Sinification by greening: Politics, nature and ethnic borderlands in Maoist ecocinema

Abstract

Focusing on a fictional film, Spring in the Desert (Shamo de chuntian, 1975), and a documentary, Army's Reclamation and Battle Song (Junken zhan'ge, 1965), this essay explores how Chinese cinemas in Maoist era imagine nature in two ethnic borderlands, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. Unlike Western empires deforesting colonies, Han Chinese green the lands to sinicize ethnic minorities. I propose an analytical framework of ‘sinification by greening’ with three arguments intertwined. First, the success of the greening campaign is viewed as evidence of the communist's superiority and legitimized by orienting itself to emancipate the oppressed class within ethnic minorities and to serve the socialist construction nationwide. Second, the greening campaign helps establish the exotic communist rule in ethnic borderlands by degrading nomadic lifestyles and acculturating ethnic minorities 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 with a context of ethnic minorities can be used as a prism through which to discuss the dangerous liaison of acculturation and environmental alteration in China and to identify certain patterns of politicized environmental discourse in China that still lingers on today.

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