Why not protest Kung Fu Panda?
This week before the China release of Dreamworks popular new film, Kung Fu Panda, an artist named Zhao Bandi and two friends protested outside the Beijing State Administration of Radio Film and Television offices. These blogs broke the story (in English) and while they were interested in laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation, I’m more interested in Zhao’s motivation. China Media Blog suggested a possible motivation: “[...]I hate to see a national tragedy used by someone to pump up his own name.” That’s a reasonable theory, since Zhao is an artist who often portrays pandas in his works, he would want to draw attention to his own works.
But I have another theory…While China is so busy crushing dissent behind the scenes, why not manifest a protest over something extremely silly but still controversial among China’s netizens as a way of showing that China tolerates protesters. Just to further hammer home the point, show that a government ministry is willing to meet with protesters and to negotiate with them! Perfect! You have the makings a wonderful show piece for the global media and human rights activists who say: “the Chinese Government’s repression has rapidly upgraded, in an effort to make sure there is no dissident voices from the people during the 2008 Olympics.” Now China can claim, we tolerate protesters and we negotiate with them.
Win-win situation: Chinese government gets positive coverage and Zhao gets attention for his artwork.
Side note: Even though the official release of Kung Fu Panda was Friday, June 20th, many of my colleagues had already seen the movie and spent the whole week laughing and talking about it.
Popularity: 1% [?]
So is the movie worth seeing?
I finally saw the movie, and it was very cute! Rather than being painful to victims of the Sichuan earthquake (as Zhao suggests), I think it’d be great for the kids to see it to become inspired and confident.