By Kyle Swenson, The Washington Post
From the footage online, it doesn’t look too different from the average local gym amateur bout or even the neon-blasted Pay Per View spectacle: pretty girls strut the octagon cage between fights; fans grab selfies with combatants afterward as bruises appear on their faces; announcers and spectators scream as the two mixed-martial artists wail away.
But there’s one key difference between the fisticuffs featured in Ultimate Fighting Champion (UFC) events and what’s displayed on a short documentary causing controversy today in China: instead of adults, the fighters featured in the Pear Media clip are toothpick-limbed preteens, some as young as 12, all reportedly orphans or abandoned by their families.
The mini-me spectacle of intense violence has now reportedly prompted an investigation by authorities.
The six-minute piece by Pear Media, a China-based video company, takes viewers inside the Endo MMA Club located in Chengdu in southwestern China. According to the South China Morning Post, the club was started in 2001 by a former police officer, a Tibetan, with the stated purpose of keeping kids from a life of crime.
According to the club owners, over 400 orphans and abandoned children have come through the club over the last 16 years. The BBC has reported the clip has notched more than 12 million views on the Chinese video site Miaopai in addition to lighting a brushfire of commentary on Sina Weibo, the country’s microblogging site.
“Some people said, ‘I give up. I wanna leave. I’m going back,'” one of the adult trainers yells at the students in the clip’s opening minutes. “What can you do go back home? Shepherd cattle or pigs? Or be a beggar? Or be a gangster?”
The clip mainly tracks two 14-year-old fighters who hope one day to compete in the UFC (the Ultimate Fighting Championship.) Cameras follow as they train, battle, and discuss their lives on their own, just two among an estimated 61 million “left behind” children orphaned or abandoned thanks to the country’s warp-speed industrialization. Food, shelter, clothing – everything the children receive comes from the gym.
The short also features interviews with the adult coaches and owners of the gym. When asked if the children are paid for their fights, one coach answers in the affirmative.”More or less,” he tells the camera. “We manage it for them. When they need money, we’ll give them.” The school’s founder also boasts all the students have been legally brought to the gym through “civil affairs bureau.”
But the clip’s popularity has become a problem for the owners. The South China Morning Post reports police and authorities have opened an investigation into the gym over “concerns that they were being exploited.”
The state reportedly was also seeking to make sure the children’s reported adoptions by the club were in fact legal. Some of the boys have already been identified as residents of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, one of the poorer rural regions of the country.
“The underage children will be taken back to Liangshan and we’ll arrange for them to go to school,” an unnamed education official stated.
Schools from the region have been asked to report any children who don’t come back from summer vacation, warning that the fight school “incited and used underage children in commercial fighting and made a huge profit.”
Zhu Guanghui, the club’s supervisor, reportedly told state broadcaster China Central Television the fight footage from the clip was from a “promotional event for a property development,” the Morning Post reports. Guanghui also publicly stated the gym had “gone through the necessary procedures to adopt the children” and had “sent the papers to police for investigation.”
