Comments on: Jackie Chan and Louis Cha

By: Sukhee Lee

Sukhee Lee — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:12:59 +0000

I see Alan’s point and tend to agree with him. Though hardly believable to any sane mind,
martial arts novel can be dangerous to a dictatorial regime which is almost always staffed by one-dimentional people who tend to see only black and white in everything in the world. In the early 1980s,
Chun Doohwan regime in Korea actually banned one martial arts novel,
“Murim pacheonhwang 武林破天荒”, written by a former seminary student because the novel tells
a story of an upright local hero who rose up against a tyrannical leader of the jianghu
and finally overthrew him. Wow. This was one disturbingly sad and equally funny, from our vantage point,
aspect of Korean dictatorship.

By: Leo

Leo — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:08:24 +0000

“What is Chinese culture? Some bits of what might be called Chinese culture were not perhaps things Beijing wanted to play up, such as the Confucian concept of government by a class of incorruptible officials chosen for their skill rather than their connections.”

I don’t know on which planet you are studying sinology. Every confucian dynasty has been trapped in the spider web of connections
from the very beginning. I would say the reason the government of then did not want to play up the whole Confucian thing more because
it did not like the whole concept of traditional Chinese state at all. Admittedly, the China of 1981 was very xenophobic and anti-
western, but in practice it was very western oriented and eurocentric.

By: Alan Baumler

Alan Baumler — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:17:10 +0000

I did not know about that, but while it may be a critical point I don’t think it is something likely to make Beijing unhappy. Quite the opposite, it fits him in with the official line from the PRC quite well.

By: Hung Yu

Hung Yu — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:06:35 +0000

Not sure that I agree with you about Jackie Chan not being critical of
anything. Many people in Taiwan will remember his comments about the
2004 Presidential election being ‘the biggest joke in the world’.
There are real problems with Taiwan’s democracy, but people from
Hong Kong are not in the strongest position to point them out.
Especially when done in such an ignorant fashion.