Patriotism in Chinese Cinema | Video Essay

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