Hooligan Sparrow, the powerful documentary debut by Chinese director Wang Nanfu (王男栿) opened the 15th installment of Taipei’s annual Urban Nomad indie film festival on May 12. It was the first screening of the film in the Chinese-speaking world, and is unlikely to ever be shown publicly in China. Centering around the arranged rape of six schoolgirls by officials in Hainan province and state efforts to intimidate the brave women fighting the coverup, this film is beyond toxic for a Chinese government obsessed with media control and "positive energy". In Hong Kong, where there is greater political expression than mainland China, the recent and ongoing chilling of political protest and expression suggest the chances of it being shown to large audiences there are low.
From the film’s opening scenes, it becomes clear that Wang herself has become a part of the story, whether she intended to or not. She’s being eyed menacingly by several men - plainclothes cops? - suspicious of her and her camera outside a government building. This scene cuts to Wang in what appears to be a hotel room speaking directly to the camera, preparing to meet state security while wearing a wire. The screen goes black, and grainy audio allows the audience to listen in as Wang lies about what she had been doing over the previous several months: documenting one of China’s most famous feminist activists - Ye Haiyan (叶海燕).
Using video from her handheld camera as well as eyeglasses equipped with a micro camera and occasionally surreptitiously recorded audio, Wang shines a spotlight on the dark and hydra-like nature of state efforts to silence those seeking basic justice in today’s China. Paranoia rules in Hooligan Sparrow: seemingly helpful people are most likely impostors and others who make unsettling first impressions turn out to be kind and brave. On multiple occasions, Wang returns to her footage to discover that seemingly new entrants into the plot had already made earlier appearances. In this unreleased scene from her film, she discovers an unidentified man who is literally on a windowsill outside Ye's office, pressing his ear against the glass.
Taipei was the most logical place for Wang to show her film in this part of the world, precisely because it is not China. Hooligan Sparrow is a searing indictment of the Chinese government’s full-on assault on any threat to its authority, be it real or perceived. It is told through the lens of the dismal state of women’s rights under the patriarchal Communist Party of China. Women have next to no voice in the halls of power in Beijing. Among the 25-member Politburo that sits atop the party’s power structure, only two women can be counted. At this group’s apex, the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, led by neo-Maoist Xi Jinping, are all men.
In stark contrast, Taiwanese society is vastly more respectful to women and open to their empowerment. This is a point that was highlighted with the inauguration of Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, on May 20. The importance of respecting women's equality to men - as well as acknowledging that Taiwan can still do a better job of it - is a message seen everywhere in daily life here. Posters in public spaces and bars promote an anti-sexual harassment message, while designated areas of subway platforms are reserved as safe waiting zones for women at night. Above all, participation by women in politics in Taiwan is surpassed only by Scandinavian countries.
It's a different world in China, where five feminists were detained in March of last year on the eve of International Women’s Day for a planned protest against sexual harassment on public transportation. Their offence: “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all term that has been used to devastating effect across civil society to justify the disappearing of activists, scholars and lawyers. In Xi's China, feminism is state subversion.
Among the activists who have fallen afoul of authorities for seeking improvements of women’s rights - as well as migrant worker rights - is the indomitable Ye Haiyan. With gritty determination, a knack for slogans and an intuitive grasp of the power of social media, Ye leads a small group of womens’ rights activists in a campaign aimed at shaming the Chinese government into prosecuting the 2013 rape of six schoolgirls - aged 11 to 14 - by two local officials in the island province of Hainan. Their rapes were arranged by the principal of the school they were attending, who personally rented the hotel rooms. Ye allowed Wang to document her efforts to bring the officials and principal to justice, understanding the importance of recording what transpire for others to witness.
From the film’s opening scenes, it becomes clear that Wang herself has become a part of the story, whether she intended to or not. She’s being eyed menacingly by several men - plainclothes cops? - suspicious of her and her camera outside a government building. This scene cuts to Wang in what appears to be a hotel room speaking directly to the camera, preparing to meet state security while wearing a wire. The screen goes black, and grainy audio allows the audience to listen in as Wang lies about what she had been doing over the previous several months: documenting one of China’s most famous feminist activists - Ye Haiyan (叶海燕).
Using video from her handheld camera as well as eyeglasses equipped with a micro camera and occasionally surreptitiously recorded audio, Wang shines a spotlight on the dark and hydra-like nature of state efforts to silence those seeking basic justice in today’s China. Paranoia rules in Hooligan Sparrow: seemingly helpful people are most likely impostors and others who make unsettling first impressions turn out to be kind and brave. On multiple occasions, Wang returns to her footage to discover that seemingly new entrants into the plot had already made earlier appearances. In this unreleased scene from her film, she discovers an unidentified man who is literally on a windowsill outside Ye's office, pressing his ear against the glass.
Taipei was the most logical place for Wang to show her film in this part of the world, precisely because it is not China. Hooligan Sparrow is a searing indictment of the Chinese government’s full-on assault on any threat to its authority, be it real or perceived. It is told through the lens of the dismal state of women’s rights under the patriarchal Communist Party of China. Women have next to no voice in the halls of power in Beijing. Among the 25-member Politburo that sits atop the party’s power structure, only two women can be counted. At this group’s apex, the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, led by neo-Maoist Xi Jinping, are all men.
In stark contrast, Taiwanese society is vastly more respectful to women and open to their empowerment. This is a point that was highlighted with the inauguration of Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, on May 20. The importance of respecting women's equality to men - as well as acknowledging that Taiwan can still do a better job of it - is a message seen everywhere in daily life here. Posters in public spaces and bars promote an anti-sexual harassment message, while designated areas of subway platforms are reserved as safe waiting zones for women at night. Above all, participation by women in politics in Taiwan is surpassed only by Scandinavian countries.
It's a different world in China, where five feminists were detained in March of last year on the eve of International Women’s Day for a planned protest against sexual harassment on public transportation. Their offence: “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, a catch-all term that has been used to devastating effect across civil society to justify the disappearing of activists, scholars and lawyers. In Xi's China, feminism is state subversion.
Among the activists who have fallen afoul of authorities for seeking improvements of women’s rights - as well as migrant worker rights - is the indomitable Ye Haiyan. With gritty determination, a knack for slogans and an intuitive grasp of the power of social media, Ye leads a small group of womens’ rights activists in a campaign aimed at shaming the Chinese government into prosecuting the 2013 rape of six schoolgirls - aged 11 to 14 - by two local officials in the island province of Hainan. Their rapes were arranged by the principal of the school they were attending, who personally rented the hotel rooms. Ye allowed Wang to document her efforts to bring the officials and principal to justice, understanding the importance of recording what transpire for others to witness.
After the girls' parents discover what happened to their daughters, their protests are enough to get the officials arrested, after which they are ordered to say nothing to media. The government initially seeks to prosecute the rapist officials for soliciting child prostitutes, which in addition to being victim-shaming and a wholly inaccurate assessment of the crime, carries a much lighter sentence than rape.
Ye launches an online campaign in which she tells the school principal who provided the girls to the officials to leave schoolchildren alone and take her to a hotel instead. The campaign goes viral, with outraged Chinese and activists including Ai Weiwei amplifying its reach and impact.
Ye launches an online campaign in which she tells the school principal who provided the girls to the officials to leave schoolchildren alone and take her to a hotel instead. The campaign goes viral, with outraged Chinese and activists including Ai Weiwei amplifying its reach and impact.
Prior to the campaign for justice in Hainan, Ye had already felt the glare of the national spotlight when she volunteered herself as a free prostitute in a campaign to highlight the plight of Chinese sex workers. She became known online as “Hooligan Sparrow” (流氓燕), a nickname that lends Wang’s film its title.
Ye and the humble sparrow share a history of government persecution. The sparrow was sentenced to extermination nationwide by Mao Zedong in 1958 under his disastrous “Four Pests” campaign, in which it was every Chinese man, woman and child’s duty to help exterminate all sparrows in China, along with flies, mosquitoes and rats.
Ye and the humble sparrow share a history of government persecution. The sparrow was sentenced to extermination nationwide by Mao Zedong in 1958 under his disastrous “Four Pests” campaign, in which it was every Chinese man, woman and child’s duty to help exterminate all sparrows in China, along with flies, mosquitoes and rats.
The anti-sparrow campaign was as ludicrous as it was tragic. Nests and eggs were destroyed and sparrows that weren’t shot in flight were harassed by noisy crowds banging pots and pans until the helpless birds fell to earth in exhaustion. In Mao’s eyes, the sparrows’ crime was eating grain seeds, but what he failed to grasp was that the bird also ate insects that ate grain seeds as well. The near-extinction of the sparrow was a disaster, resulting in ballooning populations of locusts and other insects, and sowing the seeds of ecological imbalance that contributed to massive famines in the early 1960s in which tens of millions of Chinese perished.
The campaign against Hooligan Sparrow depicted in Wang’s film is equally ludicrous. The tactics used against Ye, who is accompanied by her unflappable and wise-beyond-her-years 13-year-old daughter, Yaxin, are reminiscent of the anti-sparrow campaign. Echoing the sad sparrow of the Mao years, Ye is unable to live in peace. She is evicted by her landlord without explanation, turned away from hotels, detained by police and harassed by hired thugs who may as well be banging on pots and pans as they threaten her and Yaxin at their doorstep.
Unlike Mao’s campaign, which mobilized all Chinese, the instruments of Ye’s harassment are uniformly male, from police in both uniform and plain clothes flouting the law on camera to obfuscating officers at detention centers to hired thugs. Eventually, this Sparrow has no choice but to abandon most of her belongings and flee China’s south to the only place that will take her, the village where she was raised in Hubei province, in the country’s heartland.
Among those “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” along with Ye is Wang Yu, an activist lawyer who features prominently in the film and who has been in detention since July 2015, a fate shared by almost all of China’s weiquan (维权), or “rights defense”, lawyers.
The campaign against Hooligan Sparrow depicted in Wang’s film is equally ludicrous. The tactics used against Ye, who is accompanied by her unflappable and wise-beyond-her-years 13-year-old daughter, Yaxin, are reminiscent of the anti-sparrow campaign. Echoing the sad sparrow of the Mao years, Ye is unable to live in peace. She is evicted by her landlord without explanation, turned away from hotels, detained by police and harassed by hired thugs who may as well be banging on pots and pans as they threaten her and Yaxin at their doorstep.
Unlike Mao’s campaign, which mobilized all Chinese, the instruments of Ye’s harassment are uniformly male, from police in both uniform and plain clothes flouting the law on camera to obfuscating officers at detention centers to hired thugs. Eventually, this Sparrow has no choice but to abandon most of her belongings and flee China’s south to the only place that will take her, the village where she was raised in Hubei province, in the country’s heartland.
Among those “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” along with Ye is Wang Yu, an activist lawyer who features prominently in the film and who has been in detention since July 2015, a fate shared by almost all of China’s weiquan (维权), or “rights defense”, lawyers.
Calm, determined and thoughtful, the former commercial lawyer has also defended Falungong adherents and the imprisoned Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti. To the casual observer, Wang, no relation to the film’s director, may appear to embody the Chinese saying “throwing an egg against a rock” (以卵投石) - overestimating one’s strength in the face of a superior adversary. However, as she accurately notes in Hooligan Sparrow, even if she loses every case, by forcing the government to make a case for its actions, she and other weiquan lawyers are still acting as a check on government power. Today she is still paying the price for her small but important victories.
Calm and composed as she attempts to secure justice for the raped schoolgirls - and freedom for a detained Ye - Wang loses her composure only once in the film. Noting that the Hainan case is not an isolated incident and that the procurement and rape of underage girls to secure favors from government officials has become “fashionable” in today’s China, Wang is unable to prevent a couple of tears from falling from her eyes.
Hooligan Sparrow, like Mao’s anti-sparrow campaign, does not have a happy ending. In effect, “sparrows” such as Ye and Wang are on the verge of extinction in today’s China. This point is hammered home after the final scene, as the names and photos of the rights crusaders featured in the film are accompanied by their respective jail terms. Particularly jarring is the image of Wang Yu, who minutes earlier was using her freedom of movement to fight for justice, as she is still in detention.
As for Wang Nanfu, who is based in New York City, she has not returned to China since the release of Hooligan Sparrow, which was featured in competition at Sundance this year. Speaking with the audience after the first screening of her film in Taipei, she acknowledged the uncertainty that now clouds her future with her home country.
"The worst outcome of this could be I can't return to China," she said. "Or, I can return, but I can't leave."
Hooligan Sparrow will make its New York City debut on June 10 at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2016 at Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater.
Calm and composed as she attempts to secure justice for the raped schoolgirls - and freedom for a detained Ye - Wang loses her composure only once in the film. Noting that the Hainan case is not an isolated incident and that the procurement and rape of underage girls to secure favors from government officials has become “fashionable” in today’s China, Wang is unable to prevent a couple of tears from falling from her eyes.
Hooligan Sparrow, like Mao’s anti-sparrow campaign, does not have a happy ending. In effect, “sparrows” such as Ye and Wang are on the verge of extinction in today’s China. This point is hammered home after the final scene, as the names and photos of the rights crusaders featured in the film are accompanied by their respective jail terms. Particularly jarring is the image of Wang Yu, who minutes earlier was using her freedom of movement to fight for justice, as she is still in detention.
As for Wang Nanfu, who is based in New York City, she has not returned to China since the release of Hooligan Sparrow, which was featured in competition at Sundance this year. Speaking with the audience after the first screening of her film in Taipei, she acknowledged the uncertainty that now clouds her future with her home country.
"The worst outcome of this could be I can't return to China," she said. "Or, I can return, but I can't leave."
Hooligan Sparrow will make its New York City debut on June 10 at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2016 at Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater.