China’s Spring Festival Gala on Tuesday evening featured a robot dance performance, an American rock band and hi-tech visual effects, while delivering political messages that reinforced a unified national identity and criticised bureaucratic inefficiency. The annual variety show first aired in 1983 on state broadcaster CCTV. It remains a key cultural event in China during … Read more
The Chinese literary classic Journey to the West, written by Ming dynasty author Wu Cheng’en, may be known for its battle scenes and action, but it is religious in nature. One of the ideas behind the novel, which tells of a journey to the “Eastern Heaven” of India to find some Buddhist sutras, is to … Read more
Mann in a still from The Modelizer. Photo: Berton Chang “I have a deep love of Hong Kong. And I made this movie for Hong Kong,” says its screenwriter-star. “I was born and lived there until I was 18. Then I would go back every year for months on end, just because I liked living … Read more
“The first film in the series was really good,” says action film expert and author of The KFM Bruce Lee Society, Carl Fox. “It was one of the first times that Ip Man had been portrayed in a film in a big way, and Donnie Yen was perfectly suited to the role of Ip Man, … Read more
