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
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.
In fact, The Wandering Earth emphasises global collective actions and international cooperation. Rescue squads from all over the world scramble to get the thrusters up and running. A Russian cosmonaut sacrifices his life to help his Chinese colleague. At the last minute, before the collision of Earth and Jupiter, relief team members speaking different languages give up their last opportunity for a reunion with loved ones to make a collaborative effort to save the planet.
In China, it is difficult for individualism to take root, partly because society has a long history of collectivism, and that’s why the movie’s values may be more acceptable to a Chinese audience than American viewers, who habitually look for an individual hero to root for.
Even in the obstacle-stricken process of filmmaking, director Frant Gwo relied heavily on collectivism: there were over 7,000 crew members involved. Also, when a much-hyped film adaptation of another famously acclaimed Liu novel, The Three-Body Problem, languished due to post-production and budget problems, commentators concluded that China’s movie production standards could not measure up to the epic scale of Liu’s books. However, in the making of The Wandering Earth, the producer of The Three-Body Problem truthfully shared with his colleagues the lessons he had learned.
Needless to say, the film also gives us a taste of the other, more horrifying side of collectivism, like the eradication of half of the global population, using a lucky draw to decide who can live in the underground shelter cities. And there is a well-known yet controversial argument in The Three-Body Problem that, if one day humankind has to wander in space for real, it would take just five minutes for them to switch from democracy to authoritarianism due to the obvious “efficiency” of the latter. The theory is that humankind has to survive before having the luxury of dignity or civilisation.
I interviewed Liu in 2015 on my TV programme. When faced with the sort of philosophical dilemmas present in his plausible fantasies, what he articulated reminded me of the Chinese saying, “ju an si wei”, or “be vigilant in peacetime”: “For now, we certainly would prefer a civilised society,” he said. “But when a catastrophe takes place and humankind faces severe circumstances, a collectivist system will definitely help people adapt to it.”
In The Wandering Earth, the nations of the world must make painful sacrifices to ensure the survival of humanity. Photo: Handout
Looking back, the Chinese people endured a century of war and hardship and society has long been haunted by poverty and deprivation, meaning people have never really enjoyed freedom from want. When survival outweighs everything else, naturally, people are more susceptible to the doctrine of the ends justifying the means.
I am in no position to judge, nor can I simplify this on moral or ethical grounds, but through The Wandering Earth, international audiences for the first time have an accessible window to learn more about prevailing Chinese values when warding off disaster. After all, there couldn’t be a better metaphor for a now-divided world uniting to confront climate change or any other real catastrophe. In that regard, I would call it the first successful shot in China's own box office space race.
Audrey Jiajia Li is a broadcast journalist and non-fiction writer
