Jackie Chan, tanks, and a close encounter with CCP anus
Well well! Whatever next? The king of martial arts mayhem has developed a latent tendency for brown-nosing by making some CCP-esque comments about freedom in China:
“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.”
Secretly, Chan has clearly always fancied himself as a tank driver. He’d have done a great job 20 years ago.
Thankfully, those pesky, anarchic students in Hong Kong have got a different, less anally oriented message for China’s leaders: be accountable; do it now!
Students at a Hong Kong university have called for the Chinese government to be held accountable for events in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.
The booklet will now be made, after students from eight universities in Hong Kong criticised what they said were efforts to suppress freedom of speech.
Only 79 out of almost 2,000 students in the University of Hong Kong students’ union voted against the motion.
Correspondents say the result shows the continued strength of feeling about the killings in Tiananmen Square.
The university vote has garnered a lot of local media attention, especially during this sensitive period for Beijing in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests.
“We have had lots of discussion at the university and have realised there is a lot of diversity of views,” said Vincent Fok, council chairman in the students’ union.
He said Hong Kong students were more well-informed about the events than their counterparts from the mainland.
The union leader, Ayo Chan Yi-ngok, is under pressure after saying that some student leaders in the 1989 protest had acted irrationally.
At the City University, a plan to issue a booklet about the Tiananmen Square protests was initially quashed by students who said the 1989 events were of little relevance.
Gotta be proud of those HK students as the CCP net draws tighter around them.
On a related note People’s Daily (what a crappy name for a dictator’s mouthpiece) is censoring the names Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. That’s what happens when a child’s mind controls the media.
Update
Predictably, there has been a backlash from people in Taiwan and Hong Kong (at whom Chan’s comments were directed) against Chan’s support for state repression. Silly bugger; I could have told him it’s a bad idea to upset your fan base. Need a new PR man, Jackie?
There’s a very intelligent discussion going on at cnreviews following Kai Pan’s article on this story. He is basically taking issue with the ‘western media take’ on Chan’s remarks. It’s well worth a read, as are the comments that follow, even if I can’t quite agree with his angle.