By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The movie that became Chinses diplomacy

Wolf warrior diplomacy describes aggressive, coercive diplomacy adopted by Chinese diplomats in the 21st century under Xi Jinping’s administration. The term was coined from the Chinese action film Wolf Warrior 2.

A new brand of diplomacy is taking hold in Beijing, and its chief architects have a suitably fierce nickname to match their aggressive style; they are the wolf warriors.

It’s a phrase that is now used widely in Chinese state-run media and Western publications, and it was made clear that its proponents have the full support of the country’s top diplomat.

But “Wolf Warrior” is the title of a series of patriotic action films in China, featuring Rambo-like protagonists who fight enemies at home and abroad to defend Chinese interests. The first film was released in 2015 and made more than $76 million (545 million yuan).

It quickly spawned a sequel that became China’s highest-grossing film at the time when it was released in 2017. “Wolf Warrior 2”’ was based around a squad of People’s Liberation Army soldiers sent into an African country to rescue Chinese civilians. The film’s tagline was, “Even though a thousand miles away, anyone who affronts China will pay.”

Interestingly, COVID-19 is not just a global race to combat the pandemic. It is also a war of competing narratives, a war of competing political systems, and a war of competing ideologies. China’s “wolf warrior” diplomacy is one battlefield in the war, and the battle will only continue, if not escalate in the foreseeable future.

But it is not only Chinese, EU Ambassador Nicolas Chapuis, speaking at an energy forum in the Chinese capital, suggested that “We need to have a common understanding to say ‘no’ to bullying and intimidation, coercive diplomacy, ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomacy,” he said.

On December 20, 2021, the former Chinese ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai, delivered a biting keynote to a symposium co-hosted by the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. In front of assembled dignitaries, including Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister and state councilor, Cui criticized the current state of China’s diplomacy, warning against “carelessness, laziness, and incompetence.” He admonished his fellow diplomats to “always have the country at large in mind, and not always think about being an internet celebrity.”

The comments were a thinly-veiled dig at the increasingly sharp-edged messaging emerging from China over the past several years, as its diplomats have embraced a uniquely aggressive approach now widely known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy.

The film is a sequel to 2015's Wolf Warrior. It was released in China on 27 July 2017. The film tells a story of a loose cannon Chinese soldier named Leng Feng who takes on special missions around the world. In this sequel, he finds himself in an African country protecting medical aid workers from local rebels and vicious arms dealers.

Wolf Warrior 2 became an immediate phenomenon, grossing $146 million in that same window. By August 8, twelve days after its premiere, Wolf Warrior 2 was not just the highest-grossing movie of the year - it was the highest-grossing movie in China’s history. Wolf Warrior 2 would run for months, eventually grossing $854 million - then the second-highest amount of money earned by a movie in one country in world history. By 2017, China’s box office had grown to a point that Hollywood could regularly realize gigantic grosses, such as the $393 million made by The Fate of the Furious months earlier. But Wolf Warrior 2 made more in China in 2017 than movies like Thor ( the 2011 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name): Ragnarok ((a 2013 Norwegian fantasy adventure film about the legendary story of Ragnarök) and Wonder Woman (2017 American superhero film based on the DC Comics character of the same name) had made that year worldwide.

While China had started the decade leaning on the American film industry for revenue and education, the country would end it by not needing U.S. entertainment at all. Wolf Warrior 2 managed to wrap Xi’s propagandistic messaging in popcorn entertainment. It gave Chinese audiences a hero they could put up against the Captain Americas of the world, one who matched the moment emerging across the ascendant country. Other made-in-China blockbusters followed, putting on Chinese screens versions of the Americana classics that filled auditoriums in the U.S. in the 1980s. Hollywood studios turned to Chinese partners who could identify what themes would resonate among these discerning audiences no longer content to flock to whatever Los Angeles sent them, the incumbent global industry becoming the student for a change. Soon even Steven Spielberg, a decade after his Olympics controversy, was turning to China’s richest man for help. China, on-screen in Wolf Warrior 2 and off-screen at the box office, was winning.

The past decade had been kindling; Wolf Warrior 2 was the first match. Stories emerged of audiences spontaneously bursting into the Chinese national anthem as the credits rolled. China had a blockbuster that its people could cheer.                                                     

 

But what were they cheering?

It is also narrative worldwide audiences have come to know, call it the Bruce Willis template. Wolf Warrior 2 opens with Wu Jing’s character defying authorities razing the home of a fellow soldier’s family, an altercation that lands him in prison for two years. The action picks up when Leng is released and travels to a nameless country in Africa, where Wu Jing does his best approximation of Sylvester Stallone heroics to save the local communities from terrorists and mercenaries running over the land. Machine-gun bullets spray toward him, but not a one grazes him. He dispatches dozens of bad guys with switchblades and martial arts moves. He consoles young children and outdrinks the other men. When a soccer match breaks out, he scores a goal and flexes his biceps for the women. Deprived of most resources in one battle, he fashions a deadly arrow using poisonous sap extracted from a desert cactus.

Though he is ostensibly saving the day in Africa, a phantom opposition pervades the film: the United States. “There’s our hero!” shouts American sailors after Leng - and not their own military - rescues them from Somali pirates. When a fight breaks out, he and a woman drive to safety. She suggests going to the U.S. consulate, where the marines are stationed.

 

When the UN helicopter crashed

Later, she calls the U.S. consulate from a cell phone and gets the answering machine. The UN helicopter comes to help. It crashes soon after taking off.

While Hollywood studios were stripping their movies of Chinese villains, Chinese filmmakers were not extending the same courtesy. The main adversary in Wolf Warrior 2 is Big Daddy, leader of the mercenary soldiers. Big Daddy is a disgusting caricature of American ego and entitlement. He looks at the African villagers whom Leng wants to save and assesses them as worthless lives, a one-man representation of China’s main argument to the continent: America has abandoned you, but we are here to help.

During their final battle, Leng gets to show Big Daddy who is boss, the moment where he can beat him not only physically but metaphorically.

Leng ends the movie with his character hoisting a Chinese flag above his head and riding through the African countryside. “Hold your fire! It’s the Chinese,” the villagers shout. In the movie’s closing credits -played as some sold-out auditoriums sang or burst into applause - a pronouncement appeared: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China when you encounter danger in a foreign land, do not give up! Please remember, at your back stands a strong motherland.”

 

President Xi Jinping as China's 'Big Daddy Xi'

Shortly after taking office, Xi had said that “after more than one hundred and seventy years of struggle since the Opium War, the great renewal of the Chinese nation can finally glimpse a bright future.” Elementary school classrooms had once displayed posters reading wu wang Guo chi - “never forget national humiliation” - pervasive insecurity rooted in the Opium Wars, yet here was a Chinese hero proudly waving the elementary school classrooms had once displayed posters reading wu wang guo chi - “never forget national humiliation” - pervasive insecurity rooted in the Opium Wars, yet here was a Chinese hero proudly waving the country’s flag and stepping in when other countries fled, a cinematic incarnation of Xi’s promise in 2017 that “no one should expect China to swallow anything that undermines its interests.” Wu Jing was not unlike John Wayne, who, Joan Didion wrote, became an American star in the 1940s because he was a “perfect mold” for “the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost.” Wu Jing soon became a perfect mold into which Chinese officials and moviegoers alike could pour their ambitions. Yet unlike with Wayne, there was no wistfulness or examination of the nation’s past sins clouding the bravado, only a newfound identity as a nation on the world stage.

To make Wolf Warrior 2, Wu relied on freelance help from the West that had shaped some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters of all time. The creation of Leng Feng, China’s own superhero, had come with help from the superhero creators of Marvel Studios, Joe and Anthony Russo, brothers known for helming two Captain Americas and a two-part Avengers epic. As thanks to Beijing Culture for investing in their production company, the brothers offered filmmaking advice in a meeting held at the Disney studio lot (Wu showed up in camouflage). They encouraged Wu to hire Sam Hargrave, a stuntman and action coordinator who had choreographed Chris Evans’s fight scenes in Avengers: Infinity War. At the Russos’ recommendation, Frank Grillo, a character actor whom they had directed as a villain in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, would be paid $1 million to play Big Daddy. The Russo brothers themselves, though, declined an executive producer credit, deciding it wasn’t worth the risk to their reputation to put their name on the movie. Beijing Culture’s model kept the story’s theme and characters Chinese but outsourced some of the components of a movie that can signal sophistication to audiences: special effects, fight choreography, music.

At the time of the release of Wolf Warrior 2, China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti, the small country in the Horn of Africa, perhaps not far from the unnamed African country Leng Feng rescues in the film. Wolf Warrior 2 reflects these foreign policy initiatives.

When students in China returned to classrooms in September 2021, they were provided with a new series of textbooks outlining China’s president Xi Jinping, or “Grandpa Xi’s”, political philosophy.

Each textbook on “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era”, as Xi’s political philosophy is officially called, is tailored to students at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.

“Xi Jinping Thought” was enshrined into the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Constitution in 2017. Although the main stated aims are to remain committed to reform and build a “moderately prosperous society”, the realities of this political philosophy has been a tightening of party discipline.

Meanwhile, the Chinese movie industry produced other treatments of Chinese heroism at a clip, many inspired by real-life efforts by Chinese soldiers to save their countrymen overseas. Operation Mekong retold the story of an attack on Chinese ships near the border of Burma and Thailand. It is a Chinese-Hong Kong crime action film directed by Dante Lam and starring Zhang Hanyu and Eddie Peng and became one of the highest-grossing films in China.

Operation Red Sea is a 2018 Chinese-Hong Kong action war film directed by Dante Lam and starring Zhang Yi, Huang Jingyu, Hai Qing, and Du Jiang. The film is loosely based on the evacuation of foreign nationals and almost 600 Chinese citizens from Yemen's southern port of Aden during late March in the 2015 Yemeni Civil War. According to Chinaculture.org, the film is in a similar style to that of Operation Mekong. It serves as the highlight film presented to audiences as a gift for the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, as well as the party's 19th National Congress. This film is said to be "China's first modern naval film". The film has grossed USD$579 million, and received critical acclaim from critics, making it currently the seventh-highest-grossing ever in China and highest-grossing Chinese film in 2018. It was selected as the Hong Kong entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.

Dante Lam's military drama was a box-office hit in China, earning nearly $580 million, but took $1.1 million in Hong Kong.

It dramatized efforts by Chinese soldiers to rescue Chinese citizens stuck in Yemen during that country’s civil war. Even though the movie was produced in cooperation with the Chinese navy, the film added a propagandistic sheen to the real-life stories. Its soldiers fired slow-motion bullets and made impossible shots to the target’s cranium. When a soldier in Operation Red Sea is injured in battle, he recovers in - where else? - Djibouti. Both movies performed phenomenally at the box office, but Operation Red Sea was a particular hit. It became the fifth-highest-grossing movie in Chinese history. Decades after Qu Qiubai had called for “new wine in old bottles,” China’s filmmakers were grafting propagandistic impulses onto commercial storytelling.

 

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