THINK of it as a Chinese version of the Rambo movies and you will get the gist. Admittedly its title “Wolf Warrior” is a lot more colourful than its US counterpart, but just as patriotic in its message.

Just as Rambo does for the US, so the Chinese commando protagonist in this hugely successful series of action films fights the country’s enemies at home and abroad to defend Chinese interests.

In one film in the series Wolf Warrior 2, a 2017 blockbuster that set numerous Chinese box-office records, the publicity tagline pretty much sums it up: “Even though a thousand miles away, anyone who affronts China will pay.”

Such slogans, it would seem, have caught on far beyond Chinese movie-goers. These days Wolf Warrior diplomacy has become the adopted nickname for a new breed of foreign-policy implementation in Beijing. It’s all a far cry from the days of China’s traditional “conceal ambitions, hide claws” diplomacy under former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

To see just how much things have changed it only takes a look around Asia right now to see that there’s no shortage of the new Chinese wolf warrior diplomacy at work.

In disputed waters off the coast of Vietnam these past months, China’s coast Guard has rammed and sunk a fishing boat, while Chinese ships and maritime militias also swarmed an offshore oil rig operated by Malaysia.

Beijing continues also to pile pressure on Taiwan, denouncing the second inauguration of its President Tsai Ing-wen in the hope that she will accept the so-called 1992 Consensus that Taiwan and the mainland are part of one China.

And then there is the rather worrying confrontation between China and the world’s other most populous nation India, which has seen military clashes along their contentious border in the Himalayas resulting, some reports say, in hundreds of casualties.

“It seems that even as China was fighting a disease outbreak, it was also thinking in terms of its long-term strategic goals,” observed Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Honolulu in a recent interview with the New York Times.

Far and away, though, the most obvious manifestation of China’s wolf warrior diplomacy lately, and certainly the crisis causing most global concern, is Beijing’s move forward with a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong.

Though the legislation is yet to be formalised, some critics have called it the “end of Hong Kong”. Many fear China will follow through with its implementation, drastically curtailing Hong Kong’s political freedoms and criminalising protest and criticism of Beijing’s communist regime and its policies in the territory.

“This is the nuclear option: Beijing’s ultimate power to impose whatever it wants on Hong Kong, outside and above Hong Kong’s constitutional, political and legal structure,” warned Antony Dapiran, a lawyer and author of books on Hong Kong’s protest culture, speaking to the Financial Times (FT) last week.

Above all, say such observers, China’s latest highly controversial move would undermine the principle of “one country, two systems” that has underpinned Hong Kong’s relations with China’s central authorities since the British handover in 1997.

In response to China’s move, last year’s pro-democracy protests have already been reignited and the dangerous stand-off between the US and China has deepened.

Beyond the US, the governments of Britain, Canada and Australia have jointly condemned China’s decision to impose the law, which they warned in a statement endangered the system that made Hong Kong “so prosperous”.

In an op-ed in last week’s FT, Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong, called the Chinese regime “an enemy of open societies everywhere” and laid out what he saw as the profound economic implications of China’s policy.

“If China destroys the rule of law in Hong Kong it will ruin the city’s chances of continuing to be a great international financial hub that mediates about two-thirds of the direct investment in and out of China,” wrote Patten, before urging Britain and its partners in the Group of Seven nations – which will convene virtually next month – to take a stand against the Chinese regime.

The question of whether China will heed such a global stand, however, remains to be seen. Some analysts warn that Beijing, emboldened by a nationalist agenda under President Xi Jinping and a worldwide backlash from the spread of Covid-19 from Wuhan, might well be willing to use Hong Kong as a battlefield in a new Cold War with the West.

Such a view sees Hong Kong, China and the West entangled in a vicious political cycle, potentially for years to come. Much, of course, will depend on the reaction of the seven million or so people who inhabit Hong Kong.

“Immediately, turmoil at local level is almost certain,” says Brian CH Fong, a Hong Kong-based political scientist who has founded and leads several civil society organisations in the city.

“The democracy camp will certainly resist the national security law, and the ‘paramilitary police state’, backed by the Hong Kong government and Beijing, will respond with more aggressive oppression,” Fong told the online international news magazine The Diplomat last week.

“New waves of street fights will happen from now on all the way through the anniversaries of key dates of the ‘2019 Water revolution’, such as the June 12 resistance and August 31 attacks,” Fong added.

If the early protests on the streets last week were anything to go by, then Fong’s assessment so far is correct. In a return of the unrest that roiled Hong Kong last year, crowds thronged the city’s Causeway Bay shopping area in defiance.

Many describe the mood among young Hong Kongers, who largely do not identify as Chinese, as being grim. The slogan “laam caau” – loosely translated as “If we burn, you burn with us” – has become popular.

HONG Kong police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse thousands of people as chants of “Hong Kong independence the only way out”, echoed through the streets.

Protest organisers on social media urged people to “be water” and keep moving throughout the city.

On LIHKG, an online forum popular with protesters, users called for a “hundred-day war” to take advantage of their last opportunity to protest before the laws come into force. “Say no to China,” one posted.

Many of those on the streets again now have been involved in previous protests and fear that the new law will also be used to punish them for such activism.

“I am worried that after the implementation of the national security law, they will go after those being charged before and the police will be further out of control,” said Twinnie, a secondary school student who spoke to the Reuters news agency but declined to give her last name.

“I am afraid of being arrested but I still need to come out and protest for the future of Hong Kong,” she added. Such feelings, according to other reports, are a common refrain among the protesters.

“I’ve come for something I care deeply about – ultimately it’s freedom,” said a 40-year-old lawyer who also wished to remain anonymous, citing the national security laws, Beijing encroachment and a recent report clearing police of wrongdoing.

“If we keep quiet, they can get away with it. I don’t think we can change things but we need to make sure our voices are heard,” he told reporters.

Crucial as the voices and actions on the city’s streets are to Hong Kong’s future, it is those in global diplomatic circles that will greatly determine how this latest episode in the city’s recent tortured political existence will ultimately play out.

Most eyes right now are on Washington, which under the administration of President Donald Trump has been at increasing loggerheads with Beijing, even before this latest crisis and the outbreak of the coronavirus.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wasted no time in making clear that, with Beijing’s move on the national security law, Hong Kong could no longer be considered a meaningfully autonomous territory.

“No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground,” Pompeo said in a statement.

Put another way, it could mean that the removal of Hong Kong’s special status could lead Washington to treat it like any other Chinese city. That would mean higher tariffs, including those enacted amid the trade war between the US and China.

To say that businesses are nervous would be an understatement. Currently trade between the US and Hong Kong is estimated at $38 billion a year. Almost 300 US companies base their regional headquarters in Hong Kong and more than 1300 have operations in the city, from 3M to Goldman Sachs to the insurer AIG. The US State Department also estimates that that 85,000 US citizens reside in Hong Kong.

All this, of course, is a double-edged sword, given that the Chinese regime would also desperately need economic stability to shore up its political support in the city, without which it would be more vulnerable to US pressure.

“If the United States wanted to ensure that Beijing gets the raw end of this deal, so that they felt some pain, restricting Hong Kong’s ability to act as a global financial centre would be the way to do it,” said George Magnus, an expert on the Chinese economy at the University of Oxford. “I’m not saying it would be a good thing, but if you’re in a financial war, that’s the way to do it,” Magnus told Foreign Policy magazine a few days ago.

BUT as the same article also pointed out, other experts believe that rather than the US trying to use Hong Kong to open up a new front in the showdown against Beijing, it is instead merely trying to preserve Hong Kong’s independence and relative freedoms as best it can.

With relations between Washington and Beijing already strained to say the least, the US might simply use warning shots to pull the Chinese back from an all-out crackdown on Hong Kong’s protesters.

For its part, China insists it is not trying to pick a fight with the US or anyone else. But the war of words right now is far from pretty. Responding recently to US criticism over the spread of the coronavirus, Wang Yi, who some have now dubbed China’s “wolf warrior foreign minister”, hit back strongly at the Trump administration.

There was a “political virus” spreading in Washington, insisted Yi, one that was pushing the two countries “to the brink of a new Cold War”.

Such tough talking is sure to focus the minds of those in the West formulating a diplomatic response to the Hong Kong crisis, just as the presence of some 10,000 troops from China’s People’s Liberation Army garrisoned on the city’s outskirts will do the same for its citizens.

Only last week, its commander said they stood ready to “safeguard” Chinese sovereignty and support the national security laws.

As Bonnie Glaser, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, summed up the standoff in Foreign Policy magazine: “I don’t think there’s any real happy ending … but there are worst cases and there are less-than-worst cases.”

For now some seven million Hong Kong citizens can only watch and wait nervously as their city is caught in this global geopolitical crossfire. The standoff over the city’s status and future will undoubtedly serve as a test for whether China will continue to honour its international pledges.

It was back in 2017 that China made clear its goal of being at least on equal terms economically with the US, with a view to overtaking it in the future. Many saw it as a pivotal turning point in terms of the country’s domestic and international policies.

Curiously enough, it was that same year that Wolf Warrior 2 became a blockbuster movie success in the country. Since then, Beijing’s wolf warrior diplomacy has certainly made its mark. Hong Kong is now set to be another major litmus test of just how far China is prepared to go in pushing it.