The Promise Movie Chinese

[Doris Joo]

NANJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Integrity is one of the most important traits in traditional Chinese culture. Confucius believes that honoring one's word, recognizing one's faults, and keeping one's promise are necessary for everyone to develop.

In the Yanling Town of Danyang, east China's Jiangsu Province, there is a Jizi Temple built to honor Jizi, whose given name is Zha, the youngest son of Mengshou, the emperor of Wu during the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 B.C.).

In 544 B.C., Jizi was sent to the ancient state of Lu as an envoy, passing through Xucheng, the capital of the ancient state of Xu, and was hospitalized by the Lord of Xu. Jizi once made a promise to himself that after he finished his diplomatic mission in the north, he would give his sword to the Lord of Xu, who admired it.

For more than 2,000 years, the story of Jizi has been passed down orally by the local people. People in Danyang built a Jizi Temple to honor his great contribution to Chinese culture and have practiced his virtues from generation to generation.

Yin Siqi is a senior high school student in Danyang. She was abandoned by her parents when she was a little girl due to tuberculosis. Her grandfather, Yin Guohua, decided to raise her and took her to hospitals for treatment many times.

Although life is difficult, Yin and her grandfather have fought against the odds. After meticulous treatment, she recovered from tuberculosis. Unfortunately, she needed spinal correction surgery as a result of tuberculosis complications. The treatment cost approximately 200,000 yuan (about 31,420 U.S. dollars), putting a significant financial burden on the family.

Through two joint consultations with experts and 11 days of hospitalization, doctors gave the result that the operation was quite risky with a cure cate of less than 10 percent. After much deliberation, Yin and her grandfather decided to give up the surgery.

"We didn't expect to raise such a large sum of donations in such a short period of time, and we were so grateful," said Yin Guohua. "The money was raised for my granddaughter's surgery. We must return all of it because she was unable to receive the surgery. The good deeds of others will live on in our hearts forever."

The Promise is a 2005 Chinese epic fantasy film directed by Chen Kaige, starring Jang Dong-gun, Hiroyuki Sanada, Cecilia Cheung, and Nicholas Tse. It is loosely adapted from The Kunlun Slave, a wuxia romance story written by Pei Xing in the ninth century during the Tang dynasty.[1] Responses to the film were mainly mixed to negative.

Qingcheng, a starving girl, wanders around the land in search of food. She chances upon a boy, tricks him, steals a mantou from him, and runs away. She encounters the goddess Manshen and accepts an offer to enjoy a wealthy and luxurious life and become the most beautiful woman in the land. However, she has a price to pay: She will never find genuine everlasting love with any man. She becomes the King's concubine when she grows up.

General Guangming defeats a large army of barbarians with only 1,000 soldiers and rushes back to save the King, who is besieged in the palace by the traitorous Duke Wuhuan. He meets Manshen, who tells him someone wearing his Crimson Armour will commit regicide and tarnish his reputation. A while later, Guangming is caught off guard and injured by Snow Wolf, Wuhuan's henchman, but is saved by his slave, Kunlun. He orders Kunlun to wear his crimson armour and save the King. When Kunlun asks his master how he can identify the King, Guangming tells him the King is the one without a weapon. Kunlun arrives at the palace and mistakes Qingcheng for the King because she is unarmed, and instead kills the King, who has just drawn his sword. He flees with Qingcheng, but they end up being cornered at a cliff by Wuhuan and his men. Wuhuan promises to not harm Qingcheng if Kunlun jumps off the cliff.

Kunlun jumps off the cliff but survives the fall. In the meantime, Guangming's subordinates accuse their General of killing the King and turn against him. Kunlun returns, saves his master and gives him back his Crimson Armour. They go to rescue Qingcheng from Wuhuan later. Qingcheng falls in love with Guangming after mistaking him for the person who jumped off the cliff. On the other hand, Kunlun is captured by Wuhuan, who realises he is actually the one who killed the King. While Guangming and Qingcheng lead a happy life in the countryside, Kunlun uses his speed power to see the Veil of Time and learns that Wuhuan is responsible for the destruction of his family and homeland. Snow Wolf is actually from the same land as Kunlun and was forced to become Wuhuan's servant. Snow Wolf also tells Kunlun that no one is capable of crossing over to the other side of the Veil of Time. He allies with Kunlun to act against Wuhuan but is finally forced to undress his immortality robe and vanishes.

Wuhuan lures Guangming back to the palace and captures him. He then places Guangming, Kunlun, and Qingcheng on a show trial for regicide. During the trial, Kunlun confesses that he killed the King, and Qingcheng realises he is actually the one who saved her earlier. Guangming, Kunlun, and Qingcheng are sentenced to death but they break free and fight Wuhuan, who tells Qingcheng he is the boy she stole a mantou from. As a result of Qingcheng betraying his trust, Wuhuan grew up in hatred and became the evil person he is today. Both Wuhuan and Guangming die in the fight while Kunlun is severely wounded. Kunlun survives after wearing Snow Wolf's immortality robe. Manshen appears when Kunlun and Qingcheng are attempting to pass through the Veil of Time, and tells Qingcheng that the promises made between deities and humans are as fragile as ordinary promises. Qingcheng has finally found her true love and thus given herself an opportunity to choose again. Manshen advises her to choose wisely. The film ends with the opening scene showing Qingcheng, as a little girl, wandering around.

In North America, The Promise was originally scheduled to be released in December 2005 by The Weinstein Company (TWC) under the title Master of the Crimson Armor. TWC also removed approximately 25 minutes of footage from the original cut. However, TWC eventually cancelled the release and sold the film's distribution rights to Warner Independent Pictures (WIP). WIP retained the changes made by TWC, but reverted the film's title back to The Promise and released it on 5 May 2006 in 213 theatres.

The Promise received mixed reactions when it was first released in Asian countries. In China, most of the responses were mainly negative even though it grossed about US$9 million in the first week.[4]

The film was criticised for the environmental damage it caused while it was shooting in Yunnan. The film's production crew were accused of damaging the vegetation and natural scenery of the area and the surrounding Bigu Lake, and for leaving behind a large amount of undisposed household waste.[6]

Hu Ge's 2005 short film A Murder Case Caused by a Dumpling spoofed The Promise. After it was released on the internet, Chen Kaige threatened legal action for copyright infringement, but the case fizzled out due to widespread support for Hu from Chinese citizens.[citation needed]

Last November, in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced a series of new pledges for Chinese assistance to African countries -- and in the process, made many observers in the West very uneasy. Westerners think they know what Africa needs to do in order to develop: liberalize markets, get prices right, promote democracy. And they think they know what China is doing there: offering huge no-strings-attached aid packages to resource-rich countries that prop up pariah regimes.

But a closer look reveals a somewhat different story. Over the past few decades, China has managed to move hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty by combining state intervention with economic incentives to attract private investment -- the kind of experimentation that the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once described as "crossing the river by feeling the stones." Today, China is feeling the stones again but this time in its economic engagement across Africa. Its current experiment in Africa mixes a hard-nosed but clear-eyed self-interest with the lessons of China's own successful development and of decades of its failed aid projects in Africa.

The first prong of Beijing's efforts is to offer African states resource-backed development loans, an initiative inspired by its experience at home. In the late 1970s, eager for modern technology and infrastructure but with almost no foreign exchange, China leveraged its natural resources -- ample supplies of oil, coal, and other minerals -- to attract a market-rate $10 billion loan from Japan. China was to get new infrastructure and technology from Japan and repay it with shipments of oil and coal. In 1980, Japan began to finance six major railway, port, and hydropower projects, the first of many projects that used Japanese firms to help build China's transport corridors, coal mines, and power grids.

Since 2004, China has concluded similar deals in at least seven resource-rich countries in Africa, for a total of nearly $14 billion. Reconstruction in war-battered Angola, for example, has been helped by three oil-backed loans from Beijing, under which Chinese companies have built roads, railways, hospitals, schools, and water systems. Nigeria took out two similar loans to finance projects that use gas to generate electricity. Chinese teams are building one hydropower project in the Republic of the Congo (to be repaid in oil) and another in Ghana (to be repaid in cocoa beans).

So far, most of these loans have been issued by China's export credit agency, the Export-Import Bank of China (China Eximbank). Offered at market rates, they do not qualify as official foreign aid but nonetheless can help development. In poor, resource-rich countries, which are often cursed rather than blessed by their mineral wealth, resource-backed infrastructure loans can act as an "agency of restraint" and ensure that at least some of these countries' natural-resource wealth is spent on development investments.

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