Jackie Chan Suddenly Taken Seriously

Jackie Chan faces negative press for the first time. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

The China-related blogosphere apparently can't stop talking about a single sentence that Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan said over the weekend at the Boao Forum for Asia -- an annual gathering of Asian leaders in government, business and academia to share ideas on pressing issues.

Yeah, I'm also wondering why Jackie Chan was speaking at the Forum, but that's beside the point. Apparently Chan was quoted as saying: "I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not... 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... I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled... If we are not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want."

As anyone can imagine, those words created a firestorm in Hong Kong and Taiwan where newspapers and politicians have denounced the action star. Hong Kong Legislator Albert Ho went so far as to call Chan a racist. (Hmmmm......)

Even commentator Li Hongmei writing in the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper The People's Daily called Chan's remarks "careless" and a "lapse of good judgment."

Li went on to say: "...individuals will always need someone to look over their shoulders and to keep them in line. People in such a situation seem not to be able to afford the absence of a functioning government, or they will be thrown into the state of anarchy and feel confused. The Chinese mainland is generally a society in which government still plays an instructive or even enlightening role in standardizing the public conduct. The reason may lie in both history and reality: the whole decade of the so-called 'cultural revolution' wrought untold havoc to the time-honored Chinese civilizations, suffocating almost all the human ethics and courtesies. Even today, more and more Chinese are getting rich, as a result of the galloping economic growth, merely in wealth, not equally in morality."

Allow me to pause a moment to remind readers that this appeared in the Communist Party newspaper.

Li then said: "...this pop icon is an actor, not a political observer, and much less a political leader. His comments, though poor in taste, will not represent public sentiment nor dictate public policy, even if he could wield some influence over his fans."

But Chan's comments have had some very real repercussions. Taipei's mayor has dropped Chan as an ambassador to the 2009 Deaflympics, and the Hong Kong Tourism Board said it would reconsider his role as a spokesperson. A bunch of people on Facebook even want to send him to North Korea.

In Chan's defense some are arguing that his words were simply translated poorly. Here's what Chan said in Chinese:

"中国人还是需要被管的"

CN Review's Kai Pan writes that 被管 actually can mean "to be managed, regulated, governed" and not necessairly "controlled." (The 的 in the word just denotes past tense.) To further illustrate his point, Pan writes that there is a more common term for "control" which is 控制 or kongzhi.

Maybe it is a case of poor translation. But maybe, Chan was just repeating what many Chinese people have said about their countrymen -- that Western-style democracy isn't the solution in Asia. That's an argument former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has espoused for years.

I don't know what Chan really meant, and considering that in the same forum where he said these things, he also talked about being compared to Bruce Lee, exploding Chinese televisions, and contaminated milk, I wouldn't take so much stock in the words of this kung-fu fighter. And if that doesn't sway you, consider these other choice Jackie Chan quotables:

• "I hate violence, yes I do. It's kind of a dilemma, huh?"
• "Don't try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie.... Study computers instead."
• "It's very important that I get hurt [when making a movie]"
• "I have a few rules that I tell my manager: No sex scenes. No make love. The kids who like me don't need to see it. It would gross them out."

And my personal favorite:

• "I'm crazy, but I'm not stupid."