Governing Survival, Managing Excess

Selection, Evaluation, and Survival Labor in The Wandering Earth Franchise

Bibliographic Data

ID8134993
AuthorsZhuoyi Wang (0000-0002-1058-2791, Hamilton College, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume15
Issue3
Pages47
Publication date2026-03-18
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h15030047
OpenAlexW7138877941
LanguageEN
References cited12

This article reads the recent Chinese sci-fi blockbuster franchise The Wandering Earth (2019) and The Wandering Earth II (2023) as linked thought experiments about planetary survival as governance. It argues that the franchise operationalizes survival through administrative techniques that allocate life chances and format subjects for compliance, including selection policy, evaluative procedures, and computational judgment. Drawing on feminist social reproduction theory, affective and emotional labor scholarship, and critical posthumanism, the article shows how the films redistribute life-making work under catastrophe by routing care, sacrifice, and intergenerational continuity through gendered paternal figures. Fathers become the privileged conduits through which attachment is rendered socially legible as authorized labor, while other forms of care remain structurally secondary unless crisis forces their instrumental uptake. At the same time, the franchise is preoccupied with the limits of procedural governance. Across both installments, paternal attachment repeatedly appears as a governance problem: it cannot be fully stabilized as procedure yet becomes actionable at system stress points. The survival regime thus depends on a recurrent sequence of emergency recruitment followed by retroactive legitimation, whether through official affect, selective recognition, containment, or memorialization

Corporate governance · Franchise · Reproduction · Social reproduction · Survival of the fittest · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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