The Disaster Empire in The Wandering Earth 2

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the 2023 Chinese science fiction blockbuster The Wandering Earth 2 constructs what I call a “disaster empire”—a biopolitical system that seamlessly integrates authoritarian governance with capitalist logic through the constant threat of catastrophe. Through close readings of the film’s reappropriation of the Chinese Moving Mountain fable, its treatment of human sacrifice, and its portrayal of digital afterlife, I argue that the film presents a troubling vision where crisis enables the formation of a homogeneous time-space where the patriarchal family, the nation-state, and bio-capital converge to form a massive, enduring system of domination. While the film has been celebrated for its socialist values of collective survival, I demonstrate how it actually embodies the convergence of authoritarianism and global capitalism in its most insidious form. Drawing on theories of biopower, affect, and dead labor from Marxist scholars, this paper reveals how The Wandering Earth 2 functions as a work of prescriptive realism that faithfully encapsulates the deep drive of authoritarian capitalism.

1. Introduction: A Disaster Empire

“At first, nobody cared about the disaster. It was just another wildfire, another drought, the extinction of a species, and the disappearance of a city. Until one day, it became relevant to everyone”.

These opening lines of the 2023 Chinese sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth 2—(Gwo 2023) inherited from its 2019 predecessor, The Wandering Earth (Gwo 2019) —set the stage for an apocalyptic narrative. The apocalyptic setting has created a homogenous time-space when the entire humanity is thrust into a state of collective shock, illustrating what Naomi Klein calls “the shock doctrine”. The shock caused by the unrelenting disaster creates “a period of deep disorientation and regression” (Klein 2007, p. 16), enabling the implementation of authoritarian policies. The Wandering Earth franchise takes this concept to its logical extreme, presenting a world where crisis has become the new normal and individual struggles for survival are meaningless. Therefore, in the two Wandering Earth films, we see an authoritarian United Earth Government (UEG) seizing control of all resources on Earth and taking over all decision-making, violently suppressing protesters, and algorithmically determining who lives and who dies. We also see a triumphant UEG marching toward a teleological future in the conclusion of both films.

Klein introduces the concept of “the shock doctrine” to explain how neoliberal economic policies are often imposed in the aftermath of major crises. The Wandering Earth franchise, however, presents an inversion of this concept. Instead of a capitalist free-for-all, we see the complete supplanting of market economics by a planned economy in these apocalyptic tales. The films overtly champion the ideas of unity and mutual assistance for mankind, echoing Chinese president Xi Jiping’s concept of an encompassing “Community with a Shared Future for Humanity” (Renlei mingyun gongtongti 人类命运共同体). Disasters in the films function as a deus ex machina, jolting humanity out of its “obsessions” (zhinian 执念) with self-interest and fear of the other—articulated explicitly by the quantum computer 550W at the end of the second film—so that humanity can work collectively to save civilization. But does this represent a more optimistic take on Klein’s shock doctrine, or is it a new blend of authoritarianism and capitalism?

In my 2020 paper on The Wandering Earth, I have discussed how the cinematic adaption ultimately reinforces the authority of the Father and the nation-state (Zhu 2020, p. 94). The Wandering Earth 2 is undoubtedly another ode to the Father. The only main female character in the film, Han Duoduo (played by Wang Zhi), debuts as a strong woman but soon transitions into a traditional feminine role as the protected and the weak after she marries Liu Peiqiang (played by Wu Jing), ultimately dying of cancer. In this paper, I argue that, beneath the grand ideals of planetary unity in an apocalyptic setting, The Wandering Earth 2 constructs a homogeneous time-space where the patriarchal family, the nation-state, and bio-capital converge to form a massive, enduring system of domination. This disaster-ridden, homogeneous time-space gives rise to a biopower Empire without boundaries.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri use the concept of “Empire” to describe the new model of the global capitalist economy, which emerges from “totalizing social processes” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 10). Empire is “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri 2000, Preface, xii). This new configuration of power achieves “a new and more complete compatibility between sovereignty and capital” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 331), blurring the lines between governance and economic exploitation, leisure and labor, and life and death. Empire is endless. Hardt and Negri emphasize that Empire does not frame its rule “as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history” (Hardt and Negri 2000, Preface, xiv–xv).

The Wandering Earth 2 envisions a future that mirrors this description of a capitalist Empire, where the narrative of global survival masks an entrenched system of biopolitical control. In this Empire, hope has replaced money to become the new currency; it is measured in abstract units of time that ultimately reify human lives. Human life is no longer merely instrumentalized for labor but is subsumed entirely into the machinery of production and governance. Labor has become “the power to act” by “intelligence, passion, and affect in one common place” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 358). Life itself is reduced to bio-capital—resources to be accumulated, managed, and expended in service of an authoritarian amalgamation of power.

The film depicts the formation of a disaster empire, which seamlessly integrates authoritarian sovereignty with the drive of capital. I use the term “disaster empire” to describe a social structure defined by centralized power and limitless productivity, made possible through the constant looming threat of disaster. What unfolds in the film is an alliance between patriarchal authoritarianism and capitalist logic—sometimes called “state capitalism” in China—a model that is actively pursued by rulers in reality. As the journalist Chang Che points out, while the word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, in the eyes of contemporary Chinese party elites it is viewed as “a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization” (Chang 2024). An alliance between authoritarianism and capitalism is at the heart of the China Model.

This convergence echoes David Harvey’s prescient warning from two decades ago about the increasing similarities between neoliberalization in authoritarian states and the rise of authoritarianism in neoliberal states (Harvey 2005, p. 81). In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown also highlights the “convergences between elements of twentieth-century fascism and inadvertent effects of neoliberal rationality today”, which appear “in the valorization of a national economic project and sacrifice for a greater good into which all are integrated, but from which most must not expect personal benefit […] as well in the growing devaluation of politics, publics, intellectuals, educated citizenship, and all collective purposes apart from economy and security” (Brown 2015, p. 219).

What the scholars above discern is a disturbing trend in our world: Contrary to Marx and Engels’s assertion that “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 1955, p. 13), neoliberalism draws on old affective structures, such as nationalism and familism, to reinforce its power. In China, this model is called “state capitalism”. Harvey views this revival of nationalist sentiments in East Asia (China, South Korea, and Japan) “as an antidote to the dissolution of former bonds of social solidarity under the impact of neoliberalism” (Harvey 2005, p. 85). However, The Wandering Earth 2 suggests a more insidious purpose for these revived sentiments.

The affective structures of nation and family serve as critical loci for reproducing the homogeneous social relations that sustain the operation of the empire of biopower. A recurring object in the film aptly demonstrates the fluid flow of power between the nation, family, planet, and capital. Early in the film, a screw nut flies out of a robotic arm as Liu Peiqiang and Han Duoduo engage in a fierce battle with rebels aboard a spaceship (Figure 1). A slow-motion close-up reveals the engraved words “Made in China” on the screw nut, symbolizing China’s technological leadership in the future world. Later, Liu Peiqiang uses the screw nut as an engagement ring to propose to Han Duoduo, blending personal stories of love and family with national aspirations (Figure 2). After Han Duoduo dies of cancer, Liu Peiqiang is sent to deploy nuclear weapons on the Moon, where he gazes at the distant Earth through the hole in the screw nut (Figure 3). At this moment, the nut becomes a planetary symbol, embodying the film’s vision of a Chinese-led global unity.

The screw nut facilitates the obscene conflation of technological and masculinist conquests, family and nation, as well as globalization and deterritorialized nationalism. This collapsed singular system enables the free flow of authoritarian power across technological, nationalist, and masculinist bodies, forming a “techno-authoritarian-conservative” alliance (Chang 2024). Rather than being swept away by crisis, traditional forms of solidarity and affective ties are repurposed and strengthened, becoming the bedrock of the empire of biopower. The tenet of the film, therefore, is a firm belief in the China model, and it “fall[s] in line with the party state’s vision of an uncomplicated march in lockstep towards a glorious future” (Li 2021, p. 169). In the following sections, I aim to read The Wandering Earth 2 symptomatically, dismantling it as a sci-fi fable that encapsulates the deep drive of authoritarian capitalism.

2. The Moving Mountain Project

The central conflict in The Wandering Earth 2 arises from the competition between two ambitious projects designed to save humanity in light of the looming solar crisis. The first, the “Digital Life Project”, aims to preserve human consciousness by uploading it into digital storage, ensuring the survival of humanity even if physical bodies are lost. The second, the “Moving Mountain Project”, focuses on constructing giant Earth Engines that will propel the planet out of the solar system to look for a new habitat in the universe. The latter, spanning 2500 years and covering 100 generations, is designed to be a monumental and enduring undertaking by humanity. It not only legitimizes an authoritarian UEG but also requires the preemptive destruction of nature and the sacrifice of millions of lives. In the film the “Moving Mountain Project” eventually prevails, and the “Digital Life Project” is forbidden by the UEG.

The Chinese phrase “moving mountain” (yishan 移山) derives from the ancient Chinese fable “The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountain” (Yugong Yishan 愚公移山). This popular fable was recorded in the Taoist classic Liezi 列子, which appeared during the Warring States Period (475 BCE to 221 BCE) in China. The story is about Yu Gong (literally “a foolish old man”), who was determined to dig away the two massive mountains in front of his home. Another old man mocked his efforts, calling it futile. But Yu Gong replied, “Even if I die, I have sons, and my sons will have sons. Generation after generation, my descendants will continue without end, while the mountains won’t grow any taller. Why should we worry about not leveling them?” Moved by Yu Gong’s determination, the gods sent immortals to carry the mountains away. The original fable advocates the Taoist philosophy of solving problems with simple methods that align with the flow of nature.

Mao Zedong appropriated the Yu Gong fable to elucidate his mass line ideology. In June 1945, on the eve of Japan’s surrender, Mao delivered a closing speech at the Seventh Congress of the Communist Party of China, transforming the fable of Yu Gong Yishan into a political metaphor for revolution. After recapitulating the fable, Mao asserted the following:

Today, there are also two great mountains pressing down on the Chinese people: one is called imperialism, and the other is called feudalism. The Communist Party of China resolved long ago to remove these two mountains. We must persist, continue working tirelessly, and we too will move the heavens. This “heaven” is none other than the people of China. When the people of the entire nation rise up to join us in digging away these two mountains, what obstacle could not be moved?

(Mao 1990, pp. 1049–52)

Mao’s reinterpretation shifts the focus of the fable from the simpleness of the method to the mobilization of participants, aligning it with his concept of the mass line. It portrays the entire nation of China as a unified family by homogenizing its national space through a disaster narrative: faced with the common enemies of imperialism and feudalism, the Chinese people must work together toward the same teleology set by the Chinese Communist Party. Spatial homogenization, as Arif Dirlik warns, inevitably “reintroduces ideology—and hegemony” (Dirlik 1994, pp. 104–5). This tendency is evident in both communist and capitalist regimes. In both systems, spatial homogenization functions as a powerful tool for reinforcing dominant ideologies and maintaining hegemonic control.

The Wandering Earth 2, in turn, pushes this mass line fable further by re-introducing the linear temporal dimension in the original fable. Reminiscent of Yu Gong’s words, “Generation after generation, my descendants will continue without end”, Zhou Zhezhi (played by Li Xuejian), China’s top representative at the UEG, reenacts the fable during a conversation with the US representative Mike about the Moving Mountain Project (Figure 4):

Zhou: “Mike, do you believe in that?”

Mike: “That’s just a photo from space, that’s Voyager looking back at us.”

Zhou: “I believe. So will my children. And their children, too. By that time, I believe the reunion under the blue sky when the blossoms hang from every bough.”

Unlike Yu Gong, Zhou’s belief in the success of the Moving Mountain Project stems not from the simplicity of the method, but from his firm faith in generational continuity within a homogenized time and space. In other words, Zhou does not believe in any alternative futures; his vision is one of a homotopia devoid of otherness or uncertainty, a “time-space compression” (Harvey 2005, p. 3) analogous to that of late global capitalism, as described Harvey. The Moving Mountain Project is thus an Empire project. What Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write about Empire holds true here: “Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its own ethical order. In other words, Empire presents its order as permanent, eternal, and necessary” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 10). It is the vision of this homotopia that sustains Zhou Zhezhi’s belief.

Zhou Zhezhi occupies an important place in the patriarchal time-space of the empire. His character is a fusion of two strongman figures. The first is Zhou Enlai 周恩来, the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, with whom he shares both a surname and a striking visual resemblance. The second is Luo Ji 罗辑, a central character in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy, who plays a pivotal role in humanity’s fight against the alien Trisolarans. In the film, Zhou is also a father figure as he mentors Hao Xiaoxi (played by Zhu Yan Manzi), a member of the Chinese delegation to the UEG who later becomes Zhou’s successor. Among all the main father figures (Zhang Peng, Ma Zhao, and Tu Yuheng) in The Wandering Earth 2, Zhou holds the highest rank and is the only one to have survived by the film’s end. Despite his physical disability, Zhou embodies China’s national and technological strength, and he ultimately emerges triumphant. Combining the mass line with a linear temporality that ironically transcends that experience of the masses, the Moving Mountain Project symbolizes China’s ambition to enshrine its triumph as eternal in history. The disasters in the film serve as catalysts for the “homogenization of space” and the “globalization of time” (Dirlik 1994, p. 22), both of which are hallmark narratives of capitalism. Yet the film blends these with a distinctly patriarchal ethos, reinforcing the centralized power structures necessary for such monumental undertakings.

The revamped “Moving Mountain” fable in the film is grounded in reality. As Slavoj Žižek observes, “China developed so fast not in spite of authoritarian Communist rule, but because of it”, as China’s model of authoritarian capitalism allows the government to wield “unencumbered authoritarian state power to control the social costs of the passage to capitalism” (Žižek 2010, p. 156). This approach enables massive infrastructure projects and societal transformations that might be impossible under other systems. The film seems to unapologetically admire this China model: it actually opens with a scene in which Zhang Peng (played by Sha Yi), Liu Peiqiang’s teacher on the astronaut team, nostalgically reminisces about China’s pre-crisis economic and cultural penetration into Central Africa. Zhang Peng recalls the “good old days” when Chinese-style night markets “rocked” in Libreville, referring to this capital city of Gabon as once being “the ‘Little Northeast’ of Africa”. The remark strongly references China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which positions Africa as a key partner. The initiative, however, is often criticized as a neo-colonial project driven by an authoritarian, capitalist China (de Freitas 2023).

Now, with the disasters portrayed in The Wandering Earth 2, such authoritarian capitalism is evolving into a new stage, marked by the centralization of power, cybernetic planning, the dissolution of markets, and deterritorialized states. The film portrays global capitalism in a more abstract and speculative light, using China as its model and presenting it as “a sign of the future” (Žižek 2010, p. 158) for humanity.

3. Life as Abstraction

How can an apocalyptic vision of an Earth without markets or money still represent authoritarian capitalism? In Volume 3 of Capital, Marx reminds us, “capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character” (Marx 1981, p. 953). Marx views abstraction as a process inherent to capitalist production and exchange, where concrete labor and products are transformed into commodities of abstract values, “The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production” (Marx 1976, p. 174). This process of abstraction is central to how capitalism functions and reproduces itself. Abstraction reigns in our global economy, leading to the “loss of an authentic lifeworld” (Žižek 2010, p. 286).

In The Wandering Earth 2, the process of abstraction is reenacted when Liu Peiqiang takes a stress response test for a position at the Navigation Space Station with the quantum computer 550W. Developed by the Chinese tech team led by Ma Zhao (played by Ning Li), 550W is designed to assist in managing the survival of human civilization. The test, which is reminiscent of the Voight–Kampff test in Blade Runner, intends to test if the candidate is able to make the most rational solution unaffected by personal emotions. The test is an assault on the human lifeworld by rational calculation. During the test, Liu Peiqiang is prohibited from using metaphors, rhetorical questions, or implications, and he must respond in a strictly rational manner.

Below is a conversation between Liu Peiqiang and 550W following Liu’s confession that he desires to send his wife and son to the underground cities:

Liu: “I just want my family to survive.”

550W: “What about the other family member?”

Liu: “What do you mean?”

550W: “Major Liu Peiqiang, your father-in-law, Mr. Han Zi’ang, didn’t get selected in the sortition, either. What about Mr. Han Zi’ang?”

[Liu cannot answer.]

550W: “Your best option is to have Mr. Han Zi’ang as the guardian and let him take Liu Qi to the underground cities. Based on your wife’s current condition, her life is to end in 84.3 days.”

Liu [angrily jumping up]: “Damn you all!”

Liu Peiqiang’s initial desire to save his immediate family reflects a human, instinctual, and emotional response. 550W, however, shifts the conversation from Liu’s personal, emotional appeal to a more detached, logical perspective, abstracting Liu’s personal situation into a question of the survival of the extended family. The “best option” presented by 550W is a scenario in which the combined lifespan of all members of the extended family is maximized. This option represents a posthuman approach to “managing the future via a cybernetic system of modulation”, to borrow Eva Horn’s words (Horn 2018, p. 176). Han Duoduo, the fatally ailing wife, is thus easily singled out as the one family member to be sacrificed. The agitated Liu Peiqiang finally fails the test.

Despite Liu Peiqiang’s violent reaction to 550W’s cold, rational proposal during the test, he ultimately chooses this option, because his wife Han Duoduo arrives at the same plan. The film thus shows the convergence of human self-sacrifice and machine calculation. It is noteworthy that this instance not only shows the rationalization of thinking that plagues the contemporary world, as Byung-Chul Han describes it: “Dataism and artificial intelligence reify thinking. Thinking becomes calculating” (Han 2021, p. 9). What it reveals is how calculating as thinking can be disguised and romanticized through a certain affective structure, which is an insidious way of abstracting human life. 550W’s cold, rational calculation is humanized by the affective structure of the extended family, which justifies the self-sacrifice of a daughter, mother, and wife. Sacrifices become productive of the homogenous patriarchal time-space.

As I discussed in my 2020 essay, in The Wandering Earth, the wife’s sacrifice is somehow redeemed by Liu Peiqiang, who prevents the quantum computer (MOSS) from sacrificing the Earth to save human civilization based on calculation (Zhu 2020, p. 94). While Liu’s rebellious actions in the first film reveal that there are “blind spots of irrationality and madness” (Horn 2018, p. 42) in the machine’s calculations, the 2023 prequal seems to have reverted to reaffirming this rational decision by showing Han Duoduo voluntarily giving up her life slot to make way for the “best option” proposed by 550W. The film thus blurs the line between human and machine decisions, allowing abstraction to dominate concrete human lives.

The affective ties of kinship have always been susceptible to exploitation by various social, economic, and political forces under the guise of “dependency, loyalty, guilt, love, and obligation” (Bradway and Freeman 2022, p. 134). Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman highlight “the intractability of kinship as an ideology, a material relation, an affective structure, and a narrative frame for conceiving, organizing, and living relationality in the contemporary moment”, emphasizing “the historical, ontological, and epistemological violence that kinship engenders” (Bradway and Freeman 2022, p. 2). Liu Cixin’s original novella predicts the breakdown of kinship bonds during a solar crisis, but The Wandering Earth films have deliberately intensified them.

Human self-sacrifice in the film extends beyond the confines of the extended family. When kinship is framed as a metaphor for large collectives like the nation and the human race, the sacrifices it demands can be immense. In the film, humans in crisis adopt the cold, calculating logic often associated with machines, demanding significant sacrifices from the “few” to save the Earth. When the UEG determines that remotely detonating all the nuclear weapons on the Moon simultaneously is impossible, Zhou Zhezhi resorts to the “manual” solution, assigning 300 individuals to detonate the 219 batches of nuclear weapons on the Moon in a suicidal act. In his conversation with Hao Xiaoxi, Zhou first asks whether she thinks this plan is fair. Without receiving an answer, he reveals his own rationale: “In times of crisis, duty above all”.

Following the Chinese astronaut Zhang Peng’s call, those astronauts over fifty years old are asked to step forward and take on this suicidal mission. The sacrifices of the senior astronauts follow the same logic of mathematical calculation that is used to justify Han Duoduo’s sacrifice. Human lives are reduced to numerical values, and decisions are made to maximize the total sum of lives. This time, there is no proposition from the machine, the humans willingly choose the option in a heroic manner. The human decision and the machine calculation converge in times of crisis. Yet, the human decision is always disguised or embellished with a certain affective structure, whether it be love, duty, or nationalism, so that the chilling calculation behind it remains concealed.

The sacrificed astronauts are portrayed as heroes who will be remembered by history. In one scene, they are saluted by the younger astronauts before being sent to the Moon. The next scene cuts to Zhou Zhezhi solemnly saying: “I hope the world will remember this day”. The calculation of the maximum total sum of human lives becomes the sole logic guiding human decisions. To borrow Fredric Jameson’s words, “the anxiety of individual death is … easily assimilable to a whole rhetoric of collective sacrifice in the service of mankind” (Jameson 2005, p. 291). But the concept of the maximum total sum of human lives is so abstract that it signifies nothing more than the endless continuation of the homogeneous time-space.

If, as Marx says, capital is “a definite social production relation” that transforms specific, tangible social relations into abstract forms, and capital’s drive is “limitless”, (Marx 1976, p. 348) then we can identify such an abstract, limitless social production relation in The Wandering Earth 2. Driven by its relentless pursuit of human life as an abstract value, the apocalyptic time-space in the film embodies the capitalist system in its most abstract and limitless form. In Capitalism and the Death Drive, Byung-Chul Han writes:

More capital means less death. Capital is accumulated in order to escape death. Capital may also be seen as frozen time; infinite amounts of capital create the illusion of an infinite amount of time. Time is money: confronted with a time-limited life, we accumulate time-as-capital.

(Han 2021, p. 7)

The desire to escape death reflects the most fundamental drive of capital: to sustain itself as a specific social production relation, capital must accumulate time—hence Han’s saying, “time is money”. This allows us to imagine a capitalist biopower empire without markets or money, where the empire operates directly on lives, because lives are time, and time is money.

In The Wandering Earth 2, lives are abstracted and calculated to sustain the endless movement of time-as-capital. This insatiable drive is explicitly spelled out in the film. Before embarking on the mission that will claim his life, the Chinese head engineer Ma Zhao leaves a final note in which he draws a symbol of infinity (∞). Infinity—the ability to endlessly reproduce the same social relations—represents the converged desires of both humans and machines in the film, it is also the ultimate goal of capital.

4. Dead Labor

Led by the Chinese team at the UEG, the Moving Mountain Project’s imaginary success is predicated on preserving unchanging social relations, carrying forward the will and efforts of the deceased fathers through future generations, and upholding the logic of sacrifice rooted in calculation. The abstraction of lives and the homogenization of time and space ensure one central outcome: the past dominates the future, or, put differently, dead labor dominates living labor.

Dead labor is the lifeblood of capital. In the first volume of Capital, Marx writes: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Marx 1976, p. 342). From a materialist perspective of canonical Marxism, dead labor is workers’ past labor embedded in machinery, infrastructure, and investments. In The Wandering Earth 2, we can see that the giant machinery and infrastructure that humans build: the colossal Earth and Moon engines, the colossal space elevator that extends from Earth to a space station in orbit, the massive underground cities, and the quantum computers that can manage and control the vast, complex systems required to execute humanity’s ambitious survival plans. Humans rely on the infrastructure and machinery to sustain them, yet the sheer size and capacity of the infrastructure and machinery also pose a constant threat to human life. The narratives and aesthetics of The Wandering Earth franchise both illustrate how dead labor, as such, dominates the living.

However, dead labor also exists in the immaterial products of labor. In his 1996 essay, Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato coined the concept of “immaterial labor”, as “a labor of control, of handling information, […] a decision-making capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity” that increasingly defines contemporary organization of production since the 1970s (Lazzarato 1996, p. 134). The product of immaterial labor is, first and foremost, a “social relationship” through which the capital finds “an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself” (Lazzarato 1996, pp. 135, 138). In this way, immaterial labor is a form of dead labor, through which the past structure of production exerts an unmediated influence on living labor, perpetuating existing social structures, ideologies, and economic systems. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx again captures this metaphor of the “world-historical invocation of the dead”, writing that “Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (Marx 1996, p. 32).

As a type of immaterial labor, affective labor, too, can be viewed as a form of dead labor. Michael Hardt points out that in the capitalist economy, “the instrumental action of economic production has merged with the communicative action of human relations” (Hardt 1999, p. 96). Affective labor thus refers to the production of “collective subjectivities” and “sociality” through the production of “networks of culture and communication” (Hardt 1999, p. 96). For Hardt, the merging of production and communication leads to two key consequences: first, the instrumentalization of communication into a level of economic interactions and, second, the de-instrumentalization of capital to the level of human relations (Hardt 1999, p. 97). The latter, he seems to suggest, is also instrumental as it produces “human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital” (Hardt 1999, p. 97). Therefore, even our most personal relationships and emotional experiences can become sites of value extraction for capital. The concept of dead labor explains how capitalism homogenizes time and space, reducing alternative futures to mere extensions of the past—an idea vividly embodied in the design of the Moving Mountain Project.

One moment toward the end of The Wandering Earth 2 perfectly exemplifies the affective labor performed by the dead. To address the Lunar Crisis, the planet engines scattered across Earth must be activated simultaneously. To achieve this synchronization, the root servers of the internet in Beijing, Tokyo, and Dulles need to be manually restarted. Ma Zhao and Tu Hengyu (played by Andy Lau) are dispatched to restart the root server submerged in seawater in Beijing. Tu Hengyu is initially uninterested in the task, but Ma Zhao uses his deceased daughter Tu Yaya’s digital life card to coerce him into participating. Ma Zhao dies while carrying out the mission. Before he is drowned to death, he urges Tu Hengyu to complete the mission, leaving the latter with the final words: “Without human civilization, there is no meaning”. Tu Hengyu is unable to enter the host key to restart the root server before the rising seawater claims his life. However, with his last breath, he manages to plug both Tu Yaya’s and his own digital life cards into the 550W system.

In the next scene, a younger-looking Tu Hengyu is reunited with his late daughter in the digital world. At first, he is confused, as he had only backed up his digital life in 2037, yet the current year is 2058. Suddenly, Tu Yaya stops crying and speaks to Tu Hengyu in a detached, solemn, and adult-like tone (Figure 5):

“Daddy, it’s the year 2058. You are Tu Hengyu, member of First Advance Team of the Emergency Respond Group. Use the global Internet host key to ignite the Earth Engines around the world. Mission objective: save the world from imminent doom.”

Tu Yaya died in a car accident in the year of 2037. The digital life of Tu Yaya is created when her memories and consciousness are processed by a quantum computer to generate her virtual existence based on calculation. Her “life”, therefore, is a product of machinery, consisting of algorithmic processes, information-processing, and AI decision-making, all of which are products of past, dead labor. What makes this moment even eerier is that Tu Yaya’s voice is overlaid with the voice of the deceased Ma Zhao, infusing her injunction with an authoritarian tone. Ma Zhao is the creator of the machinery that generates Tu Yaya’s digital life, so we can view this Tu Yaya as Ma Zhao’s dead labor. During this marvelous moment of interpellation, the dead father figure speaks through his dead labor, telling the digital life of Tu Hengyu who he is and what he must do. Thanks to this timely digital interpellation, Tu Hengyu quickly resumes his mission with the help of 550W and successfully reboots the root server. Consequently, the Earth is saved.

This scene serves as a vivid example of the immaterial dead labor: the dead (Tu Yaya and Ma Zhao) manage to connect the digital life of Tu Hengyu in 2037 to his mission in 2058, ultimately achieving the goal of saving the maximum total sum of lives on Earth. In Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death, James Tyner repudiates “the ongoing subsumption of death into capital, with capital increasingly extracted from dead or dying laborers” (Tyner 2019, p. 128). In The Wandering Earth 2, we see not only the premature deaths of laborers—like the sacrificed astronauts and engineers—but also how their affective and technical labor continues to complete the mission set by UEG, even after death.

This dead labor is acknowledged by Zhou Zhezhi in the film. After the root server in Beijing has been rebooted and the Earth engines ignited, Zhou says the following lines: “I believe that human courage can transcend time, history, the present, and the future. I believe our people can accomplish the task, whether real or virtual, whether in life or death”. He seems to suggest that dead labor is included in the labor force, among “our people”. Although the UEG previously declared the Digital Life Project illegal, at this point, it is officially incorporated into the Moving Mountain Project to ensure its success. The initial contradiction between the two projects has been articulated into “a complex whole structured in dominance” (Althusser 2005, pp. 204–5). In this imagined future scenario, the dead are summoned to work alongside the living, perpetuating an unchanging social relationship.

In Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek jokes about “the totalitarian Chinese Communists who now want to control the lives of their subjects even after their deaths” (Žižek 2010, p. 287). The joke, however, is nothing new in Chinese ideology. One of the well-known martyr stories propagated by the Chinese Communist Party is about a young party member named Liu Zhen 刘真, who was allegedly tortured and steamed to death by the Nationalists in the late 1920s. Despite the excruciating torture, Liu refused to surrender, leaving behind the famous words: “In life, I am a member of the Communist Party; in death, I am the party’s ghost” (Yi 2021). Liu’s last words appropriated a woman’s vow of chastity to her husband and clearly appealed to the megalomania of the Party. In The Wandering Earth 2, the ghost is transformed into digital life, continuing to serve the UEG. It is a posthuman empire where individuals are consumed “completely in the rhythm of productive practices and productive socialization” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 24).

Louis Althusser famously illustrates the concept of interpellation with the example of a police officer calling out to someone on the street:

…ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”.

(Althusser 2006, p. 118)

In the above example given by Althusser, the individual recognizes the call and responds, thereby becoming a subject of ideology. The power of interpellation lies in its ability to recruit individuals within a specific ideological framework simply by compelling them to respond.

In The Wandering Earth 2, however, we witness a more emotionally charged and deeply effective form of interpellation—one rooted not in the impersonal authority of a police officer but in the intimate ties of kinship. Here, it is not a stranger who hails you, but a family member, making the call nearly impossible to ignore. Tu Yaya, Tu Hengyu’s beloved daughter, and Ma Zhao, who serves as his disciplinarian father figure, embody this powerful affective interpellation. This familial dynamic intensifies the ideological function of interpellation, embedding it within the emotional structure of kinship. How could Tu Hengyu possibly refuse the call from his dead daughter or disregard the authoritative voice of his teacher? The emotional ties of these relationships ensure that he is drawn into action, compelled to answer their call and join the “productive and cooperating subjectivities” (Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 319) of the empire, despite his initial indifference to the mission of saving the world.

This intriguing moment of digital interpellation represents the capitalist drive to mobilize dead labor, ensuring that both living and dead labor are conscripted into the endless machinery of production. By intertwining interpellation with kinship, The Wandering Earth 2 illustrates how capitalism co-opts not only the labor of the living but also the memory, identity, and affective ties of the dead. Those who live a digital life are both dead and immortal at the same time. Housed in the quantum computer, the immortal digital life is a “reified, mechanical life” (Han 2021, p. 9), readily exploitable by capital. The film thus presents a chilling depiction of a disaster empire, where all forms of life and death are harnessed to ensure the relentless production and reproduction of the homogenous time-space.

5. Conclusions: Sci-Fi Realism

The Wandering Earth 2 has been touted as a stellar Chinese sci-fi film that upholds the socialist principle of “putting the people first” (remin zhishang 人民至上) (Wang 2023). However, as my analysis of this film reveals, the disaster empire it constructs is rooted in a closed universe that eliminates any conceivable alternatives. Moreover, the film embodies the convergence of authoritarianism and global capitalism in its most insidious and abstract form.

Science fiction, according to Fredric Jameson, has the potential of exposing “the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners” (Jameson 2005, p. 289). American sci-fi and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin provides a vivid description of the open universe that sci-fi can offer, as follows:

…a cosmos that is not a simple, fixed hierarchy but an immensely complex process in time. All the doors stand open, from the prehuman past through the incredible present to the terrible and hopeful future. All connections are possible. All alternatives are thinkable. It is not a comfortable, reassuring place. It’s a very large house, a very drafty house. But it’s the house we live in.

(Le Guin 1993, p. 207)

While Liu Cixin’s original novel successfully created such an open universe, the Wandering Earth films have closed off all avenues for imagining alternatives. The film actually appeals to the popular “wish-fulfillment’ of an ambitious China Dream, which Liu “lucidly maintains a critical distance from” (Li 2019). In this way, the films strip themselves of an essential characteristic of science fiction.

The Wandering Earth 2, however, stands as an intriguing example of sci-fi realism. The Chinese sci-fi writer Han Song has suggested that “China’s reality has now become more science fictional than science fiction” (Han 2010). Mingwei Song further elaborates the “cognitive inversion of the order of representation and reality” in contemporary Chinese science fiction, which subscribes to “a transgressive notion of reality that does not equal being completely real and observable” (Song 2023, p. 59).

The Wandering Earth 2 has done its share of sci-fi realism by presenting two distinct realities. The first is immediately apparent: the solar disaster serves as a stark reflection of the growing environmental crisis in our world. The second reality, which is presented as a solution to the first reality, is the convergence of authoritarianism and global capitalism in its most insidious and abstract form. This biopolitical empire, which encompasses both living and dead labor, reveals an underlying drive to transform our world into an idealized realm of well-governed exploitation. It represents a distilled form of authoritarian capitalism operating in an abstract realm.

The second reality, therefore, presents itself as a form of “prescriptive realism”, as discussed by Jason McGrath: “the idea that a film might seek to represent, not just reality as it now appears, but a truer reality that lies beneath the surface or is yet to be fully realized. Such a film thereby encourages the awareness or realization of that higher or deeper reality by presenting it as an abstracted form or ideal” (McGrath 2022, p. 18). Prescriptive realism was a popular creative formula during the socialist period, and it enjoys a continued presence in contemporary Chinese films, including The Wandering Earth franchise (McGrath 2022, p. 296). Through its prescriptive realist lens, The Wandering Earth 2 likely, though unwittingly, maps the true catastrophe of our age: the endless perpetuation of the current order. In Walter Benjamin’s words: “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given” (Benjamin 1999, p. 473). Weaving a portrait of a disaster empire where apocalypse masquerades as salvation, the film charts not just a future world, but our present predicament, where solutions and catastrophes have become eerily interchangeable.