Venkatesan Vembu

Hong Kong: Chinese netizens are boiling with rage over Hollywood sex symbol Sharon Stone’s insensitive remarks, made in Cannes on Monday, that the earthquake in Sichuan, which killed 80,000 people, was perhaps a karmic retribution for China’s crackdown on Tibet.

Asked on the red carpet at Cannes about the Sichuan earthquake, Stone said: “I am not happy about the ways the Chinese were treating the Tibetans... And all these earthquake and stuff happened and I thought, ‘Is that Karma?’ When you are not nice, bad things happen to you...”

Stone further said she had been concerned about “how we deal with the Olympics because (the Chinese) are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine.”

But, she added, she then got a letter from Tibetan groups that said they wanted to “go and help” in Sichuan.

“That made me cry... It was a big lesson to me, that sometimes you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who are not nice to you.”

Within hours, Chinese bulletin board services were swamped with an avalanche of criticism and abuse over Stone’s remarks, although the discussion thread on the China Daily bulletin board was deleted, suggesting that Chinese officials wanted to get over this controversy fast.

“Sharon Stone reveals her dark basic instinct,” wrote a Chinese blogger.

“Here is my message for Sharon: please do not ever try to be of service to me because when you put your head down, I might be tempted to knock something really hard and heavy on it.... And here is a message for the Dalai Lama: You should be careful about the friends you keep. Either they reflect a lot about who you are, or they are not being particularly helpful for your cause".

Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi, the star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, who too was at Cannes, bristled with rage that the stars she met at Cannes did not seem to know about the extent of the Sichuan tragedy.

She wrote on her blog: “I was as angry as a madwoman. I said, ‘Are you idiots? You are well-dressed people who look like you identify with society, but you don’t know what’s going on on planet Earth.’ It’s incredible!”

The issue that Stone raised has been raised by other Chinese media commentators who suggested that the earthquake was an indication that the Chinese rulers had lost their “mandate from heaven” (the authority that Chinese emperors claimed in earlier times). That criticism too met with trenchant criticism from readers and Netizens, who pointed out that the people who died were innocent civilians, who had nothing in common with Chinese rulers.

Source : DNA