“If we don’t control things, we’ll do things as we wish. Why can’t I eat gum in Singapore? You realize that it’s good to not being allowed to eat gum. If I give you gum, some people might take the gum and stick it on tables, put it on chairs without self-respect. Lots of people can’t respect themselves like many do in the US and Japan. When you’re disrespecting yourself, we’ll control you.If I give you complete freedom, let you do what you want, but now, many people wrongly use their freedoms, artistic freedom, human rights.”

He sets the parameters for what he means by ‘control’. Most of the news reports seem to allude to democracy for some reason.

But I will not apologize for finger pointing at Western Media, because like with the Lip-synching article, many times they get things wrong because they don’t know Chinese, and will propagate false information easily without fact-checking, and that is definitely the case here. And Yahoo news definitely twisted it into a political thing when they included this crap:

“The kung fu star has not been a vocal supporter of the pro-democracy movement in his hometown of Hong Kong. Since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997, voters have not been allowed to directly elect their leader. Several massive street protests have been held to demand full democracy, but Beijing has repeatedly said Hong Kong isn’t ready for it.”

It seems everytime they talk about anything related to China, they have to give the same history lesson over and over that leaves out convenient facts, like the fact that under British rule HK had no democracy either. It’s infuriating seeing this kind of crap every single time in Western Media.

You’re right though, all the media seemed to have a field day with this particular report including Asian newspapers, where it hit a nerve. And HK media is no angel.

Edit: I took out the last paragraph, since I don’t want to imply anything you didn’t want to imply, since this was your work.

I couldn’t even find a Chinese transcript of this thing, and not a single Chinese newspaper that includes the actual transcript of the response (though there were a few that stated it was a misconception and Jackie Chan was not talking about people). What really made me mad was that most video reports had cut out the two comments about control and only showed those two only, which means they obviously had the full video available but did not show them to the audience.