The Na'vi people driven away... by Confucius

This week, the authorities in China announced that the 2-D version of James Cameroon's epic would be pulled from most cinemas there to make way for the film Confucius. It could be because the popularity of the film Avatar, whose imperialist theme is a parable for Chinese people who are forced to leave their dwellings by local authorities to make way for new construction, has touched the nerves of the sensitive government. But more importantly, the state-backed film Confucius represents the government's attempt at filling the nation's moral void by reviving the traditional moral value which guided the people's thinking in much of the Chinese history. The irony of this is that the act of forcing off an immensely popular film and replacing it with an indoctrinating one is reminiscent of the human attempt at demolishing the Na'vi people's home in the film Avatar. Equally ironic is the fact that the very man and philosophy the film Confucius extols is the same one that the same regime (or so it seems) condemned in the seventies. It is hard not to be a little confuciused...I mean confused!