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Front Page of the Day
Jackie Chan sings the peacekeepers homePosted by Joel Martinsen on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 4:35 PM
News about the Chinese peacekeepers who lost their lives in the Haiti earthquake continued to saturate the mainland media today. The bodies of the eight police officers, who were found amid the rubble of the UN mission in Port-au-Prince, arrived in Beijing today. Sanxia Metropolis Daily put up a front-page story about a song written especially for the fallen peacekeepers. Last night, international superstar Jackie Chan joined with Tan Jing, a singer from the PLA Song and Dance Ensemble, to record "To Welcome You Home" (接你回家). The lyrics and melody were written by Wang Pingjiu and Shu Nan, the team behind the Wenchuan Earthquake commemorative song "In Life Or Death We Are Never Apart (生死不离). That song was also performed by Jackie Chan. Here's a report from Beijing TV that contains a snippet of "To Welcome You Home": |
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Comments on Jackie Chan sings the peacekeepers home
fuuuuuuuuuuuc*ing hell...
Wow. Whenever China's next war rolls around, we're likely to die not of nuclear missiles, but of diabetes.
Sorry about the peacekeepers, though.
...But not THAT sorry. The Chinese media always gives a more space to the problems of their own handful of people caught up in disasters abroad than they maybe should, (First headline from 2006 [?] attack on Ethiopian oil field that killed 9 Chinese and nearly 70 Ethiopians read "9 people killed") but this level of schmaltz over a few peacekeepers against the scale of the disaster in Haiti is pretty nauseating.
Oh, look- MOFA says "people who are saying we only save Chinese should be ashamed," Chinese people say "why shouldn't we save our own people first/only?" link
@MAC, it's not that strange. It's the same in alot of countries. The media will always be like that. "120 people died and 1 Dutch. Yes 1 Dutch" or "200 died and 2 Britons"
I am well aware of this, and ever since the 2006 incident stunned me so much I have paid attention to make sure I wasn't just being a hypocrite and letting my "bash China" reflex take over. I don't think it's on the same level, in all honesty. It's normal to see a headline "100 dead in xxxx including 3 Americans," but not a headline saying "8 people dead" and then an article adding, "8 Americans and, oh yeah, "some" locals." And while you may get some secondary "human interest" stories about survivors from the newspaper's country, they don't tend to take precedence over the much vaster suffering of local people while the crisis is still ongoing.
After Jack Ma's recent "don't let the door hit you" message to Google, somebody on Twitter called him the "Jacky Chan of the IT world." I thought that was funny.
Jacky Chan: the Quisling of the 21st century