But during Earth’s long voyage, the Liu family and their comrades face an existential threat, as Jupiter is on an unexpected collision course with Earth.

Convinced by this plan, people on Earth are mobilised to maintain the Engines, while a group of cosmonauts on the ISS provide navigation and communication aids to them. The project is hoped to bring everything ‘back to normal’ from crisis-mode, when some effects of disasters can be reversed and people can finally ‘go home’. These engines supposedly generate enough force to push Earth towards a new orbit over the course of 2,500 years. The project is projected to build and activate 10,000 Earth Engines around the planet under the orders of the United Earth Government (UEG). In their world, the Sun’s initial rapid expansion forced mankind to survive by living in underground cities and initiating “The Wandering Earth” Project, which sought to move planet Earth to another star system. It tells the story of a mission to save Earth from the parallel perspectives of cosmonaut Liu Peiqiang on the International Space Station, and his son, technician-in-training Liu Qi. The film, directed by Frant Gwo, is loosely based on the novella of the same name by award-winning sci-fi author Liu Cixin. “The Wandering Earth” (2019) is a Chinese science fiction blockbuster released last February, timed to coincide with the busy Lunar New Year season and the historic touchdown of China’s Chang’e 4 probe on the dark side of the moon.

More strikingly, the recent phenomenon of ‘main melody films’ in China provides a case study for how the Chinese government has adapted the messaging of its globalised agenda for international consumption.

In both fiction and reality, art plays a sometimes subtle, and at other times crude, role in promoting CCP ideology while diminishing those of other systems. Our current situation might not be as dramatic as the Earth’s destruction, but China has theorised about that too on the big screen, and about what it would do to lead humanity to safety. As the rest of the world adjusts to the new normal of life in the time of COVID-19, this real-time global emergency reveals stark cultural, systematic, and stylistic differences between China’s crisis leadership and that of other countries.

The wandering earth novel