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. 

        

Stratfor and Nia Peeples

In tandem with George Freidman's last Stratfor article, The State of the World: A Framework, which discussed the evolving geopolitics on a global scale, Scott Stewart discusses the evolution of terrorism from the cold war, through the al Qaeda ascendance, and into the modern era of 'lone wolf' style, grass roots terrorism.

The beginning of Scott's article is excerpted below, and at the end of the excerpt is a link to the full article. 

For the article's Hot Stratfor babe I carefully pondered the matter for several hours until I decided that the perfect choice would be Nia Peeples for her role as a terrorist in the film Half Past Dead.

At least I think Ms Peeples played a terrorist in the movie. She may have been a criminal mastermind instead. You'll understand, since it was a Steven Seagal movie such minor plot details are not always spelled out as clearly as one would expect, but I'm pretty sure she was a terrorist.

In the film Seagal plays a zen spouting, and at this stage in his career somewhat blimpish, FBI agent who has infiltrated the sooper-dooper, maximum security New Alcatraz prison for some reason or another. While that's going on the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shows up to witness the execution of a prisoner who stole $200 million dollars in gold bars.

Before the execution can take place some terrorists, or perhaps they're criminals, with Nia Peeples as their Eeeevil 2nd-in-command demonstrate that New Alcatra's security wasn't all that it was cracked up to be by parachuting in and taking over. The Supreme Court justice ends up strapped into the electric chair instead.

Surprisingly, instead of gathering around to hoot and applaud the frying of the Chief Justice like you would think hardened convicts might do, the prisoners are roused into action to try to save the prison from the terrorists who have captured it. I guess they figure New Alcatraz is their Hood, and nobody messes with their Hood. Or maybe the movie just doesn't make any sense.

Half Past Dead was the last movie Seagal starred in to have a theatrical release. From that point on it was straight to DVD for the films he cranked out. Meanwhile, Nia continues to be busy as she bounces from TV to B-Movies. 

By the way, unless you -- as I do -- find Steven Seagal movies to be a guilty pleasure, I wouldn't recommend watching Half Past Dead. It's a terrible movie with an absurd plot, bad dialog and lousy acting.
  

The Myth of the End of Terrorism
By Scott Stewart, February 23, 2012

In this week's Geopolitical Weekly, George Friedman discussed the geopolitical cycles that change with each generation. Frequently, especially in recent years, those geopolitical cycles have intersected with changes in the way the tactic of terrorism is employed and in the actors employing it.

The Arab terrorism that began in the 1960s resulted from the Cold War and the Soviet decision to fund, train and otherwise encourage groups in the Middle East. The Soviet Union and its Middle Eastern proxies also sponsored Marxist terrorist groups in Europe and Latin America. They even backed the Japanese Red Army terrorist group. Places like South Yemen and Libya became havens where Marxist militants of many different nationalities gathered to learn terrorist tradecraft, often instructed by personnel from the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi and from other militants.

The Cold War also spawned al Qaeda and the broader global jihadist movement as militants flocking to fight the Soviet troops who had invaded Afghanistan were trained in camps in northern Pakistan by instructors from the CIA's Office of Technical Services and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. Emboldened by the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and claiming credit for the subsequent Soviet collapse, these militants decided to expand their efforts to other parts of the world.

The connection between state-sponsored terrorism and the Cold War ran so deep that when the Cold War ended with the Soviet Union's collapse, many declared that terrorism had ended as well. I witnessed this phenomenon while serving in the Counterterrorism Investigations Division of the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) in the early 1990s. While I was in New York working as part of the interagency team investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newly appointed assistant secretary of state abolished my office, declaring that the DSS did not need a Counterterrorism Investigations Division since terrorism was over.

Though terrorism obviously did not end when the Berlin Wall fell, the rosy sentiments to the contrary held by some at the State Department and elsewhere took away the impetus to mitigate the growing jihadist threat or to protect diplomatic facilities from it. The final report of the Crowe Commission, which was established to review the twin August 1998 bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, explicitly noted this neglect of counterterrorism and security programs, as did the 9/11 Commission report.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks triggered a shift in international geopolitics by leading the United States to concentrate the full weight of its national resources on al Qaeda and its supporters. Ironically, by the time the U.S. government was able to shift its massive bureaucracy to meet the new challenge, creating huge new organizations like the Department of Homeland Security, the efforts of the existing U.S. counterterrorism apparatus had already badly crippled the core al Qaeda group. Though some of these new organizations played important roles in helping the United States cope with the fallout of its decision to invade Iraq after Afghanistan, Washington spent billions of dollars to create organizations and fund programs that in hindsight were arguably not really necessary because the threats they were designed to counter, such as al Qaeda's nuclear briefcase bombs, did not actually exist. As George Friedman noted in the Geopolitical Weekly, the sole global superpower was badly off-balance, which caused an imbalance in the entire global system.

With the continued diminution of the jihadist threat, underscored by the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden and the fall in Libya of the Gadhafi regime (which had long employed terrorism), once again we appear on the brink of a cyclical change in the terrorism paradigm. These events could again lead some to pronounce the death of terrorism.

Several developments last week served to demonstrate that while the perpetrators and tactics of terrorism (what Stratfor calls the "who" and the "how") may change in response to larger geopolitical cycles, such shifts will not signal the end of terrorism itself.

Read the rest of The Myth of the End of Terrorism at Stratfor.

The show is real

One of my guilty pleasures is the ever ridiculous Steven Seagal. Imagine my joy when I stumbled across the above trailer for a his new AE show, Steven Seagal: Lawman.  It is a reality show with the premise that, between movies, he's been a Louisiana cop for 20 years. He assures us, "well, the show is real. I mean it's... this is not a joke."

Now Steven, why would anyone ever doubt you?

As I patiently wait for the premier I've been wondering... how much would it suck if, drunker than a skunk in your trailer park, you answered a knock on your door to discover Steven Seagal, dressed like a cop with a camera crew shadowing him, spouting Zen inanities as he arrested you?

Man, talk about a 'Come to Jesus' moment.