So I was watching Wolf warrior
A 2015 Chinese blockbuster
And I saw this
It's a deeply patriotic battle cry
Like one of those you saw in Independence Day
But instead of feeling proud as the Chinese
My feeling was mixed
But then I realized this is not a speech to raise morale
This is a warning
Directly to the rest of the world
My earliest exposure to Chinese patriotism was in elementary school trip to the cinema
The films were always educational to some degree
Which is why I never understood why we watched Drunken Mmaster II
It's a 1994 Hong Kong classic
It tells the fictionalized story of a Chinese folk hero
Called Wong Fei-hung
In the film he's a young martial artists who uses skill to fight injustice
But he's playful attitude tends to cause more trouble
It was a good time like most Jackie Chan movies
But at the time, I was too young to fully understand the message behind it
You see, Imperial China was once a victim of colonial exploits
To oversimplify things, in the mid-1800s late Qing Dynasty
British merchants smuggle large amount Opium's in the China for sale
...in exchange for highly demanded items like silks and Chinese tea
This created a generation of drug addicts in China
The increasingly worsened relationship between the Qing government and the British merchants
...escalated into the opium war
Which the British won
And Hong Kong became a British colony
From that point on many Western countries also exploited China
More and more Chinese territories were at "leased" to Western powers
as well as blatant robbery
...like the burning of the old Summer Palace
And there's also Japanese invasion in World War II
To this day, you can see the scars of colonialism in many Chinese cities
It's not rare to see old western building clusters
standing in a middle of a Chinese city
This is why Chinese patriotic films have foreign bad guys
In Classics like Drunken Master II
The message is revolving around a core Chinese values
To never forget the shame of the nation
And to endlessly improve ourselves
In the film, the protagonist represented the self-perceiving image of a pre-colonial China
He is strong, but he is immature
He's good at heart, but he causes trouble
He has great power, but he abuses it
But when faced with a national crisis
He learns and uses power for what really matters
This is where wolf warrior steps in
the film features a renegade hero who causes trouble
just like Jackie Chan
He is the best of the best, just like Jackie Chan
And he also faces a national crisis
Which he has to use his power to solve
But it's not being punished for the mayhem he caused...
His renegade actions always save the day
At the end, he is always right
There's nothing for this surrogate of China to learn, to improve
Going back to Drunken Master again
The main villain of the film is the European business tycoon
He is well-dressed, well-spoken
A larger-than-life existence
In wolf warrior our main [villain] is visualized with shots like this
It's grotesque, making the villain appear as a clown
You know what I fight for?
Money
So not only does our hero learn nothing
He has no need to
By having the bad guy portrayed as less than human
It removed the motivation for self-improvement
This is why the line sound is so wrong to me
It's not a message to the Chinese people
It's warning the rest of the world.
It doesn't help improve the nation
It just boast the strength of China
Something this film does plenty of
With economic upturn
it seems China is finally stepping out of the trauma of the past century
With that, an increasing amount of Chinese blockbusters
features invincible characters
They beat up the foreigners
And nothing is learn at the end
It's easy for Chinese people to feel like we are on top of the world,
But this pride had led the nation astray before
The prideful Ming and Qing dynasty closed off its trade to the rest of the world multiple times
And in the process, we missed out on the progress the west has made
the Age of Discovery
the Industrial Revolution
Next thing we know the wall of China
...was knocked down by cannon fire from British ships