Professor Leigh Jenco shares her insights about the recent film screening and panel discussion of The Wandering Earth 2 at the British Film Institute

Jenco, Leigh K.

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LSE Research Online

What can a science fiction blockbusterteach us about China’s worldview?Professor Leigh Jenco shares her insights about the recent film screening and panel discussion ofThe Wandering Earth 2 at the British Film Institute.In 2019, before the Covid pandemic confined us all to our living rooms, director FrantGwo released a film that considered a cosmically spectacular solution to shared globalproblems: rather than wait around and let our world collapse, why not shoot the wholeplanet into a different solar system? The Wandering Earth became a global blockbuster,whose grand scope and prolific use of CGI have earned it the title of “China’s Marvelmovie.” More importantly, as the work of LSE academic William A. Callahan has argued,the film introduced Western audiences to a distinctively Chinese perspective on globalproblems—one that favours scientific solutions delivered by fiat, rather than throughpolitical debate. Now more than ever, as China becomes increasingly resistant tooutsider scrutiny, sci-fi offers a window into how China might see itself solving theworld’s problems.A recent screening and panel discussion at the British Film Institute, funded by theBritish Academy, took up this question of how science fiction films might provide anunlikely source of insight into the Chinese worldview. Experts on Chinese sci-fi—including bestselling Chinese science fiction authors Stanley Chan (Chen Qiufan) andXueting Ni; Callahan; Mia Chen Ma (Strathclyde), Hui Man Chan (UK-China Film Collab)and me (a political theorist from LSE)—focused on the blockbuster film The WanderingEarth 2. Unlike its predecessor, this prequel was primarily directed at Chinese audiencesand is not widely available to view outside of China. The film focuses on the political andpersonal conflicts that arise as humanity tries to figure out a way to save itself from theimminent explosion of the Sun. Is the answer to human extinction the Digital Life Project,which would secure an eternal, albeit purely digital, existence to human consciousness?Or is it the Moving Mountain Project, which would move the whole Earth into anothersolar system with the help of humongous nuclear fusion engines?The panel was a mix of Western and Chinese specialists, and at times we discoveredPage 1 of 3Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 16/05/2024ourselves focusing on different things. The Chinese speakers caught all the jokes aboutShanghai real estate, and the Americans (including me) found the depiction of flat-footedAmerican refusal to do the obvious right thing more hilarious than offensive. We allagreed that the omission of women’s perspectives in the film was rather graceless. Butsome of the messaging was more subtle. The film does more than simply substitute“China” for “America” as a saviour for the world’s troubles. The astonishing scope andtimescale of the Moving Mountain Project—moving a whole planet into another solarsystem over a period of 2500 years—suggests a distinctive commitment to home andplace, and a willingness to consider solutions to political problems that, far from beingquick fixes, might take a thousand generations to work. It is probably no accident that2500 years is about the same amount of time that has lapsed since the rise of Confucius.But how Chinese is all this, really? As the panellists pointed out, having America savethe day occurs so frequently in Hollywood sci-fi films it has become a defining feature ofthe genre (and of course, has been much-parodied in films such as Team America:World Police). Much of the tension in the story is driven by commitments to family andcommunity which would be deeply felt by Chinese audiences (but also surely by mostWestern ones too!). These do introduce ethical and emotional complexity beyond thesimple action formulas that drove the original film. The key antagonist Tu Hengyu(whose name in Chinese literally means “scheming for an eternal universe”) scuttlesseveral attempts to Move that Mountain solely to acquire ever more powerfulsupercomputers to bring his dead daughter’s digital consciousness alive again. Many ofthe film’s most exciting action sequences are centred on the violent attempts by politicalprotestors to sabotage the Moving Mountain Project, suggesting the high stakes ofglobal disagreement about shared problems.But these tensions ultimately dissolve against the film’s insistence that a single rightanswer to the world’s shared problems not only exists but is already known to those ofhigher virtue. And this may be the most “Chinese” thing about this film: the idea thatvirtuous leaders, chief among them the Chinese ambassador to the United EarthGovernment, Zhou Zhezhi, could go about saving the world if only people (especiallythose loud-mouthed Americans) would shut up and listen. Again and again, the film’smessage is that humankind will be saved by its unity—not in the sense of politicalsolidarity or shared effort for a common cause, but acceptance of a self-evident masterplan to solve all human problems. In that sense the prequel to The Wandering EarthPage 2 of 3Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 16/05/2024continues the work of its predecessor, insisting that virtuous leadership offers a magicalcharisma to light the way for all humanity. Those of us looking for more contestation inour political solutions will have to look elsewhere—but to be fair, this likely won’t befound in the average Hollywood science-fiction blockbuster either!Page 3 of 3Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 16/05/2024

What can a science fiction blockbuster teach us about China's worldview?

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/123469/1/government_2024-4-22--what-can-a-science-fiction-blockbuster-teach-us-about-chinas-worldview.pdf

What can a science fiction blockbuster teach us about China's worldview?

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