ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the sociopolitical context that conditions the emergence of the Chinese Western and its cross-fertilization with ecocinema. Tracing the evolution of the “west” in Chinese literature and film, the author argues that for the Western to be possible in China, the landscape has to be de-culturalized and de-nationalized and a social context has to be comparable to that of nineteenth-century America. As manifested in Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land, a primary example of the contemporary Chinese Western, the de-culturalization of landscape marks a new stage of national imagination associated with the rediscovery of the west. However, rather than embodying human adventures advancing civilization, this newly discovered “west” displays a post-national nature, an ecological consciousness that corresponds with the moral crisis in post-socialist China. The combination of ecocinema and Western genre therefore unleashes an eco-Western phenomenon that not only deterritorializes the national boundary, but also questions the classical Western’s anthropocentric assumption of civilization and progress.
