Word: li
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...Foundation's name carries unfortunate echoes of Li's 2001 movie The One - an execrable film, which borrows from The Matrix to an embarrassing degree. Its plot - Li plays a cop saving the world from a version of himself who arrives from a parallel universe and desires to become a god - is doubtless some sort of comment on the struggle between egotism and responsibility. But it's far better to think of the One Foundation as so called because of its essential idea: that if every able person in China were to contribute one renminbi (about 15 cents) once...
...well over twice that for the provision of cataract operations). But the One Foundation is not about billionaires. It is about a celebrity who has forsworn a pleasant life of premieres and parties, and the ordinary people who support him with their pennies. It is for them, perhaps, that Li places an almost neurotic stress on the One Foundation's "transparency" and "professionalism." He says he wants to run the organization "like a listed company" and make it a "21st century charity." Before discussing how a single cent has been raised, he speaks of "best practices," explains how the foundation...
...Fighting for Nonviolence To the rest of the world, Li's show-biz sabbatical may appear abrupt, but to his countrymen he is reprising the major themes of his life - self-sacrifice, service and discipline. At the age of 8, Li was randomly enrolled in a wushu class during a summer sports program. He had no idea what wushu was, which isn't surprising. At that time, wushu was only 13 years old. It was a committee-ordained synthesis of the various age-old Chinese combat forms (wushu literally means "martial arts"), intended to create a new codified sport. Emphasis...
...Young Li was among the performers who accompanied Chinese delegations around the world, and his extraordinary ascent through the sport has never been duplicated. At the age of 11, he was part of a troupe sent on a goodwill tour of America and performed in front of U.S. President Richard Nixon, who jokingly asked the young fighter to become his bodyguard. Li's precocious reply - "I don't want to protect an individual; I want to defend my 1 billion Chinese countrymen!" - was regarded as a great propaganda coup by Chinese apparatchiks, whose darling he became. Li also became...
...those sorts of sentiments running through Li's film corpus. In Bruce Lee's action movies, the Eurasian outsider fought for no greater cause than himself (the sole exception is 1972's Fist of Fury, in which he battled the cocksure Japanese). Jackie Chan made the action-comedy subgenre his own, reducing martial arts to a form of slapstick. Li, however, has most often played the sober upholder of national pride...