Reservoir, Animals, and Planet Earth: Infrastructure as World-Building in Science Fiction Films of (Post)socialist China

This article revisits utopian, cataclysmic, and future narratives of (post)socialist China, ruminating on infrastructural imagery – both physical and metaphorical – and its implications as envisioned in three science fiction films spanning early socialist to contemporary China: Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (十三陵水库畅想曲, 1958), Vanishing of the Ozone Layers (大气层消失, 1990), and The Wandering Earth (流浪地球, 2019). By rendering and situating infrastructural imagery in socialist China, it not only highlights the nation’s shifting pace of industrialization and modernization in ideological terms – as reflected in the Five-Year Plans and the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) – but also traces cultural narratives of constructing a communist utopia in spatial and visual terms, one that later collapses and is transformed, giving rise to speculation about a collective future for humanity on Earth in threshold moments. In analytically opening up these science fiction film case studies, a threefold approach through an infrastructural lens is considered: capital construction, tentacular practices, and planetary thinking. More pointedly, capital construction provides both the material substructure and the ideological cornerstone for socialist utopian fantasies, exemplified by the reservoir as a form of mega-infrastructure. The post-socialist industrial landscape, meanwhile, frames infrastructure as a built environment collapsing amid environmental problems and ecological crises, bound to co-living matter through tentacular practices (of the Chthulucene) with animals, nature, and Earth. In contemporary Chinese science fiction film, planetary thinking positions Earth as an infrastructural ground for hope and human survival, opening an alternative technological imaginary. In these narratives, world-building infrastructure is depicted as deeply entangled with nonhuman elements and active forms – the reservoir, animals, and Earth – which not only foreground anthropocentric perspectives on man-made disaster and technological violence, but also move beyond them through tentacular and planetary ways of seeing. As a result, cultural practice and the remaking of infrastructural space in (post)socialist China extend beyond progressive developmental or technocratic narratives, instead reflecting projections of belief, morality, and survival.