The Jet Age

Villagers have been lining the road to Sanjiang, awaiting the convoy's arrival, and now they slip and surge down muddy paths in the hope of getting closer to its head. A vehicle door finally swings open and Donatella Versace — of all people — shyly emerges from her sanctum of tinted windows and tobacco smoke. Standing in blonde tresses and heels, she is a fabulously incongruous sight here in the mountains. But the good villagers of Sichuan have no idea who she is. They are here, instead, to see her companion for the day — Li Lianjie, otherwise known as Jet Li. And when he appears before them, a great roar erupts.

Established in April 2007, the One Foundation is Li's contribution toward that balance, and for its sake he has taken time out from films, becoming a full-time relief worker and traveling tirelessly on foundation business... It is difficult to name any other A-list celebrity, not even Bono, who has made such a total commitment. There are plenty who touch down in Africa between albums or movies, but none has actually walked off the job as Li has done, at the top of his game.

At the age of 11, he was part of a troupe sent on a goodwill tour of America and performed in front of U.S. President Richard Nixon, who jokingly asked the young fighter to become his bodyguard. Li's precocious reply — "I don't want to protect an individual; I want to defend my 1 billion Chinese countrymen!" — was regarded as a great propaganda coup by Chinese apparatchiks, whose darling he became... You can see those sorts of sentiments running through Li's film corpus. In Bruce Lee's action movies, the Eurasian outsider fought for no greater cause than himself (the sole exception is 1972's Fist of Fury, in which he battled the cocksure Japanese). Jackie Chan made the action-comedy subgenre his own, reducing martial arts to a form of slapstick. Li, however, has most often played the sober upholder of national pride.