Nothing sweetens an ongoing cultural property dispute like a little blackmail. As I wrote about last week, two bronze heads were plundered from Beijing’s Summer Palace over 150 years ago, and somehow ended up in the possession of Yves Saint Laurent, whose art collection is going under the hammer this week in Paris. China has been pressing the French government and Christie’s auction house not to sell the statues in an effort to reclaim the pieces and bring them back to Beijing. A Chinese cultural preservation group even filed a formal injunction to pull the items from the auction, which was rejected Monday by a Paris court. To rub some salt in China’s wounds, Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent’s former lover and the conductor of this week’s sale, released a statement Monday offering the statues to China for a price much higher than any money. Berge said:

I am prepared to offer this bronze head to the Chinese straight away. All they have to do is to declare they are going to apply human rights, give the Tibetans back their freedom and agree to accept the Dalai Lama on their territory.

If they do that, I would be very happy to go myself and bring these two Chinese heads to put them in the Summer Palace in Beijing. It’s obviously blackmail but I accept that.”

Pretty ballsy. Because not only is the offer utterly shallow, it will bring even more shame to China for its inability to reclaim its relics. I bet the Beastie Boys, wherever they are, are smiling today.

As Barack Obama took his first step into the international arena today, with his first foreign trip to… um… Canada, and his Secretary of State fresh off a visit to Japan, it’s fitting that we finally get to see what might be the only thing that hasn’t yet been made with Obama’s face on it: sushi. BoingBoing posted photos of the Obama roll from a Japanese website which feature a sushi chef who created a platter in honor of the American president. According to BoingBoing, Obama’s skin is made of small shrimp, his hair of black sesame, and his teeth of fish paste. Here’s what I call, and I’m surprised no one else has called, the Barack Obamaki:

More photos here.

Those of you familiar with The Princess Bride probably know the fire swamp scene pretty well. After Westley and Buttercup survive the first two deadly terrors of the fire swamp — the flame spurt and the lightning sand — Westley assures his lady that the third terror, the R.O.U.S.’s (rodents of unusual size), are nothing to worry about because they don’t exist. Then, of course, to all of our surprise, and to the surprise of sick, little Fred Savage and his grandpa, an R.O.U.S. appears and Westley battles the enormous rodent to its death. Well, something sorta similar happened in the city of Fuzhou in South China over the weekend, except he who conquered the rodent was not a good-looking, sword-wielding, giant-defeating hero with a little blond pony-tail. He was a middle-aged Chinese guy named Mr. Xian, who picked up the giant rat after people found it on the street. According to a Telegraph report Wednesday, the rat weighed in at six pounds, has a 12-inch tail and one-inch teeth. The animal is believed to be a Chinese bamboo rat, a species of rodent found in China and Southeast Asia that are so large, they’re sold for meat. According to the story, local Chinese officials plan on borrowing the rodent to examine it and attempt to identify the species for sure… and/or eat it.

Photo: News.163.com

For days now, China has protested the sale of two bronze statues on the block at a Christie’s auction this week in Paris. The two bronzes in question were reportedly looted from the Summer Palace in during the Second Opium War in 1860 and ended up in the hands of the late Yves Saint Laurent. The two pieces, a rabbit head and a rat head, were part of a 12-piece collection of all the zodiac signs that China is desperately trying to retrieve. However, Christie’s is not caving to Chinese pressure and plans to go ahead with the sale of the two bronzes, which according to David Barboza of the New York Times, will be worth over $10 million a piece. From the Times report Monday:

Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer who is helping to organize the lawsuit threatened in France, said he had located a descendant of China’s royal family to serve as plaintiff in the case.

“The Old Summer Palace, which was plundered and burnt down by Anglo-French allied forces during the Second Opium War in 1860, is our nation’s unhealed scar, still bleeding and aching,” Mr. Lui said. “That Christie’s and Pierre Bergé [Yves’ former partner] would put them up for auction and refuse to return them to China deeply hurts our nation’s feelings.”

“An unhealed scar, still bleeding and aching?” Really? Perhaps China would be more successful in its cultural property disputes if it didn’t always talk about how “hurt” the “nation’s feelings” are. And instead of whining and trying to halt what sounds like a perfectly legal auction, why doesn’t a Chinese official get his ass on a plane to Paris with a suitcase full of Euros and bid on the bronzes? Lord knows they can afford it.

I don’t speak Cantonese so I have absolutely no idea what she’s saying, but rest assured this, in no way, will interfere with your enjoyment. I would turn your volume down.

Well, to be quite honest, this is pretty much the only thing I could read about a Jackie Chan movie that would make me want to see it. You might be tempted to rebut with, “well what if you heard he and Chris Tucker were doing another Rush Hour?” And to that I would say, “nope.” Because for the most part, and I’m sorry to all my friends in Hong Kong for saying this (don’t really have any), but Jackie Chan sucks. I know he’s a Chinese action hero and is really funny when he speaks English and does those Visa ads with Yao Ming, but his movies suck. And he’s 54 years old. That said, Chan’s latest, Shinjuku Incident, coming out in April, is so gory, says director Derek Yee, that he’s not even bothering with a release in the mainland. And that makes me want to see it. According to the AP:

Yee said the $25 million Chinese-language movie, in which Chan plays a refugee who escapes to Japan and becomes a killer for the mob, has scenes that show characters getting a hand chopped off and pierced with knives.

“We tried to cut the violent scenes to meet the requirements of the Chinese market, but producers I invited to watch that version thought it was incomplete,” he said.

The takeaway from this story isn’t that Jackie Chan sucks, or that his new movie sounds kind of cool. It’s that perhaps Hong Kong directors, who for decades have been watering down their finished products in order to create something suitable for the delicate mainland, may just be giving up on the China market altogether. Why bother anymore, when a film like Shinjuku Incident will have a wide release all over Southeast Asia and Japan? If the mainland Chinese want to be treated like children (who can’t take some knives to the hand), maybe it’s time for the Hong Kong film industry to seriously consider leaving mainland China behind.

Shinjuku Incident comes out in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia on April 2 and in Japan on May 1 and Russian pirated DVD probably right now.

The great English-language website chinaSMACK posted the best photoshopped images from last week’s TVCC building fire at CCTV headquarters. Since Beijing narrowly avoided a massive tragedy with this one, it seems okay to laugh at the explosion of photoshop creativity that can only be found on the Chinese blogosphere. Here’s my favorite:

Go to chinaSMACK for the rest.

Photo: MOP.com (Chinese)

In Variety Friday, Clifford Coonan writes about a new film, The Great Cause of China’s Foundation, an epic, feature-length homage to Mao’s revolution starring every huge mainland star. 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of the communist revolution and I guess, what better way to convince a country of a billion people that Mao was a good idea, than a huge cinematic spectacle that everyone will be dying to see. I found present-day Chinese people to be quite convinced already, but a huge movie, that, by the way, is funded completely by the government, can’t hurt. Coonan writes of the starpower:

Among the stars will be helmers Chen Kaige and Feng Xiaogang plus thesps Andy Lau, Jiang Wen and Ge You.

Local heroes Tang Guoqiang and Zhang Guoli will play bitter civil war rivals Chairman Mao Tse-tung and “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek. China Film declined to give the budget for the movie, but said the stars were offering their services at a special rate to support the anniversary of the state’s foundation.

A special rate? Try that in Hollywood. I always thought Mao should be played the great Danny DeVito, but it looks like producers of the film had a different, more Chinese vision for Mao.

The propaganda film is set for release on September 10th and will be available on pirated DVD as soon after the release as humanly possible, if not before.

If you haven’t read about the Daft Punk concert scam in Shanghai, Alex Davenport wrote a great piece in the Huffington Post that tells the whole story of the concert that never was. As a former Shanghai expat myself (and one who’s been ripped off on concert tickets), I wish I could say I was more surprised by this saga. In fact, I could have seen myself getting duped on these tickets very easily, as I was a sucker for pretty much any Western show, and I certainly would not have missed Daft Punk… had they ever considered actually playing in Shangers. So read Alex’s piece here, it’s the exact type of story about Shanghai I wish there were more of.

You could call it an apology. Or you could call it begging for Mazda, with whom Phelps just inked a 7-figure Chinese sponsorship deal, not to drop his ass like like Kellogg did last week in the United States. Mazda released a statement Wednesday saying, “We were shocked on learning the news [that Mikey takes bong rips] and we regret such behavior. But Phelps has since apologized and is determined to learn from his mistake, especially since he apologized to the Chinese public through a videocast.” Not that Michael should have to apologize for his behavior for any other reason than to appease his sponsors (he’s 23 years old for God’s sake), this sounds as though Mazda was like, “Hey Mike, apologize to China and tell them how ‘regrettable’ your actions were and its all good.” This whole story is getting completely ridiculous. The power-crazed sheriff from the South Carolina town in which Phelps was snapped ripping the bong has arrested 8 people who participated in the pot party. Give me a break. Those people looking to use the Phelps incident to scare people from smoking pot should realize that the more light the media shines on this case, the more “the kids” are reminded that the greatest Olympian in the history of the world is a pot smoker.