China Salesman

This is a review of the 2017 Chinese action/comedy/propaganda film China Salesman. I don't know if you can find it online, I bought the stupid thing for this post (I need to work on my money management skills). There will be spoilers in this review.

It stars Dongxue Li as a salesman for a Chinese telecom company which is bidding for a contract to sell superior Chinese 3G telephone equipment to an African country. Opposing him is an Eeeeevil Western telephone company that's trying to win the bid so they can tank the country's phone network, thereby restarting a civil war so's they can sell arms to both sides. Diabolical Westerners, hiding their illicit arms trade behind a telephone company! 

If battling phone companies seems like an odd premise, bear in mind that this was made around the time that Huawei's reputation was swirling down the drain, so much of the nonsense in this film is just touting the wonders of Chinese 3G technology compared to the junk the Westerners put out. 

The producers of the film also planned an international release and so, to bolster its overseas box office, they cast two huge Hollywood action stars -- Steven Seagal and Mike Tyson. OK, maybe 'huge Hollywood action stars' is an exaggeration, although in Seagal's case, considering his ample girth, huge certainly fits.

 

Ms Ling and the China Salesman,
who can't afford a radio phone to call their headquarters,
whine about not being taken seriously

We are introduced to the China Salesman and his assistant Ruan Ling as they are riding into the capital city on camels. Driving past in a fancy car are Susanna, the blonde woman who is running the bidding, and Michael, the salesman for the Eeeeevil Western phone/weapons dealing company. That seems like a bit of a conflict of interest to me, but what do I know? Susanna and Michael, from the comfort of their air-conditioned car, smirk at the two Chinese yahoos on their camels.  

Later, while the Westerners settle into luxurious accommodations, the China Salesman and his sidekick open up their old regional office in the Capital. It is dusty and pretty run down looking. At one point the China Salesman even complains to Ling that they don't have a radio phone to call their headquarters in China. Wait, this movie is promoting the wonders of Chinese 3G telephony, and these two boobs can't even call their headquarters? 

We then cut to a bar ran by Steven Seagal. It's kind of like Rick's bar in Casablanca, but instead of Humphrey Bogart you get Seagal waddling around. He's tasting some hootch from a barrel, declares it to be good and hands over crates of guns he's trading for the booze. Now, I'm not an international arms dealer, but it strikes me that Seagal got the short end of the stick trading of all those automatic weapons for only a few gallons of whiskey. 

Then, who should happen to walk in but Mike Tyson. His backstory is that he is a fearsome African Chieftan. However, unfortunately for him his entire tribe was massacred and exterminated. His big ambition is to reconstitute his tribe. How he plans on doing that when they're all dead is a mystery - I guess he's just an optimist. 

Tyson, Seagal, and Seagal's stunt double duke it out
(image from Film Threat) 

Since there are two high alpha action stars in the same bar a fight is inevitable. One problem is Seagal is in his 'beached whale' phase so all he can do is sit and wave his arms around as he does some fearsome chair-fu. Meanwhile, Tyson wants nothing to do with that, he just wants to run around punching people. To solve the problem of providing a mobile Seagal for the fight they hired the world's skinniest stunt double to do the duty. The three of them bust up the place, crashing through walls and demolishing all props in sight. 

When the required amount of promotional video has been filmed, the fight ends with a Tyson victory. Seagal, his contract completed, thankfully largely disappears from the show. Tyson continues as a minor character with an amusingly absurd faux-African accent that changes from scene to scene. 

The movie's plot is pretty much of a mess. It stitches together over-the-top action sequences while pumping the superiority of Huawei telephones, whining about the lack of respect for China, blathering about the incomprehensible civil war, displaying supposed African culture, and revealing devious Westerners. My favorite Tyson appearance was at one of the innumerable, technobabble infused telephony negotiation sessions. Tyson crashes through the front door in an armored personnel carrier and touches off a massive gunfight. Way to negotiate Mike.

Who needs guns when you have a Chinese flag?

Another ridiculous scene is when the China Salesman needs to get to the south to repair a vital telephone relay tower. However, there is only one mountain pass they can use to get there, and currently that pass is being blocked by the two warring rebel factions who are engaged in a massive firefight. Trying to solve this conundrum, the China Salesman thinks for a bit and then gets a brainstorm. He breaks out a gigantic Chinese flag, mounts it on the back of his truck and starts to drive through the pass. Hilariously the rebels all stop fighting and instead stand up and start shouting "Its China!", "China good!", "Yea for China!" so the China Salesman can make it through the pass. Yea, that sounds plausible.   

Would I recommend you watch it? If you can get it for free the plot is preposterous, and it is stuffed full of ludicrously transparent propaganda. Still, it is a hoot and entertaining in a crappy B-movie sort of a way. 

        

Eating birds and drinking snow

Finally, the truth is told. Sheds a whole new light on the election, don't it?

 

Stratfor and Tokyo Rose / Lotus Long

Scott Stewart concludes his series on terrorism by reminding people that terrorism needs to be kept in perspective. While terrorism is an unquestionably violent act, at its heart -- for at least the type of terroism conducted against non-moslem targets -- it is more properly considered an act of propaganda.

The intent of terrorists is to leverage news coverage of their attacks ot spread fear far beyond reasonable bounds. All though difficult to do in this day of the 24 hour news cycle, it is imperative to judge the true scale of terrorism and not create exaggerated fears over its reach.

The beginning of the article is excerpted below, with a link to the full article at the end of the excerpt.

Because of the talk about propaganda in the article, for the Hot Stratfor Babe, Tokyo Rose immediately sprang to mind. So, I turned to the 1946 film Tokyo Rose and selected Lotus Long who played the title character for the honor.

Ms Long was an American of Japanese and Hawaiian ancestry and she made a career of playing exotic Asian women in movies. In the movie Tokyo Rose she was kidnapped by an escaped American POW who plans on killing her because her treachery led to the death of his buddy. I don't know much else about the film. I'm guessing it would probably be entertaining like films of that era tend to be, but I suspect there is enough racial stereotyping and what-not to ensure it will never again appear on TV.

Interestingly, there never was an actual Tokyo Rose. That was a generic name given to any of the number of English speaking woman who broadcast for the Japanese during the war. 

None the less, because she identified herself as Tokyo Rose to get paid for a post-war interview, one of the women -- Iva Toguri D'Aquino, who actually broadcasted under the name Orphan Ann -- became the one who was most associated with the Tokyo Rose monicker. That's her behind bars to the left.

Ms D'Aquino was an American citizen in Japan when the war started. She was pressured, but refused to renounce her citizenship and also smuggled food to allied prisoners in POW camps. When approached to do broadcasts by the POWs who ran the stations, she agreed to only after being given assurances that she would not have to broadcast anti-American propaganda.

After the war she was detained and investigated, and eventually released when no evidence of treasonous behavior on her part was found. However, when she returned to the States there was a public uproar and she was rearrested and tried for treason.

Her trial was a sham, with witnesses coerced into testifying against her. She was convicted of treason and sentenced to a 10 year prison sentence. She served a little over 6 years of the sentence before being paroled. In 1977, after an investigation into the irregularities of her trial, Jerry Ford issued her a full and unconditional pardon.


Keeping Terrorism in Perspective
By Scott Stewart, March 22, 2012

As we conclude our series on the fundamentals of terrorism, it is only fitting that we do so with a discussion of the importance of keeping terrorism in perspective.

By design, terrorist attacks are intended to have a psychological impact far outweighing the physical damage the attack causes. As their name suggests, they are meant to cause terror that amplifies the actual attack. A target population responding to a terrorist attack with panic and hysteria allows the perpetrators to obtain a maximum return on their physical effort. Certainly, al Qaeda reaped such a maximum return from the Sept. 11 attacks, which totally altered the foreign policy and domestic security policies of the world's only superpower and resulted in the invasion of Afghanistan and military operations across the globe. Al Qaeda also maximized its return from the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings, which occurred three days before the 2004 Spanish general elections that ousted the ruling party from power.

One way to mitigate the psychological impact of terrorism is to remove the mystique and hype associated with it. The first step in this demystification is recognizing that terrorism is a tactic used by a variety of actors and that it will not go away, something we discussed at length in our first analysis in this series. Terrorism and, more broadly, violence are and will remain part of the human condition. The Chinese, for example, did not build the Great Wall to attract tourists, but to keep out marauding hordes. Fortunately, today's terrorists are far less dangerous to society than the Mongols were to Ming China.

Another way to mitigate the impact of terrorism is recognizing that those who conduct terrorist attacks are not some kind of Hollywood superninja commandos who can conjure attacks out of thin air. Terrorist attacks follow a discernable, predictable planning process that can be detected if it is looked for. Indeed, by practicing relaxed, sustainable situational awareness, people can help protect themselves from terrorist attacks. When people practice situational awareness collectively, they also can help protect their communities from such attacks.

A third important component in the demystification process is recognizing and resisting the terror magnifiers terrorist planners use in their efforts to maximize the impact of their attacks. Terrorist attacks will cause tragedy and suffering, but the targeted population can separate terror from terrorism, and minimize the impact of such attacks if they maintain the proper perspective.

Propaganda of the Deed

As we begin our examination of perspective and terror magnifiers, let's first examine the objective of terrorist planners.

Nineteenth-century anarchists promoted what they called the "propaganda of the deed," or using violence as a symbolic action to make a larger point, such as inspiring the masses to undertake revolutionary action. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, modern terrorist organizations began to conduct operations designed to serve as terrorist theater, an undertaking greatly aided by the advent and spread of broadcast media. Some examples of early attacks specifically intended as made-for-television events include the September 1972 kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the December 1975 raid on OPEC headquarters in Vienna. Aircraft hijackings quickly followed suit, and were transformed from relatively brief endeavors to long, drawn-out and dramatic media events often spanning multiple continents. The image of TWA Flight 847 captain John Testrake in the window of his cockpit with a Hezbollah gunman behind him became an iconic image of the 1980s, embodying this trend.

Today, the proliferation of 24-hour television news networks and Internet news sites magnifies such media exposure. This increased exposure not only allows people to be informed minute-by-minute about unfolding events, it also permits them to become secondary, vicarious victims of the unfolding violence. The increased exposure ensures that the audience impacted by the propaganda of the deed becomes far larger than just those in the immediate vicinity of a terrorist attack. On Sept. 11, 2001, millions of people in the United States and around the world watched live as the second aircraft struck the south tower of the World Trade Center, people leapt to their deaths to escape the raging fires and the towers collapsed. Watching this sequence of events in real time profoundly impacted many people. Its effect was far greater than if people have merely read about the attacks in newspapers.

In the wake of 9/11, a wave of terror swept the globe as people worldwide became certain that more such spectacular attacks were inevitable. The November 2008 Mumbai attacks had a similar, albeit smaller, impact. People across India were fearful of being attacked by teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen, and concern spread around the world about Mumbai-style terrorism.

Terror Magnifiers

Such theatrical attacks exert a strange hold over the human imagination. The sense of terror they create can dwarf the reaction to natural disasters many times greater in magnitude. For example, more than 227,000 people died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami compared to fewer than 3,000 people on 9/11. Yet the 9/11 attacks spawned a global sense of terror and a geopolitical reaction that had a profound and unparalleled impact upon world events over the past decade.

As noted, the media magnifies this anxiety and terror. Television news, whether broadcast on the airwaves or over the Internet, allows people to experience a terrorist event remotely and vicariously, and the print media reinforces this. While part of this magnification results merely from the nature of television as a medium and the 24-hour news cycle, bad reporting and misunderstanding can build hype and terror.

Read more: Keeping Terrorism in Perspective | Stratfor