ABSTRACT
Focusing on a fiction film, Spring in the Desert (Shamo de chuntian, 1975), and a documentary, Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song (Junken zhan’ge, 1965), this chapter explores how Chinese cinemas during the Mao era imagine nature in two Chinese ethnic borderlands, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. Unlike western empires deforesting colonies, Han Chinese green the lands to sinicize ethnic minorities. Based on the notion of “sinification by greening,” this chapter proposes three intertwined arguments. First, the success of the greening campaign is viewed as evidence of the communist’s superiority and is legitimized by setting its goals to emancipate the oppressed class within ethnic minorities and to serve the socialist construction nationwide. Second, the greening campaign helps to establish the exotic communist rule in ethnic borderlands by degrading nomadic lifestyles and acculturating ethnic minorities in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang with new conceptions of nature. Finally, during the Maoist greening campaign, the environmental discourse dovetails with socialist revolutionary discourse. In these ways, ecocinema in Maoist China in the context of ethnic minorities becomes a perfect prism through which we can perceive the dangerous liaison of acculturation and environmental alteration in China that is distinct from the West, and identify certain patterns of politicized environmental discourse in China that still linger on today.
