Jackie Chan Addresses China’s Communist Party: ‘I Want to Be a Party Member’

Chan reportedly performed at a propaganda spectacle event for China's Communist Party earlier this month.

Jackie Chan made his support for China’s Communist Party blatantly clear during a July 8 speech at a symposium organized by the China Film Association (via Variety). Chan has long supported the Communist Party’s propaganda efforts, but he generated news out of the symposium after declaring he wants to be an official member of the Party. As reported by Variety, the symposium was “organized by the China Film Association last week to ‘study and implement the spirit’ of a keynote speech delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping.”

“Abroad they often say, ‘proud to be Chinese.’ I’m very lucky to be a Chinese person, but I also am very jealous that you all are Party members,” Chan said during the event, video footage from which was released by official broadcaster CCTV. “What the Party says, what it promises, it doesn’t need 100 years to accomplish — it will definitely accomplish it in just a few decades. I want to be a Party member!”

Variety reports: “Earlier this month, Chan participated center stage in an enormous propaganda spectacle event put on by the Party at Beijing’s 91,000-capacity Bird’s Nest national stadium, best known abroad as the location of the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. In the star-studded show released on the July 1 anniversary [of the 1921 founding of the Chinese Communist Party] via state broadcaster CCTV, Chan sang a part of the ‘Yellow River Cantata,’ a classic patriotic work composed during the Second Sino-Japanese War.”

Chan performed at the event while dressed as a solider in the Eighth Route Army, a “military group under Communist Party command during [the Second Sino-Japanese War] in the late ’30s and ’40s.” Chan said at the July 8 symposium that he admired the military group.

“Those soldiers faced down machine guns while wearing straw sandals and using single-shot pistols, and confronted their advanced weaponry with swords and spears,” Chan said. “I think the Eighth Route Army of our Communist Party is truly amazing!”

Chan’s film career continued most recently with “Vanguard,” a 2020 action-adventure movie that marked the actor’s sixth collaboration with director Stanley Tong, and “Wish Dragon,” the 2021 animated film he produced and is featured in a supporting voice role. “Wish Dragon” debuted on Netflix last month.