MovieChat Forums > Lord of War (2005) Discussion > Why not Chinese suppliers for Yuri's mer...

Why not Chinese suppliers for Yuri's merchandise?

posted 14 years ago by Mazryonh
5 replies | jump to latest

The movie mainly focuses on Yuri getting his merchandise from unsecured Soviet arms caches, but some otherwise legal and state-supported factories do trading on the sly. One of them happens to be Norinco of China. Here are some very interesting articles detailing how some Chinese nationals attempted to sell everything from automatic weaponry to anti-aircraft missile launchers to tanks to what they thought were the heads of a Private Military Company (actually American federal agents on a sting operation):

http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/pressroom/pr2005/151.html

http://bigpeace.com/bhamer/2010/10/20/exclusive-an-inside-look-at-operation-smoking-dragon/

http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/tobacco/articles/entry/762/

I bet that the Chinese have done this before, and that this is only the most recent break into similar operations. Were the Chinese just not in this kind of business much back in the 1980s, which is the time period of this film?

[–] colby-badhwar 14 years ago

The Chinese sell lots of arms too. They have tons of low quality, knock of Soviet junk. Most of it is sold to Africa.

[–] Mazryonh 14 years ago

That makes it strange as to why the movie didn't show Chinese suppliers with Norinco-type weaponry.

[–] colby-badhwar 14 years ago

Because Yuri was from Ukraine and thus he had access to Soviet stocks. Why spend more money hiring Asian guys and renting Chinese equipment to put in the movie?

[–] Kawada_Kira 14 years ago

The movie didn't show everything that Yuri did. A lot of stuff was just hinted at or mentioned in passing. I would assume that he did get weapons from China.

Sig under construction

[–] rmiikku 12 years ago

China just started to open on the 80s, it would probably be very hard to do business with them at that time.