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Cinematic Im/mobilities in the Planetary Now

Midway towards Planetarity: (Im)mobility in The Wandering Earth (English version)

Regina Kanyu Wang

Résumé

The article examines the Chinese science fiction blockbuster The Wandering Earth by looking at three levels of (im)mobility: from the planet’s surface to the subsurface, above the surface, and the planet itself. It argues that mobility and immobility in the film always go hand in hand, and that the mobility of one group/stage/level is always accompanied by the immobility of another. While the film presents cosmopolitanism across national boundaries and includes the planet itself in the migration of humankind, it does not really take a full planetary turn, but rather stops midway. This article focuses on different forms of mobility of living organisms, resources, and energy at different levels, pointing out the film’s aestheticisation of transportation and technology-fetishism and emphasising the neglected immobility of marginalised groups, other species, and even the planet itself.

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Notes de la rédaction

The article has been translated by the author.

Notes de l’auteur

This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 852190). The author wants to give special thanks to the CoFUTURES team members for the initial discussion of ideas, to the editors of the special issue, and the reviewers for their suggestions for revisions.

Texte intégral

1The Wandering Earth, the dark horse of the 2019 Chinese New Year films, gathered a cumulative box office of more than 4.6 billion RMB in 90 days during its screening in mainland Chinese theatres from Feb 5 to May 6. It reached second place in the box office ranking in Chinese film history, though the record was broken in July of the same year by the animation film Ne Zha. The Wandering Earth was directed by Frant Gwo and adapted from Liu Cixin’s short story of the same title. Like many other science fiction blockbusters, The Wandering Earth begins with a catastrophe: the sun is about to explode in a helium flash, thus, the solar system will no longer be inhabitable, and humankind faces its greatest crisis yet. They have to leave their home planet where they have lived for thousands of years and travel to an alien system for a new settlement. Unlike other similar works, however, the humans in this film do not choose to leave Earth in a spaceship but decide to take the whole planet with them. While traditional mobility studies tend to focus on the mobility of individuals or communities in the social and geographical sense, The Wandering Earth is fundamentally about the moving of earth out of its fixed position in the solar system, thus expanding the idea of (im)mobility to the migration of the planet, understanding its path, and rethinking the meaning of mobility itself.

2By analysing the three levels of mobility in The Wandering Earth, from the surface to the subsurface, above the surface, and the planet itself, this paper relies on the premise that mobility and immobility always go hand in hand, and that the mobility of one group/stage/level is always accompanied by the immobility of another group/stage/level. What leads to this distinction is the separation between ‘us’ and ‘others’, whether between humans and other humans, humans and other species, or humans and the planet. While the film takes a cosmopolitan perspective across national boundaries and on the planet, now subject to migration, it does not really take a full planetary turn but stops midway. This article focuses on the different forms of mobility of living organisms, resources, and energy levels, points out the “the aestheticisation of transportation and technology-fetishism”, and emphasises the neglected immobility of marginalised groups, other species, and even the planet itself.

From Cosmopolitanism to Planetarity

3The term cosmopolitanism can be understood from a variety of perspectives, but most interpretations accept a common premise: that all human beings can or should belong to the same community and collective. Although different paths lead to different kinds of cosmopolitanism, whether it is the moral community of Kant or the capitalist world economy of Marx and Engels, tianxia advocated by Confucianism since ancient China, or the “community of a shared future for mankind” proposed by Xi Jinping, the only members of the cosmopolitan community are human beings. Yet an anthropocentric version of cosmopolitanism is clearly not enough to face the present planetary crises and challenges. Indeed, the planetary turn has to be put on the agenda. In this section, I will discuss cosmopolitan cinema, critique the inadequacy of cosmopolitan thinking, and then introduce planetarity and Thomas Nail’s “theory of the Earth” to broaden the meaning of mobility and provide the theoretical foundation for the analysis that follows.

  • 1 Maria Rovisco, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Cinema: Understanding the Connection Between Borders, Mobili (...)

4Maria Rovisco proposes the concept of “cosmopolitan cinema”, which is both a “mode of production” and a “cross-cultural aesthetic practice.” It can stimulate specific audience responses and “structures of feeling”, such as “care, compassion and empathy” towards “others,” and has the ability to “generate serious public dialogue.”1 The Wandering Earth certainly fits this definition. First of all, in terms of cast, production, and distribution, it was produced as a cosmopolitan film from the very beginning: its creators and actors came from multiple regions and countries from all over the world. Weta Workshop from New Zealand was invited to join the production, and the film was screened in cinemas in various countries and then streamed on Netflix globally. From production to release, the film crossed national boundaries, seeking cooperation and resonance around the world, using cosmopolitanism as a consistent “mode of production.” Secondly, in terms of the content of the film, its “cross-cultural aesthetic practice” is also obvious: the opening series of news clips is broadcast in English, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and other languages, one after another, reporting natural disasters in different parts of the world, leading the audience to cross borders quickly through a montage of frontiers of catastrophe in different countries and cities, thus evoking the audience’s concerns about distant disasters before finally revealing the crisis that the whole world is facing: the accelerated expansion of the sun, which will destroy the entire solar system in 300 years. In the face of this crisis, all countries around the world unite to form a United Earth Government (UEG) and implement the Wandering Earth Project, committed to joining forces to push the earth away from the solar system and look for a new home in outer space.

  • 2 Rovisco, “Cosmopolitan Cinema”, p. 149.
  • 3 Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 1-1 (...)
  • 4 Shuo Fang et al. 朔方 , Liulangdiqiu dianying zhizuo shouji 《流浪地球》电影制作手记 [The Making of The Wanderin (...)

5Rovisco points out that cosmopolitan cinema has the function of stimulating public dialogue and giving voice to ‘others’ from the margins.2 However, a discussion of what is ‘us’ and what is ‘others,’ what is ‘centre’ and what is ‘periphery,’ deserves our careful consideration. Timothy Brennan argues that Kantian cosmopolitanism is nothing more than a universalism that exists to hide the particularism of, for instance, American cultural colonisation and cultural hegemony.3 When Hollywood distributes a large number of films across the world, American culture is exported and implanted in the consciousness and viewing habits of global audiences. Even though these Hollywood blockbusters rely on international investments and are set around the world, the core values are still largely American (e.g., focusing on the individual and free market ideologies). Frant Gwo, the director of The Wandering Earth, visited the US in 2014 for an exchange program and asked his American colleagues if they had watched any Chinese films, and the answer he received was “no” because they never watch non-English films that require subtitles.4 Such arrogance compelled Gwo to make Chinese films that can succeed internationally. Gwo’s declaration undoubtedly challenges the American-centred film industry and its cultural hegemony. A challenge from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’, the film and its content transcend the boundaries between ethnic groups within humanity and challenge traditional centre-periphery narratives.

  • 5 Tingyang Zhao, “’All-under-Heaven’ (Tianxia 天下): Between Idealism and Realism”, Journal of Global E (...)
  • 6 Weihua He, “The Wandering Earth and China’s Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism”, Compar (...)

6The cosmopolitanism presented in The Wandering Earth resembles the concept of tianxia, the term that is closest to cosmopolitanism in the Chinese tradition. Tingyang Zhao points out that tianxia is an ideal shared world that can be realised, resolving political conflicts by turning enemies into friends, and is based on three constitutional concepts, one of which is the “internalization of the world,” building a world in which all nations, religions, and civilisations act as internal allies, thus eliminating external dissent.5 According to Weihua He, The Wandering Earth follows the concept of tianxia and presents the concept and image of cosmopolitan China in a new era. The central position of China in the UEG and the leadership of the Chinese rescue team during the whole crisis certainly implies a Sino-centrism. However, the concept of tianxia does not seek to impose a universal set of values on everyone; rather, it promotes the idea of a global community that embraces diversity and differences while maintaining harmony. This Chinese cosmopolitanism is responsibility-oriented and, thus, very different from the rights-oriented cosmopolitanism of the Western tradition.6

7The film unites all nations, religions, and civilisations as an internal world through the biggest crisis in the history of human civilisation – the solar helium flash – and places characters of different cultures, colours, and nationalities in the same shot to show that all peoples are united to implement the Wandering Earth Project. This narrative intentionally eliminates ‘others’ in the sense of marginalised nations and structural forms of racism to unite all of humanity into a collective ‘us.’ In this sense, the distinction between ‘others’ and ‘us’ no longer exists in the film. It transcends the value and vision of cosmopolitan cinema. Instead of giving a voice to ‘others’ from the periphery, the film takes an important step towards imagining a planetary human community united by the process of ‘our’ (i.e., planetary) migration.

8Nonetheless, the planetary turn in the film is not complete but is arrested midway and faces many issues. Before scrutinising the film, I will examine the concept of planetarity or planetarism itself. Stefan Pedersen, a political scientist, points out that:

  • 7 Stefan Pedersen, “Planetarism: A Paradigmatic Alternative to Internationalism”, Globalizations, vol (...)

Planetarism is conceived as a concept no longer rooted in the nation-state that indicates a future world order where the key political subject no longer is ‘the people’ but instead what I here conceptualise as ‘the planetarists’, or those individuals who prioritise perpetuating human civilisation through finding a symbiotic pathway ahead where the wellbeing of individual human beings and life on Earth in general are seen as inextricable factors.7

  • 8 Pedersen, “Planetarism”, p. 150.

9His definition of planetarism goes beyond the “current centre-right globalism, centre-left cosmopolitanism, and both older and present notions of socialist internationalism.”8 His argument is closer to the ideal state that the UEG in TWE wants to achieve, which is a political vision of a planetary community.

  • 9 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 72
  • 10 Li Guodong李国栋, Sipiwake lun “xingxing” 斯皮瓦克论行星 [Spivak on “Planet”], Houxueheng《后学衡》[Post Study F (...)

10Rethinking the field of comparative literature, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, on the other hand, proposes to replace the “globe” with the “planet” and the “global” with the “planetary.”9 In Li Guodong’s reading, Spivak’s planet "is neither a homogenous identity … nor a superficial multiculturalism, but a transformation of the other into a heterogeneous ’wholly other’” (“既不是同质化的身份想象,也不是肤浅的多元文化论,而是将他者转换为一种异质性的‘绝对他者’”). Thus, the planet “becomes a way of imagining heterogeneous [alterity] . . . ‘Us’ is no longer the minority ‘us’ with subjective power, but the ‘us’ that encompasses all the others, a whole ‘us’, such that the ‘us’ is the ‘planetary subject.’” (“变成了想象他者异质性形象的方式。在这种想象中,‘我们’不再是具有主体权力的少数的‘我们’,而是囊括了所有他者在内的、全体的‘我们’,这样的‘我们’才是‘行星主体’”).10 Spivak’s planetarity reminds us to rethink the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world, to include not only human ‘others’ but also other species and even the planet itself into the ‘us’.

11These debates about planetarity can be fruitfully combined with the idea of mobility. Traditional mobility studies focuses on the mobile human subject, while mobility studies in the fields of biology and ecocriticism extend this subject to other species. If we want to extend it further to the planet, we must redefine mobility. From the perspective of classical physics, movement is relative. Traditional mobility studies consider the earth as a stationary system that rotates on its own axis to examine the movement of other subjects on the planet. From the perspective of astrophysics, the earth undergoes periodic motion as it revolves around the sun. In The Wandering Earth, the planet leaves its orbit around the sun and moves through space, which challenges the prerequisite of a static or stable earth. However, we cannot just simply set the sun as the centre of an alternative coordinate system but should look for new ways in which to study the (im)mobility of the earth.

  • 11 Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth, California, Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 1-14.

12In Theory of the Earth, Thomas Nail proposes to use the earth itself as a perspective for research, focusing on its material continuity achieved through all levels of its movement. He does not regard nature and humanity as separate systems. Instead, the earth is intimately connected with humans and should not be dichotomised. In Nail’s argument, “the most radical import of the Anthropocene is the unpredictable agency and mobility of the earth itself.” Western theories of the earth emerging from the Enlightenment have two major problems: first, they consider the earth as a stagnant and stable object, and second, they consider it as a non-historical entity lacking agency. Thus, he proposes a movement-oriented or “kinetic” Theory of the Earth.11 Following Nail’s path, I will focus not only on the migration of the planet as a whole in cosmic space in The Wandering Earth, but also on those micro-level flows, both material and energetic, that occur between humans, between humans and nonhumans, and between humans and the earth every moment and everywhere.

(Im)mobility from the Surface to the Subsurface

13In The Wandering Earth, all people collectively experience the largest migration in the history of human civilisation – a migration from the surface to the underground. The main moving subject in this process is still human. The mobility of one part of the population is accompanied by the immobility of another, and the migration of humans is accompanied by the end of other species. In this section, I will mainly examine the (im)mobility of living organisms.

14During the implementation of the Wandering Earth Project, the planet’s surface environment deteriorated at an accelerated rate as the earth moved away from the sun. Global temperature plummeted, the sea level rose, and the entire surface of the planet is no longer suitable for human survival. Therefore, the UEG built a supporting Underground City (UC) under each Earth Engine (EE) and humanity has migrated to the subsurface.

15However, not all humans have access to mobility opportunities. There is limited space in the UCs because they are not able to accommodate the global population. Who lives and who dies during this migration, who gets to move and who does not, all depends on the outcome of a universal lottery. In the news montage at the beginning of the film, there is a piece from “June 30, 2057, -35 degrees, Beijing News (2057年6月30日,-35度,北京新闻).” A narrator describes the number and size of EEs with the headline “‘EEs’ are humanity’s only hope for survival (‘行星发动机’是人类活下去的唯一希望),” while another, less important news item is outlined in small font below: “Heated discussions on how to decide entry eligibility for UCs; some countries fiercely opposing the proposed lottery (地下城进入资格遴选方式激烈讨论中,部分国家激烈反对抽签的提议).” Thus, how to decide the eligibility to migrate to the UCs is causing no small amount of controversy around the globe. We can speculate that there may be countries in this situation that want to use wealth or force to monopolise more tickets for the UCs. In the film, the UEG uses a lottery as the final solution to give people all over the world an equal chance to get tickets to survival. This negative news takes a back seat to “hope,” but the implied death-or-survival issue is critical in this global migration.

16The film portrays the fairness and cruelty of the lottery draft. We hear an authoritative voice-over telling us that “the results of the lottery cannot be transferred, lent or gifted (抽签结果不得转让、出借或赠与),” read the warning in capital letters announcing that “those who have not passed the lottery are strictly prohibited from entering the UC (未通过抽签者,严禁进入地下城),” and see crowds of people flocking to the UC while heavily armed soldiers maintain order at the gate, shouting to the out-of-control crowd, “Stop crowding! (不要挤了!)” If human lives can be abstracted into numbers, then the UEG is indeed saving as many lives as possible, and the lottery has eliminated vested interests in obtaining more tickets through various means, reflecting a cosmopolitanism that transcends national boundaries. But in the name of rationality and justice, a large number of randomly selected innocent lives are sacrificed in the migration process. In order to guarantee the mobility and survival of some, the others are left in a situation of immobility and death, and it is their denied mobility that paves the way to the UCs for other lucky ones.

Figure 1. Heavily armed soldiers maintain order in the crowd. Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth, 2019.

  • 12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, NewYork, Pantheon Books (tran (...)
  • 13 Achille Mbembe (trans. Libby Meintjes), “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, vol. 15, no.1, 2003, p. 11

17Such Malthusian population control is not uncommon in science fiction, whether it is the lottery to determine life and death in The Wandering Earth, the deliberate creation of a rebellion to kill the surplus population in Bong Joon-ho’s movie Snowpiercer (South Korea/Czech Republic, 2013), or the folding of cities to accommodate the overpopulation in Hao Jingfang’s novella “Folding Beijing” (2014). When disasters and resource scarcity occur, such population control is often naturalised, rationalised, and justified with grand excuses that champion ‘the survival of all mankind.’ This type of population management easily reminds us of Foucault’s “biopolitics,” which he describes in The History of Sexuality as not only a “calculated management of life” but also the “power to expose a whole population to death.”12 Sacrifice for apparently grandiose reasons is exactly the purging of mass populations in the name of the survival of a nation, a people, or a class described by Foucault. Achille Mbembe proposes “necropolitics” on the basis of Foucault’s “biopolitics” and states that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”13 By dividing human communities into different subgroups and creating biological divisions, rulers and governments are able to decide over life and death. In Foucault’s and Mbembe’s work, this division is premised on colonial, imperial, and fascist history and their underlying logic of racism, while in The Wandering Earth, this kind of sovereignty is replaced by a more subtle way of division.

18Yet the universal lottery in the film still hides privilege and injustice, as the biological division between humans is measured by ability and health. As an astronaut working on the space station, Liu Peiqiang has a place for a family member who can take his child to the UC. This obviously violates the guideline that “the results of the lottery cannot be transferred, lent or gifted.” Under the pretense of fairness and justice, the sovereign political subject, the UEG, has the right to decide not only who lives and who dies, but also whose offspring is given the opportunity to live. On the other hand, Liu Peiqiang decides that his seriously ill wife will die soon and chooses to sacrifice her so that his father-in-law Han Ziang can take his son Liu Qi to the UC. Even though the film renders this as a choice of last resort, we can still detect a tendency towards ablism here. Able-bodied, skilled people have a higher priority for survival in the selection process, similar to contemporary real-life migration politics, which affords able-bodied and skilled people more opportunities for mobility and survival while neglecting the sick, the weak, and those without socially ‘useful’ skills. At first glance, the universal lottery in The Wandering Earth transcends racism, but on further reflection, it still employs other, more subtle, necropolitical strategies of selection. Those who survive continue to live with the ghosts of the dead. A perfect example is the orphan who is passed to Han Ziang by countless hands in the river. She is eventually given a chance to survive, but also inherits the name of Han’s deceased daughter aka Liu’s deceased wife, Han Duoduo. She is destined to live bearing another Han Duoduo’s death. Even though the ‘others’ are no longer distinguished by nationality, they are still singled out by other means and condemned to death in the process of planetary migration.

19If we look further, this massive migration contains only a percentage of humans as subjects, and no other species. The only non-human animals that appear in the film are the underground native earthworms, which appear as food on kebabs and in dried form in various flavors; there are only a few traces of plants, the baby leaves on Liu Qi’s windowsill and the few trees on the streets of the UC, which appear as decorative landscapes. This contradicts Chakrabarty’s vision of planetary “habitability.” He notes that

  • 14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 46, no.1, p (...)

[t]he key term in planetary thinking that one could contrapose to the idea of sustainability in global thought is habitability. Habitability does not reference humans. Its central concern is life, complex, multicellular life, in general, and what makes that, not humans alone, sustainable.14

20When humans move underground, they do not consider the survival of complex life forms, and the construction of a new underground home is based solely on the survival of human life. Humans can bring the Spring Festival, firecrackers, and lion dances into the UC, which symbolise their spirit and culture, but they cannot bring non-human species for future survival. Humans do not to move farm animals underground, as they consume and use the creatures that already live underground and those that can be easily transplanted to the subsurface. Other organisms on the surface are excluded from the process of moving underground and die on the frozen surface of the earth.

21In summary, in The Wandering Earth, the mobility of some humans from the surface to the subsurface is contingent on the immobility of others. With the grand proposition of the overall interests of the human species, the film seems to dissolve the centre-periphery opposition, to eliminate the distinction between ‘others’ and ‘us,’ and to emphasise cosmopolitanism, but it ignores the ‘others’ that are not able to leave the earth’s surface. When all the people of the world unite as one, the weak, the sick, the physically and mentally challenged, and the incapacitated are left behind and sacrificed in the name of the greater good, i.e., the survival of the species. This also applies to the nonhuman ‘others’ who are excluded from the migration plans from the very beginning. While the film seeks to portray an egalitarian form of cosmopolitanism, it does not really arrive at a genuinely inclusive planetarity.

(Im)mobility above Surface

22Although the whole of humanity migrates to the UC in The Wandering Earth, resource acquisition and transportation still have to go through the surface. The UC is located under the EE, and there are no inter-city tunnels beneath the surface, so moving directly underground is not possible and moving between cities on the surface is also extremely difficult. This section will focus on the flow of resources on the surface and the aestheticisation of transportation and technology-fetishism presented in the process, as well as on how the human body and technology itself are turned into resources.

  • 15 Shuo Fang, Liulangdiqiu, p. 275.

23The precondition for mobility on the surface is returning to the surface from the subsurface, and it is difficult for ordinary people to do so once they enter the UC. The protagonists Liu Qi and Han Duoduo break a series of prohibitions in order to return to the surface: creating a power outage, stealing Han Ziang’s vehicle pass, illegally trading thermal suits, forging fake IDs, and creating small explosions. The whole process emphasises the difficulty of getting to the surface. The surface is usually only visited by relevant technicians, staff, and soldiers,15 and ordinary people live their entire lives in the same UC with no opportunity to reverse the migration from the subsurface back to the surface. Even relevant staff have to queue through heavy security checks and identity controls before going to the surface. Thus, the successful global migration from the surface to the subsurface in only a one-time, one-way flow. If people want to reach the surface again, they need to apply for special jobs, otherwise they may never see the outside world.

24Identity checks can be regarded as deliberate impediments set up to prevent people from moving from the subsurface to the surface, but the five kilometres from the UC to the surface constitute a real physical obstacle. The elevator is a necessity to overcome this layer of thick and solid geological structure. In the movie, the protagonists get into the elevator and travel up all the way. After the elevator reaches the surface, the sunlight reflected by the snow shines through the glass and, along with the protagonists, we see the frozen city of Beijing with its skyscrapers and overpasses, feeling the shock of the openness of the surface, the sunlight, and the snow. This shock is then escalated by the wind and snow that comes with the opening of the elevator doors. The interior walls of the elevator are frosted with a layer of ice, the red background of the Fu (福, fortune) character symbolising the Spring Festival is frosted and rolled up, and the thermometer reading quickly drops to -84°C. All of this emphasises the harsh and dangerous environment above ground.

25After passing through all these obstacles and returning to the ground, the protagonists are facing more difficulties regarding their mobility. In the snow, ice, and extreme cold, human beings can only use vehicles like high-speed transporters to move around. The transporters are valuable public property of the UEG. Private ownership or renting is not possible. If private use is discovered, the perpetrator may face detention. Liu Qi commands Han Duoduo to steal the vehicle pass of their grandfather Han Ziang to obtain this key means of transportation. However, even after successfully acquiring the vehicle pass and smuggling it to the surface, ordinary people cannot easily drive the transporter and require five years of training to operate it on the road. And except for these vehicles made to carry out specific tasks, the surface does not have any public transportation for ordinary citizens to travel between different UCs.

  • 16 Nathaniel Isaacson, “Trains, Technology and National Affect in Socialist-Realist Cinema 1949-1965”, (...)

26The film’s portrayal of elevators and transporters embodies what Han Song calls “the aestheticization of transportation” and, by extension, what Nathaniel Isaacson refers to as “the aestheticization of development,” which is “an aesthetics that soon bleeds over into the glorification of surrendering one’s body to the machine.”16 The film uses numerous scenes to portray these vehicles themselves, notably the elevators rising from the subsurface to the surface and the transporters moving in snow and ice. The camera emphasises the grandeur and solidity of the vehicles, foregrounding their reliability in extreme cold weather conditions. This heavy industrial aesthetic tendency fetishises technology. On the one hand, the development of these technologies to navigate the harsh environment reflects the greatness of humanity or human exceptionalism; on the other hand, the vehicles provide temporary shelter for humans to move through the snow and ice on the surface in order to achieve an even grander technological project, namely to geo-engineer the movement of the earth. This continues the attitude towards nature of China’s Mao era, namely that humans can always conquer nature with perseverance, and is further reflected in the fact that in order to overcome nature, humans not only use technology but appreciate it and even actively surrender to it.

27This is especially evident when the earth is captured by Jupiter’s gravity, many EEs fail, and the UEG initiates an emergency rescue plan. In order to transport the Lighter Core to repair the EEs, the UEG deploys all the resources on the surface to support the mission and, of course, the transporters are among those requisitioned. However, the transporters themselves cannot move, and the vehicles can only move on the surface with the help of human drivers. The human body thus becomes a resource as well, a replaceable machine part. The CN171-11 rescue team led by Captain Wang Lei has to requisition Han Ziang after the death of their original driver, making him and the front end of the vehicle that he is driving a new part of the transporter to sustain the mobility of the vehicle and carry out the rescue mission of transporting the Lighter Core. The imminent crisis becomes a justifiable reason for the human body to be transformed into a resource and consumed. As noted earlier, individuals can be sacrificed, but the moving of the earth cannot be stopped.

  • 17 Amir Khan, “Technology Fetishism in The Wandering Earth”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2020, vol. 2 (...)

28The resources enlisted for rescue missions are not just the drivers themselves, but also all on-board personnel. Whether the elderly or teenagers, all the people on board are compelled to join the dangerous rescue mission and become a reserve resource in the mission. In Amir Khan’s analysis, The Wandering Earth juxtaposes the issues of “people first” and “technology first,” allowing us to remeasure the value of people and consider the implications of technology as well as the fetishism of growth and progress inherited from earlier histories of colonisation. He focuses on the scene in which the rescue team ascends a tall building via elevator in frozen Shanghai, arguing that Liu Qi’s insistence on people first and the rescue team’s insistence on the Lighter Core first represent the different value positions of the two parties.17 This mission also posits people and technology as two different resources: the people represented by Han Ziang have the ability to drive the transporter and control the high-speed movement of the vehicles on the surface while the technology represented by the Lighter Core has the ability to restart the EE, which is the key to moving the entire planet. Without the former, the rescue team will not be able to move; without the latter, the earth will not be able to move.

  • 18 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, p. 72.

29The ‘saturation rescue’following the Jupiter crisis in the film is actually a global emergency resource reallocation. The UEG deploys all ground resources to assist the rescue mission, with people, Light Cores, transporters, and aircrafts rapidly moving on the surface. The global strategic map reflects an information system interface and appears several times in the film. Here, the UCs are abstracted as red dots and the rescue routes as red lines. Once again, planetarity retreats into globalism, as Spivak puts it: “In the gridwork of electronic capital, we achieve that abstract ball covered in latitudes and longitudes, cut by virtual lines, once the equator and the tropics and so on, now drawn by the requirements of Geographical Information Systems.”18 Is this rescue intended to take the planet out of its immobility as one of ‘us,’ or is the planetary crisis used as a pretext to promote a global flow of resources pointing into the void?

Figure 2. Strategic map under the information system interface. Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth, 2019.

30In fact, the UEG has long known that this rescue mission would not be successful, and that the all-out rescue only serves to create the illusion that the government is doing something before doomsday arrives. In the process, 1.5 million people around the world are used as resources. They sacrifice everything and leave their homes for the mission, while a significant portion dies during the rescue. At the last minute, the UEG announces that it is abandoning the rescue plan and encourages all rescue team members to go home and stay with their families, a so-called humanitarian concern that seems hypocritical in the face of the earlier lies. It is not only the human bodies on earth that are used as resources in this crisis, but also the astronauts at the space station, except that they are selected as more scarce and precious elite resources. The bodies of these astronauts, along with the 300,000 human fertilised eggs and 100 million seeds of basic crops, DNA profiles of plants and animals, and the digital database of human beings on board the space station, are protected and become the necessary resources for the implementation of Helios Project, a plan B to abandon the earth and build a new home with what is carried on the space station.

31At this point, we can conclude that the claim of wandering with the planet and guarding the home is a lie, and that the UEG has never really considered the planet itself as one of ‘us.’ When the earth is trapped by Jupiter’s gravity and loses its mobility, it can only be abandoned, just like the 1.5 million rescuers and countless transporters that are used as resources. When they lose their mobility for various reasons, they also lose their value as resources and can only be disposed of in situ. This attitude towards resources as disposable and unsustainably squandered reflects the world’s attitude towards fossil fuels today.

32At the end of the film, Liu Peiqiang drives the space station into Jupiter, becoming the key fuse that ignites the planet and completely destroys the resource base for the implementation of the Helios Project; the rescue teams on earth work together to push the pin and eventually help the earth break free from Jupiter’s gravitational pull and continue its voyage into the distance. This ending somewhat redirects the film towards planetarity, as the protagonist team refuses to see the planet as an abstract global information system and instead treats it as a subject, as one of ‘us,’ requiring the earth and its inhabitants to migrate together. In this more planetary context, the majority of the human community, including the national rescue teams, unite to take over from the ruling regime (i.e., the UEG), which abused and finally abandoned its responsibilities. The majority chooses to save the planet from immobility at the expense of a more mobile and elite space station.

Planetary (Im)mobility

  • 19 Liu Cixin 刘慈欣, “Liulang diqiu” 流浪地球 [The Wandering Earth], Liulang diqiu《流浪地球 [The Wandering Earth] (...)

33In this section, I finally analyse the (im)mobility of the planet itself by focusing on a) the macroscopic movement of the earth in cosmic space and b) the microscopic movement of matter on the earth. Following the ideas of Nail’s Theory of the Earth, I will analyze how these two levels of mobility are related and exchanged through energy transformations and reveal the paradoxes behind the narrative of human-driven, geo-engineered earth movement. Beginning with the macroscopic movement of the earth in cosmic space, we may question the decision to wander with the earth instead of building a spaceship to leave it. The author of the original short story and the director of the film provide two very different answers. In the original story, Liu Cixin states, via his characters, that an ecosystem on the scale of a spaceship cannot be maintained for too long, and that “only an ecosystem on the scale of Earth, with such an imposing ecological cycle, can make life prosperous for all generations. (只有像地球这样规模的生态系统,这样气势磅礴的生态循环,才能使生命万代不息。)”19 Thus, as the author writes in the story, wandering with the earth is a pragmatic decision because it maintains the ecosystem and provides the grand aesthetics – the novum – of the SF setting itself.

  • 20 Richard Buckminster Fuller Collection, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Illinois, Southern Ill (...)
  • 21 Sabine Höhler, “‘The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People’: Spaceship Earth as Ecological Scie (...)
  • 22 Hua Li, “Spaceship Earth and Technological Utopianism: Liu Cixin’s Ecological Science Fiction”, Tam (...)

34Moving the earth through space can be seen as the ultimate extension of the classic SF setting of Spaceship Earth. R. Buckminster Fuller first compared the earth to a spaceship in order to evoke the idea of how to pilot it, how to handle it, and how to face such issues as limited resources.20 Based on this, many scholars have debated and developed the notion of Spaceship Earth and also discussed visions of Spaceship Earth in SF works, such as Sabine Höhler21 and Hua Li22. Ultimately, if we realise that all resources on earth are finite and that the space of the earth is also finite, the planet can indeed be seen as a spaceship that sails around the sun in a set orbit and on which humanity has survived for thousands of years. In the film, it has detached from the sun and sails on a new course. In this vein of thinking, the earth is seen as a treasure trove of resources that provides humanity with the necessary conditions to flourish.

  • 23 Shuo Fang, Liulangdiqiu, pp. 36.
  • 24 Andrew Hageman and Regina Kanyu Wang, “Exploring SF Ecocinema: Ideologies of Gender, Infrastructure (...)
  • 25 He, “The Wandering Earth and China’s Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism”, pp. 536-7.

35On the other hand, the film adaptation of The Wandering Earth repeatedly emphasises that the earth is the home of humankind, so we have to take it with us on our way. When discussing the difference between The Wandering Earth as a Chinese SF film and a Hollywood blockbuster made in the West, Gwo stated his belief that although home is a theme that resonates in both China and the West, it is still not the same; in the face of a planetary crisis, Americans may leave the earth behind and escape in a spaceship, while the Chinese, out of their attachment to the homeland, will take the planet with them.23 These two different responses reflect the different ideologies of China and the US, and they are also expressed differently in the film industry of the two countries, such as the often compared pair of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (USA, 2014) and The Wandering Earth. The former has an individual heroic narrative of leaving the earth in search of a new home for humanity, while the latter portrays a collective narrative of wandering together with the earth as home.24 Weihua He points out that the emphasis on home is the ethical core of Chinese cosmopolitanism and that The Wandering Earth is more about defending the home than saving the earth.25 In this case, home and earth may be unified in physical space, but they are not identical in spiritual values as humankind’s attachment to home is accompanied by an exploitation of the earth, ultimately repeating the logic of Spaceship Earth.

36A spacecraft needs a source of energy to navigate, and Earth’s energy comes from the light and heat of the sun. During the Wandering Earth Project, the earth is pushed away from the sun, losing the planet’s primary energy source. So where does the energy to mobilise the earth come from? As one character in the film says: “Burning rocks (烧石头).” EEs and all UCs are powered by “heavy fusion propulsion technology,” which provides energy to move the earth by mining mountains. Heavy fusion is a fictional technology in the film, but it is not difficult to guess that its principle is the aggregation of microscopic particles, where energy is generated from the microscopic level of thermodynamic movement. With the help of this technology, humankind has built a lot of heavy industrial infrastructures in the film. Constantly operating excavators dig through mountains and mine stones that are piled on the carriages of the transporters. Via a dense shipping network, the stones are then transported to the EEs and UCs; they will be fed into the EEs and turned into energy resources through the heavy fusion reaction to provide energy for the EEs and heat for the UCs. Each of the 10,000 Propulsion Engines is 11,000 meters high, providing the earth with a total of 150 trillion tons of thrust, which is the power necessary to drive the planet away.

Figure 3. Expanding scale of giant machinery. Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth, 2019.

  • 26 Isaacson, “Trains”, pp. 64-65.

37In a long take of about 40 seconds, the camera gradually moves away from the protagonists, ascending to high altitude and showing the giant mining machinery in the mountains, the huge engine spout, the surface of the earth dense with Propulsion Engines and their spouting trails, and the planet itself moving away from the sun. The ever-expanding scale of the frame, coupled with the film’s magnificent soundtrack, is undoubtedly intended to show the greatness and majesty of human engineering. This further embodies the film’s technology fetishism with its “aestheticization of development,” which Isaacson sees as an important symbol of national prosperity in the contemporary Chinese context, especially with regard to the consumption of fossil fuels. This aestheticisation of fuel and development extends to the aestheticisation of industrial pollution.26 In a world frozen by snow and ice, industrial infrastructure projects run at full power, with EEs swallowing fuel and spewing flames skyward to propel the earth through the universe. This celebrates the supposed greatness human technology: even if the whole world is in crisis, technology can finally solve the problem, and humanity can always find a way to survive in the midst of despair.

38The plot of mining mountains is reminiscent of the ancient Chinese legend “The Mountain-Mover Yugong”: in front of Yugong’s house there were two mountains, Taihang and Wangwu, which blocked his way out of the house, so he led his children and grandchildren to dig the mountains and remove the rocks every day little by little, and eventually the Emperor of Heaven was touched and removed the mountains for him. This story is used to promote the spirit of perseverance and persistence, and it can be regarded as a spiritual forerunner of the doxa ‘humans can always conquer nature with perseverance’. In the twenty-first-century Chinese SF film, “The Mountain-Mover Yugong” is retold in a techno-positivist story in which humans accomplish the seemingly impossible task of moving the earth by digging up mountains and burning rocks. After the first draft of this article was completed, The Wandering Earth 2, a prequal to The Wandering Earth, was released in January 2023 during the Spring Festival; it directly names the predecessor of the Wandering Earth Project as the “Moving Mountain Project,” further confirming the film’s recognition of this spiritual symbol.

  • 27 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New (...)

39The moving of stones as an energy source is also related to two other levels of flow, namely the thermodynamic movement of microscopic particles due to heavy fusion technology and the macroscopic movement of the earth in cosmic space after being propelled out of its orbit. The Wandering Earth’s most important novum – the element of novelty of the SF genre in the Suvinian definition27 – is the propulsion of the earth through the universe. However, if we look at it from the perspective of Nail’s Theory of the Earth, the earth is always moving, both in its macroscopic rotation and revolution and in its microscopic exchange of matter and energy. From the perspective of a kinetic theory of the earth, there is something fundamentally wrong with treating the planet as a stagnant and stable object. The earth, in the process of being propelled, is seen as a non-historical entity that does not have agency; it can only be moved by the technology invented by humankind.

  • 28 Jessica Imbach, “Chinese Science Fiction in the Anthropocene”, Ecozon@: European Journal of Literat (...)

40It is easy to see the paradox: humans take the earth with them on their cosmic migration in the name of protecting their home, but at the same time they burn the material entity of the earth itself to provide energy for the migration. The planet earth, which plays an important role in the film, becomes itself the fuel to feed humankind’s never-ending desire for mobility and development. This techno-positivism celebrates grand infrastructures and the spirit of “The Mountain-Mover Yugong,” but does not give the earth any agency. As Jessica Imbach puts it, “planetary survival relies here not only on the death of a lot of people, but also on a reimagination of the planet as a purely geological formation – a rock.”28 In The Wandering Earth, humanity takes the earth on a journey, seemingly to defend it, humanity’s home, but in reality, it exploits the planet. Even the material substance of the planet is abstracted as “rocks” and viewed as a pure resource, just like the human body, serving as fuel to drive humanity’s dreams and homeland forward. The agency and subjectivity of the planet is stripped away. The earth is reduced to an oppressed and exploitable ‘other’ that exists only to serve ‘us.’ Therefore, the planetarism in the film is incomplete. The earth itself is not truly recognised as a member of ‘us’ but exists only as a vehicle of transportation and a treasure trove of resources to sustain human existence.

Conclusion

  • 29 Mingwei Song, “Variations on Utopia in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studi (...)

41In this article, I have discussed planetary (im)mobility in The Wandering Earth, focusing on the planet’s surface, its subsurface, and the planet itself. I have examined the movement of living organisms, resources, and energy flows to trace the film’s efforts to reimagine cosmopolitanism in terms of planetarity and its limitations. To conclude my argument, I wish to turn to the metaphors that underlie the notion of the wandering planet. The earth leaves the solar system to escape from the accelerating aging of the sun brought about by the risks and crises of progress and development ideologies and politics. This is reminiscent of the work of another Chinese SF writer, Han Song’s “Rail” trilogy (Subway, High-Speed Railway, and Rail). In this series of novels, the carriages move forward at high speed, never stopping, but at the same time, they are caught in endless risk and alienation. Mingwei Song notes that “[t]he advanced subway system, high-speed rail, and the maglev have all become celebrated symbols of China’s pursuit of non-stop economic development.”29 The high-speed transporters and the earth itself in The Wandering Earth can be seen as metaphors of development, metaphors that refer not only to China but also to the whole world. Humanity chases after the benefits of global economic development while inevitably putting the planet itself at greater risk.

42The earth’s departure from the solar system also means that the planet is cut off from its own familiar environment and moves into the endless unknown. In analysing Han Song’s novel, Hua Li points out that

  • 30 Hua Li, “Machine Ensemble, Mobility, and Immobility in Two Chinese Railway SF Narratives”, Comparat (...)

[t]he train system is disconnected from the outside world and is desperately trying to escape from its imagined enemies in the outside world. […] [T]he advanced system of transportation can make the society alienated from the outside world in a time of globalization, and bring immobility to its people and stagnation to its historical trajectory.30

43The derailment of the earth is also a reflection of the planetary reality we are facing: climate change, population explosion, environmental pollution, species extinction, and other problems are intensifying, yet human beings are unwilling to abandon the logic of capitalist accumulation and its associated social and political way of life. Instead of trying to solve the problems, they keep perpetuating the behaviors that caused the problems in the first place. In the film, this process of the earth’s derailment fragments the planet’s life support systems; all people are trapped and must escape together with the planet. The mobility of the planet itself brings immobility to its inhabitants. All humans and nonhumans, along with the planet itself, are forced to join the community of a shared future for mankind. Midway to planetarity, The Wandering Earth presents a certain critical awareness but still does not completely escape the shackles of an anthropocentric cosmopolitanism. However, analysing the film from the perspective of (im)mobility paves the way towards imagining a genuinely inclusive form of planetary thinking, one that interlaces multidimensional ‘others,’ including humans, nonhumans, and the planet itself, in a common planetary narrative.

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Notes

1 Maria Rovisco, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Cinema: Understanding the Connection Between Borders, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction Film”, Mobilities, 2013, vol. 8, no.1, pp. 148-65.

2 Rovisco, “Cosmopolitan Cinema”, p. 149.

3 Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Harvard University Press, 1997, pp. 1-11.

4 Shuo Fang et al. 朔方 , Liulangdiqiu dianying zhizuo shouji 《流浪地球》电影制作手记 [The Making of The Wandering Earth: A Film Production Handbook], Beijing, Renmin jiaotong chubanshe, 2019, pp. 2-3.

5 Tingyang Zhao, “’All-under-Heaven’ (Tianxia 天下): Between Idealism and Realism”, Journal of Global Ethics, vol. 17, no.1, 2021, pp. 26-41.

6 Weihua He, “The Wandering Earth and China’s Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism”, Comparative Literature Studies, 2020, vol. 57, no.3, pp. 530-40.

7 Stefan Pedersen, “Planetarism: A Paradigmatic Alternative to Internationalism”, Globalizations, vol. 18, no.2, 2021, pp. 149-50.

8 Pedersen, “Planetarism”, p. 150.

9 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 72.

10 Li Guodong李国栋, Sipiwake lun “xingxing” 斯皮瓦克论行星 [Spivak on “Planet”], Houxueheng《后学衡》[Post Study Forever], 2021(02), pp. 211-224.

11 Thomas Nail, Theory of the Earth, California, Stanford University Press, 2021, pp. 1-14.

12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, NewYork, Pantheon Books (trans. Robert Hurley), 1978, pp. 137, 140.

13 Achille Mbembe (trans. Libby Meintjes), “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, vol. 15, no.1, 2003, p. 11.

14 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 46, no.1, p. 20.

15 Shuo Fang, Liulangdiqiu, p. 275.

16 Nathaniel Isaacson, “Trains, Technology and National Affect in Socialist-Realist Cinema 1949-1965”, Comparative Literature & World Literature, 2021, vol. 6, no.1, p. 64.

17 Amir Khan, “Technology Fetishism in The Wandering Earth”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2020, vol. 21, no.1, pp. 28-9.

18 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, p. 72.

19 Liu Cixin 刘慈欣, “Liulang diqiu” 流浪地球 [The Wandering Earth], Liulang diqiu《流浪地球 [The Wandering Earth], Chengdu, Sichuan kexuejishu chubanshe, 2019, p. 84.

20 Richard Buckminster Fuller Collection, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

21 Sabine Höhler, “‘The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People’: Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction”, in Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2014, pp. 99-114.

22 Hua Li, “Spaceship Earth and Technological Utopianism: Liu Cixin’s Ecological Science Fiction”, Tamkang Review, 2017, vol. 47, no.2, pp. 17-32.

23 Shuo Fang, Liulangdiqiu, pp. 36.

24 Andrew Hageman and Regina Kanyu Wang, “Exploring SF Ecocinema: Ideologies of Gender, Infrastructure, and US/China Dynamics in Interstellar and The Wandering Earth”, in Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2, New York, Routledge, 2022, pp. 118-134.

25 He, “The Wandering Earth and China’s Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism”, pp. 536-7.

26 Isaacson, “Trains”, pp. 64-65.

27 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1979.

28 Jessica Imbach, “Chinese Science Fiction in the Anthropocene”, Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2021, vol. 12., no.1, p. 131.

29 Mingwei Song, “Variations on Utopia in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no.1, Mar. 2013, p. 94.

30 Hua Li, “Machine Ensemble, Mobility, and Immobility in Two Chinese Railway SF Narratives”, Comparative Literature & World Literature, 2021, vol. 6, no.1, pp. 120, 122.

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1. Heavily armed soldiers maintain order in the crowd. Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth, 2019.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2170/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 1,2M
Légende Figure 2. Strategic map under the information system interface. Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth, 2019.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2170/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 870k
Légende Figure 3. Expanding scale of giant machinery. Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth, 2019.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2170/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 1,3M
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Référence électronique

Regina Kanyu Wang, « Midway towards Planetarity: (Im)mobility in The Wandering Earth (English version) »Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 17 | 2022, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2022, consulté le 01 novembre 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2170 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.2170

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Auteur

Regina Kanyu Wang

Regina Kanyu Wang is a PhD fellow of the CoFUTURES project at the University of Oslo, an Applied Imagination Fellow of Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, and a Start-of-Voyage Scholar at China Science Fiction Research Center. Her research interest is Chinese science fiction, especially from gender and environmental perspectives. Her academic works are published or forthcoming in Modern Chinese Literature Criticism, Vector, Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2, and Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms. She has also co-edited a special issue on Chinese science fiction for Vector, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an all-female-and-non-binary collection of Chinese speculative fiction, New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction, and The Making of The Wandering Earth: A Film Production Handbook. She is also an awarded science fiction writer who writes in both Chinese and English.
王侃瑜,奥斯陆大学CoFUTURES项目博士研究员,亚利桑那州立大学科学与想象力中心应用想象力学者及中国科幻研究中心起航学者。她的研究兴趣集中于中国科幻,尤其是从性别和环境角度。她的学术写作发表或即将发表于《新文学评论》《矢量》《生态电影理论与实践2》《劳特里奇共未来主义手册》等。她合编有《矢量》的中国科幻专号、《春天来临的方式和其他故事》(首本全女性和酷儿阵容中国幻想小说英译选集)、《中国科幻新声》及《<流浪地球>电影制作手记》英文版。她也一位荣获诸多奖项的作家,用中英双语写作科幻小说。

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