"In the film’s climax, Big Daddy, the white villain in the story, tells Leng that there are only two kinds of races in the world: winners and losers. The conversation begins with Big Daddy gesturing to African war captives behind bars and asking Leng if he is willing to die for them, to which the Chinese says, he “was born for them.” Big Daddy replies: “people like you will always be inferior to people like me; get fucking used to it” (这个世界只有强者和弱者; 你们这种劣等民族永远属于弱者; 你必須習慣). At this point, Leng, who has been losing the fight, suddenly gets up on his feet, punches back, and says “that’s fucking history” (那他媽是以前), before beating his white opponent to a pulp.
Is Leng right that a new world order has arrived? Is the history of China’s humiliation and oppression at the hands of Western powers, so familiar and so deeply ingrained in the consciousness of generations of Chinese people, now definitively a remnant of a past? Is China now actually a rising imperialist power in Africa and elsewhere in the world? If Big Daddy is right to say that the world is a zero-sum game and one is either a winner or a loser, to which side does China belong? Put even more crudely, if the only way to comprehend the world is through a black/white binary paradigm, where do we locate the yellow?...
while the film imagines and presents China as the new leader of the world, the narrative that buttresses this fantasy is simply borrowed from the older era of European colonial history. Indeed, the construction of China as the new savior of the underdeveloped world merely inherits the older narrative of “white man’s burden” and the “civilizing mission” without much creativity, including the narrative of white guilt. It is striking to see how facilely China inserts itself into the familiar European narrative and assumes a place in the history it did not create...
Wu states that his choice of a military theme for Wolf Warrior II was meant to “inspire men to become real men, and encourage women to go for real men”...
Wu’s claim that he has rehabilitated Chinese notions of masculinity by giving the people a Chinese Tom Cruise or Sylvester Stallone also suggests a realignment of Chinese masculinity with its Euro-American counterpart away from China’s Asian neighbors. Wu’s view implicitly suggests that before China can assert its proper place in the family of respected, modern nations, it must first redefine its sexual culture, and in order to redefine its sexual culture, it must first re-imagine itself in some way as a continuation of Euro-American culture...
the cinematic structure of the movie is evidence that China’s “rejuvenation” (复兴) is primarily about supplanting White supremacy and not saving the Global South from it."
FB: "The film’s portrayal of China as a “good foreigner” that helps the Africans ward off aggression from the “bad foreigners” from Europe and America is a clear reflection of China’s new ideology about its place in the world. Within the film’s narrative parameters, the Chinese are not just honorary whites, but a new master race that has arrived to displace the whites as the new savior of an “Africa” ravaged by civil war, political chaos, starvation, and deadly diseases."
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