Audrey Jiajia Li

Opinion | China’s blockbuster The Wandering Earth has a message: collective action tops individual freedom in times of crisis

Audrey Jiajia Li says that, unlike in hit US films, Chinese cinema’s latest sci-fi movie lacks individual heroes, and the focus on group effort to resolve crises reflects the country’s response to a century of hardship

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Audrey Jiajia Li

Published: 1:00am, 16 Feb 2019Updated: 4:52am, 16 Feb 2019

I didn’t rush to the cinema when The Wandering Earth, hailed as China’s first big-budget science fiction thriller, premiered during the Lunar New Year holiday. As it stars actor Wu Jing, I had seen quite a few comments putting it in the same category as the nationalistic The Wolf Warrior, in which Wu played a superhero who violently battled Western villains.

When I finally watched the film during the second weekend in February, it was already dominating Chinese social media, its daily gross sales had been climbing each day for almost a week and many believed it could eventually surpass Wolf Warrior 2’s stunning US$854 million record. Interestingly, compared with Wolf Warrior, The Wandering Earth is brilliantly patriotic but nowhere near as xenophobic and chauvinistic.

Adapted from sci-fi author (and China’s first Hugo award winner) Liu Cixin’s short story, The Wandering Earth lays out a futuristic crisis in which the sun is about to expand into a red giant and devour the Earth, and the world’s governments must unite to strap thrusters onto the planet, ejecting it out into the universe in search of a new home. The film then portrays how a group of intrepid astronauts, soldiers and scientists bravely avert a collision with Jupiter and save the world from annihilation.

The freshest part of the film is that it provides a revealing illustration of the differences between Chinese and American values.

In the Hollywood blockbuster Interstellar, for example, the solution to apocalypse is to abandon the Earth and search for a new planet to settle on. The Wandering Earth, on the other hand, reflects the Chinese people’s attachment to their native land – taking the planet with them on the run – which echoes the Lunar New Year time frame in which the movie was released. Each year, during the Spring Festival, hundreds of millions of Chinese migrant workers travel back to their hometowns, no matter how far away, for a family reunion – this is believed to be the largest human migration on the planet.

Also, for many years, Hollywood blockbusters have been films about invincible superheroes, with a protagonist who possesses a god-like aura, while his (or, as in Wonder Woman, her) adversaries are evil and stupid. In The Wandering Earth, there is no such individual, so it’s easy to sense that the director values the collective rescue project and the will of the group over any single character.