Wolf Warrior and Wolf Warrior 2
WWI and WWII are two Chinese films. They’re state-approved I think, whatever that means. They’re in Mandarin and they lack that Hong Kong polish. The second film made 800 million dollars in the box office, which is insane. I recently watched both on Peacock.
I learned of these movies from The Economist’s podcast series on Xi Jinping, which had lots of interesting tidbits, including a reference to WWII in particular, which became the namesake for “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy”.
It’s Rambo with Chinese characteristics. The protagonist is physically small, and he sweats a lot and he’s not very handsome and the military unit is called “wolf warriors” because, in paraphrase, a single wolf isn’t that dangerous but a pack of wolves is. (WWI)
The first movie is I guess lower budget but they both seem pretty low-budget to me. It involves the back story of the Wolf Warrior. His love interest is a stern commanding officer with her hair under the hat who sees potential in him.
He eventually stops a plot to use samples of Chinese blood to develop a Chinese-specific bioweapon by beating up a white guy. There’s a lot of working together harmoniously, but sometimes he’s a bit of a maverick. 3/5 stars, would recommend.
WWII opens with his old lady-comrade killed by a Damascus Steel-style bullet that he now wears on a necklace. He travels to Africa in search of her killer, outdrinks all the Africans, dances with them, then saves them from a coup by their own corrupt dictators who are merely puppets for Western lowlifes. He gets stabbed a bunch this time but he gets the bad guy again, while this one Chinese Commodore is just on his boat sweating bullets with his finger over the “airstrike the bad guys” button waiting for UN approval as the Wolf Warrior live-streams the carnage and slowly bleeds out. But somehow he just doesn’t bleed out, and the film ends with him waving the Chinese flag.
I must say the brutality of some of the images in WWII was unsettling. Like oops I just flipped the Land Rover onto a mass grave. Later in the film even after nearly totaling the Land Rover if it hadn’t been for all those cushioning bodies he still won’t let his love-interest drive. He’s passing out from blood loss with her riding shotty no shotgun and a little African boy in the back. So from I to II, it went from defending one’s own borders and a strong female character to expansionist propaganda and a wilting ingenue. But they do still wait for UN approval.
ANYWAY, to rewind all the way back to the Economist’s podcast series, it’s never really made clear though it is implied that a Chinese Chinese person came up with the phrase “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy”. The Wikipedia said “coined from the movie Wolf Warrior II”, and is laid out as such a fact that the only option was to believe that this was some sort of top-down Authoritarian State-ordered thing. Which was exactly how the interviews went with these “China-watchers” (their word, not mine) trying to sell their books about “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy”. Interviewers would ask questions like: “So do these diplomats have to do this Wolf Warrior Diplomacy?” And instead of clarifying, the authors would hedge, “well, it’s a strategy they use.”
So I fixed the Wikipedia a little. Had to have a back-and-forth with some other editor, but both already-cited sources admit that it came from the West, it just took a lot of skimming and ctrl-f’ing.
I guess that’s it.