This is coming from a guy who lives in Hong Kong, not the Mainland.
Action star Jackie Chan’s comments wondering whether Chinese people “need to be controlled” have drawn sharp rebuke in his native Hong Kong and in Taiwan.
Chan told a business forum in the southern Chinese province of Hainan that a free society may not be beneficial for China’s authoritarian mainland.
Of course not. They wouldn’t be in power otherwise.
“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said Saturday. “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.”
Uh, that’s basically what freedom is, Jackie.
He went on to say that freedoms in Hong Kong and Taiwan made those societies “chaotic.”
“Chaotic”, as compared to what? The orderly, totalitarian regime in Bejiing?
Chan’s comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders, but did not sit well with lawmakers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
……Former British colony Hong Kong enjoys Western-style civil liberties and some democratic elections under Chinese rule. Half of its 60-member legislature is elected, with the other half picked by special interest groups. But Hong Kong’s leader is chosen by a panel stacked with Beijing loyalists.
In democratically self-ruled Taiwan, which split from mainland China during a civil war in 1949, legislator Huang Wei-che said Chan himself “has enjoyed freedom and democracy and has reaped the economic benefits of capitalism. But he has yet to grasp the true meaning of freedom and democracy.”
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2009Apr19/0,4670,ASHongKongPeopleJackieChan,00.html
His parents escaped from China to Hong Kong during the Chinese civil war (between the nationalists and communists). If they hadn’t, Chan might have been controlled to his heart’s content.