Hong Kong movie star Jackie Chan has long been known to harbor authoritarian and anti-free speech views. Now, the action movie star is calling for other artists to be arrested for art that is deemed insulting to China, particularly in advancing favorable images of the Japanese. Chan and his 37 other members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference called on then government to punish fellow artists who insult “national integrity and dignity.” The call follows Chinese artists who wee criticized for showing the Japanese in World War II in a positive light. This by the way was part of the propaganda issued by the U.S. government against the Japanese. The racist elements are quite evident and shocking. Hollywood was a critical part in our propaganda efforts during the war. Now, over 50 years later, Chan and other artists and authors however are seeking to criminalize speech that is viewed as sympathetic or favorable to the Japanese.
Chan wants the government to round up those who are viewed as creating art deemed as advocating “Japanese militarism, fascism, and Bushido spirit.”
If an international artist calling for the arrest of other artists is shocking, so is an academic. Nanjing University history professor and signatory He Yunao made the nonsensical argument that “A nation has integrity just like a person. Citizens enjoy legal rights to personal integrity, and states and nations also have rights to integrity.” This ignores that the state is the subject of free speech not the beneficiary of free speech. Otherwise, if the state has free speech rights to be balanced against individual rights, there is little real free speech left in the balancing.
Whether it is an academic or an actor, the call for the criminalization of artistic and political expression is a disgrace against their respective professions.
@Mr Kurtz, March 14, 2018 at 8:15 PM
“this is all western values type stuff. Chan Kong-Sang is a good actor, a skilled kung fu artist, an amazing stuntman, and a patriotic Chinese. they will love him for it. cut the guy a break and skip the moralizing” (sic)
Chan’s considerable artistic accomplishments and his “patriotism” hardly excuse his advocating the suppression of dissident speech by his fellow Chinese countrymen. He apparently lacks the imagination to see that he and his own work are potentially at risk of future repression by capricious authority unrestrained by statutory protection.
This is all human rights “values type stuff,” MK, applicable to human beings, with natural rights, everywhere.
this is all western values type stuff. Chan Kong-Sang is a good actor, a skilled kung fu artist, an amazing stuntman, and a patriotic Chinese. they will love him for it. cut the guy a break and skip the moralizing
Squeeky Fromm, Girl Reporter, March 11, 2018 at 5:05 AM
“What Chan is being criticized for, is the equivalent of the United States banning Nazism, or the celebration of the Germans conquering France. Or banning Tojoism and the celebration in this country of the Jap victory at Pearl Harbor.”
What Chan is being criticized for is his collectivist mentality that publicly and strenuously endorses repression of the majority of the Chinese people, including political dissidents, by the Chinese Communist State.
He and his apologists, including you, seem to be familiar enough with a previous Japanese government’s atrocities against the people of China, but are you and they in denial (or just ignorant) about a previous Chinese government’s atrocities against the people of China?
“From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war.”
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM
“Mao’s Great Leap Forward ‘killed 45 million in four years’
“[Historian Frank] Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. ‘It ranks alongside the [Soviet] gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century…. It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot’s genocide multiplied 20 times over,’ he said.
“Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.
“His book, Mao’s Great Famine; The Story of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been ‘quite forgotten’ in the official memory of the People’s Republic of China, there was a ‘staggering degree of violence’ that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as ‘digits’, or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.
“State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.
“Mr. Dikötter said that he was once again examining the Party’s archives for his next book, The Tragedy of Liberation, which will deal with the bloody advent of Communism in China from 1944 to 1957.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-
2081630.html
It’s most noteworthy that while the current Chinese government acknowledges that Mao “made mistakes,” he nonetheless still enjoys a place of honor in the Chinese government’s political and cultural pantheon.