Subtitle: How a Chinese sci-fi blockbuster challenged Hollywood's monopoly on imagining the future
By Afra Wang
(Note: This article was originally written in Chinese and published on the Financial Times Chinese website on February 15, 2019. Here is the original page.)
On February 11th, 2019, a sold-out theater in the San Francisco Bay Area buzzed with anticipation. The screening of The Wandering Earth had been added at the last minute, tickets vanishing within hours. Those unlucky enough to arrive without reservations found themselves squeezed into the theater's most awkward corners. When the credits rolled two hours later, many young Chinese faces in the audience—illuminated by the screen's dying light—remained in their seats, reluctant to leave. I was among them.
Both in China and abroad, this film has become a phenomenon. Yet the praise and criticism it has generated have transformed into something more complex: a litmus test for nationalism, a battleground where film criticism becomes ideological warfare. On Chinese social media, hardcore sci-fi fans awarding five stars clash with critics giving one star out of disgust for "Wolf Warrior"-style nationalism, their conflict casting an unsettling pall over discourse. What is it about this film that inspires such passionate responses?
Though The Wandering Earth tells a story set in 2075, its elements resonate deeply with contemporary Chinese audiences. The film shrewdly maximizes viewer identification by grounding its futuristic society in familiar family structures, leaving an unmistakably Chinese imprint on its vision of tomorrow.
Consider the moment when the protagonist Liu Peiqiang, before sacrificing himself to ignite Jupiter, places a family photograph on his spacecraft's control panel. The image—father, mother, child—represents the archetypal Chinese nuclear family, shaped by decades of the one-child policy. It's a structure that most Chinese viewers recognize intimately, a visual shorthand for modern Chinese domesticity from the late 20th through early 21st centuries.
Meanwhile, the storyline of Liu Qi's sister, Han Duoduo, carries darker undertones. Her introduction as an abandoned infant echoes narratives familiar to many Chinese: the discarded second daughter, the adopted girl whose very existence depends on luck rather than right. In a society where female infants were often abandoned, Duoduo's presence serves as both individual character and collective symbol—a reminder of the countless "second daughters" whose survival was never guaranteed.
Perhaps most provocatively, the film presents Liu Qi as a "left-behind child" on a cosmic scale. When Liu Peiqiang departs for the space station, leaving four-year-old Liu Qi in his grandfather's care, he creates a distance measured not in kilometers but in the void between Earth and orbit. Liu Qi's resulting resentment toward his father—whom he blames for his mother's death—and his rebellious behavior throughout the film echo the psychological patterns documented among China's millions of left-behind children, those raised by grandparents while parents work in distant cities.
This parallel may seem like overinterpretation, yet it reflects a broader truth about contemporary China. The film's emotional core isn't culturally Chinese in any traditional sense—it's pointedly modern Chinese, shaped by the massive social disruptions of urbanization and economic transformation.
These are families fractured by what feels like the distance between Earth and space station, torn apart by duty and economic necessity. The creators may not have consciously designed Liu Qi as a symbol of China's left-behind children, but this intuitive storytelling suggests how deeply these social realities have penetrated the collective imagination.
Aesthetically, director Guo Fan and original author Liu Cixin chose a distinctly Soviet-inspired industrial sublime: towering infrastructure projects, massive vehicles, enormous burning engines, endless conveyor systems transporting ore and materials. Both creators' backgrounds inform this choice. Guo Fan grew up in Jining, an industrial city in Shandong province, while Liu Cixin was born in Yangquan, Shanxi—a city built on coal mining—and spent his most creatively fertile years surrounded by the coal industry's infrastructure.
The film features colossal infrastructure
Anyone who has witnessed a coal mining operation will recognize the uncanny resemblance to The Wandering Earth's mise-en-scène: the labyrinthine underground passages mirror the film's subterranean cities; the ore transport sequences directly echo coal washing and waste disposal processes; the coal truck drivers are real-world Han Ziangs, piloting dust-covered black vehicles across the country; the militaristic management of miners parallels the film's United Earth Government's regimented control of its population. Safety slogans proliferate everywhere, and even the elevators ascending to ground level emit the same thunderous mechanical groans.
The Wandering Earth depicts an extraordinarily realistic contemporary China—despite its futuristic setting.
The Wandering Earth depicts an extraordinarily realistic contemporary China—despite its futuristic setting. Beyond its aesthetic homage to North China's heavy industry and mining sectors, the film's scenarios resonate with recent collective memory: crowds desperately pushing into underground cities evoke the hundreds of thousands stranded at train stations during the 2008 Guangzhou snowstorms, waiting for Spring Festival trains home; the rescue teams' saturated relief efforts and collapsing buildings recall the Wenchuan earthquake, with some viewers noting that the international rescue sequence at the Sulawesi engine follows the actual order in which foreign aid arrived after the earthquake.
In Liu Cixin's original novella, humanity's journey to Jupiter's vicinity spans four centuries. Liu deliberately portrayed how this prolonged ordeal would fundamentally transform human moral and value systems. Faced with perpetual catastrophe, humanity develops entirely new survival ethics: death becomes casual, human connections grow tenuous. The narrator's voice remains flat and brutal throughout—describing, for instance, his mother's death in underground lava flows with the same emotional register used for routine observations. He and his Japanese wife marry in what would seem, by contemporary standards, a bizarrely random fashion: meeting during a courage-testing competition, they reach the finish line and immediately register their marriage without a word.
This moral transformation illustrates Liu Cixin's observation that humanity lacks any philosophical preparation for how apocalyptic scenarios might reshape ethical systems. In the original work, this moral collapse feels both inevitable and, paradoxically, more profound than the film's treatment.