point in the documentary he notes, “I can’t ensure I will not be disappeared in the future.”
For the time being China seem to be adopting a softly softly approach to Wong and indeed the larger protest movement inside Hong Kong. 

As the documentary progresses – and it’s worth issuing a spoiler warning here for those who don’t want to be broadsided by details of widely reported real-life events – we see the Umbrella Protests falter and ultimately fail, not because of a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown, but as a result of apathy and fatigue on the part of its participants. 

Even a hunger strike by Wong, when his camp is finally dismantled by police, isn’t enough to reinvigorate the movement. 

Ultimately, even Scholarism feels forced to call it a day.
That would of course make for a pretty downbeat coda to an otherwise rousing documentary – not to mention wildly out of character from Wong – and encouragingly things end with him and several other members of Scholarism forming a new political entity, Demonsisto, and plotting to run for political office. 

The fight for Hong Kong’s future is far from over, and it seems that Joshua is going to be a major player in it.

'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.”

China's Crimes Against Humanity

Two movies China desperately wants to hide
By Jeff Jacoby

Canada's Miss World contestant Anastasia Lin speaks to media after she was denied entry to mainland China, at Hong Kong International Airport on Nov. 26, 2015.

This week, two extraordinary Canadian films — one a chilling documentary, the other a riveting drama based on its findings — were released for sale on iTunes. 

Directed by Leon Lee, the films illuminate what may be the most depraved of all systematic human-rights atrocities in the world today: China’s industrial-scale harvesting of vital organs from prisoners of conscience, to be transplanted into patients paying exorbitant fees for a heart, kidney, or liver made available on demand.
The documentary, “Human Harvest,” won the coveted Peabody Award for its exposé of an unspeakable crime against humanity. 

In 1999, Chinese hospitals began performing more than 10,000 organ transplants annually, generating a vast and lucrative traffic in “transplant tourists,” who flocked to China on the assurance that they could obtain lifesaving organs without having to languish on a waiting list. 

China had no voluntary organ-donation system to speak of, yet suddenly it was providing tens of thousands of freshly harvested organs to patients with ready cash or high-placed connections. 

How was that possible?
The evidence, assembled by human-rights researchers and investigative journalists, added up to something unimaginable: China was killing enormous numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting their organs — and then delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become a major source of revenue. 

Chinese officials claim that organs come from violent criminals on death row. 

But “Human Harvest” makes it clear that most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians — and, above all, practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-style spiritual movement of peaceful meditation and ethical commitment.
Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa), a peaceful and nonpolitical discipline, attracted millions of adherents across China during the 1990s. 

But in 1999, Jiang Zemin and the Chinese Communist Party, alarmed by the popularity of a belief system not controlled by the state, abruptly turned against it. 

Practitioners found themselves demonized as dangerous cultists; by the hundreds of thousands they were arrested and imprisoned, often subjected to ghastly torture until they “transformed” — i.e., until they signed a document renouncing Falun Gong. 

Many who wouldn’t died under the knife, literally butchered for their organs.
As awareness of China’s gruesome organ-harvesting crimes has spread, a few Western governments have moved to combat it through laws prohibiting citizens from traveling to China for transplants or barring insurance companies from covering it. 

In conferences and parliamentary hearings, activists have pressed for a comprehensive strategy to end to organ harvesting. 

But the best vehicle to arouse a massive audience to resist China’s massive evil is popular culture. Hence Lee’s newest movie: a feature-length thriller, “The Bleeding Edge.”
The film stars Anastasia Lin, a gifted Chinese-Canadian actress who also happens to be the reigning Miss World Canada. 

She plays Chen Jing, a young Falun Gong practitioner who is jailed and brutally tortured for her refusal to “transform.” 

A simultaneous plot line follows James Branton (played by Jay Clift), a hard-charging tech entrepreneur whose heart collapses while on a business trip to China to close a major deal with the government. 

Branton receives an emergency transplant that saves his life — and motivates him to find out how a suitable organ could have been located so quickly.
Lin drew international headlines last year when she was forbidden to enter China, where the 2015 Miss World pageant was being held. 

For Lin, who was born and lived in China until she was 13, beauty pageants are a means of calling attention to human-rights abuses in her native land, and Beijing was intent on denying her a Chinese platform from which to speak.
This year’s Miss World pageant is taking place in Washington, D.C. 

Lin is once again representing Canada. 

The competition’s motto is “Beauty with a Purpose,” and Lin’s purpose hasn’t wavered: to shed light on China’s terrible repression, particularly its inhuman treatment of those who practice Falun Gong.
“The Bleeding Edge” will be screened in Washington a few days before the Miss World final on Dec. 18, and the iTunes listing is timed to coincide with Lin’s bid for the crown. 

Far better, of course, would be a wide theatrical release, but no theater chain has agreed to show the movie. 

That isn’t because of any problem with the quality of the film — it is a gripping work, and Lin’s performance is haunting. 

But China’s regime exerts enormous leverage on the US movie industry. 

Studios are afraid to make films that may face resistance in the Chinese market, and major swaths of the American theater market, such as AMC Entertainment, are Chinese-owned subsidiaries.
When Beijing aims to stifle a message, it takes grit to push back. 

Lin’s father, who still lives in China, was threatened by security agents into severing his ties with a daughter he adores. 

A renowned Canadian fashion designer who was eager to provide dresses for Lin’s Miss World appearances abruptly backed out after allegedly receiving a warning from the Chinese embassy in Ottawa. 

Lin has been told more than once that she is effectively blacklisted in Hollywood.
Making any film is challenging, but “The Bleeding Edge” has also had to contend with the roadblocks that come with Chinese enmity. 

Chinese-speaking cast and crew members who were supposed to work with Lee backed out for fear of endangering loved ones in China. 

Owners of venues where filming was to take place panicked when they heard actors rehearsing their lines. 

One potential distributor told Lee: “I am not keen on putting my head in China’s crosshairs... I really wish I could publicly attach my name to this, but too many of my paychecks are involved in Chinese funds.”
Yet Leon Lee and Anastasia Lin have not lost their resolve. 

Nor have they lost sight of their goal. 

They seek not fame or fortune for themselves, but liberty for China’s people and an end to an crime against humanity so evil that it could have been devised by Josef Mengele. 

China wants to quash “The Bleeding Edge.” 

All the more reason to view it.

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.