Flexing Armageddon: Displacing Climate Change Anxiety through Soft Power Nationalist Interests in Guo Fan’s The Wandering Earth (2019)

Abstract In recent years, apparently as part of the public relations for its global “soft power” initiatives, China has moderately relaxed much of its previously archaic policy control of its cinema production industry. One result has been the release of a spate of Chinese films to international streaming platforms such as Netflix. One highly visible example is Guo Fan’s The Wandering Earth (2019), a pre-pandemic apocalypse film that unabashedly appropriates conventions from the raft of fin-de-millenaire Hollywood apocalypse films such as Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998) as part of China’s political economy bid to enter into the international cinematic market. But is it as simple as all that? While films such as The Wandering Earth represent a welcome diversification of more international fare on such giant media streaming platforms as Netflix, and give international exposure to such talented Chinese directors as Guo Fan, the particular ideological project of the film should not go unnoticed. While critics such as Petrus Liu (2020), Laura Waisbich (2020), Ping Zhu (2020), and Amir Khan (2020) have noted the film as an allegory of catastrophic climate change, and Petrus Liu (2020) and Jeroen de Kloet (2022) have noted its similarity to Armageddon in particular, the specific ideological projects of the displacement of techno-industrial responsibility for catastrophic climate change in concert with a “soft power” competition with U.S. hegemony in the context of what Chris Berry (2021) refers to as the phenomenon of “two globalizations” has not been clearly articulated. When compared against Armageddon in particular, it becomes clear how the film works to displace climate change responsibilities in a soft power ideological gambit against U.S. global-capitalist hegemony. Thus, the project of this article is to explore how The Wandering Earth narratively raises the stakes on a similar American ideological project in such spectacular Hollywood films as Michael Bay’s Armageddon , in particular, for example, and resolves contemporary issues of eco-catastrophe with a melodramatic tale of xenophobic Chinese patriarchal salvation that supersedes the American originals in a “soft power” gambit for global hegemony.