Zhang Yimou Speaks Out Against Human Rights

Acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, director of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, has graciously shared some pearls of his brand of Eastern wisdom during a recent interview.

From the heights of his transcendent mind, he comments on beauty, the true Chinese spirit, human weakness, and the evils of unions.
In a surprising interview with the popular Chinese weekly Southern Weekend, Zhang patiently explains the main reason why Western countries are inefficient – they waste too much time on worrying about human rights.

According to Zhang, the West cannot reach the high standards that the Chinese can, both at the artistic level and at the organizational level. This, if uniformity can be interpreted as creativity. These two things may seem to be opposites to many, but not loyal CCP tool Zhang. Of course Zhang the millionaire lives a life of privileges very different than the lives of the 1 billion poor in his country.

"I often joke and say that our human performance is number two in the world. Number one is North Korea. Their performances can be so uniform! This kind of uniformity brings beauty. We Chinese can do it too. After hard training and strict discipline, Chinese achieved that as well. Like the moveable type cubes, they follow orders. Actors listen to the orders, and can do it like computers. Foreigners admire this. This is the Chinese spirit. We can make our human performance reach such a level, through hard and smart work. This many foreigners cannot achieve.
I have conducted operas in the West. It was so troublesome. They only work four and a half days each week. Everyday there are two coffee breaks. There cannot be any discomfort, because of human rights… they could not even stand in straight lines yet. You could not criticize them either. They all belong to some organizations... they have all kind of institutions, unions. We do not have that. We can work very hard, can withstand lots of bitterness. We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month. Therefore our actors can give such a high quality performance. I think other than North Korea, no other country can achieve this in the world."

Evidently Zhang is a Maoist at heart. His declarations bring to mind Mao’s Great Leap Forward, in which 30 million Chinese people were ordered to move from the countryside to the cities and then back to the countryside. The goal? To transform China from a primarily agrarian economy into a modern, industrialized society. The result? 38 million dead farmers and children.

Zhang and the Beijing Olympics, including all its ceremonies, have shown us that all totalitarian regimes make use of the same clichés.
Zhang also informs us, "the audience throughout China only cares about the results, not the process."

But we ask ourselves, is this really the truth? If there is no freedom of speech or democracy in China, then how do we know what the "moveable type cubes" really think?

Sources:
http://www.china.org.cn/olympics/news/2008-08/22/content_16302686.htm
http://www.bangkokpost.com/sportsplus/sportsplus.php?id=129799
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/08/the-way-art-works-an-interview-with-zhang-yimou-1/

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