Age of Extinction: Projecting the Asian Century in Chinese Cinema

Abstract: This essay reads China’s strategic alignment of its cinematic and geopolitical futures as a newly reformed, free-market economy still heavily interdependent on American capital. Blockbuster imperial-action genre franchises by directors like Wu Jing, Dante Lam, Guan Hu, and others cast themselves, to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s phrase, as the decisively “post-auteurist” blockbuster catalysts of China’s neoliberal-imperial twenty-first-century development: not the industrial props of a declining Hollywood but the postindustrial intellectual properties of an up-and-coming Chinawood whose creators view the film industry as paradigm and lodestar for a range of information and technology sectors poised to propel China from state-led supplier of low-wage manufacturing labor to ultramodern, innovation-driven economy.