‘Hooligan Sparrow’ lifts veil on China’s sex trade

Ye, born to poverty in a tiny village in rural China, went undercover as a sex worker so she could highlight the abuse and suffering of the many thousands of such women in China. One of the cases she protested against involved a school principal using young female students enrolled in his school for this purpose. She demanded he be arrested and punished. For raising her voice on this controversial issue, she lost her home and was chased from city to city until she found refuge back in her childhood village.
Ye’s story is the subject of a documentary titled “Hooligan Sparrow”, produced by filmmaker Nanfu Wang. Wang followed Ye and her fellow activists as they protested outside the school and engaged in other peaceful demonstrations that highlight the plight of women in China’s sex trade. Nanfu herself battled again and again with people trying to take her camera or her footage. Often she could only record audio by hiding the mic inside her clothes. In several cases, strangers posing as fellow activists tried to obtain access to the footage, saying that they would keep it safe and return it to Nanfu later, when the Chinese government or sex-trade bosses were not looking.
Like Haiyan herself, Nanfu did not fall for the false promises. The result: this documentary is a rare and riveting look at an aspect of Chinese life and society that is otherwise unknown. Many would assume that a strong state would also mean equal protections for women.
A cornerstone of the Cultural Revolution was to bring Chinese women into the workforce and free them of the traditional bondage imposed by gender inequality. We might assume that, liberated to make a living in other ways, women would not have to engage in sex work in order to survive.
The documentary reveals that this is not the case. Not only does it expose the trafficking and misuse of young women by men such as the school principal, but the women are later blackmailed by their male bosses who threaten to hand them over to the authorities if they do not comply. They remain stuck and abused by the men who pay for their services and by the men who enslave them in the profession. The Chinese state seems to care little or not at all about their welfare; the well-being of these women or even of the young girls who are forced into the profession appears to be a seemingly low priority for the government.
Animosity towards women can now be added to the list of things that Pakistan and China appear to have in common. Just like Pakistan, it seems that China too wants to use the veneer of respectability and pretend that abused women, particularly those forced to work in the sex trade, simply do not exist. This faulty morality impacts the women who are pushed and forced into the profession; it threatens them with arrest and punishment if they are found out. This dynamic forces the women to stay silent and invisible so that they are available to be abused by men. No one knows how they live and no one cares when they die. Both societies are completely comfortable with this.
For all of these reasons, “Hooligan Sparrow”, the brave chronicling of how one woman has stood up to society’s conspiracy of silence and shame, is a film worth watching. 

Rafia Zakaria is a lawyer teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.