By Tim Saunders on
Back in May, Look To The Stars reported on Jackie Chan's donation to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in the Sichuan Provence in China. He has now blogged about the facility and talked about what inspired him to help.
“Sichuan is the breeding place of pandas in our country,” wrote the action star. "However, when I arrived in Chengdu and walked out of the airport, I didn’t see any sort of advertising with pandas on it. In overseas countries such as Taiwan, Japan, or others places, tens of thousands of people queue up every day to see the pandas and each person is only allowed to look at them for 5-10 seconds. Pandas are the treasures of our own country but we don’t seem to be as enthusiastic about it compared to other places. I know that it’s quite difficult to do the very best with everything but some things can still be achieved.
“Trying to revive all the businesses and industries in surrounding areas as a whole is extremely difficult. It’s a similar situation for people like us who make films. As an individual, each person is absolutely amazing because we’re all skilled in many areas and every one of us can multi-task. But as a whole group, our skills and abilities are incomparable to other people from overseas. Foreigners tend to specialized in one particular area; directors might only know how to direct movies, actors might only know how to act, screenwriters might only know how to write scripts, but the moment when they unite as whole body, they are a lot stronger compared to us. It’s the same thing with the pandas. The publicity for the pandas as a whole is not strong enough.
“Since I’ve already been appointed as the panda ambassador, I didn’t just want to be given the name and not live up to the reputation. I want to arrange and design a series of events for them, and I will try my best to get everything organized. Even though I might not be successful, I will still continue to try my best and get it done.”
Chan encouraged his fans all over the world to support the great work being done at the research base. Founded in 1987, the facility looks after 83 pandas that have been bred from an original six individuals. The base is a world leader in research into pandas and their plight in the wild, and acts as a conservation education center and international educational tourism destination.
“Chengdu appointed me as the panda ambassador so I decided I’d like to adopt two pandas as well as being the ambassador… Usually it costs an ordinary person RMB $1 million (USD $146,000) to adopt a panda for life but because my status is exceptional, they gave me a special adoption rate of RMB $100,000 (USD $14,600). But honestly, I truly think that I’m no different from any other ordinary person, especially as an artist, and I cannot be treated specially. So when I donated the check at the ceremony, I personally added an extra zero at the end of the amount on the check.”
To find out more about the facility, click here.
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