Sharon Stone boycott

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Information Times
May 28, 2008

Today’s Information Times ran a full page special about Hollywood actress Sharon Stone’s comments about the Sichuan earthquake last week at the Cannes film festival. Stone suggested that the quake may have been a result of “karma” from China’s treatment of Tibetans.

The headline on the newspaper’s front page reads “Sharon Stone is an enemy of the whole nation”. The inside full page special uses another headline: The Chinese people spontaneously start an anti-Sharon movement”. Below the headline, there is a roundup of online criticism against the Hollywood star, laid out in two blocks with the top group captioned: “Chinese netizen: She is a pseudo-philanthropist”; the bottom one is captioned “American netizen: She should apologize.”

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Caption of the top image: “Sharon Stone is having a headache.”

In the newspaper, her compliment to China as a “great country” during last year’s Shanghai Movie Festival was dug out and compared with her “karma” comment. Other anecdotes about her—including a story about her calling a German audience “nasty little Germans”—proved, according to the newspaper, that she has always been a “big mouth”. An article based on an interview with her during her stay in Shanghai that may make an interesting read can be found on Shanghai Daily in English.

On the top right corner of the full page anti-Stone special is a translated excerpt from a statement by Dior, a French cosmetic brand that Sharon Stone endorses. The statement says that Dior does not agree with Sharon Stone’s remarks. However the original version of the statement has apparently not yet surfaced on the Internet.

Today’s The Beijing News also reported the Sharon Stone story but in a much more moderate fashion. With most papers still putting their attention on the Sichuan quake zone, Sharon Stone’s controversial remarks did not make the front page in most cases.

However, there have been many calls to boycott Sharon Stone and ban her movies from China by both netizens. Ng See-yuen (吴思远), founder of the UME Cineplex chain that operates theaters in several Chinese cities, has been widely quoted in the Chinese media condemning Stone’s remarks and on the Hollywood Reporter’s website saying “his company would not show the Hollywood star’s films”.

There is a video of Stone making her remarks and a transcript of the bad karma comment below.


Sharon Stone: First, I’m not happy with the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans, because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else, and so I have been very, concerned, about how to think about what to do about that, because I don’t, like, that. And then I’ve been, just, concerned, oh, how should we deal with the Olympics, because they’re not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who’s a good friend of mine. And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, ‘Is that karma?’, when you’re not nice the bad things happen to you?

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