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.