Who are the baddies these days? Globalisation has been tricky for Hollywood action screenwriters, whose stories need a source of villains that it’s culturally legitimate to hate. In earlier, more nationalistic eras, this role was fulfilled by either Nazis or Russians. But since the end of the Cold War, it’s been increasingly difficult to find an Other to serve as big screen bad guys without insulting potential customers somewhere.
Two recent Chinese films, Wolf Warrior (2015) and Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) suggest that the Chinese movie industry has no such squeamishness about Official Foreign Villains. With the poster tagline “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated”, the films depict a muscular Chinese military hero seeing off drug lords and their American mercenaries, bringing life-saving vaccines to Africa and generally showing off superior Chinese technology, competence and morality. In contrast, America is degenerate, weak — or simply absent. As one character says: “Why are you calling the Americans? Where are they? It is a waste of time.”
Discussions of ‘national populism’ in the UK have tended to focus either on the USA, or on European phenomena such as the Rassemblement National in France, the Brexit vote, or the Orbàn regime in Hungary. We hear lots of parallels anxiously drawn with the 1930s. But a variant of the national-populist political settlement has been the norm in China for decades, and enjoys widespread popular support.
Not long ago, most in the West paid little attention to China except as a source of manufactured goods, or possibly of economic competition. The prospect of ideological competition seemed remote. But the Chinese Communist Party has made economic nationalism a central part of its domestic strategy of legitimation since the days of Chairman Mao. When Deng Xiaoping crushed pro-democracy protests in 1979, he dismissed agitators for political changes as lackeys of hostile foreign power.
Until recently, China’s highly nationalistic domestic debate has not been widely remarked-on in the West, the way identitarian nationalist politics might be in – say – Austria. The Western consensus at the turn of the century was that WTO accession would result in moves toward liberal democracy, interdependence and mutual understanding. More recent popular discussion has focused on China’s growing economic heft as a matter for international concern, while her internal political discourse seemed only of interest to scholars and political wonks.
But in recent months, official Chinese mouthpieces have embarked on a change of tack in communications terms that has become known as ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy. This new approach looks less like the soft-spoken approach typically understood as ‘diplomatic’ than a kind of geopolitical trolling. Often conducted in English, via social media, it involves highly-placed Chinese officials posting provocative challenges to the global liberal order, and particularly to American foreign policy.
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