Batman Battered by Bad Chinamen
After seeing CNN footage of “Batman” actor Christian Bale being shoved by a bunch of Chinese gong-an (public security bureau agents) on his way to the home of civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, there is every reason to be deeply worried about the fate of bats in China.
After seeing CNN footage of “Batman” actor Christian Bale being shoved by a bunch of Chinese gong-an (public security bureau agents) on his way to the home of civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, there is every reason to be deeply worried about the fate of bats in China.
Would the government sanction nationwide bat banquets in revenge, and have our gluttonous mainland countrymen leave shark’s fin and abalone alone for a while? It is a little-known fact that deep-fried bat genitals work better than Viagra. The Oscar-winning Hollywood star has certainly been as blind as a bat, flapping his way (after an eight-hour minibus journey) into the dark, forbidden cave where the famous human rights lawyer had been kept under house arrest.
It was Zhang Yimou—the film director who staged the gaudy Beijing Olympics opening ceremony—who paid Bale a sum of US$2 million to play a British vicar that offers asylum to a dozen Chinese prostitutes during the Japanese occupation in his film, “The Flowers of War.” Beijing would most certainly hold Zhang responsible for this marketing stunt, which is most unforgivable, given his cynically calculated move to drag in a few thuggish public security agents as freelance talent to help promote his film.
As a film director, Zhang needs fame abroad, so it must have been part of the plot to get Bale geared up for a “take-up-the-white-man’s-burden” humanitarian mission and get roughed up by barbarians. This would boost box office sales in the west, where the popcorn-eating and Coke-drinking young audience can’t tell the difference between Japanese atrocity and Chinese brutality anyway.
As for the “Batman” hero, receiving a few punches at the hands of the Chinese is no new experience. As a teenage actor in Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun,” a film adapted from British novelist J.G. Ballard’s autobiography, Bale is slapped in the face by a Shanghai amah in his bedroom after the spoiled expat brat shouts racist remarks at his servant. The Japanese warplanes are roaring above, and the young hero, obsessed with Japanese samurai style, rushes up to the rooftop and pays his salute to the Japanese pilots in the blue sky. This was August 1937, long before the British army joined with the Americans to fight the Japanese in the South Pacific and tens of thousands of British POWs were tortured in prisons in Changi, Singapore and Stanley in Hong Kong. The Chinese have a long memory. The gong-an must have seen a pirated copy of the film and recognized the not-so-innocent face of this anti-Chinese white devil. Those were a few politically corrective punches that were long overdue.
