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piqer for: Global finds Globalization and politics
Nuala Lam is a bilingual freelance journalist with a focus on civil society, justice, and identity in China. She speaks, reads and writes Mandarin Chinese and forms her analysis of contemporary China through both English and Chinese language media. She has worked for NGOs and news media in Beijing and Shanghai and has also spent extended periods in the Chinese countryside, seeing the country's diversity and uneven development first-hand.
Her postgraduate research at the London School of Economics focussed on English-language coverage of China, investigating the translation of journalistic ethics between differing political contexts. She also holds a first class degree in Chinese and History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Hooligan Sparrow: How A Sex Worker Activist Stood Up For School Girls
“Principal get a room with me. Leave the school kids alone.”
These were the words scrawled across a handwritten sign held by the activist Ye Haiyan, aka “Hooligan Sparrow”, as she stood in protest outside a primary school in China’s Hainan province.
In this episode of East Asia for All podcast, Professor Gail Hershatter lays out the recent history of sex work in China and relays the unusual career of sex worker cum activist Ye Haiyan.
The Communist party prided itself on having eliminated prostitution in the period after its ascent to power in 1949. While it is unlikely that the exchange of sex for money ever really went away in China, it has certainly gained new levels of visibility in the forty-odd years since China began the reform and opening process.
Hershatter explains that the laws governing sex work remain vague and contain loopholes which result in the burden of punishment falling primarily on women in the industry. In 2005, Ye began taking action to defend the rights of sex workers:
She had a whole track record of showing up with other organizers, basically to demand the state live up to its promises of legal protection for its citizens.
The Chinese law incentivizes perpetrators, and their lawyers, to depict underage victims as prostitutes, the reason being that sex with an underage prostitute carries a far shorter sentence than sex with a minor. This defense was used in a case where the principle of a Hainan primary school and a government official raped several female school children in a hotel room in May 2013.
This podcast tells the deeply moving story of how Ye Haiyan stepped in to fight, along with parents, to draw attention to the case and seek justice for the girls involved.
