Here's what the action star said at a forum whose attendees included Wen Jiabao:

"I'm not sure if it is good to have freedom or not," he said. "I'm really confused now. If you are too free, you are like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."

He added: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."

Via Evgeny, I see that the comments have provoked an angry online backlash in Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as the blogosphere on the mainland. There are calls for a boycott of the "racist" Chan's films.

At Post Global, John Pomfret sees a class dynamic at play:

Chan is just saying what a lot of other rich Chinese feel. In the 20 years since Tiananmen, Chinese society has changed enormously. One of the most astounding ways has been in the return of a class society and in the disdain with which China's rich view China's poor. When Chan was saying Chinese need to be "controlled," to be sure, he was speaking about the poor. He didn't have to say it, But that's what the audience at Boao heard and that's why they cheered him on. Anyone who has conversations of depth with members of China's elite has heard this argument before.

Granted I don't know much about the context, but it seems to me like it's at least possible that Chan is being sarcastic. The comments were in response to a question about censorship. Chan's new film Shinjuku was recently banned in mainland China because of violence. It seems strange to me that Chan would so vociferously praise a set of policies that resulted in him losing quite a bit of revenue. Whatever his class prejudices or political beliefs, I'm sure that Chan believes that poor Chinese should at least be free to spend their hard-earned yuan on his products. He should also know better than to insult his many fans in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Chan's not in a position to criticize a decision by the Chinese government, but the over-the-top comments seem like they could be a subtle dig at the Chinese authorities for being so uptight about his movie. Then again, I could be giving the guy too much credit. 

Victor Fraile/Getty Images

On his China Rises blog, McClatchy's Tim Johnson reports that Chinese authorities have cancelled performances by British band Oasis because of concerns over singer Noel Gallagher's political views. From the band's press release:

"The licensing and immigration process for the two shows had been fully and successfully complied with well before the shows went on sale. The Chinese authorities action in cancelling these shows marks a reversal of their decision regarding the band, which has left both Oasis and the promoters bewildered.

"According to the show's promoters, officials within the Chinese Ministry of Culture only recently discovered that Noel Gallagher appeared at a Free Tibet Benefit Concert on Randall's Island in New York in 1997, and have now deemed that the band are consequently unsuitable to perform to their fans in the Chinese Republic on 3rd and 5th of April, during its 60th anniversary year.

By now, China should've somehow realized that it's gotta lighten up on those artistic censorship laws. Other superpowers' leaders seem perfectly content to just ignore self-righteous outbursts from ageing foreign rock stars.

Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reportedly told an interviewer that former Polish President, Solidarity leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa has been banned from entering the country to speak to a student opposition group:

Chavez instructed authorities on Tuesday to ensure that Walesa does not enter Venezuela, which is preparing for a Feb. 15 referendum on a proposal to lift term limits for all elected officials.

Chavez made the comment after an interviewer suggested that Walesa had received a new invitation.

Granted, Walesa has turned into a bit of a blowhard in recent years, (a Polish friend once told me that he can only stand to read Walesa speeches after they've been translated into English) but the role he played in Eastern Europe's struggle for democracy is legendary. Chavez just put himself in some pretty bad company by denying him the right to speak.

Photo: JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Freedom House has just released its annual Freedom in the World report on global political rights and civil liberties. Overall, the report shows global freedom in decline, a continuation of a trend over the last three years.

Last week, I spoke with Freedom House's director of research, Arch Puddington, about some of the report's more significant findings. Among these was a general improvement in the state of democracy in South Asia in 2008, a rare bit of good news for the increasingly unstable region.

South Asia is a volatile region. Last year one of our headlines was, "South Asia shows major decline." But you had some progress in Bangladesh, in Pakistan and some small countries like Bhutan, Nepal and the Maldives. They did show progress... I think that having India as the most powerful country in the region has a powerful ripple effect. India, despite its ethnic divisions and problems with terrorism and poverty does maintain a pretty stable democracy, which has rubbed off on its neighbors.

This year's report is also an opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of outgoing President George W. Bush's famous "freedom agenda."

If you look at just our findings, there was a modest improvement over the eight years of the Bush administration. There was modest improvement in the Middle East. There was modest improvement in sub-Saharan Africa. The only region that showed decline throughout that period is the former Soviet Union.

So we certainly would not conclude, as some have, that the Bush administration was a catastrophe for the state of world freedom. There was some gain. Most of that gain came during the first four years and the decline came after the color revolutions and the backlash in the Middle East and you saw some of the gains eroded.

Also relevant to the discussion of Bush's legacy is the the only country in the Middle East that improved this year: Iraq.

The diminution of violence and expecially the decline in influcence of the Shia militias were cited by our analysts are improving the security environment and therefore enhancing, to a modest degree, the freedom of orginary people. I should not that we've always designated Iraq, in the post-Saddam era as "not free" and it's still not free. The improvement is modest but we thought significant enough to make note of, since we've been pretty hard on Iraq in the past.

The report may also put to rest notions that the Olympics would do anything to improve the state of freedom in China.

You can check out Puddington's full overview here.

Human Rights First

Tonight, the organization Human Rights First will give out its annual Human Rights Awards in New York. One of the honorees is 24-year-old Russian activist Oleg Kozlovsky. In 2005, Kozlovsky helped found Oborona (Defense), a youth democracy movement modeled on Serbia's Otpor and Ukraine's Pora, the student groups that played a critical role in those countries' democratic revolutions.

For his troubles, Kozlovsky has been arrested more than a dozen times, served three prison sentences, and spent the 2007 Russian presidential elections at a remote military base after being illegally conscripted into the Army. (As a university student, he should have been exempt from the draft.)

Kozlovsky was in Washington yesterday and kindly agreed to stop by FP's offices to talk about the future of the Russian opposition movement and how the financial crisis will affect the Putin regime:

So far, the impact of the crisis on Russian politics hasn't been that huge because it hasn't really affected a lot of Russians. However, it's clear that the crisis is going to affect more people in the coming months so what we can expect is that people will understand that the economic stability that was, in their minds, connected to Putin's rule, is over.

This is a very bad signal for Putin because his support was mainly based on the economic growth that we experienced for 10 years. This is a chance for the democratic opposition to explain to people how this crisis is connected to the policies that have been conducted for eight years and the political system that we have now, particularly the corruption, lack of rule of law, and lack of property rights... However cynical it may sound, we need a crisis in Russia to wake people up.

Unfortunately, this is hardly what ordinary Russians hear from their mass media, which in recent weeks has been reassuring viewers that Russia can weather the storm and that any problems are the fault of the United States. How can groups like Oborona cut through the filter?

It's hard to get the message out. We mostly have to communicate with people directly through street actions ranging from graffiti paintings to big protest rallies like the dissenters march. We are also quite active on the Internet, where the majority of our potential audience resides because we mostly work with well-educated youth.

But while Oborona and similar groups have successfully built a dynamic online community, translating this into real-world activism is more difficult:

It is really two different things to be politically active online and do something offline. For example, a blogger and activist from Oborona was persecuted in the city of Kemerovo in Siberia for posting some entries on his blog that were actually reports on the activities of the police and FSB [Federal Security Service]. For that he was charged with distributing extremist information and may face up to two years imprisonment. We started a campaign in his defense and in a matter of a couple of days we gathered about 500 signatures. However when we organized an offline street action in Moscow for him we only managed to gather about 15 people and half of them were organizers.

All the same, some recent victories have given Kozlovsky hope. One recent campaign was inspired by an unlikely event, the cancellation of a certain foul-mouthed American cartoon:

The government tried to take the license from a TV channel called 2X2 for broadcasting South Park. The series was considered extremist by a court ruling in Russia, but the channel is very popular with Russian youth. Some of this channel's fans organized a protest rally against its closing and the government decided not to pull the license. It only took several days for the civil activists to solve this problem and many of them were participating in such a campaign for the first time in their lives. Many of them didn't believe they could change anything. Such small campaigns are very important for building Russian civil society.

The South Park revolution? Has a nice ring to it.

After Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft, there was Skype -- the latest U.S. company to buckle to China's draconian Internet laws. But this most recent scandal might be the most alarming of all. Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, reports that China tracked and recorded Skype instant messaging (IM) conversations, storing massive amounts of private data. 

How did it work? 

The tracking system was based on keywords -- red flags such as "Communist," "Falun" (of the banned Falun Gong religious movement) and "Taiwan independence." Users couldn't send these words over IM, but the contents of the message were nonetheless recorded and stored on a publicly accessible database.

This chart, from researchers' report, charts the frequency of "trigger words" in surveyed IM discussions:

Says the report,

Villeneuve [one of the researchers] was able to view, download, and archive millions of private communications, ranging from business transactions to political correspondence, along with their identifying personal information...  These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data.

The outcry has already begun. Activists worry that dissidents could be jailed on Skype-compiled evidence. Google in particular, did great harm to its "Do no evil" image by helping Chinese authorities before.

Skype is in for a barrage of criticism too, I suspect. And thanks to its own software, Chinese users can place those complaint calls for free. Kind of.

JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images

Hugo Chávez didn't agree with Human Rights Watch's assessment of Venezuela's fall from democratic ways, released in a 230-page report today. He didn't agree that he has "undermined freedom of expression," or that he has undertaken an "aggressively adversarial approach to local rights advocates."

So, with no apparent sense of irony, he kicked out the Americas director of HRW, José Miguel Vivanco (shown here leaving a press conference in Caracas).

Chávez's Ministry of Foreign Relations, quoted in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, said in a statement that Human Rights Watch had illegally intervened in Venezuela's sovereignty. But more importantly, he called the organization an agent for the interests of the United States government, "cloaked in the robes of defending human rights, deploying an unacceptable strategy of aggression." 

Alrighty then! According to Human Rights Watch, that's pretty much the standard Chávez reaction when he senses criticism a-brewin'. Clearly, they are on to something.

RAVEENDRAN/AFP/Getty Images

With all eyes on China this week, it's refreshing to see George and Laura Bush noting that today is the 20th anniversary of pro-democracy protests in Burma that were brutally suppressed.

Last fall's Saffron Revolution was the probably the closest the country has come to mass protests since that fateful day when hundreds of thousands of Burmese took to the streets to call for democracy: 8.8.88.

The Irrawaddy, the best source of news on Burma, has a special issue today commemorating the '88 uprising. They are reporting that many people in the capital donned black clothing to mark the anniversary today, and that plainclothes police were out in force. All the while, conditions in the delta where Cyclone Nargis hit hardest remain dire, with little to no government or foreign aid coming through.

Feng Li/Getty Images

If you want to protest in favor of freedom and democracy during next month's Olympics, you have an ironically appropriate place to go: the Beijing World Park. The park -- which has replicas of the Statue of Liberty, the U.S. Capitol Building, and the White House, along with other world monuments such as the Sydney Opera House and the Eiffel Tower -- is one of three official protest zones that China has set up for protesters.

Some have speculated that the logic of designating the World Park as a protest zone is to make it look like protesters are elsewhere when images appear on television and the Internet.

And what's up with the Twin Towers still standing in the replica of the New York City skyline?

PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images

Moving to disarm critics and follow through on promises made to the International Olympic Committee, China announced yesterday that it will allow demonstrations in special "protest pens": three public parks that are no closer than several miles to the Olympic Stadium.

Unsurprisingly, activists are unmoved. Demonstrations must first obtain formal approval by local police, and it's not clear whether Chinese laws banning political protest "harmful to national unity and social stability" will apply:

We never get it no matter how many times we try," said Jiang Tianyong, a lawyer and legal-rights advocate who has been rejected numerous times [attempting to schedule a protest]. "This is only a show for foreigners. Otherwise, I'd love to see these three places be kept after the Olympics so we can let our voices be heard, too."

That said, such "free-speech zones" are really nothing new for the Olympics. They've also been employed at other large international gatherings such as the G-8, as well as American political conventions. China certainly stands out for its political suppression before and after the Olympics, but during the games, for better or for worse, it's par for the course.

U.S. Library of Congress

Which economists, journalists, and business leaders are doing the best job of advancing free markets and free people? You can make your opinions known by voting for nominees for the Free Market Hall of Fame.

At this year's FreedomFest—which describes itself as the world's largest annual gathering of free minds and is the brainchild of contrarian economist Mark Skousen—the first five members of the Free Market Hall of Fame will be inducted at a July 12 gala banquet in Las Vegas. Unlike with FP's top public intellectuals poll, however, the nominees receiving the highest vote counts won't necessarily make it into the Hall of Fame. Rather, "[a] select group of economists and other free-market supporters will make the final decision and vote on upcoming Hall of Fame members," according to the hall's Web site. I guess the Hall of Fame isn't ready to surrender the commanding heights to the tyranny of the Internet majority.

The eXile, Moscow's button-pushing alternative biweekly and self-described "Jesus Christ of English-language publications," is no more. The 11-year-old tabloid shut down after its investors were scared away by a Russian government investigation of its ties to opposition leader Eduard Limonov as well as its general obnoxiousness toward those in power. Editor Mark Ames has been blogging the eXile's downfall for Radar Online and "war nerd" Gary Brecher has launched a fundraising drive to keep his employer alive as an online-only publication.

Brecher brings up the possibility of relocating to a city with a more welcoming media climate, but it's hard to imagine the eXile's unique brand of obscenity and excess existing anywhere but Moscow.

It looks like the climate for Russian media may not be improving so much after all in the Medvedev era.

The eXile, Moscow's venerable English-language alt-weekly, is under investigation by the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications and the Protection of Cultural Heritage and may be shut down. After 11 years of proudly mocking government authorities, it's not clear what finally brought the hammer down. It could have something to do with Eduard Limonov, novelist and leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party, who is friends with editor Mark Ames and a frequent contributor. 

Though I sometimes found its descriptions of ordinary Russians condescending, bordering on racist, the eXile was undoubtedly one of the great guilty pleasures of living in Moscow -- a rare breath of politically incorrect air in an otherwise muzzled media climate. Its cultural coverage sometimes felt like the last vestige of the wilder, pre-Putin Moscow scene of the early '90s. It's also had some international influence, with Gary Brecher's War Nerd column gaining an loyal Internet readership and former editor Matt Taibbi going on to cover U.S. politics for Rolling Stone.

In what may be a farewell editorial, Ames recounts the eXile's history of abuse in a tone of proudly obscene defiance:

From its very inception, The eXile has been under constant siege, always pushed to the brink of collapse by a nefarious alliance of Russian bureaucrats, aggrieved small-business owners, thick-ankled American women, thin-skinned Russian celebrities, seething Western journalists and politicians, and even members of our own staff, people whom we thought we could trust. Everyone, it seems, learns to hate us at one time or another, leaving only a small rump core to keep the flame of hatred burning. Is there a lesson to be learned in that? Yes there is: everyone but us is a worthless piece of [expletive]."

Moscow won't be the same without them.

Iran is far from a free and open society, but apparently its control of the Internet is not as pervasive as one might think.

Created by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) -- an Internet surveillance monitoring partnership between the Citizen Lab, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, and the Oxford Internet Institute -- this week's Tuesday Map plots the top 6,000 Persian language blogs according to the links among them, showing both those blocked (left) and visible (right) inside Iran.

Each dot represents a blog, color-coded by content (yellow and green for reformist, secular and expatriate bloggers; purple for Persian poetry; green for popular culture, and red for religious and/or conservative bloggers) and scaled by the number of links to the blog from other sites. 

Although most blocked blogs are "secular/reformist" in nature, ONI notes:

[T]he majority of these [secular/reformist] blogs are not blocked. Also, a handful of blogs from religious, pro-regime parts of the network are blocked as well. A preliminary analysis of these indicates content (like anti-Arab bias and discussion of "temporary marriages") that, while not unfriendly to the Islamic Republic, might nevertheless be embarrassing to it."

For a closer assessment of the Iranian blogosphere, check out this more detailed map and case study from the Internet and Democracy project at the Berkman Center.