Thirty year old Chen Yanyu first heard about Star Wars as a university student when production for Revenge of the Sith arrived in her home town. The limestone karst hills of Guilin, in southern China, helped form the backdrop of Kashyyyk, the planet of the Wookiees. Now, in anticipation of the China release of The Force Awakens on January 9, she’s watching all of the Star Wars films for the first time, starting with Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
“I watched it first because it’s the newest one,” she says. “I didn’t want to start with the 1977 one because it’s too old.”
Asked which Star Wars characters she’s familiar with, she says, “Skywalker. He is the bad guy.”
On December 15, The Wall Street Journal published the article ‘New “Star Wars” Flick Is an Unfamiliar Force in China’. The Late Show With Steven Colbert picked up the story, quoting 27-year-old Beijinger Pan Chen, who said, “I can’t remember the plot at all. Is there a sword or something that can suddenly light up and turn off for some reason?”
Given the franchise’s lower profile here, it’s perhaps unsurprising that pre-sales for the film have been underwhelming, despite liberal use of the force known to marketers as promotion. To get Chinese audiences excited about The Force Awakens, distributors Disney recruited Chinese boy band star Lu Han (who introduces the Chinese trailer for The Force Awakens in the video above) to sing a track called “The Inner Force”, and placed 500 scaled down stormtrooper figurines on the steps of the Great Wall. They also signed a deal with tech company Tencent to stream all six of the previous Star Wars movies on its online platforms, including v.qq.com, and posed props and costumes in prominent shopping malls including Shanghai’s IAPM.
The reason that China isn’t as steeped in Star Wars lore as the rest of us is that the first film, Episode IV: A New Hope, came out in 1977, immediately after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when China was very much closed to the outside world. In 1980 a Chinese comic book guesstimated the plot, rendering Chewbacca as a chimp and Darth Vader as a triceratops-riding employee of the Kennedy Space Centre.
Pages scanned by researcher Maggie Greene from a Star Wars comic, or lianhuanhua, published in 1980
Chinese fans are far more familiar with (and forgiving of) George Lucas’s second trilogy, Episodes I, II and III, which Abrams ignored entirely in The Force Awakens after a collective cultural decision in the US to strike them from the Star Wars history. The Star Wars page on one of China’s most popular online encyclopaedias, Baidu Baike, features not Hamill, Fischer and Ford but Samuel L. Jackson and Ewan McGregor as “the main actors”.
Based on its first 7,123 ratings on social media site Douban Dianying, The Force Awakens has a lower rating (7.7/10) than every other Star Wars film, including the maligned Episode I: The Phantom Menace (8.0/10).
Ironically, while it didn’t have Chinese audiences in mind, the original Star Wars films borrowed heavily from Eastern cultures with themes that resonate here including the interconnectedness of living things (karma), an invisible force (qi), the need to balance light and dark (yin and yang), and a plot that sees a young talent train with a wise old master, something pulled straight from kung fu novels and flicks that are hugely popular in China. George Lucas has also acknowledged a debt to Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa’s film The Hidden Fortress.
The challenge for promoting The Force Awakens in China is that its chief theme is Star Wars itself.
Zheng Yi, a 26-year-old project manager living in Shanghai, hadn’t watched any of the Star Wars films when we spoke to her. “I first heard about Star Wars from The Big Bang Theory,” she says. “Sheldon was crazy about it.”
After watching her first ever Star Wars film, Attack of the Clones, Zheng said she “enjoyed all the different creatures. I really liked Master Yoda. He’s very wise. Some things he said are really Taoist.”
Chen chimed in with her own appraisal of the character: “Don’t you think he looks like [Alibaba CEO] Jack Ma?”
This article was originally posted on Flamingo’s online magazine Lens