The “Wolf Warrior Cycle”: Chinese Blockbusters in the Age of the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

This article concentrates on four Chinese blockbuster movies, Wolf Warrior (2015), Operation Mekong (2016), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) and Operation Red Sea (2018), referring to them collectively as the “wolf warrior cycle” on the basis of their shared themes of China's overseas military actions. To understand why films addressing this topic have emerged since the mid-2010s, the article employs a critical political economy approach and situates the wolf warrior cycle in China's transforming foreign policies. It argues that the Belt and Road Initiative, one of the state's prominent foreign policies and global strategies in this period, played a crucial role in shaping the production of the wolf warrior cycle films under a trend of the politicization of commercial blockbusters in the Chinese film industry. In turn, these films contributed to the formation of the “wolf warrior diplomacy” image by reinforcing the proactiveness of China's diplomacy and nationalistic stereotypes in Chinese society towards international relations.

China’s Soft Power Projection in Foreign Policy: A Qualitative Analysis of Wolf Warrior II

“…In sum, some researchers analyzed the relationship between Africa and China, and other considered the political discourse association with the hero of Lang Feng Yao (2017) some recent studies explores the stereotyping of Africa in the narration of Wolf Warrior 2 (F. Zhang, 2020). In different studies Chinese students were responded to the film are devoted to patriotism like the heroic epic of Leng Feng (Galafa, 2019;Z. Xiang, 2018).…”