Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong movie star who gained fame for portraying Chinese martial arts during his prime years, is now pushing for a new law in China to outlaw Bushido, Japan’s own martial arts tradition, known as the the code of the samurai.
“Bushido” literally means “the Dao of martial arts,” emphasizing the upright spirit of practitioners of martial arts. Scholars studying Bushido have generally attributed the origin of this Japanese martial tradition to the strong influence of Confucianism, which originated in China.
The 63-year-old Chan has aligned himself closely with the authoritarian views of the Chinese Communist Party in recent decades and is now widely seen across the Chinese-speaking world as a mouthpiece for the Beijing regime.
On March 9, Chan was one of the 38 delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference who proposed legislation to “protect national dignity” at the annual session of the National People’s Congress, which is the Chinese regime’s rubber-stamp parliament.
The proposed new law would prohibit any citizen of the People’s Republic of China from “advocating for Japanese militarism, fascism, and Japanese Bushido,” and it would make doing so a criminal offense.
It would also outlaw any public insult to “the national character of the People’s Republic of China, dignity of the Chinese races, national heroes, and revolutionary martyrs.” Expressions in the form of “text, image, speech, rap, photo, film and television, body language” would all be covered under the proposed law.
Other co-sponsors of the law include He Yun'ao, a history professor at Nanjing University, and Feng Yuanzheng, a Chinese actor.
The March 9 proposal was said to be a response to a public incident that occurred in February, in which two Chinese men donned uniforms of the Japanese army and took selfies at the site of a historic bunker in Nanjing.
The men were later arrested by Chinese police and detained for 15 days. Chinese state media widely reported the incident and labeled the behavior of the men as traitorous, citing Chinese memories of Japanese aggression and war crimes in World War II.
Bushido, also known as the way of the warrior, has its roots in Japan’s feudal history and is now among the most recognizable elements of Japanese culture, featuring widely in film, television, literature, and art. The events of World War II greatly complicated the image of Bushido, as both the supporters of militarism in Japan and also the opponents of Japanese aggression during and after the war attributed the rise of the Japanese empire to the teachings of Bushido.
Chinese state media, in accordance with the Chinese regime’s practice of fostering anti-Japanese sentiments, have consistently portrayed Bushido as the cultural embodiment of Japan’s war crimes and aggression against China.
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