http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090418/ap_en_ot/as_china_people_jackie_chan
Nah. I actually half agree with him.
Though I suspect he doesn’t really know how freedom works in a democracy. Not surprising since he grew up in a British colony.
“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”
Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”
Oh, really?
Chan said the problem with Chinese youth is that “they like other people’s things. They don’t like their own things.” Young people need to spend more time developing their own style, he added.
The action hero complained that Chinese goods still have too many quality problems. He became emotional when discussing contaminated milk powder that sickened tens of thousands of Chinese babies in the past year.
Speaking fast with his voice rising, Chan said, “If I need to buy a TV, I’ll definitely buy a Japanese TV. A Chinese TV might explode.”
Which is it, man? You apparently don’t want your own things, either!
The audience reaction is much funnier:
Chan’s comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders in China’s southern island province of Hainan.
If I had control over China, I would have them ban all Jackie Chan movies.
I know I’m going to regret asking this, but… which half do you agree with, exactly?
That the Chinese need to be controlled (Preferably by another country), would be my guess.
I showed this to my wife and she immediately said that this is because he hadn’t had a decent education. She further points out that Chan has himself admitted that the only thing he ever learned as a kid for kung fu and regretted not having gone to school.
He’s illiterate. I don’t mean that as an insult, I mean he has assistants give him his lines because he can’t read the scripts. But you hear the exact same talk from Chinese of wildly varying backgrounds (not too long ago a university professor told me that democracy has ruined Taiwan), so I don’t buy that as an explanation.
I misread that and spent the entire time waiting for the Chinese Mickey Rooney (who I imagined to be a Chinese man in an offensive racial stereotype costume).
I’ve never heard that about Jackie Chan being illiterate. Google only comes up with two blogs that mentions this but with no reliable source link.
I know that Michelle Yeoh can’t read Chinese (she’s ethnic Chinese but grew up in Malyasia). She speaks Cantonese but not Mandarin, so in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon she had assistants phonetically teach her the lines.
Well, he was definitely illiterate well into adulthood – he was claiming illiteracy (in reading and writing) as late as 1996, although I did some googling and came up with this, which says he finally learned to read in the '80s. I’m probably conflating him somewhat with Jet Li, who had a similar educational background and still couldn’t read his scripts as late as 2007.
I never heard that either. A blog says that Jet Li being illiterate was being taken literally (pun intended).
Well, I have to admit that I’m illiterate in Chinese. Even though I was born in Hong Kong I had emmigrated to Canada at the age of five and grew up in the very white city of London, Ontario. I didn’t have any Chinese friends until university (they either spoke only English or spoke other dialects than my native Cantonese).
I think the reason why the Chinese government has pushed for the simplified Chinese characters to make it easier for people to read. That was always my problem, as a kid, with trying to memorize the characters as a kid was not only the look of the characters but also the order of the strokes when writing them. My mother had scolded me of memorizing the characters as drawings, even though technically that’s what the Chinese characters are – pictographs (albeit evolved over 5000 years).
I hope Jackie Chan’s account isn’t screwing him over. That’d be my worry.
I’m sure he can read numbers.
http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org/jackie-chans-china-comments-prompt-backlash-ap
Bruce Lee would never have said something so stupid.
I agree that Chinese people need a great number of laws to control it. However, this was true of any country that made it’s first steps toward democracy. The vast swath of Chinese people are still very poorly educated and have little respect for the rule of law unless it’s forced down their throats. It can be done. It will just take a little longer in China than anywhere else.
Yes, but those numbers are usually put in context. Even that people that are literate can be fooled by manipulated financial statements.
That’s the official stated reason. I’ve heard it argued that the party also did it in order to cut people off from the older texts, thus giving the party greater control over the people’s minds.
Huh… and Hong Kong, in its unique political region, still uses the traditional Chinese.