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China welcomes Bruce Lee
07/10/2008 19:21 - (SA)
Beijing - Bruce Lee is getting a belated hero's welcome in China, with the country's state broadcaster set to air a 50-part prime-time series on the late kung fu star.
Lee became a chest-thumping source of nationalistic pride to Chinese around the world with his characters who defended the Chinese against oppressors in a series of movies in the early 1970s.
But his influence wasn't felt immediately in China, which was then a closed communist country.
Lee's films started surfacing in China on video in the 1980s - years after his death in 1973 from swelling of the brain.
China's official China Central Television hopes to fill the void with the exhaustive $7.3m biography, The Legend of Bruce Lee - the country's first movie or TV series on the actor, according to producer Yu Shengli.
Prime-time series
Shot in China, Hong Kong, Macau, the US, Italy and Thailand over nine months, the series, starting on Sunday in prime-time, will air daily on the CCTV's flagship channel, with two episodes airing consecutively every night in a two-hour slot.
Unlike past films about Lee, The Legend of Bruce Lee is unusually detailed in tracing Lee's life, from his teenage years in Hong Kong to his move to the US, where he studied and taught martial arts, to his movie career and early death at 32.
"We've only seen the glorious side of Bruce Lee - he comes out all guns blazing, his films are entertaining.
"But very few people know what injuries he suffered and what grievances he suffered," Danny Chan - who plays Bruce Lee - said, noting the series even reveals that Lee was afraid of cockroaches.
The 33-year-old actor, whose best known work is Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, makes up for his lack of star power with his uncanny resemblance to Lee with his thick eyebrows and slender body.
Symbol of a new China
Lee's message of Chinese strength in movies like The Chinese Connection and Return of the Dragon also matches that of the Chinese government.
"Lee had strength, agility, pride, intelligence, not to mention charisma to burn, which coupled with the pro-Chinese rhetoric in his films have made him a potent symbol for the powerful new China that is now rising," said Michael Berry, a professor in contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
"He wrote the word 'kung fu' into English dictionaries. He made people aware of China," CCTV official Zhang Xiaohai said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Lee is shown bursting with Chinese pride in a trailer shown at the news conference, bellowing "I am Chinese" to spectators after defeating a foreign opponent.
In an apparent effort to boost racial pride, the series was originally scheduled to be aired before the Beijing Olympics in August, but was pushed back in keeping with the period of mourning for the deadly earthquake in China's central Sichuan province on May 12, which killed 70 000 people.
The series was authorised by the Lee family. Producer Yu said Lee's daughter, Shannon Lee Keasler, approved the script and is credited as an executive producer.
- AP
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South Africa
