Hong Kong’s movie tycoon Sir Run Run Shaw, who died at 107, has been drowned in an ocean of flowery eulogies thanks to his wealth, an enviable career associatwed with young, beautiful women, and his legendary longevity—combined with the life-long micro-control of an empire comparable to that of the mythical Dr Fu Manchu.
Among the sycophantic chorus, some of whom pretended to be the knights who had shared the round table with King Arthur, most showed very little factual knowledge about the already immortalized Sir Run Run. I was most amused by the comment of Xi Jiatun: former boss of the Xinhua news agency and a de facto ambassador of China in Hong Kong during the colonial years, who escaped to the United States to claim political asylum after the 1989 June 4 massacre.
Interviewed by a Chinese current affairs magazine, the 92-year-old once-powerful Communist asylum-seeker anointed Shaw as a “living Buddha” and a “life-long patriot who loved the Party, loved China, and loved Hong Kong.”
No doubt about Shaw’s Buddha bit, given his generous charity donations totaling more than $4 billion, mostly to China—although a bean-counting theologist could argue that Shaw was more like a Christian, as a faithful Buddhist is supposed to stay away from beautiful women and meat.
As a teenage fan of Shaw’s movies, I live with a vivid memory of how Sir Run Run was bashed and smeared by local Communist newspapers. Shaw, according to the official Chinese verdict 40 years ago, was a demon who had been poisoning the minds of the Chinese in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia with his production of movies full of sex and violence. The Shaw Brothers Studio was labelled as a reactionary warehouse of ideological pollution, with the backing of the evil colonial British power—and American imperialism as well, with red-carpet visits of Hollywood movie stars such as Ava Gardner, Cary Grant and William Holden held up as evidence.
Shaw received what Jimmy Lai somehow receives today from purists and Chinese patriots—accusations that his work corrupted the minds of society with his apparently unlimited freedom of expression. As for “loving China,” Sir Run Run led a delegation of his movie stars to a Taiwan National Day cocktail party, then ruled by the anti-Communist Chiang Kai-shek, on October 10—nine days later than what is called the “correct” National Day today.