Actor or ambassador? The star persona of Jackie Chan in social media

Abstract

The advent of social media has profoundly altered star construction. While ordinary fans are allowed to produce and circulate texts and images of stars on the Web, stars and their personnel also join the cyber fan circuit to exercise persona management and manipulation. This essay explores the online persona of Jackie Chan, a celebrated transnational Chinese star whose stardom has expanded from cinema to goodwill, on the photo-sharing site named Flickr. Through the analysis of three photo albums on Flickr, I argue that fans as well as Chan's publicity teams participate in cyber discourse, redressing any ill-reputed images and promoting a preferred persona that presents Chan as a cosmopolitical martial arts star and ambassador. This collaborative constructing of Chan's online persona exemplifies a new star–fan dynamic, causing his star image to oscillate between nationalistic allegiance and cosmopolitical consciousness.

Notes

^1. For decades, the Chinese central government has held complicated yet sometimes intimidating relationships with Hong Kong and Taiwan, which were once the colonies of the UK and Japan, respectively, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hong Kong returned to the motherland in 1997, finishing the 99-year lease of the territory to the British. The Japanese were ousted from Taiwan in 1945 when the Nationalist Chinese (the Kuomintang) took over the island. Now, though both places were handed over to China, its legitimacy and authority over the prior colonies are at stake (Tucker 2008).

^2. A blogger quoted from The Strait Times article ‘Jackie Chan Faces Boycott’, which has not been accessible on the Web, and re-posted the details on his/her blog, ‘Anonymous X’. His blog may be accessed at http://anonymousxwrites.blogspot.hk/2009_04_01_archive.html. Some Taiwanese demanded that Chan's latest movie be pulled from theatres, and in Hong Kong, people protested his role as the city's Tourism Ambassador. Even worse, the story was reported not only by local media but also by some foreign media like The New York Times and The Straits Times, suggesting Chan's comment had attracted international attention.

^3. The ‘One country, two systems’ policy made Hong Kong a Special Administrative Region of China. Allegedly autonomous, Hong Kong could retain all internal affairs under its control, leaving merely its foreign relations and defence policy to Chinese authorities. Besides, Taiwan shows unwillingness towards unification with China, renouncing independence. Backed by the power of the USA, who enabled Taiwan to defy Beijing in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, China regards Taiwan as a remnant regime supported by a key capitalist enemy (Tucker 2008).

^4. Here in my analysis, I intend to put agents, managers, and publicists in the same category as the figures in the publicity industries that help Jackie Chan to engineer his public persona. It is related to the fact that my analysis does not have a sole focus on the specialists in the celebrity system. Yet it discusses the star construction of Chan in social media that involves an array of components like fans, cultural nationalism, and Web technology. For the differences of the roles and range of duties played by agents, managers, and publicists, one may refer to Turner's (2007) essay ‘ The Economy of Celebrity’.

^5. The concept of Web 2.0, as Paul Graham explained in an interview with Ian Delaney, originated in a conference organized by Tim O'Reilly and Media Live International. It emerges from a brainstorming session for a conference about web and technology tradeshows (Graham 2006). The World Wide Web is no longer a ‘web-as-information-source’ but a ‘participative web’, empowering the public to write, edit, organize, and publicize their own texts, and to respond to the others' texts through annotation and sharing. Key tropes include interactivity, connectivity, and collaboration.

^6. The rationale of choosing Flickr to examine Chan was based mainly upon the large number of photos of Jackie Chan on the site. On 29 March 2012, the day I surveyed the platform, Chan's 9024 Flickr entries far outnumbered those of other internationally famous Chinese or Asian actors and actresses featured in my current study, including Jet Li (4415 entries), Zhang Ziyi (1802 entries), Takeshi Kaneshiro (786 entries), and Donnie Yen (584 entries). These numbers, generally speaking, reflect their level of global fame. Jackie Chan's Flickr entries also outnumber those of other Hollywood stars who have connection with Chinese cinema or Chinese culture such as Keanu Reeves (5567 entries) and Richard Gere (3400 entries). Keanu Reeves became internationally acclaimed with The Matrix series (1999–2003) in which he performed martial arts choreography under the direction of Yuen Woo-ping, a famous Hong Kong choreographer who works in Hollywood. Richard Gere, a veteran American actor, is regularly involved in humanitarian concerns and is particularly well known for his advocacy of human rights in Tibet. Considering Chan's status as a martial arts actor and philanthropist, the Flickr presence of these two Hollywood actors, as points of reference, may further establish Chan's representativeness as a subject of scrutiny.

^7. One of the founders of Flickr, Caterina Fake, once said in Wired magazine‘What could be more social than photo-sharing?… You take all these pictures of births, birthdays, and weddings, and you want to show them to your friends’ (Leonard 2010).

^8. Giving a similar comment, Andy Baio elucidates the distinctive significance of Flickr, ‘There may have been other sites that allow photo sharing, but Flickr takes it all to the next level. It's social software, but the interface never gets in the way of what you're trying to do’ (Terdiman 2004).

^9. On 29 March 2012, the day I conducted the search, the site generated altogether 9204 results. I categorize the photo entries into four groups: (1) movie stills and posters; (2) general publicity events; (3) fan-based activities; and (4) goodwill activities.

^10. The other five ‘superstars’ include Yao Ming, Zhang Ziyi, Lang Lang, Jet Li, and Zhang Yimou (the website of China National Tourist Office Sydney: http://www.cnto.org.au/).

^11. Though this album has drawn only 13 views, perhaps seemingly making it unworthy of attention, the event it documents has broader connections to Jackie Chan's Australian stardom.

^12. The question is ‘Do you have any night vision goggles?’

^13. Adelaide Flashmob's website is located at the following address: http://www.adelaideflashmob.com/.

^14. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = VY34OjtE50Q(accessed 1 August 2010).

^15. In fact, Asian film workers in Hollywood have long held such ambivalent roles. Hollywood has a long history of émigrés and foreigners. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Jewish Russians and East Europeans who were fleeing from pogroms formed part of the effort that created Hollywood. In the 1970s and 1980s, a flood of talent from Australia also entered Hollywood studios. But arguably, these foreign film-makers have had an easier time assimilating into Hollywood due to their shared whiteness.

^16. This is an English translation of the title of a song composed in honour of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the PRC, co-presented by Jackie Chan and Chinese female vocalist Liu Yuanyuan. The original title in Chinese is Guojia, literally meaning ‘country’.

^17. Intriguingly, the turmoil came at a sensitive moment for China as it was at the height of preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The issue called for the international attention and scrutiny of China's human rights record, which then caused some foreign leaders to boycott the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony. Whereas Olympic torch-bearers in many countries are the human rights protestors, Jackie Chan showed disapproval to the pro-Tibet protesters in a nationalistic tone that downplayed the international denunciation of China's cruel crackdown in Tibet just months ago (Anonymous 2013).

^18. This concert also gained exposure in other media. The article ‘The Lynch Chronicles: Jackie Chan's Beloved Country and Tiger Claw's KungFuMagazine.com Championship’ is an example (see Lynch, n.d.).

^19. ‘Jackie Chan in Los Angeles to Promote Patriotic Song’, People's Daily Online, 23 June 2009, http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/92901/6684710.html (accessed 10 June 2012).

^20. See Note 19.

^21. The song has a hand-sign version. See http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMxNDQzMDY4.html.

^22. In political terms, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has also been called ‘Red China’ since its establishment on 1 October 1949. Red is used as the major colour of the national flag of the PRC. In cultural terms, the colour red is used by Chinese people in a broad range of occasions such as weddings, celebrations, and the New Year festival (M Dee Dubroff, n.d.).

^23.UNICEF's website is located at the following address: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/cambodia_26155.html.

^24. The album on Oliver Stone is called ‘Oliver Stone (Director) in Cambodia, Phnom Penh – International Peace foundation’.

^25. The website of ‘Bridges: Dialogues Towards a Culture of Peace’ is located at the following address: http://peace-foundation.net.7host.com/speaker.asp?sp_id = 58.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dorothy Wai Sim Lau

Dorothy Wai Sim Lau received her PhD at The University of Hong Kong. She is now teaching at Academy of Film of Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include digital culture, Chinese-language cinema, film stardom and fandom.