Hooligan Sparrow: Activism in a globalizing (digital) world

TW: mentions of sexual assault

There's a certain "mystique" the Western world prescribes to China, and by extension its people. One one hand, its an extension of the Iron Curtain; a nation whose government does not resemble our own. Like the Soviet Union before it, Western media has a tendency to focus on military marches in public squares while thousands in the crowd create a sea of red as they wave the Chinese flag. The purpose of such displays of military might and undying unity is never pondered on by the broadcaster reading off the teleprompter, only that the message of the "other" is conveyed to their audience. On the other hand, China is a land of tradition. If authoritarianism is a zeitgeist of the Cold War, tradition is the zeitgeist of China. Emperors, festivals lit up in lanterns and firecrackers, and dancing dragons come into mind for many across the globe; symbols so recognizable that white film executives in Hollywood have no problem plastering them on billboards to sell their next diversity project.

Yet, the barrier that seemed so impenetrable at the start of the millenium seems to be showing its cracks. Communication has rapidly changed as personal computers and access to the internet has proliferated across the globe since the 1990s. Not only has this digital communication boom flooded our phones with TikTok dances and San Francisco with young (somewhat annoying) tech professionals, but it has connected people from the Global South in a manner never before seen in human history. If television meant we are all watching the same narrative, smartphones and the internet now mean we are all creating different narratives. For the first time in our history, in what is essentially overnight in the grand constructed scheme of time, we have not only control of our stories, but a means to share it globally.

China is no exception to this new digital communication revolution. China's rise to global superpower status has drawn global attention to the country, and its successes are clearly visible to the outside world like never before. From the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, to competing with the United States for the world's dominant economic power, China's role in global affairs can no longer be written off to the side. However, the excitement to showcase its rise as a global superpower to the world also means that the world is looking into China. With this new global audience, Chinese citizens are now able to share their stories, triumphs and struggles alike, to a global audience.

Ai Weiwei's 2016 documentary film, Hooligan Sparrow, about Chinese women's rights activist Ye Haiyan showcases this new reality that China now faces. Haiyan (a.k.a. Hooligan Sparrow) is an advocate for the rights of women and sex workers within China, also being a sex worker herself. Haiyan's fusion of art and public action often grabs the attention of Chinese media, to which she is sometimes a guest on, all the way to messaging and social media platforms where people from all over the world share her story. Weiwei's film follows Haiyan, her young daughter, and a team of activists over the course of a summer across China. Focusing on a rape case involving schoolgirls in southern China, Haiyan's struggles as a women's right activist in China is made clear from the very beginning. Haiyan and her fellow activists peacefully protest in the street demanding that the principal who assaulted the girls be charged as men record. Weiwei's narration states that they are from the Chinese government, establishing the dangers of such visible displays of dissent in China. As a crowd gathers around the activists, a man complains about how the women yelling won't get anything done.

As the film progresses, the threat Haiyan and her daughter face become more clear and immediate. A shot of a train ride through the Chinese countryside. Haiyan's apartment. A shot of a street below. A man filming with a smartphone. A banner telling Haiyan to leave. A man banging on the apartment door. An eviction notice. Disorienting as these events may be, they paint a clear picture of the dangers of activism in China. Government officials watching your every move, people on the street below telling you that you're not welcomed any longer, and the apathetic response of society at large. Yet, there's something distinctive about Weiwei's depiction of women's rights movements in China. The struggles of activists in authoritarian countries is nothing new, and outsiders have always built careers on telling such stories for (mainly Western) audiences. But, had this film been made just a decade easier, the significance of the story may have been entirely different. We, as an audience, are not just viewing Haiyan's story as a singular narrative taking place in a country unlike our own, but as an extension of ourselves in a global civil society. The film makes use of the sheer speed and expanse of the internet, often showing how many shares Haiyan's demonstrations get around the world. Not only can activists like Haiyan share their own story to a global audience, but for the first time that audience is the driver of that story's visibility across many audiences. If marketing is the channel by which media is sold to the general public, social media is the channel for which stories reach a global public. The differences being that, unlike marketing where we don't determine who makes up a marketing team, we decide what to share and where to share it.

Haiyan's story is no longer just a story about a Chinese activist, but rather an activist in China. Her story can just as easily resonate with a sex worker's rights activist in South Africa, a women's rights activist in New York, and a human rights activist in Japan. Haiyan's work may focus on the rights of women and sex workers in China, but the struggles depicted in the film show universal struggles facing any audience. Haiyan's eviction from her apartment plays out everyday here in the streets of Los Angeles, where only about ten miles separate the mansions of Beverly Hills to the tents of Skid Row. The Chinese government's constant harassment of Haiyan and her fellow activists is not so different from the harassment and violence faced by protestors across the world, from Portland to Hong Kong and Minsk. Haiyan's story is undeniably the story of a women, a mother, a sex worker, a Chinese citizen, and an activist. But, like the essentialist depiction of China as the remaining Iron Curtain, we risk writing off her story as solely a Chinese story. It is a story of the struggles faced by women's rights activists in China, but the story itself is of a citizen in a global world. Afterall, we are race by skin color, ethnicity by culture, and citizens by passport. Yet, we face oppression by the same institutions. Patriarchy, authoritarianism, and capitalism all create the boundaries of our existence within society. Haiyan faces the same institutions that all humans face. She is a sex worker in a deeply patriarchal society run by an authoritarian regime that is now competing for the crown of sole superpower in a hyper-capitalistic world.

The digital landscape nows empowers us to acknowledge these similarities across multiple audiences. It is slowly breaking down the barriers of nationality by allowing us see the interconnected nature of oppression across borders, and sometimes even identity. The digital has allowed us to peer across the world as we please. In doing so, we see it in all of its ugliness, its abuses, its oppression, and its violence. Yet, it also means that we can radically look into ourselves, free to construct and share our narratives outside of the institutions that use to prescribe them to us. In doing so, we are now able to shine a light on those very institutions, reckoning all their violence, but also identifying them in a way like never before. And if we can see each other not as people divided across borders, but as members of the same global society ruled by the same institutions, then we are free to tear them down together.