Watching the movie 'The Wandering Planet' in Shanghai

By Emanuel Pastreich

The contradictions of contemporary China were on my mind during my trip to Shanghai in February, 2019. After all, China is not just some country and observing it is not just an amusement. What China becomes, or does not become, will determine our common future.

As I looked around Shanghai, I was thinking about how the American government, and American corporations, have slipped into corruption and militarism, and our distracted population barely notices what is happening. Perhaps I was hoping that China might offer some alternative, but ultimately I was disappointed.

I have followed China for thirty years as part of my career. Many of my colleagues in Asian studies have remarked to me in conversation that they think the country will play a critical role in the world at a future date, perhaps in thirty years.

Recently, I find that the American media is so biased that I must seek out alternative sources and that has drawn me closer to Facebook as a result.

And interestingly, I found many of the more informative articles about US foreign policy posted on a Facebook group dedicated to China's President Xi Jinping. This Xi site was not a public relations site, although it did include some government publications. This Facebook group was one of the few with a large membership that addresses issues in the US and Asia.

Some of the articles present China as a model for the world, a country that is eliminating poverty, that is increasing renewable energy and that has a cultural vitality unlike the West.

But my reading of these glowing reports has left me skeptical. China has tremendous strengths, but I see the same consumption culture, the same indifference to the environment and the same definition of human worth in monetary terms there too.

The articles posted in the group described how China is helping countries in Africa to build power plants and factories and how it is constructing more bridges at home than any other country. They describe a wealthy China covered with massive building projects that has avoided the endless wars of the United States.

But in light of the catastrophe that is climate change, highways and airports should be shut down, and not more built. We know that the same flawed and dangerous ideology of "growth" has infected China, at least as badly. Economics in China is defined in terms of consumption and production, and the impact of such actions on the environment is ignored.

If China promotes "growth and consumption" economics globally, if it continues to fund coal-powered plants and airports along the "Silk Road," we face a grim future. The fact that China is doing a better job of introducing solar and wind power domestically than the US is not comforting.

The interiors of the restaurants in Shanghai were immaculate, at least as clean as anything in Seoul, or Tokyo. The food was delicious and the service was impeccable. But the waste of food was horrific and it was no longer so easy to converse with those serving.

I saw no awareness of ecology in the advertisements that everyone must look at. In fact I did not find a single reference anywhere to climate change. Young Chinese toss away plastic cups without a thought about their environmental impact.

Western-style skyscrapers are overrunning Shanghai. Their grand interiors waste energy on a massive scale. They also create tremendous distance between the workers within and the community around them. The small shops and stores that made up the more human Shanghai are being torn down to make way for big construction projects.

Fashion stores, Starbucks and various restaurants catering to the rich and the bored continue to proliferate with little concern for the actual needs of ordinary people. Posters on every corner suggest that people must have a big house and a luxurious automobile in order to be happy.

When I visited Shanghai for the first time in 1990 I met with professors of classical Chinese literature at Fudan University and their students at dirty restaurants and unadorned dormitories. The spaces we met in were dark because energy was expensive ― people had a sense of the real cost of things. I felt that the students I met spent their days reading books and pondering serious questions.

I watched the Chinese movie "The Wandering Planet" 流浪地球 (directed by Guo Fan 郭帆 and based on the novel by Liu Cixin ?慈欣) while in Shanghai. I had read about the controversy surrounding The Economist's critical review of the movie and the Chinese response.

The title of this article in the February 16 edition of The Economist was simply "Xi Jinping thought saves the world." The dismissive tone was evident from the first line, "The apocalypse looms. There is only one hope for the human race: China."

A firestorm raged online among Chinese people concerning this review.

I was recently forwarded a humorous response to the Economist by the famous blogger Thomas Hon Wing Polin entitled, "Saving the World is also a Western Monopoly."

Polin noted,"

"American screen heroes (and superheroes) have been saving the world since ... forever. But when Chinese heroes do it for the first time ever, The Economist freaks out and calls the notion 'absurd.' The barometer of Western Imperial thinking spends the rest of its article mocking China's efforts to bring about a better world, one characterized more by peace and mutually beneficial cooperation than the rapacious exploitation inflicted by Western empires the past five centuries."

I could not help chuckling when I read this comment. The Economist's critique of "The Wandering Earth" did seem like a bit of hyperventilating to me. Just count the number of American block-buster films that glorify the military, that justify torture, or that encourage brutality and greed and you may feel that any alternative is preferable.

The movie relates the efforts of three generations of a family, and the entire human population, to save the Earth from destruction. The Sun has become a red giant that will consume the Earth. Scientists rush to build thrusters along the side of the Earth facing the Sun which then propel it out of its orbit and set it on a course into space. The hope is that after hundreds of years of living in underground cities, the remaining citizens of the Earth will find a safe orbit around a hospitable star.

But when the Earth passes by Jupiter, it is caught up in the gravitational field and part of the Earth's atmosphere is sucked into the clouds covering the planet. A group of young people figure out a plan that creates an explosion in the atmosphere of Jupiter which propels the Earth away from that planet and sets it again on its path into space.

There were some impressive features in the film. The movie avoided the themes of war and of killing. No one died in the film because they were killed by someone else. That already puts the film above just about any action film that Hollywood has cranked out. Nor was explicit sexuality employed as a tool to make up for a lack of content or acting. It was a film about the relationships between people, with a focus on the family and bonds between individuals committed to a cause.

But the director could not avoid including a few scenes in which guns were employed to blast through barriers.

The film assumes that rational planning and thoughtful dialog are essential to success and that global governance can be both participatory and mutually beneficial. The movie contrasts with the irrational and anti-scientific themes found in much of American science fiction, and in much of U.S. foreign policy.

Nevertheless, there was nothing green or organic in the entire film. The spaces within the buildings were full of concrete steel and glass and the surface of the Earth was dead and barren. There was no suggestion that conservation, or the cultivation of plants had value, or that frugality was essential to surviving such a catastrophe.

The plot involved the use of enormous thrusters to blast the Earth away from the Sun and avoid human extinction. The presumption was that the ecological crisis could be solved through technology and that the massive emission of carbon gases from these thrusters was not a problem.

That is to say that China's growing space program can somehow play a vital role in the response to climate change. Such a suggestion is painfully misleading.

An amusing tale about how the Earth can be propelled into another solar system is no problem if we are talking about science fiction. But the underlying theme was no fiction. The catastrophe described is human-induced climate change and that is plenty real. What we need today is a film that shows how humans should reinvent civilization so that they can survive climate change. This movie does not offer such a model, or even a discussion of what climate change means.

Ultimately, what bothered me most about both Shanghai and about the movie "Wandering Planet" was the distinctly anti-intellectual currents that flow beneath the surface. Shanghai was attractive, but there were no newspapers in the hotel, or anywhere, and no discussion about serious issues of the day among the people I met.

I do not think there is much choice concerning China's future. Its influence will grow on almost every front. But China's future culture remains entirely open to change, entirely in the hands of its young. I hope that they can break away from this dangerous culture of consumerism, superficiality and denial, and formulate a real alternative.