What the IP MAN movies can teach us about the New Cold War with China

I think I've said this before, but it is worth repeating in the current context: People who want a better understanding of China -- as the United States moves toward a more confrontational posture toward that country -- could help themselves a lot by watching Chinese movies.

I'm thinking particularly of the IP MAN series, starring Donnie Yen. You can find all four movies on Netflix right now.

The movies are fantastic martial arts flicks, so they're worth watching from that standpoint alone. But they are also loosely biographical, telling the story of a real Wing Chun master -- he was Bruce Lee's mentor -- and taken as a whole, they signify something about China's relationship with the west.

The first movie takes place in Foshan, China, around the time of Japan's 1937 invasion. The Japanese oppress the Chinese, Ip Man defeats a Japanese martial arts hotshot in single combat competition, and his countrymen are given the pride they need to defeat the aggressor.

In the second movie, Ip Man moves to Hong Kong -- ruled by the British, who are snarling, sneering colonialists. Ip Man defeats a gigantic English brute named Twister. The whole affair leads to a corrupt British officer getting his comeuppance.

In the third movie -- well, this one's a little different. Ip is still in Hong Kong and the story basically revolves around him proving the superiority of Wing Chun over other fighting styles. (Also, Mike Tyson is involved. Yes, it's ridiculous.)

But in the fourth movie, Ip Man goes to the United States, is treated as inferior by arrogant, racist Americans. Ip defeats the most arrogant American in single combat competition, and his countrymen in San Francisco find newfound pride.

You get it. It's a story of a proud Chinese man refuting the "weak man of Asia" stereotypes that justified decades upon decades of outsider incursions to demonstrate that Chinese are just as strong, and maybe even a little better, than the outsiders who have misjudged them. Some of this is propaganda -- movies don't get made in China without official sanction -- but it is also rooted in the last 200 years of Chinese history.

It's not just Ip Man. Chinese historical epics -- especially those set since the beginning of the 20th century -- are telling us a story.

• Westerners are big, bad, and haughty. “Ip Man 2” isn’t the only movie to depict white guys as oversized grunting meatheads. Check out this clip from “Fearless,” which is about the real-life martial artist Huo Yuanjia.

• If Westerners are bad, the Japanese are worse. It’s hard to find a Japanese man in these movies who isn’t playing the villain. No wonder: The Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s and 1940s is estimated to have killed at least 10 million Chinese civilians — some estimates range much higher. It’s safe to say that hurt feelings linger still.

So you wouldn’t expect “Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen” — a sequel of sorts to Bruce Lee’s “Fist of Fury” — to seem so triumphant: It ends, after all, with the Japanese invasion of China underway. But the closing moments are defiant, with Yen — him again — defeating a series of Japanese combatants and crushing the testicles of one particularly nasty officer, before disappearing to join the resistance.

• The Chinese are resilient, strong, and nationalistic in the face of such indignities. “Legend of the Fist” opens with Yen and his comrades winning a battle for the French against the Germans in World War I; “Bodyguards and Assassins” depicts fictionalized efforts to protect real-life nationalist Sun Yat-Sen from those who would do him harm.

In these movies, the setbacks for the Chinese against outsiders is always temporary. Nationalistic pride might go under cover, but it never disappears entirely. Even the worst defeats tend to be triumphs of the spirit.

Now: None of this is to say the Chinese government is good and Americans are bad, or anything so simplistic. The Chinese government is authoritarian in its treatment of the Uighurs and crackdown on dissent, and has even been murderous at times.

But it is also simplistic to go "America good, Chinese government bad." Not just because President Trump has his own authoritarian inclinations, but because in a conflict between America and China, the Chinese people are going to be factoring the ugly history of outside domination in their views of the conflict. They might not think that America is merely aiming for their freedom, but that America intends to limit their country's ambitions, and perhaps eventually to subdue them.

I'm not quite sure how understanding this Chinese view of history modifies American policy going forward, but I can't help but sense that it should. There's a real history here. It matters. You don't have to be a scholar to begin to understand that. (It helps, but not everybody has the time or interest.) All you have to do is watch a few movies.

And now: A moment of snark about Zbigniew Brezezinski

The former national security advisor writes this morning about how to confront and accomodate China's rise: By making allies with everybody else!

A successful U.S. effort to enlarge the West, making it the world's most stable and democratic zone, would seek to combine power with principle. A cooperative, larger West—extending from North America and Europe through Eurasia (by eventually embracing Russia and Turkey), all the way to Japan and South Korea—would enhance the appeal of the West's core principles for other cultures, thus encouraging the gradual emergence of a universal democratic political culture.

I could be wrong, but Brezezinski seems to want to enlarge the West to include ... everyplace but China and Africa. And I could be wrong, but that seems to be far too large a coalition to actually be effective. As we're seeing in Europe, it's tough to hold continental coalitions together—there are just so many competing interests. Growing the "West"—even informally—seems unlikely.