A Study on the International Promotion Strategy of “The Wandering Earth” as a “Chinese Story”

This paper proposes a trinity approach of “documentary-text-material” for the cross-cultural dissemination of The Wandering Earth. At the documentary level, guided by the concept of “cultural discounting/cultural proximity,” it advocates reducing cross-contextual comprehension friction through genre grammar and universal emotions (“disaster-mission-team-sacrifice”). At the textual level, adhering to the “global localization” principle of localized translation, it rewrites genre cues using recognizable discourses in the target language region while retaining moderate source identification to maintain cultural distinctiveness. At the field and material level, posters, trailers, setting compendiums, and teaching guides are treated as “quasi-texts.” These are deployed within spaces rich in interpretive resources—such as film festivals and universities—to facilitate initial meaning negotiation. Leveraging participatory cultural mechanisms, engineering marvels are transformed into retellable knowledge units, creating a ripple-like diffusion from core to periphery and fostering long-tail sedimentation in streaming media. Overall, the approach does not erase differences but transforms them into readability and dialogic potential, facilitating a smooth translation between “national narratives and global themes.” This provides a transferable promotional paradigm for Chinese sci-fi to achieve readability, dialogic engagement, and reusability across multilingual regions.