What the Chinese Are Making of Avatar


As I have been speaking with my USC student Lifang He about her work on the fan cultures which have quickly grown up around Avatar in China, I’ve wondered what connections, if any, exist between these two efforts to promote the fantastical imagination in that country. Are the young men and women we read about here the offspring of Chu’s efforts? Are they connecting with western fan culture on line? This piece offers us some tantalizing glimpses into the many different ways Chinese fans have mobilized around and fantasized about James Cameron’s blockbuster.

The American press has been following the commercial success of Avatar in China primarily as a business issue — exploring what it might tell us about other opportunities for selling media in this country, using it to shadow Google’s turmoil in the country, and marginally exploring why China was pushing the film from many of the nation’s movie theaters. Yet, this piece takes us inside the world of Chinese Avatar fans, helping us to better understand what the film looks like from their perspective.

Avatar and Chinese Fan Culture

Lifang He





Collecting and Sharing Information


The planet Pandora draws most of the attention. Fans are very interested in the Pandora world because the movie only provides a glimpse of its ecology and culture. Fans established an online study group to learn the Na’vi language, planet, trees, customs, colors, lifestyle in Pandora etc. A fan bought an English version of Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora and shared the content with other fans (link). Some fans can’t understand English very well, so they are waiting for the Chinese version of the book. As one fan explained “no matter how expensive the book is, I still want to buy the Chinese version although my monthly salary is only 800 RMB (120USD) a month.”



Fans were also eager to explore all kinds of information from the production, back-story to the reception process. For example, they talked about the sex scene that was cut off from screen, explored the different versions of trailers, the couple’s relationship in the movie, and their stories in the future. Other interesting discussions included the best time to use the restroom during the movie. They indicated that it is better to go to the toilet when the movie was at 56 minutes so they won’t miss a lot of exciting moments.

Fans share the knowledge with all the members of Tieba community, circulating the information and inviting other members to participate in the discussion. As Pierre Levy wrote “no one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity” (Levy, 1998).

Fan Writing


Some fans also wrote a parallel story based on the Chinese current social issues. As a famous blogger, Chenpeng Li wrote, the story of how the alien Na’vi are pulled off their homeland by humans is similar to Chinese residents being forced to leave their homes and land by the Chinese government (Sina.com, 2010). Avatar is a great metaphor of nail house dwellers against big property developers. “Nail House” refers to home or buildings of people who refused to move when the property needs to be demolished by the government for development (Wiki, 2010). In Li’s blog, he wrote


Li regarded Jake as the leader who betrayed the Housing Demolition Office, referred Colonel Quarles as the chief city manager and the Na’vi people as the Chinese residents who are pulled off their land. The last scenario about Neytiri beating Colonel Quarles represents the extreme military power that was defeated by the Chinese mass residents.


UP provides the Chinese citizens with a new perspective toward house demolition. Chinese residential tenants only have the right to use the land for 70 years, and after 70 years the land use rights belong to the government and the houses are regarded as private owned property. Both the movie UP and Chinese government provided us a solution to cope with the house demolition. UP tells us to lift the house off the ground by the helium balloons; and the Chinese government tells us that don’t think too much because after 70 years, the houses will probably collapse” (Han, 2009).



Fans Creative Work


Vidding is another way for them to participate in the creation. Three kinds of videos will be shown here to showcase the vidding culture in China. The first one is a theme song vid, which remixes the video “I See You” and “My Heart Will Go On.” Fans find that the stories of two theme songs are very similar: both are love stories and the main actors in the two movies both died. For example, the lyrics of “My Heart Will Go On” has the words “I see you” that can match with the content of Avatar. Here is the video of “I See You.”Also fans made another version of Titanic with “I See You.”



Why fans are so enthusiastic?



Chinese youth are tired of Chinese serious mainstream film culture because Chinese films lack the creativity that American TV shows and movies have. Avatar created a dream and an ideal world that Chinese fans can’t have in reality. As a famous movie director Lu Chuan said, “Avatar made me realize that what we lack is not technology. I suddenly realized how far away our films are from simple beauty, crystal-clear purity and passionate dreams” (Sina.com, 2010).




China is in a transition period where old system and new system are colliding and they haven’t developed a very stable system yet. In the future, with political and social policy more and more open and transparent, there will be more freedom for movie production. It will be also be easier for the Hollywood filmmakers to promote their films and other media extensions.



Baidu (2010). Retrieved Jan. 20, 2010







Levy, Pierre (1998). Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace.


Nail House. Wikipedia. Retrieved Jan.20, 2010.



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  1. Dear Mr. Jenkins]

    Do you check your henry3@mit.edu yet?

    I emailed to this address because i couldn’t find your USC email.

  2. I found USC mail.

  3. Dear Lifang / Henry,

    The blog talks about 2 aspects – quality of the movie and its connect with the mass audience on the oppression (for lack of better word) of some locals. Would you ascribe more importance to any one particular aspect ?

    If we credit the success to its incredible portrayal of visual effects (the same reason it created a lot of buzz in so many nations), is the Chinese success any different from the reception ‘Avatar ‘ got worldwide?

  4. Henry Jenkins says:


    The point of this essay is not to explain WHY Avatar is popular in China. The film has been popular all over the world and in any case, that’s not a question that we can answer very directly. The core of this post, as the title suggest, is to explore what the Chinese have done with Avatar — we wanted to provide a glimpse into Chinese fan culture around the film and to see some of the specific conversations which have grown up around it. Some of those fan practices are global — though most of us know very little about what fans in China are doing. Some of them are very specific to the Chinese context. Lifang may have her own responses to your question, but from my point of view, I am far less interested in WHY it is popular than what activities its popularity has inspired.

  5. Lifang He says:

    Hi Kunal:

    I agree with Henry’s point here. My paper is mainly focused on Avatar’s impact on Chinese fan community and various fan activities, rather than explaining the movie’s success. It helps readers to understand how Chinese fans understand the movie and what they’ve done with the movie. It also gives readers an overview of the Chinese fan culture.


  6. Barbora says:

    Thank you for a very interesting account! I am working on a master’s thesis on science fiction fandom in mainland China at the moment, but haven’t had the time to look at Avatar yet.

    Fantasy literature seems to be really popular on the mainland, however, Western-style fantasy is quite a recent phenomenon and is sometimes distinguished from a much older Chinese fantasy tradition (I was actually told by (SF) fans that Western-style fantasy did not really become popular until LotR translations came along, which I understand happened in the early 2000s). Science fiction is an altogether different matter. Sf is indeed popular in the form of Hollywood blokcbusters, but the market for sf literature is not large (by China’s standards).

    Good luck with further research!


  7. I read that entire article and I must admit that I am impressed. He tried to do an amazing thing. English chinese translation