Nanfu Wang’s 2016 documentary Hooligan Sparrow records the story of women’s rights activist Ye Haiyan (the film draws its title from her better known epithet) in her struggle to speak out against misogyny and chauvinism in China. Ye Haiyan was first drawn to activism in the setting of China’s “Ten Yuan Brothels,” most often visited by migrant workers where a session with a prostitute costs less than two dollars. In order to gain access to this underside of Chinese society, she began working as a sex worker for free; her initial goals as an activist were to research and report on the working conditions and backgrounds of migrant workers, while also raising awareness about HIV prevention.
Hooligan Sparrow documents her effort to expose a case of sexual abuse in Hainan. In 2013, six girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen were taken by their school principal to a hotel, where they were offered as sexual bribes to local officials and raped. Ye Haiyan and human rights lawyer Wang Yu work in collaboration with a handful of other activists and travel to Hainan to protest the crime, offer support to the girls’ families, and advocate for justice.
While the film focuses on the aftermath of this specific incident, its power lies in its demonstration of dissidence, bureaucracy, and inequality in China. One challenge of developing a film whose story serves as a case study is point of view. In this conflict, who is the main character: Ye Haiyan, the young victims and their families, Wang Yu, or the local authorities? Director Nanfu Wang chooses to use her own first person narration to guide the structure of the film. At first, this choice seems distracting–the subjects of the film have more at stake than the director. However, her narration highlights both the difficulty of carrying out acts of resistance as well as recording and raising awareness about those acts. This is essential for activism that intends to change a prodigious and rigid system. The arc of the film coherently portrays a defined period of an ongoing, messy situation at the same time as it reasons the necessity of this document. The last line in the film states: when you are repressed, all you can do is record.
Many of the most shocking moments in the film are not what we expect. They do not conform to stereotypes of tightly controlled states and showcase police brutality or asinine bureaucracy. Rather, they show how little it takes to incite the government’s fear of instability. To hear rumors of massive political demonstrations against sexual abuse in Hainan is different than to see that those so-called demonstrations consist of roughly five people, mostly women holding hand-written paper signs and giving out sheets with information about the victims. In other words, the means of resistance are extremely humble, especially in comparison to mass protests elsewhere in the world, and yet the consequences that these activists face are dire.
At one point in the film, Ye Haiyan returns home from her work Hainan and finds her house, where she also has her office, has been raided and pillaged; this threat could have come from an irate neighbor or the local government. She calls the police to confront them directly about it, and the officer brushes off the attack responding, “别大惊小怪”, or “don’t make a big deal out of it”.
The phrase is an apt description of much of what happens in this film on different levels and from various perspectives. First, as in the case of the officer’s claim, government officials regard the protesters’ actions as “making a big deal out of nothing” as a way to belittle the original crimes committed. While stripping sexual abuse of its gravity, these criticisms frame activists as posing the real threat to security rather than the criminal offenders. On a second level, the audience may consider the government’s reactions to these small acts of resistance reactionary and over the top. The degree to which the government fears anything that might subvert its power means that a single picture posted on the internet could have serious consequences for the person who posted it.
The film itself is also engaged in the action of “大惊小怪” to promote and advocate for the cause it is dedicated to. Throughout the film there are multiple moments when the director steps back from the drama to show the splash that either the case or its backlash made on the internet. For example, the audience is told that one of Ye Haiyan’s tweets or pictures spurred an international response, while the screen displays countless comments, almost all of which are in Chinese.
Considering China’s vast population, the amount of views and comments presented in these instances are in fact, on second thought, less impressive than they are made out to be. These instances show the film engaging in this tactic to sway the audience–and a passive, noncritical viewer could easily be convinced of the reaction’s magnitude, amplified by the director. This is not to discount the brave work of Nanfu Wang and Ye Haiyan as well as the many other activists who appear in the film, but to point out that in pursuit of justice, the tactic of “大惊小怪” can also be useful.
At the core of this film is the horror of sexual abuse and the corruption of authorities that condone and conceal it. Lawyer Wang Yu reminds us that this is only one case of many more that have been left uninvestigated. According to a study by the Girls’ Protection Foundation in Beijing released in May of this year, there were 968 cases of sexual abuse of children reported in the media between 2013 and 2015, involving 1,790 victims. Furthermore, Wang Dawei of the People’s Public Security University estimates that for every case that was reported, roughly seven were not, bringing the number of child sexual abuse victims in that two year span to 12,000.
These cases are particularly hazy when it comes to an especially vulnerable group of young people in China: left-behind children or 留守儿童. Their parents move to cities for work, while they are either left in boarding schools near where they were born or brought along to cities but are not sufficiently cared for. As in any country, the numbers are unclear because the breadth of victims’ silence is unquantifiable. But the magnitude is startling. There may be 25 million people under 18 who are victims of abuse.
In the United States, recent debate about sexual assault and rape has originated from and centered on one type of environment: the college campus. The controversial sentencing of Brock Allen Turner from Stanford University, Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress as a form of protest against the classmate she accused of raping her at Columbia University, and Brown University student Katherine Byron’s effort to create safe spaces regarding sexual misconduct on campus all exemplify the growing conversation about rape in the last five years. Many of the debates in the US attempt to come to conclusions about how to deal with these cases legally. Lynn Hecht Schafran, vice president at Legal Momentum and director for the National Judicial Education Program, told Public Radio International about the current “tension between judicial discretion and the temptation to install mandatory minimum sentences.”
Since legal institutions are less mature and independent in China, the options for pursuing legal representation and succeeding in mediation and litigation are limited, and often not even considered as a realistic possibility. Therefore, the primary conversation surrounding these issues is taking place in different spheres, most notably online on social media platforms Wechat and Weibo. These spaces offer anti-rape activists an effective means of transmitting their information that is potentially less risky than going out to raise awareness. The problem of male sexual entitlement and practices victim-blaming are worldwide phenomena. The work of Hooligan Sparrow’s female protagonists, Ye Haiyan, Wang Yu, and Nanfu Wang, is to expose sexual abuse in China, end violence against women, and bring justice to survivors. The first step is bringing these cases out of the dark and giving voice to people who have felt safest in silence.
Hooligan Sparrow screened at HotDocs and Sundance among many other festivals and aired on PBS POV on October 17th, 2016.
