Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change [1st ed.] 978-981-13-6684-0;978-981-13-6685-7

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
Introduction: Impoverishing Anthropocene with Chinese Characteristics (Kwai-Cheung Lo)....Pages 1-17
Front Matter ....Pages 19-19
The World Besieged by Waste: On Garbage, Recycling, and Sublimation (Carlos Rojas)....Pages 21-36
The Environment and Social Justice in Chinese Documentaries: Crisis or Hope? (Jessica Yeung)....Pages 37-55
Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging Nature in Hong Kong Literature (Enoch Yee-Lok Tam)....Pages 57-79
Front Matter ....Pages 81-81
The Eternal Return of Mythology: The White (Green) Snake Legend in Maoist China and Colonial Hong Kong (Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng)....Pages 83-107
Magic Realism as a Critical Response to the Anthropocene (Wai-Ping Yau)....Pages 109-129
Expansionist Ethnic Ecology: On Reading Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (Howard Y. F. Choy)....Pages 131-149
Too Inhuman to Die; Too Ethereal to Become a Ghost: Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts (Victor Fan)....Pages 151-175
Front Matter ....Pages 177-177
The “Nature” of Ethnic Tensions: Under the Flaming Mountains as Xinjiang’s First Novel (Pang Laikwan)....Pages 179-201
“Original Ecology” Style of China’s Minority Performing Arts: Examples from Uyghur Music (Chuen-Fung Wong)....Pages 203-223
Animals, Ethnic Minorities, and Ecological Concerns in Chinese Digital Cinema (Kwai-Cheung Lo)....Pages 225-248
Pristine Tibet? The Anthropocene and Brand Tibet in Chinese Cinema (Chris Berry)....Pages 249-273
Conclusion (Jessica Yeung)....Pages 275-277
Back Matter ....Pages 279-281

Citation preview

Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change

Edited by Kwai-Cheung Lo Jessica Yeung

Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene

Kwai-Cheung Lo  •  Jessica Yeung Editors

Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change

Editors Kwai-Cheung Lo Department of Humanities and Creative Writing Hong Kong Baptist University Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Jessica Yeung Hong Kong Baptist University Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

ISBN 978-981-13-6684-0    ISBN 978-981-13-6685-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935191 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Xinjiang image by Enoch Cheung This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This volume originates from a workshop on “Anthropocene and Contemporary Chinese Cultures” that was held at Hong Kong Baptist University in January 2018. Most of the contributors presented papers in the workshop. In preparing this volume, we received support from various people and organizations. We express our gratitude to Sara Crowley-­ Vigneau of Palgrave Macmillan, who made this project possible. We acknowledge the generous support of the Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. The editing of these chapters also benefited greatly from the copy-editing by Michael Luongo, technical assistance of Chester Chan, editorial assistance of Connie Li, and assistance with the references of Angel Jiang and the Tibetan names of  Tsemdo.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Impoverishing Anthropocene with Chinese Characteristics  1 Kwai-Cheung Lo Part I Disposing and Recurring  19 2 The World Besieged by Waste: On Garbage, Recycling, and Sublimation 21 Carlos Rojas 3 The Environment and Social Justice in Chinese Documentaries: Crisis or Hope? 37 Jessica Yeung 4 Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging Nature in Hong Kong Literature 57 Enoch Yee-Lok Tam Part II Nonhuman and Mythic Spectres  81 5 The Eternal Return of Mythology: The White (Green) Snake Legend in Maoist China and Colonial Hong Kong 83 Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng vii

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Contents

6 Magic Realism as a Critical Response to the Anthropocene109 Wai-Ping Yau 7 Expansionist Ethnic Ecology: On Reading Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem131 Howard Y. F. Choy 8 Too Inhuman to Die; Too Ethereal to Become a Ghost: Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts151 Victor Fan Part III Ethnicity and Im-purity 177 9 The “Nature” of Ethnic Tensions: Under the Flaming Mountains as Xinjiang’s First Novel179 Laikwan Pang 10 “Original Ecology” Style of China’s Minority Performing Arts: Examples from Uyghur Music203 Chuen-Fung Wong 11 Animals, Ethnic Minorities, and Ecological Concerns in Chinese Digital Cinema225 Kwai-Cheung Lo 12 Pristine Tibet? The Anthropocene and Brand Tibet in Chinese Cinema249 Chris Berry 13 Conclusion275 Jessica Yeung Index

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Notes on Contributors

Chris Berry  is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. His primary publications include China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (2006, with Mary Farquhar); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (2004); and Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017, co-edited with Luke Robinson). His “Pema Tseden and the Tibetan Road Movie: Space and Identity Beyond the ‘Minority Nationality Film’” appeared in Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10, no. 2 (2016). Howard Y. F. Choy  is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University, and is the author of Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979–1997 (2008), and the assistant author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism (2005). He is also the editor of Discourses of Disease: Writing Illness, the Mind and the Body in Modern China (2016), and Selected Essays by Liu Zaifu (forthcoming). Victor  Fan  is a senior lecturer at the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, and Film Consultant of Chinese Visual Festival. Author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (2015) and Extraterritoriality: Politics in Hong Kong Cinema (forthcoming in 2019), he has also published articles in journals including World Picture Journal, Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, Film History, Comparative Literature and Culture, and other edited volumes.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Kwai-Cheung  Lo  a professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, and Director of Creative and Professional Writing Program at Hong Kong Baptist University, is the author of Excess and Masculinity in Asian Cultural Productions (2010), and Chinese Face/Off: The Transnational Popular Culture of Hong Kong (2005), and the editor of a Chinese-language anthology entitled Re-Sighting Asia: Deconstruction and Reinvention in the Global Era (2014). Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng  is an associate professor in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University, and is the author of The Lost Geopoetic Horizon of Li Jieren: The Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China (2015), and dozens of articles in journals and essay collections on film adaptation, censorship and Chinese literature. Laikwan Pang  is a professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is the author of The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (2017), Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and Intellectual Property Rights Offenses (2012), The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (2007), Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (2006), and Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–37 (2002). Carlos Rojas  is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He is the author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China (2015), The Great Wall: A Cultural History (2010), and The Naked Gaze: Reflection on Chinese Modernity (2008). The books he edited include Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (2007, with David Der-wei Wang), Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (2008, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (2013, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (2016, with Andrea Bachner), and Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China (2016, with Ralph Litzinger). Enoch Yee-Lok Tam  is a lecturer in the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University. His recently presented papers include “Revisit Hong Kong ‘Local’ Novels: Chan Koonchung, Wong Bik-wan and Hon Lai-chu as Examples.” He is also the author of three novels in Chinese, translator of academic books in film studies, and the editor of literary magazine Fleurs des lettres and film website Cinezen.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Chuen-Fung  Wong is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Macalester College. He is a musicologist specialized in Uyghur and Central Asian music, and the author of numerous articles about the modern performance of traditional Uyghur music in northwest China, particularly in relation to the rising Chinese and Uyghur nationalisms in the twentieth century and beyond. Wai-Ping Yau  is Associate Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University. Yau has published numerous articles on Hong Kong and Chinese film and literature, including works by Stanley Kwan, Wong Kar-­ wai, Pema Tseden and Tashi Dawa. He is also a translator of literary works by writers including Hong Kong’s Dung Kai-cheung. Jessica Yeung  Associate Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University, is author of Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writings as Cultural Translation (2008) and The Anarchist Theatre of the Hong Kong Dramatist Augustine Mok (2019, in Chinese).

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2

Rong’s traumatic experience is retold as a fairy tale enacted by his daughter with stuffed animals and plastic figurines 164 A photojournalistic image of a family of abandoned children 165 Rong wakes up from his dream 167 Jalimah and Sabir dancing, with Sun Mei also dancing in the background189 The illustration opening Chapter 2 191 Dolan musicians performing at Tanz- und Folkfest Rudolstadt 2012. The Dolan instruments played by musicians sitting at the center of the ensemble are, from left to right, rawap (plucked lute), qanun (plucked zither), and ghéjek (spike fiddle). (Photo by the author on 8 July 2012) 208 Weli is seen visiting the mazar of Sadir Palwan in the music video of “Ili Boyliri” 215 Weli is seen standing on the Ili River bank in the music video of “Ili Boyliri” 216 The sheep attempts to cross the barbed wire in Old Dog238 Cloud in the shape of wolf in Wolf Totem239

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List of Tables

Table 12.1 Table 12.2

Feature films directed by Pema Tseden and Sonthar Gyal A list of some Chinese film productions set in Tibetan areas of the PRC and made since 2000 by non-Tibetan directors

253 254

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Impoverishing Anthropocene with Chinese Characteristics Kwai-Cheung Lo

A “fake news” story circulated worldwide some years ago about how China reacted to the almost incurable smog problem in Beijing. It was reported that since the residents in the capital could no longer see daybreak due to heavy pollution, a giant TV screen had been installed on Tiananmen Square to show fake sunrises. The story, which had originated from the U.K.-based Daily Mail, rapidly went viral among major Western media outlets. Global audiences were “shocked” and amused to learn how the Chinese adapted to the weather situation with a unique method, given that China has been notorious as the world’s leading manufacturing centre of fakes, pirate goods, and “shanzhai” (counterfeit) cultures. Smog in large Chinese metropolitan areas became so severe that it earned a horrifying title—“airpocalypse”—a phenomenon which affected the lives of half a billion people. Although the Chinese authorities ridiculously attempted to categorize smog as a “meteorological disaster,” like a hurricane, drought, or tornado, rather than an outcome of industrial pollution and energy consumption, the reportage of using a sunrise onscreen as a sur-

K.-C. Lo (*) Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_1

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rogate for the real one was simply untrue. In truth, the sunrise did appear on the screen for less than 10 seconds at a time, as it was a video clip of a tourism advertisement for Shandong province. The advertisement played—no matter how bad the pollution was. The photographer had simply snapped the picture at the moment when the sunrise was shown on the screen on a day when pollution had been high. The photo was credited to ChinaFotoPress via Getty Image, and it was not taken by a Daily Mail reporter. It is unclear why major international media did not verify the often repeated story from the Daily Mail, which is “one of the least reputable news sources in the U.K.”1 Orientalist prejudice, the shock factor of exotic China, or the threat of China’s environmental problems could all be reasons for credulously spreading a false story, revealing the shock reaction or the world’s fear of China’s rapid growth. However, one way to deal with shock is to pretend that the shock simply does not exist. Ignore it and live one’s normal life as usual. As there is hardly any escape from poisoned air, the Chinese regime eventually stopped denying the problem, but began to “normalize” it as some understandable hazard which is expected to happen regularly and thus is “manageable” and tolerable. Ironically, it may be a confrontation with the ecological crisis without confronting it. In the usual rhetoric of Chinese officials, even an ecological crisis must work under socialism with Chinese characteristics to serve economic development, social stability, and national unity. The paradox is not just of China’s situation alone. The fear of China and China’s fear of its own unruly development might have already spilled over to the entire world. In the big picture, the shock China’s rise brought to the world has already led to a collision between the established orders and the emerging disruptive forces in the larger domains of economy, politics, and culture. Is China’s rise an alternative to world-scale capitalist expansionism? Or, is Chinese development merely an integral part of the current driving engine to prolong the prevailing structures and coordinates? As the historical development of capitalism has demonstrated that the dominant system was centred on a distinct hegemonic Western power, is there any possibility that the “China model,” if such a thing exists, can produce a different future for humanity or merely give rise to an even more ruthless system for the privileges of the powerful elite class that perpetuates global inequality? Whether China is able to offer a non-­exploitative economy or a different mode of production aiming for the well-being of all kinds in the future remains undetermined; we may perhaps examine if the fast-developing nation aspires to any alternative understanding of the relation between economic growth and the environment. Meanwhile, the

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body, the Earth, and its milieu, may have become altered, receiving such a rapid and powerful jolt of new energy in its irreversible destructive power of exploiting natural resources. Still, the geological changes of the Earth are probably not just the result of shock-wave acceleration within several decades from the late twentieth century to the present. Without any doubt, one of the agents of geological changes is the presence of the human. Indeed, all organisms, not merely human, always change their surrounding environment. For thousands of years, human beings have already undergone a process of agricultural expansion that has constituted a broad zone of farming folks covering a large surface of the Earth across different continents. The term “Anthropocene” refers to the major transformation of the Earth system from the Holocene, beginning 11,700 years ago, to a warmer planet becoming less inhabitable for human beings. Human activities, from the ancient sedentary agricultural civilization to the extensive capitalist industrialization processes, have significantly changed the ecosystem. The impacts of human activities may even exceed the effects of nonhuman forces, leading to the consequence of climate change and the possible sixth mass extinction. If the blame of the Anthropocene does not just fall on the shoulders of the Western capitalist nations since their Industrial Revolution and global colonization from the eighteenth century onwards, the long course of China’s history, that of the Han Chinese agrarian populations in particular, is also responsible for the current environmental crisis. Studies have demonstrated that Han Chinese peasants and ruling elites throughout history have relentlessly exploited natural resources through expanding towards and integrating the borderlands in the interest of improving human benefits, and drove other modes of production—including nomadic pastoralism, hunting, forestry, fishing, and upland farming—to the margins.2 By no means was China’s agrarian system a natural product, but instead an outcome of human action and dynamic alliance between Han farmers and the state over thousands of years in order to enhance state control and advance popular welfare, regardless of factors such as eliminating biodiversity, degrading soils, polluting water sources, and other mass-scale ecological consequences. In light of such environmental degradation in the longue durée, the various forms of pollution in relation to air, water, soil, and the scourge of electronic waste are not necessarily new issues but simply mounting pressures faced by contemporary China. China under the leadership of Xi Jinping has vowed, in its nineteenth party congress in late 2017, to play the leading role in preserving the planet for the future in a context against which the United States under

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the President Donald Trump would cease all participation in the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation.3 Although China by far is the largest force in global clean energy development and its state-owned enterprises are actively looking abroad for new energy investment opportunities, its “Belt and Road” Initiative is also backing many coal-fired power plants in the countries joining the project. Such ambitious Eurasian development campaigns will definitely generate new environmental risks across continents, especially in countries with poor records of environmental governance, such as many former Soviet republics. When China launches its new “ecological civilization” crusade by elevating its environmental standard and tightens its practice of accepting foreign trash to force many developed countries to face their own waste problems,4 China’s partners of the Belt and Road Initiative in their collaborative infrastructure projects could become the pollution dumping ground for the Chinese state-owned enterprises. Some critics have sharply pointed out that China’s green reforms “may be achieved partly through the export of polluting industries and the degradation of natural resources in countries which find themselves at the lower, and therefore more vulnerable, positions of the global production chain.”5 If it really happens, an “ecologically civilized” China would not be different from the industrial West that has shipped their waste product to the Global South in the past. Taking action on ­climate change may mean a restructuring of global power,6 which is closely tied to China’s rise and the general resistance from the dominant nations in the world system, thus expectedly generating new waves of political struggles, if not military conflicts. While China, like many developed nations, is responsible for the world’s destruction due to the fast expansion of mankind in numbers and per capita exploitation of the Earth’s resources, can the post-socialist country also become a redeeming agent, other than being a victim and a perpetrator? However, its history of rapid economic development over the last thirty years has not fully convinced the world that the Chinese state and its people have respected naturally imposed resource constraints and learned how to live sustainably in the environment they share with other beings. As the world’s leading greenhouse gas emission and pollution producer, China’s ecological footprints are globally visible and damaging. The scale of China’s rise is unprecedented, and so are its impacts on the global environment. China’s economic growth has been driving unparalleled demand for resources that may lead to scarcity, extinction of other species, and skyrocketing commodity prices.7 Other than the relatively

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indirect or unintended environmental effects China has made on the whole world, the illiberal nation-state under Xi’s iron-fist governance is now becoming more confident in shaping international norms and institutions by asserting its presence on the global stage as well as exporting its experiences and political values to other countries. But the Chinese authoritarian polity has not yet shown to the world any determination to overhaul the global imposition of neoliberalism and transform the status quo of inequality, let alone offering any compelling vision to curb the environmental or weather shocks in order to build a better world for all sentient beings without depending on the rise of nationalist sentiments and military rivalry. As mentioned earlier, in terms of its long history, China could be considered as one of the geneses of the Anthropocene since the country, before the advent of Western industrialization, had already been part of a basic global process of human ecosystem domination. Although there is no lack of traditional Chinese philosophy and cosmology on promoting humans’ harmonious relationship with nature, the increasing popular awareness about the crisis of global warming only emerged in the late twentieth century, when China began to grow speedily, while Chinese society has already been hit hard by the consequences of environmental pollution and the warming planet. Undoubtedly, the Chinese economy has developed at an incomparably high rate over the last three decades, but the terrible price China’s rapid growth has paid is not only the environment’s devastation, but also the freedom of its people. While the living standard in coastal provinces has greatly improved because of rapid development, a large section of its population—especially peasants, migrant workers, ethnic groups, and the lumpenproletariats—are still stuck with low income levels and low productivity. The wealth generated from the economic growth since the post-­Mao reform of the 1980s has never been evenly distributed. The accompanied problems such as corruption, cronyism, and other social injustices only intensify wealth inequality and social stratification. Social discontent and unrest in the forms of strikes, demonstrations, and protests have become a chronic situation in today’s China, although the government has concealed the real figures of these incidents. Chinese authorities, since Xi’s leadership in particular, may have arrived at a general consensus that outright suppression of social discontents and further development for higher-value economy are the only effective means to cope with the alarming instability and the existential threat to the regime. China’s past success has benefited from the availability of a highly disci-

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plined and cheap labour force. In a severely competitive global setting, international capital will impatiently leave in the face of rising workers’ demands and the availability of other cheaper options elsewhere. Intense exploitation of the workforce constitutes a significant pillar of China’s export-led growth. As a result, the power of Chinese workers has been systematically undermined by the government. The precarious conditions of the working class are perpetuated by the centralized, top-down system that aims for continuous economic achievement. The prospectus for freedom, demand for labour rights and other political rights, and higher degree of democratization or autonomy is hence curtailed. Legacies of Chinese Communism put great emphasis on re-centring human beings as a life-changing agency while suppressing humanity and the desire for freedom in the pursuit of the long-term nationalist and revolutionary causes. Maoist advocacy of subjugating human nature went parallel with an equally devastating conquest of the natural world under the drive for utopian urgency of drastic developmentalist ideology, with the result of silencing any rational critiques, ­pushing forward radical transformation of landscapes, imposing singular schemes on various kinds of regions, and sending millions of Han settlers to develop frontier “wastelands.”8 On the domestic front, the Chinese authoritarian government, which systematically restructures its security apparatus for “stability maintenance” (weiwen 維穩), seems to be very responsive to the public dissatisfaction with the state of environment (as expressed through petitions, protests, and social conflicts), but the efforts it has made appear to only aim at achieving short-term benefits in order to quickly repress these unrests.9 China’s adaptive governance for managing complicated environmental challenges has given an impression that the regime appropriates the neoliberal framework of marketization to handle ecological problems. Although privatization and market institutions have been the significant factors for China’s urban growth—because of which many of its people were dispossessed of lands, jobs, and political rights and left in a precarious situation—neoliberalism may not be the keyword to understand its environmental governance. Instead, China’s non-market-oriented and non-­ democratic approach to the ecosystem is more associated with a form of “environmental authoritarianism.”10 The new ecological civilization paradigm promoted by the officials apparently is a top-down imaginary for the nation’s future set by authoritative standards as a means to contain discontents in the name of science management and social stability, though some space may have been opened up for other environmental agencies. There

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have been debates on whether authoritarian regimes are more effective in the limited time frame available than their electorally responsive democratic counterparts (mainly referring to Western countries) in addressing ecological challenges since authoritarian governments are more capable of implementing major reforms without wide consultation and common consensus. Presumably, the ruling elite in China is not directly accountable to the general public, and neither would it be constrained by the governed population in its actions. However, the policy-making process and power structure in China are far more complex than the label “authoritarianism” could reveal. The matrix of its power relations is enmeshed with factionalism, local politics, in-group rivalries, and severe competition over conflicting missions, ethos, and resource allocation—a system deemed by some scholars as “fragmented authoritarianism” or “consultative authoritarianism.”11 By no means is China a stable country with an authoritarian regime that can guarantee social harmony and keep the destructive and antagonistic nature of capitalist dynamics in check. Without the participation of the public in policy-making process and implementation, it is doubtful if the Chinese authoritarian state, being occasionally responsive and consultative but at times fragmented in realizing its interests in various situations, can alone produce the ideal optimal outcomes in the face of severe environmental challenges. But what does public participation in ecological issues mean in the Chinese context? Civil society in China remains tightly controlled and monitored by the authorities. The growing bourgeois class has had a very small role to play so far in terms of pressing for any political liberalization. As a result, the discourse on climate change is still largely confined to the hands of the state agencies. The Anthropocene, as the climate and environmental crisis, could be understood also as a crisis of culture since it stretches people’s capabilities to imagine and think of the impending catastrophe and its possible solutions.12 The actual and potential impacts a rapidly deteriorating environment could bring to social and political life in China resonate not only in the mainstream society but also at its peripheral borderlands, given that the Han-dominated Chinese state is a multi-ethnic nation with 55 officially recognized non-Han minorities primarily populated in many nature reserves and ecologically vulnerable areas. But China’s ethnic regions may serve as one of the best examples to demonstrate how social, economic, and political conflicts that environmental problems both result from and precipitate are distributed unevenly, with the risks falling disproportionally on the ethnic poor and their impoverished communities, in line with the

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sharpened social, economic, and political inequalities in a multi-ethnic nation. Environmental injustice and inequity does not only take place at transnational and global levels, but also within a single nation-state with structural discrimination. When the regime and its propagandist media are trumpeting the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and the aspiration to the Chinese Dream in support of the developmentalist narrative, the state-­ led extractive industries and other businesses have been inflicting on the ethnic communities for decades an invisible kind of “slow violence”13— attritional, incremental, slow-moving environmental damage—that harms peoples and ecosystems in the borderlands through the activities of mining, logging, farming, dam construction, military operation, migration, nature preservation, and resettlement as well as tourism. The structural violence instituted by alien rule-cum-exploitation in China’s peripheries has even been glossed as the gratitude or gift owed by the local ethnic people for the Chinese civilizing mission. Aiming for political stability and integration of the ethnic lands into the Chinese nation-state, the coercive state-subsidized development projects are meant to bring huge benefits and improvements that the “backward” ethnic communities have to accept and return with loyalty, no matter how the flawed development policies may eradicate ethnic traditional practices that are more ecologically sustainable, and intensify local discontents and inter-ethnic tensions.14 It is widely believed that only major structural change, rather than sheer individual efforts, can handle the imminent crisis on such a colossal scale. Environmental issues may create the possibility to narrow down the huge gap between the Han and the ethnic minorities, and generate a new world of meaning and value for both to learn and comprehend. As there may not be any visible sign showing that structural transformation of the world is looming on the horizon, individual consciousness and social conscience even increasingly become a touchstone for producing collective ­movements, although neoliberals would be happy to see that any measure against the crisis is left to the individual endeavour only. While crisis would blast people out of their mind, make them disoriented, and make them vulnerable to be manipulated by authorities, shock could also urge people to think, resist, get stronger, and change.15 Literature, arts, film, and other cultural productions would have the mission to cultivate individual conscience and a symbiotic view of life in order to produce new possibilities for collective action. To what extent can the Anthropocene capture the imagination of Chinese-language artists, filmmakers, and writers? Are they inspired by or

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getting suspicious of such proposed geological periodization based upon Western epistemologies and experiences? Can literature and arts in China enable a situation to disrupt the established order of thought and produce some new possibilities of understanding and acting? Rather than inspiring action and new socio-political possibilities, will they only leave people with the feeling of helplessness, frustration, and the sense of being defeated in face of the relentless forces? If arts and literature about the environment are critical practices, can they provide new openings for thoughts and actions, or do they paradoxically close down any possibilities of imagining and constituting the world differently? How far can the critical perspective of arts and literature avoid becoming a judgemental critique or a conventional mode of thinking in which “difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude”?16 How can they possibly enact a situation that is able to affect its participants, readers, or audiences, and by doing so, to generate new ideas, new power relations, and new possibilities among the stakeholders for composing different socio-­ ecological realms? The new epistemological and ontological questions brought forth by the Anthropocene have challenged the dichotomy of nature and culture, and destabilized the traditional ground upon which conventional critiques of environment or preservation calls for restoring the nature lie. Under the notion of Anthropocene, there is no longer a nature that stands outside human intervention and impact, while humanity has been inflated to be a geological agent at a global scale to annihilate their own living milieu. Not only does nature become something without perceived pristine essence, nature is always more than what we imagine as being timeless and ordered, but is turned out to become some proliferated natures perpetually marked by historical human activities and continuously in flux. In this sense, nature and humanity are not some pure things in-itself independent of each other but, rather, dependent on their relations to each other. This edited book will bring multi-disciplinary lenses to examine China’s role and its cultural productions in the process of environmental destruction. Contributors study from different perspectives how various cultural media play significant roles in shaping, reproducing, and transforming Chinese subject formation in relation to the changing ecological conditions. By closely analysing two documentaries and a novel about the waste problems in China, Carlos Rojas contemplates how garbage disposed on the city’s peripheries, in order to be kept out of one’s sight and mind,

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parallels the boundary construction of one’s identity, which is a mechanism of differentiating our human world from that of the unwelcomed other. But dialectically, as Rojas points out, refuse could also be fetishized as the recyclable in the chain of consumption and disposal. The abject object of disgust and revulsion, in our naïve belief about the actually complicated process of recycling, can transform into an object of beauty and desire. As if the documentaries discussed in the chapter have attempted to transform the filthy garbage into an artwork of aesthetic value, our view about the irreversible damage caused by the Anthropocene also gives rise to a fantasy that the environment may have its boundless potential and capacity to regenerate itself. Such blind faith in the nature’s (re-)cycling power may resonate with the reality that China has been the world’s factory that produces most of the consumer goods as well as the world’s recycling centre that receives the most foreign garbage. Although many independent Chinese documentaries have been highly regarded for their investigative approach and progressive social critique, Jessica Yeung goes against the grain by analysing how the environmental concerns expressed in a range of documentaries are not really an altruistic awareness about well-being for all, but simply the anxiety of future impossibility of exploitation of nature for the use of the Chinese people, and placing mankind in a higher hierarchical position over other creatures being affected by environmental factors. When these documentaries touch on the environmental issues in relation to ethnic minorities, such as overexploitation of natural resources and disruption of the ecological equilibrium in the ethnic regions, in Yeung’s critique, they generally maintain a conservative political position for upholding state sovereignty and fail to do justice to the ethnic communities. While new film law has been recently implemented to further quash any challenging voices, Yeung still finds some documentaries are able to espouse sceptical views towards the existing approach to nature and to embrace nonhuman creatures for environmental justice, thus enhancing—rather than mutually excluding—aesthetics and social critique. Rethinking one’s relation with nature and seeking a different kind of engagement with the Earth, as Enoch Tam’s chapter tries to underscore, also manifests in the literary works of some Hong Kong writers. Unlike the writers migrating from mainland China, who depict nature as a nostalgic symbol for their lost home, Hong Kong writers such as Wu Xubin, Xi Xi, or Dung Kai-cheung, in the face of large-scale urbanization of their hometowns, have to develop a new understanding of their relation with nature, dwell in such environments with a reshaped awareness

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of the interdependency between human and nature, and even go so far to re-create an imaginary landscape for their recreational or rejuvenating purpose. The Chinese shock of the Anthropocene may be therapeutic in the sense that alternative aesthetics and consciousness could emerge from the cultural productions to look at nature and human in different ways, which would have the capacity to solicit action from the bottom-up. Kenny Ng traces the historical developments of myth criticism in the West and changing adaptations of the White Snake mythology in China to reflect on the roles human beings have played in their relations with the biosphere. Interpreting myth is not only tied to one’s own psyche and social contexts, but it also aspires to re-examine the meanings of ethics, justice, and happiness in a world cohabited by both human and nonhuman. With specific reference to the Cultural Revolution backdrop appropriated in Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee’s novel Green Snake and Tsui Hark’s filmic adaptation, Ng discusses how the Maoist political attempt to master nature and human contradictorily generates the rekindled interests in mythology and fantasy through which what it means to be human has been rethought, particularly in its relation to the imaginary reincarnation of animal in human form. In similar fashion, Wai-Ping Yau looks at the magic realist literature by Han and non-Han writers, including Han Shaogong, Mo Yan, and Tashi Dawa, to understand how China’s anthropogenic modernization, that is, developmentalism propagated by the Chinese Communist Party as a national cause, has been contested through fantasy narratives, marvellous articulations, and surreal elements with the portrayal of pre-modern practices. Yet, the linear progress promoted by the state-led modernization has been challenged and subverted by the marvellous narrative that works in circular movements and disrupts any coherent structure. In face of the pressing forces of modernization, the ethnic writer goes even further than the Han counterpart to turn magic realism into a postcolonial discourse in order to produce a plurality of selves and to open up an alternative future with a heightened sense of reflective agency. In connection to the communist and nationalist endeavour to dominate nature, Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem, as scrutinized by Howard Choy, calls for a re-learning from wild nature, primarily for the purpose of national re-strengthening in the sense that peasant mentality has to be nomadized and Han culture must be Mongolianized. While carrying the message of environmental preservation and sustainable development, the controversial bestseller, Choy observes, also promotes an expansionist

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worldview for the rights of the fittest race. The cult of the Mongolian animalistic spirit actually is the re-enactment of colonizing the ethnic other and the re-assertion of ecological fascism with market law as its logic to further marginalize ethnic groups for the benefits of the nation. The stock image of the Han peasant as peaceful sheep in Wolf Totem indeed covers up the aggressive history of the Chinese imperial era and ignore the current expansionist Belt and Road Initiative aimed for China’s global domination. China’s rapid development has rattled the community structure of numerous ethnic groups with the huge influx of rural labourers into urban areas, resulting in many left-behind children without appropriate parental care and love. Victor Fan offers a critical account of a docu-­ drama that portrays a group suicide of some ethnic left-behind children in Guizhou to question the issues of humanity and subjectivity. Right from the beginning, Fan aptly states that political power is instantiated by actively dehumanizing others who are unwanted by the ruling class, and such dehumanization is always accompanied by the bankruptcy of trust in the interdependency between photogenic reality, its authenticity and credibility. Rong Guang Rong’s film Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts discussed in Fan’s chapter precisely witnesses the impertinent dehumanization of ethnic minorities whose existence is seen by the authority as too ghostly to even be allowed to leave a trace on the image. In order to avoid police surveillance over the truth claims of the children’s suicides, the filmmaker has to remake the documentary as some mysterious drama so as to restore their humanity and leave imprints of their existence. Fan reminds us that though the Anthropocene may locate the human as the central agent who has the power to violate nature, it is the technics that constantly redefines what it means to be human, and the very concept of humanity is closely tied to a dehumanization process under the mechanism of neoliberalism. Ethnic minority is a recurring subject in our contributors’ analyses of the Chinese reaction to the Anthropocene. Many of these chapters draw our attention to the transformations happening in the marginalized existence of the ethnic minority communities in multi-ethnic China. However, the non-Han ethnic groups are generally treated as the others, ready to be disposed, dehumanized, and spectralized in the violent process of Chinese development that drastically transforms nature. Laikwan Pang examines how the ethnic tensions between the Han and the Uyghur in Xinjiang—as described in Uyghur writer Qeyum Turdi’s novel, Under the Faming Mountains—could be sublimated, under the political guidance, to form

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their united effort in order to conquer nature by overcoming a drought problem and managing water shortages in the Cultural Revolution background. But such inter-ethnic joint force remains more a fiction, a political blueprint single-handedly drawn by the Han regime. In her analysis, Han romanticization of Uyghur Xinjiang—and all other ethnic minorities in China in this regard—as the spiritual homeland of purity and harmony with nature, is always a constant in the cultural history of the People’s Republic of China. From the Han’s perspective, to reform and change the harsh environment is parallel to converting the ethnic Uyghurs by diverting their passions and taming their animality for nation-building under the Maoist ideology of subduing nature for political use. The Maoist projection in the Uyghur novel manifests in a mission in the scale of “Yu Gong moving the mountains” to force the water or nature, even if it may have its own agency, to comply with the human will in order to achieve the national development project. While depriving the ethnic people of any agency capacity in response to the environmental deterioration, there emerges an ongoing craze for “original ecology” (yuan shengtai 原生態), beginning from the turn of the twenty-first century in mainland China, which reveals widespread Chinese anguish over rapid traditional culture loss and ecological degradation, and exhibits in the enthusiasm with intangible cultural heritage protection and obsessions with cultural authenticity. The “original ecology” vogue almost fully overlaps the general projection of Chinese consumers over the ethnic minority cultures, which are supposed to be bestowed with a sense of innocence and assumed connection to the natural world. Offering us a comprehensive and detailed depiction of the development of “original ecology” style, Chuen-Fung Wong argues how pre-modern and folk music practices, which started the “original ecology” style, should not only be grasped in an environmentalist frame but also embedded with national connotation, as the notion of “original ecology” style in Uyghur Dolan music or Ili folk singing is more a discursive trope than actual practices meant to cater to the new exotic tastes of middle-class Han Chinese urbanites, and is characterized as authentic, uncontaminated, and indigenous “Chinese-ness” for the global music market in the new century. Although Uyghur musicians can legitimately sing to non-Uyghur audiences in Uyghur languages, in a politically stringent environment, the use of minority languages in the region has greatly been minimized. Resonating with the critique of “original ecology,” in my own chapter, I tell the story of how the animal issue has been appropriated in eco-­

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politics in relation to the ethnic borderlands by studying several eco-films made by Western, Han, and ethnic directors. Becoming-animal is understood as a subtle form of resistance that pushes politics beyond its anthropocentric limits and opens up another space that may elude the tight control of state apparatus. I also argue that ecological problems mean more than toxicity and waste, but the transformation of spatio-temporal experiences brought by digital technology, such as digital film, could be equally influential in the new ecosystem under the Anthropocene. The digital operation may have the potential to shed new light on ecological politics from a non-anthropocentric vision. Meanwhile, the ethnic products for their symbolic value of being authentic, pristine, and unpolluted have become a big hype in China’s consumer market. Chris Berry questions the current Brand Tibet discourse by examining related cultural products, ranging from novels and films to bottled water and canned air, in order to deconstruct the self-other dichotomy and examine the exotic consumption prevailing in orientalist fantasies. The Chinese obsession with pure pristine Tibet as an imagined zone of exception free from industrial pollution and human intervention constitutes an obstacle to engaging with the Anthropocene that presumes there is no pristine space left on Earth. Berry criticizes that the alleged idealization of Tibet as “pure land” is simply a disavowal or denial of any coeval status upheld by the concept of the Anthropocene, and he alerts us that only those cultural productions that regard Tibet as coeval can provide an opening to engage in the notion of the Anthropocene. All these chapters explore and contemplate how China’s rise or China’s threat has unearthed the strata of many differences hidden beneath the singular collective of “Anthropos.” Anthropocene is more than just another process by which China becomes more like the West in its process of modernization, but is also a dynamic conjuncture that would shake up the Chinese majority’s relation with socially marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, animals, and other nonhuman beings. The cultural imaginary this anthology explores is that the notion of balanced ecology may be only a metaphor or a myth that one can restore, and China would not believe that when it stops certain actions, the Earth will return to homeostasis. Carbon emission is intimately tied to power, and the desire for ecological justice may produce a different order that would challenge the emancipatory ideals of the prevailing universal Enlightenment.

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Notes 1. Paul Bischoff, “No, Beijing residents are NOT watching fake sunrises on giant TVs because of pollution,” Tech in Asia, 20 January 2014, https:// www.techinasia.com/beijing-residents-watching-fake-sunrises-gianttvs-pollution 2. See, for instance, Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Robert B. Marks, China: Its Environment and History (Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). 3. The “turning point” of China’s environmental policies and attitudes actually happened earlier in 2013, when the just-appointed Xi began to vow for a green, low-carbon, and sustainable development pattern, and committed more resources to address the worsening pollutions. See Daniel K. Gardner, Environmental Pollution in China: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 213–221. 4. Xiao Liangang and Zhao Rongqin, “China’s New Era of Ecological Civilization,” Science 358 (6366), 24 November 2017, 1008–1009. 5. Elena F.  Tracy, Evgeny Shvarts, Eugene Simono Rivers, and Mikhail Babenko, “China’s New Eurasian Ambitions: the Environmental Risks of the Silk Road Economic Belt,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 58.1 (2017): 79–80. 6. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 7. Elizabeth C.  Economy and Michael Levi, By All Means Necessary: How China’s Resource Quest Is Changing the World (Oxford & New  York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9. Xiao Tang, Weiwei Chen and Tian Wu, “Do Authoritarian Governments Respond to Public Opinion on the Environment? Evidence from China,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15.2 (2018): 1–15. 10. Mark Beeson, “Environmental Authoritarianism and China,” The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, ed. Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall, John M. Meyer, and David Schlosberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 520–532. 11. See, for example, Kenneth G. Lieberthal, “Introduction: The ‘Fragmented Authoritarianism’ Model and Its Limitation,” Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China, ed. Kenneth G. Lieberthal and David M. Lampton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1–30; Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, ed. Chinese Politics as Fragmented Authoritarianism:

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Earthquakes, Energy and Environment (London & New York: Routledge, 2017); Rory Truex, “Consultative Authoritarianism and Its Limits,” Comparative Political Studies 50.3 (2017): 329–361; Jinting Deng and Pinxin Liu, “Consultative Authoritarianism: The Drafting of China’s Internet Security Law and e-Commerce Law,” Journal of Contemporary China 26.107 (2017): 679–695. 12. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, “Part I: Stories.” 13. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 14. For insightful analysis of how the state development project historically aims for territorialization, assimilation, or incorporation, see Emily T. Yeh, Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); for some similar development in Inner Mongolia, see Dee Mack Williams, Beyond Great Walls: Ecology, Identity, Development on the Chinese Grasslands in Inner Mongolia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 15. The brutal tactics of systematically manipulating the public disorientation after a collective shock, such as wars, political coups, terrorist attacks, social uprisings, financial crashes, or natural disasters, to push through some radically unfair and pro-corporate measures have been named by Naomi Klein as “shock doctrine” and “shock therapy.” See her The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 138.

Bibliography Beeson, Mark. 2016. Environmental Authoritarianism and China. In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, ed. Teena Gabrielson, Cheryl Hall, John M.  Meyer, and David Schlosberg, 520–532. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bischoff, Paul. 2014. No, Beijing Residents Are NOT Watching Fake Sunrises on Giant TVs Because of Pollution. Tech In Asia. https://www.techinasia.com/ beijing-residents-watching-fake-sunrises-giant-tvs-pollution. Accessed 20 Oct 2018. Brødsgaard, Kjeld Erik, ed. 2017. Chinese Politics as Fragmented Authoritarianism: Earthquakes, Energy and Environment. London/New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deng, Jinting, and Pinxin Liu. 2017. Consultative Authoritarianism: The Drafting of China’s Internet Security Law and e-Commerce Law. Journal of Contemporary China 26 (107): 679–695.

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Economy, Elizabeth C., and Michael Levi. 2014. By All Means Necessary: How China’s Resource Quest Is Changing the World. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Elvin, Mark. 2004. The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gardner, Daniel K. 2018. Environmental Pollution in China: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. Lieberthal, Kenneth G. 1992. Introduction: The ‘Fragmented Authoritarianism’ Model and Its Limitation. In Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China, ed. Kenneth G.  Lieberthal and David M.  Lampton, 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marks, Robert B. 2012. China: Its Environment and History. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shapiro, Judith. 2001. Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tang, Xiao, Weiwei Chen, and Tian Wu. 2018. Do Authoritarian Governments Respond to Public Opinion on the Environment? Evidence from China. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15 (2): 1–15. Tracy, Elena F., Evgeny Shvarts, Eugene Simono Rivers, and Mikhail Babenko. 2017. China’s New Eurasian Ambitions: The Environmental Risks of the Silk Road Economic Belt. Eurasian Geography and Economics 58 (1): 56–88. Truex, Rory. 2017. Consultative Authoritarianism and Its Limits. Comparative Political Studies 50 (3): 329–361. Williams, Dee Mack. 2002. Beyond Great Walls: Ecology, Identity, Development on the Chinese Grasslands in Inner Mongolia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Xiao, Liangang, and Rongqin Zhao. 2017. China’s New Era of Ecological Civilization. Science 358 (6366): 1008–1009. Yeh, Emily T. 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

PART I

Disposing and Recurring

CHAPTER 2

The World Besieged by Waste: On Garbage, Recycling, and Sublimation Carlos Rojas

Garbage. All I’ve been thinking about all week is garbage. I mean, I just can’t stop thinking about it. (Sex, Lies, and Videotape)

In the opening lines of Steven Soderbergh’s classic 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Ann (played by Andie MacDowell) confesses to her therapist that she can’t stop thinking about garbage, and specifically a garbage barge stranded off the coast of Long Island: “I’ve just gotten real concerned over what’s gonna happen. . . . I started feeling this way. … when that barge was stranded.” As it turns out, Ann’s obsession with municipal waste is revealed to be a displacement of her true concerns—which centre around her marriage and sex life—but apparently, it is only by talking about the former that she is able to broach the latter. At the same time, the historical incident to which Ann is referring similarly foregrounds a logic of displacement in its own right. In particular, Soderbergh’s fictional character is referring to a drama that unfolded in 1987, when New York City officials, realizing that landfill space in Long Island was running out, decided to hire a private contractor to transport a C. Rojas (*) Duke University, Durham, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_2

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load of the city’s waste out of state. The contractor arranged for a barge, known as the Mobro 4000, to ship 3100 tons of New York refuse to a site in North Carolina. Heeding the complaints of local residents, however, the state of North Carolina refused to permit the barge to dock, as did Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, as well as Mexico, Cuba, and Belize. Eventually, after logging more than 6000 miles at sea, the barge returned to New York, where its haul was incinerated in Brooklyn and the resulting 400 tons of ash was buried in Islip Town, Long Island, where much of the waste had originated in the first place.1 In the US, the Long Island barge episode attracted national attention to an issue that, while already regarded as a critical problem by city officials, had tended to be a more peripheral concern for many ordinary citizens—namely, the question of how to dispose of the growing amounts of municipal waste generated by the nation’s metropolises. As some existing landfills approached their designated capacity and residents of other communities lobbied against permitting new landfills or incineration plants to be established too near to where they lived, many municipal officials began to turn to recycling to dispose of the waste generated by their c­ ommunities. In Long Island itself, for instance, only 1% of the borough’s garbage was being recycled and only 6% was being incinerated in 1987, the year of the Mobro 4000 incident, but by 2010 these percentages had increased to 30–35% and 50%, respectively.2 Moreover, Soderbergh’s thematization of garbage in the opening scene of his film is quite apposite, given that it not only anticipates the logics of displacement and transference that are the main concern of the film, it also reflects an underlying logic that characterizes the process of waste disposal itself. In particular, waste disposal involves processes of literal and symbolic displacement—in that waste is not only displaced from its original location, it is also displaced from people’s conscious awareness. In Sex, Lies, and Videotape, however, we observe a reverse process, insofar as waste disposal is used as a stand-in for a set of more personal concerns. Moreover, the central plot of Soderbergh’s film, which features a man who videotapes women discussing intimate details about their sex lives and sexual fantasies, revolves around an inverse process of making visible that which is normally kept outside of public view—which is to say, of displacing intimate secrets from a private realm into another, very different, domain. In this chapter, I discuss several works, both fictional and non-fictional, that foreground issues of recycling and waste disposal in contemporary China, particularly in relation to the migrant labourers who frequently live

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near or even in China’s open-air waste dumps. I am particularly interested in how these representations of municipal waste, which is invariably figured as an object of disgust and revulsion, are subtly interwoven with themes of beauty and desire. I conclude by suggesting how a dialectics of refuse as both garbage and recyclables offers a way of viewing both the environment as such and the Anthropocene—the latter understood as an environment that has been nearly irreversibly transformed by human activity.

Waste Filmed over a three-year span from 2008 to 2010, Wang Jiuliang’s (王久良) 2011 documentary Beijing Besieged by Waste (Laji weicheng 垃圾圍城) depicts an array of open-air waste disposal sites situated around the outer periphery of the city of Beijing. The film was shocking not only for its revelation of the sheer amount of waste that was being dumped on the virtual doorsteps of the nation’s capital, but also for its focus on the people who lived near these sites and struggled to make a living rummaging through other people’s garbage. A photographer by training, Wang Jiuliang explained that he initially got the idea for his documentary when, in 2008, he decided to follow some Beijing garbage trucks on his motorcycle, to see where they were taking their loads. He initially planned to take just a few photographs of these waste sites for another project that he was working on, but in the end was so shocked by what he saw that he resolved to spend the next several years tracking down as many of Beijing’s waste disposal sites as he could. After logging more than 15,000 kilometres on his motorcycle and spending countless hours scouring satellite images of Beijing and its surroundings, Wang succeeded in identifying nearly 500 of these dumping sites—which formed an outer ring around the city that he ironically described as Beijing’s “seventh ring road.”3 In addition to mapping the locations of all of these dumping sites, Wang also visited and filmed many of the sites in person—photographically capturing the mountains of garbage as well as the communities of migrant workers living near or even inside these dump sites. The resulting documentary contains compelling footage of these migrant labourers combing through the refuse by hand, searching for items of potential value, while also permitting their livestock to feed on the organic material intermixed with the garbage. The film consists mostly of long takes of endless expanses of garbage and of migrant labourers and their livestock

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struggling to eke out a living in these urban wastelands. Many of these shots are virtually silent or at most contain faint ambient background sound, though in some, the migrant labourers can be heard either talking among themselves or responding to questions from the filmmaker or his assistants. Periodically throughout the documentary, however, we hear Wang’s off-screen narratorial voice-over commenting, in a somewhat scandalized tone, on the scale of the phenomenon and its implications. Implicitly comparing himself and his fellow urban residents to young children who have not yet acquired an understanding of object permanence, Wang notes in a subsequent interview that “many of us believe that we are completely disconnected from the garbage we produce once it has left our sight. . . . Few realize that their garbage has not gone far. The garbage, albeit in a different form, always comes back. . . .”4 This observation could be used to describe not only the specific phenomenon of open-­ air dumping, but also of virtually all waste disposal. The primary objective of waste disposal, in other words, is precisely to place it out of sight and out of mind. The irony about Wang’s remark about garbage being out of sight, however, is that, unlike waste that is disposed of using landfills, incineration, or recycling, the garbage in the open-air dumps he documents in his film actually remains in plain sight—at least for local residents. What Wang is actually pointing to, accordingly, is the way in which the garbage becomes simultaneously invisible (for some) and hyper-visible (for others). Moreover, the focus of Wang’s documentary is not merely on the garbage itself, but also on those communities for whom the garbage remains inexorably visible—and his suggestion that, like the garbage itself, those communities are effectively hidden from view of mainstream society. Fittingly, for a film explicitly concerned with a phenomenon that is generally removed from public view while at the same time remaining in plain sight, Beijing Besieged by Waste was not approved for public screening in China, though it was subsequently included in an internal Party report by the Xinhua Media Agency, and furthermore was reportedly viewed by Premier Wen Jiabao himself. Wang Jiuliang claims that by the end of 2011, the year the documentary was released, 80% of the local dumping sites he had documented along Beijing’s periphery had already been closed “or were being dealt with.” He adds, “That’s a pretty big difference, and it was very comforting to me. It made me feel like my work hadn’t been for nothing.”5 What Wang does not mention, however, is where precisely the waste from these closed sites had been taken, and what were the conditions of these new disposal sites. In other words, to the extent that the open-air dumps featured in the documentary were half-­hidden from public

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view by virtue of being located at the periphery of the nation’s capital, Wang’s subsequent remarks suggest the possibility that his film, in addition to helping make these existing disposal sites more visible, may have simultaneously contributed to making the capital’s waste disposal process even more invisible by pushing it even further beyond the city’s periphery. Paralleling the documentary’s tension between the invisible and the visible, meanwhile, is a similar contrast between an aesthetics of beauty and disgust. Although much of the work seems to attempt to elicit a sense of disgust on the part of the viewer, the film also occasionally features moments of something resembling beauty. Near the beginning of the work, for instance, there is a sequence in which, interspersed amidst cut-­ away shots to a murder of crows standing on top of a trash heap and calmly pecking at the garbage for edible items, we see a couple of boys playing with some bric-a-brac that they have found, including a pair of figurines that the boys call Amitabha Buddha (彌陀佛). One boy takes a crystal object of some sort and repeatedly knocks it against the head of one of the figurines, breaking the neck of the figurine and shattering the glass object. Even though the entire scene unfolds in the middle of a vast trash heap, the boys nevertheless seem genuinely pleased by their discovery— suggesting the possibility of finding traces of beauty amidst the otherwise desolate landscape. At the same time, however, their actions suggest that this act of serendipitously finding beauty amidst desolation may itself entail further destruction. In this respect, the sequence of the boys playing in the dump captures in miniature the paradoxical logic of Wang Jiuliang’s film as a whole, insofar as it attempts, through an unflinching focus on the city’s waste, to create an aesthetically significant work in its own right.

Migrancy Released the same year as City Besieged by Waste, Ji Dan’s 季丹 2011 documentary When the Bough Breaks (Wei chao 危巢) focuses on a single migrant family living in a vast dumpsite on Beijing’s southern margins. In particular, the parents live in a dilapidated hut inside the waste site, which is much like the ones documented in Beijing Besieged by Waste, while three of their four children live in the dormitory of a nearby residential school, but frequently come home to visit. Most of the work’s footage is shot either inside the hut or in the surrounding waste site, and focuses on the family’s interactions with one another as they confront a series of challenges relating to the family’s future and, especially, the education of the youngest son, Gang.

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Ji Dan’s documentary opens with an establishing shot of several people slowly picking their way through an enormous field of refuse. This process of searching for objects of potential value amidst these mountains of detritus, meanwhile, offers a useful metaphor for the documentary’s nominal subject matter, which involves the family’s struggle over whether to send Gang to an experimental private school in Hebei, which could significantly improve his future employment prospects. That is to say, the work focuses on the possibility that Gang could be figuratively salvaged from the dump-­ like conditions in which he and his family currently find themselves, and be refashioned for a better future. In order to enrol Gang in the new school, however, the impoverished family would need 13,000 yuan in tuition, but they only have 9000 yuan in savings. In a curious twist on a familiar narrative of Chinese families struggling to pay for education so that the children may enjoy a better future than their parents, in When the Bough Breaks the parents are presented as being quite ambivalent about their children’s educational prospects, and instead it is one of their twin daughters—Xia, who is the more aggressive of the two twins—who struggles desperately to find the funds required to enrol her brother in the new school. The irony, though, is that Xia’s efforts to help Gang escape from the virtual trash heap in which the family finds itself appear to be in direct opposition to the possibility that Xia might similarly improve the educational opportunities available to herself and her twin sister. It appears, in other words, that Xia is effectively sacrificing her own future opportunities in order to assist her brother, the same way that many Chinese families traditionally would prioritize their sons’ education over that of their daughters. The children’s father—an amputee who is missing one leg and suffers from debilitating back pain and alcoholism—is openly dismissive of the children’s concerns about their education, and while their mother at times seems more supportive of their efforts, she is nevertheless presented as being a relatively weak and naïve figure. For instance, at one point we are told that the girls have been offered several thousand yuan by a certain Mr. Chen (who never appears on camera), and that the mother encouraged the girls to accept the money, so that it might be used for the children’s education. The girls themselves earnestly debate whether or not to accept the offer, even as Ji Dan explains to the film’s audience, in a subtitled commentary, that the offer is actually intended to be in exchange for sexual services, given that Mr. Chen suffers from health problems that he believes could be resolved by sleeping with young virgins.

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This spectre of semi-consensual sex work also haunts the documentary as a whole. As Ji Dan later recounts, she first met the family in 2004, while working on another project, but it did not occur to her that she might want to make a documentary about them until five years later, when the family’s twin daughters contacted her to update her on the family’s situation. In particular, the girls informed Ji Dan that the family has recently lost contact with the twins’ elder sister—and the implication is that she left the family to pursue sex work. Although no additional information about the elder sister’s fate is provided in the documentary, her absence haunts the work as a whole, just as it provides the catalyst for its initial creation. The figure of the absent elder sister, accordingly, closely mirrors that of the similarly absent Mr. Chen’s proposal to the twins—in that they both represent a perverse attempt to find “beauty” in this human community closely linked to the Beijing waste site. In both instances, moreover, this “beauty” is figured as an explicitly commoditized state of erotic fetishization. Just as the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism denotes a process by which consumers focus narrowly on the commodity in its present form while ignoring the conditions and processes that led to its creation in the first place, these attempts to render the daughters of the family as sexualized commodities similarly involve a narrow focus on their eroticized bodies in their present form and deferral of the social and material conditions out of which they emerged. There is, moreover, a way in which this spectre of eroticized commodity fetishism ironically mirrors filmmaker Ji Dan’s own relationship to the family featured in her documentary, and to the larger phenomenon that the family represents. It was, after all, the news about the elder daughter’s entry into sex work, and her consequent disappearance, which inspired Ji Dan’s interest in filming a documentary about the family in the first place. Furthermore, just as Mr. Chen offers the family money for the children’s education so that he might then be able to use the girls for his own purposes, Ji Dan ultimately offers the family the money they need for Gang’s tuition, but only after having filmed the entire documentary about Xia’s desperate struggle to raise the sum in question. In other words, presumably capable of intervening at any time, Ji Dan instead waits until she has captured the family’s abject struggles on film before offering a solution to their original difficulties.6 In transforming the family’s abject situation into a socially and aesthetically validated documentary, accordingly, it was necessary for the director to extend, and even exacerbate, the girls’ predicament.

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E-Waste After a brief prologue, Chen Qiufan’s 陳楸帆 2013 novel, The Waste Tide (Huang chao 荒潮), opens with a passage quoting the Wikipedia entry on the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, which was an international treaty designed to restrict the export of hazardous waste. Convened in 1989 (which, coincidentally, happened to be the same year that Sex, Lies, and Videotape opened with its famous allusion to the Long Island garbage barge searching as far as Belize in its attempt to dump its unwanted cargo of municipal waste). The Basel Convention sought to prevent developed nations from dumping hazardous waste—such as chemical waste, radioactive waste, incinerator ash, and electronic waste (e-waste)—on the shores of less developed nations. Despite the Basel Convention (which has now been ratified by over 100 nations, including China, though not by the US), however, in the 1990s and 2000s, China emerged as the world’s largest destination for the disposal of electronic waste, and until 2013 the town of Guiyu—in the Guangdong province municipality of Shantou, which in turn also happens to be the hometown of Chen Qiufan himself— was unquestionably the single largest recipient of e-waste in China, thereby earning it the title of “e-waste capital of the world.” The e-waste sent to Guiyu was then broken down for its raw materials, mostly by hand and in appalling conditions, such that by the 2010s, the town’s air, soil, and water were all dangerously contaminated and many of the town’s residents suffered serious health problems. Published in 2013, the same year that Guangdong’s provincial government approved a plan to transfer all of Guiyu’s e-waste recycling operations into a specially designed industrial park on the outskirts of the town (so that the extraction and recycling process could be more carefully regulated, and the environmental impact of the process could be more effectively controlled), Chen Qiufan’s novel The Waste Tide is set in a fictionalized version of the town in the near future—though the novel substitutes the first character in the name of the actual town, guìyǔ 貴嶼, which literally means “expensive island” or “treasure island,” with a close homophone, guı̄yǔ 硅嶼, which literally means “silicon island.” Punning ironically on the English toponym Silicon Valley, accordingly, Chen Qiufan’s fictional “Silicon Isle” is a dystopian futuristic site in which electronics are used to generate profit by virtue not of their computational power, as is true of Silicon Valley, but rather of the mineral resources they contain.

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Chen’s novel foregrounds the status of the vast army of migrant workers who populate Silicon Isle and perform the dirty and dangerous work of processing the e-waste, and it focuses in particular on a young “waste girl” by the name of Xiaomi (“little Mi”). Like the town’s other waste people, Xiaomi lives an abject existence almost completely invisible to the outside world. At one point, however, she is violently raped by group of locals, after which her consciousness somehow bifurcates—with her original consciousness, now referred to as “Xiaomi 1,” being joined in the same body by a second, cybernetic consciousness known as “Xiaomi 2.” Apparently generated after Xiaomi’s brain was contaminated by a virus carrying nano-particles capable of producing a sort of cybernetic circuitry, this second “Xiaomi 2” consciousness has preternatural power and ­acuity—essentially a post-human consciousness residing in Xiaomi’s original abject body. Xiaomi’s original consciousness, “Xiaomi 1” is aware of the existence of this second consciousness, and is simultaneously awed and terrified by it. To the extent that the nightmarish setting of Chen’s Silicon Isle represents the direct antithesis of contemporary society’s fetishistic relationship with electronic culture, Xiaomi’s transformation emblematizes an inverse process, wherein her original abject status is transformed into its direct opposite. Xiaomi 2 may be viewed as a direct embodiment of the fetishized status of high-end technological products within our society, and the fact that this idealized second identity is brought into being as a result of sexual violence directly mirrors the underlying logic of When the Bough Breaks, wherein Ji Dan has revealed that although she had known the family in question for many years, it was only after she learnt that the elder daughter had gone into sex work and had lost contact with her family did she (Ji Dan) finally decide that the family would be a good subject matter for a (socially and aesthetically validated) documentary.

Recycling A similar logics of deferral and displacement also characterizes the contemporary politics of recycling itself. Whether legally required or economically incentivized, recycling regimes attempt to change not only how waste is disposed of, but also how it is perceived. To this end, consumers are encouraged to view waste not as mere garbage, but rather a potential source of raw material, though they often give little thought to the practicalities of the actual recycling process itself—including the energy and

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labour required, the contaminants that are potentially released into the environment, and the uses to which the recycled material may  subsequently be put. In the US, a vast industry has developed around the process of collecting, sorting, and recycling consumer waste. Approximately one-third of this recyclable waste, however, is sent abroad, with more than half of this amount sent to China. The result is that recycling programmes in the US and other nations have become highly dependent on the willingness and ability of China and other major destination sites to accept their waste exports. This is significant because it means that the collection and preliminary sorting of the recyclable waste often becomes effectively delinked from the recycling process itself. The waste, which is typically bundled into one-ton bales, almost inevitably contains a certain amount of contaminated or non-recyclable items mixed in with the recyclable material, and this is increasingly true now that many communities in the US and elsewhere have adopted so-called single-stream recycling (meaning that different kinds of recyclables, including paper, glass, plastics, etc., are disposed of together, and then sorted using automated technologies). The more imperfect the preliminary sorting process is, meanwhile, the greater the burden that is placed on the system responsible for handling the actual recycling—both because they need to complete the sorting process, but also because they then need to dispose of the non-recyclable material.7 In recent years, China has adopted increasingly stringent standards for the types of recyclables it would accept from abroad, in an effort to increase the quality of the material being recycled. In February of 2013, for instance, China initiated its so-called Green Fence policy, which involved intensive inspections of imported scrap material, in order to enforce regulations that had been passed between 2006 and 2010. Several more enforcement campaigns quickly followed, including a one-year campaign that was announced in February 2017, which targeted scrap smuggling operations using illegal permits. The latter initiative—which was part of a larger campaign known as National Sword 2017, which sought to crack down on smuggling of all sorts—specifically targeted “foreign waste,” including plastics, industrial waste, electronics, and other household waste materials. Then, in July 2017, after months of rumours and speculation, China formally informed the World Trade Organization that it would ban all imports of recovered mixed paper, post-consumer plastics, textiles, and vanadium slag by the end of the year.8 Furthermore, even before the ban officially went into effect, China had already begun to limit recycling

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imports by declining to renew import licences, and also by lowering the limit on the amount of contaminated material to what were generally regarded as unrealistic levels—thereby effectively excluding several additional types of recyclables that had not been included in the original ban. Unlike China’s preliminary efforts to curtail recycling imports, which did not receive significant attention outside of the recycling industry itself, the 2018 decision to completely stop foreign imports of various different types of recyclables received considerable attention in the international press and has had dramatic ramifications. Initially, some other nations in the region—including Vietnam, Malaysia, and India—increased their scrap plastic imports from the US, though by mid-2018, both Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as Indonesia, announced new restrictions on imported recyclable materials. For the US, meanwhile, China’s new policies have underscored the degree to which the domestic recycling industry had become increasingly dependent on outsourcing much of its actual recycling activities (which can be dirty, energy-intensive, and pollutive) to offshore sites in China and other Asian countries. Furthermore, China’s ban made it necessary for some US communities to send some of their recyclables to landfills, which created legal difficulties since some of them have passed resolutions requiring them to recycle a certain amount of their waste. This has also been perceived poorly by US consumers, many of whom have become conditioned to separating out their recyclables without necessarily giving much thought to the specificities of the recycling process itself.9 John Tierney, in a widely circulated 1996 New York Times Magazine article “Recycling Is Garbage,” argues that recycling makes neither environmental nor economic sense. Tierney contends that, in reality, there is no garbage disposal crisis, since the US, with its vast territory, is in no danger of running out of landfill space. Moreover, he contends that recycling is counter-productive, since it is energy-intensive in its own right, generates dangerous pollutants, and yields post-recycling material of limited utility. He concludes, “Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We’re not just reusing our garbage; we’re performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess.”10 Although many of Tierney’s points have been effectively challenged (for instance, although it is technically true that the US has plenty of land for new landfills, this ignores the fact that landfills themselves are a major source of air and water pollution; and although it is true that recycling can be an energy-intensive process, the extraction of raw materials is usually

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even more energy-intensive),11 his underlying point that many Americans have come to regard recycling as a virtuous end in itself does have some merit. To the extent that recycling is a direct by-product of modern commodity culture, it is ironic that contemporary attitudes towards recycling tend to feature a fetishistic logic similar to that which Marx describes in his critique of commodity fetishism. In other words, consumers often focus on the beginning point of the recycling process—that is, the point at which commodities are discarded—without necessarily giving much thought to the messiness and complexities of the rest of the recycling process. Just as a fetishistic relationship to commodities encourages us to ignore the degree to which many of the commodities Americans use are actually produced abroad, a fetishistic relationship to recycling similarly encourages us to ignore the degree to which many of our recyclables are sent abroad for processing. Moreover, for many products in the global marketplace, China is both origin and terminus—the world’s factory, and the world’s recycling centre. This parallel, moreover, is not coincidental, insofar as China’s initial decision to develop its globalized recycling industry was originally intended to help the country increase its access to the raw materials it would need in order to further develop its own industrial base. Psychoanalysis offers another way of understanding some of the apparent contradictions involved in our attitudes towards waste and recycling. In her book Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of the abject, which she defines as that category of objects that elicit a sense of disgust. The direct inverse of the Lacanian partial object (or what Jacques Lacan calls an objet petit a), which refers to elements that have become symbolically separated from the self and consequently come to function as objects of desire, the Kristevan abject refers instead to elements that have been figuratively expelled from the self and subsequently come to function as objects not of desire, but rather of revulsion. For Kristeva and Lacan, moreover, both the abject and the objet petit a play an important role in the constitution of the self as a coherent and bounded entity, insofar as they function as partially externalized nodes against which the self can negotiate its own boundaries.12 Comprised in large part of the detritus of everyday life, meanwhile, municipal waste inspires a sense of disgust and revulsion for many of the same reasons that Kristeva discusses. A combination of discarded commodities, appliances, packaging, food remains, and so forth, municipal waste consists mostly of items that were once part of people’s lives, but which have since been discarded and ejected from that lived sphere. A

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work such as Beijing Besieged by Waste, for instance, capitalizes on this abstract sense of revulsion, in that the horror generated by the sight of migrants making a living off giant mounds of garbage is often not directly linked to specific concerns with health (though the documentary does make some specific observations about the health and environmental ramifications of these waste sites, such as their contamination of local water supplies), but rather relies on a more generalized horror at the ubiquity of the garbage itself. At the same time, however, waste also has the potential to generate the opposite sort of reaction—which is to say, to function as a figure of beauty and an object of desire. In Beijing Besieged by Waste, for instance, we observe this in a scene like the one featuring the two boys playing with the figurines that they have retrieved from the garbage mounds. In fact, each of the three cinematic and literary works discussed above could be viewed as examples of a similar process, wherein the author and filmmakers succeed in transforming garbage into an artwork of aesthetic value. While Kristeva and Lacan discuss the figures of the abject and the objet petit a primarily in relation to the individual subject, we may also use a similar dialectic to reflect on the constitution of larger collectives ranging from towns and cities to entire nations. That is to say, whether it is its attempts to move its garbage out of sight or beyond its borders or its celebration of its own recycling efforts, a community’s attitude towards its own refuse often plays an important role in structuring how the community understands its own conceptual boundaries. In a contemporary Chinese context, meanwhile, the boundary status of garbage and recyclables is reinforced by the fact that many of the individuals who live and work in close contact with this refuse are migrants—which is to say, they are boundary figures in their own right, and society uses them to reaffirm its own imaginary and conceptual limits in much the same way that it uses garbage itself. At an even more abstract level, a similar dialectic also informs humanity’s understanding of its relationship with the natural environment. In perceiving refuse as garbage, in other words, we implicitly attempt to distance ourselves from the materiality of our environment, treating that same materiality as an abject figure against which we attempt to imagine ourselves as humans. Conversely, in perceiving refuse as recyclables, we implicitly underscore the degree to which we are inextricably embedded within our natural environment, thereby affirming our humanity through our relation to the natural environment, rather than in opposition to it. At

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the same time, however, each of the three works discussed above illustrates the degree to which the abjection of garbage generates the possibility of a fetishistic attachment to recyclables, even as a fetishized recycling culture may itself be predicated on overt processes of abjection and displacement. By extension, the concepts of the environment and the Anthropocene stand in a similarly dialectical relationship with one another, insofar as the concept of the Anthropocene underscores the degree to which humanity has transformed and destabilized the natural environment, essentially rendering it abject, whereas the concept of the environment itself generally carries positive connotations, as a natural system with nearly unlimited potential for self-regeneration. Thinking syllogistically, if the Anthropocene is to garbage as the environment is to recycling, then the lesson of the three works discussed above is that just as an attention to the abjection contained in the concept of the Anthropocene may yield a more ­productive orientation towards the environment as a positive entity, a focus on the regenerative capacity of the environment may unwittingly work to push aside, and out of sight, the more unpleasant aspects of the Anthropocene and likely consequences.

Notes 1. Emily C. Dooley and Carl MacGowan, “Long Island’s infamous garbage barge of 1987 still influences laws,” Newsday, 22 March 2017, https:// projects.newsday.com/long-island/long-island-garbage-barge-left-islip30-years-ago/ 2. Dooley and MacGowan, “Long Island’s infamous garbage barge of 1987.” 3. Wang Jiuliang, “Beijing Besieged by Garbage,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review no. 1, http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/ejournal/photo-essay/beijing-besieged-garbage/statement 4. Wang Jiuliang, “Beijing Besieged by Garbage.” 5. Christen Cornell, “The Affluent and the Effluent: Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste,” senses of cinema, issue 63, July 2012, http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/miff2012/the-affluent-and-the-effluent-wangjiuliangs-beijing-besieged-by-waste/ 6. Ji Dan’s assistance is alluded to elliptically within the documentary, though she herself never appears on camera. See, also, Maya Eva Gunst Randolph, “CinemaTalk: A Conversation with Filmmaker Ji Dan,” DGenerate Films, http://dgeneratefilms.com/critical-essays/cinematalk-a-conversationwith-ji-dan

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7. See Laura Parker and Kennedy Elliot, “Plastic Recycling is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It,” National Geographic, 20 June 2018, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/china-plastic-recycling-ban-solutions-science-environment/ 8. “From Green Fence to Red Alert: A China Timeline,” Resource Recycling, 13 February 2018, https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/02/13/ green-fence-red-alert-china-timeline/ 9. Livia Albeck-Ripka, “Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not,” New York Times, 29 May 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html 10. John Tierney, “Recycling is Garbage,” New York Times, 30 June 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html?pagewanted=all 11. Richard A.  Denison and John F.  Ruston, “Recycling is Not Garbage,” New York Times, 1 October 1997, https://www.technologyreview. com/s/400100/recycling-is-not-garbage/; Alex Hutchinson, “Is Recycling Worth It? PM Investigates its Economic and Environmental Impact,” Popular Mechanics, 13 November 2008, https://www.popularmechanics. com/science/environment/a3752/4291566/ 12. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S.  Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), and Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.  W. Norton, 1998), 112.

Bibliography Albeck-Ripka, Livia. 2018. Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html. Accessed 4 Aug 2018. Cornell, Christen. 2012. The Affluent and the Effluent: Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste. Senses of Cinema. http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/ miff2012/the-affluent-and-the-effluent-wang-jiuliangs-beijing-besieged-bywaste/. Accessed 21 May 2018. Denison, Richard A., and John F. Ruston 1997. Recycling Is Not Garbage. New York Times. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400100/recycling-is-notgarbage/. Accessed 27 June 2018. Dooley, Emily C., and Carl MacGowan. 2017. Long Island’s Infamous Garbage Barge of 1987 Still Influences Laws. Newsday. https://projects.newsday.com/ long-island/long-island-garbage-barge-left-islip-30-years-ago/. Accessed 16 Oct 2018.

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Hutchinson, Alex. 2008. Is Recycling Worth It? PM Investigates Its Economic and Environmental Impact. Popular Mechanics. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a3752/4291566/. Accessed 25 May 2018. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1998. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New  York: W. W. Norton. Parker, Laura, and Kennedy Elliot. 2018. Plastic Recycling Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It. National Geographic. https://news.nationalgeographic. com/2018/06/china-plastic-recycling-ban-solutions-science-environment/. Accessed 14 Nov 2018. Randolph, Maya Eva Gunst. 2018. CinemaTalk: A Conversation with Filmmaker Ji Dan. DGenerate Films. http://dgeneratefilms.com/critical-essays/cinematalk-a-conversation-with-ji-dan. Accessed 14 Nov 2018. Resource Recycling. 2018. From Green Fence to Red Alert: A China Timeline. https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/02/13/green-fence-redalert-china-timeline/. Accessed 22 Jan 2018. Tierney, John. 1996. Recycling Is Garbage. New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 3 June 2018. Wang, Jiuliang. 2011. Beijing Besieged by Garbage. Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, No. 1. http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/photo-essay/beijing-besieged-garbage/statement. Accessed 18 Sept 2018.

CHAPTER 3

The Environment and Social Justice in Chinese Documentaries: Crisis or Hope? Jessica Yeung

The Environment and Social Justice in China In contemporary China, where rigorous journalism—in the sense of factual investigation and informing the public of such facts—is non-existent, independent documentaries have performed a journalistic function. This was made possible at the turn of the millennium with the advance of digital camera technology. Despite the “underground” status of these documentaries in China being a limiting factor in their circulation, the circumstances of their production have facilitated the development of an alternative edge in these films. Given that there is no mass distribution channel for these documentaries, they are correspondingly less subject to compromise to the market forces of the commercial cinema circuit. It also means that the resources that are available for films circulated in the commercial market or permitted productions not subject to censorship or suppression are simply inaccessible to them. Under these circumstances, it is all the more important that these films are understood and evaluated for their vigour as a

J. Yeung (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_3

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force of cultural resistance. I propose that one of the best ways to do this is by looking into the treatment of environmental factors in some of these films. As Ban Wang observes, environmental issues occupy a very special place in social justice discourse in China.1 The Chinese government has put a strong emphasis on “development” in its policies since the 1949 creation of the People’s Republic of China, and has used its avowed success in all kinds of propaganda to justify and legitimate its power. As a result, issues about the environment, which is directly affected by development, have acquired a highly charged political dimension. Evaluating the impact of development on the environment becomes a de facto critique of government policies. Indeed, in a good number of excellent documentaries about natural disasters, such as Wang Libo’s Buried and Ah! The Three Gorges, or Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste and Plastic China, investigations into environmental problems often imply interrogation of, or even challenge to, the Communist Party’s governance by exposing the complicity between power and money within government circles. However, as the conditions of independent documentary making are changing, I have observed potential crises in the critical vigour of the movement. By crises I do not only refer to the increasingly hostile political environment, but more importantly, the immanent changes in the aesthetics and selection of material in recent documentary films, as they respond to changing conditions. I will articulate this concern with three case study examples, and also discuss two films which have demonstrated sensitive awareness of the environment as part of the social justice discourse constructed in the films. A Yangtze Landscape [長江] by Xu Xin, 2017 My first example is Xu Xin’s A Yangtze Landscape, made in 2017. It displays masterful craftsmanship in the visual department. A predominance of the horizontal axis throughout the film imitates the traditional visual representations of rivers, resulting in a strong sense of structure in the 150-minute-long film. A static camera is set on a boat capturing the scenery on the bank, as the boat sails upstream along the Yangtze River to create stunning panoramic views of the river and its onshore environs. This treatment alludes to classical Chinese paintings on horizontal scrolls, and in particular, to the most prominent example of this genre, Zhang Zeduan’s early twelfth-century work Life along the River Bank during the Chingming Festival. This allusion is strongly hinted at by the title of the film written in Chinese calligraphy with the seal stamp of the artist, exactly

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in the way the titles and signatures in classical Chinese paintings and calligraphy are fashioned. Like the painting, A Yangtze Landscape captures moments of daily life along the river, but unlike the painting showing lives in prosperous late eleventh-century Chinese cities, the film depicts a much more complicated scenario. It starts with a frontal view of the river water occupying the lower half of the frame. The upper half is composed of the sky. This is an unspecified location along the river. Then, the title of the film appears in the form of Chinese calligraphy, and this cuts to a shot of the beautiful skyline of the prosperous Shanghai city at night. Modern buildings that crowd the river shore are brightly lit up by decorative lights on the outer walls. Closer but still wide shots of the buildings show some of those lights being designed as Chinese writings—promoting the idea of the rule of law in China. This is followed by a shot of the famous Western-­ style buildings cluster of Shanghai, still along the shore, as the heritage of the pre-World War II Republic era, but the music that comes in at this point, although played on bells usually associated with Western Christmas celebration, is the tune of “The East Is Red”, an iconic song of the Cultural Revolution era that promoted the personal cult of Mao Zedong. At this point, brief titles appear near the bottom of the frame, giving information about two incidents in 2014—one being a swine fever epidemic resulting in 10,395 dead pigs being dumped into the river; the other a celebration-­ turned-­tragedy New Year’s Eve party held in Shanghai along the historic Bund waterfront area that led to 36 deaths and 49 serious injuries. Both incidents were the result of a lack of regulatory systems in China that goes against the principle of the rule of law. What is also implied by this is a dark side of development contrasting sharply against the appearance of prosperity in the image of Shanghai. This dark side of development is further accentuated in the next sequence, showing a choppier river now that the boat that carries the camera has sailed past Shanghai. Dominating this sequence are tall industrial chimneys emitting thick smoke into the sky. Until this point and further on in the film, the composition of every frame is carefully and beautifully designed. Elements in the shots are in good proportion, and a sensation of softness is evoked by the black-and-white colour texture. It is worth noting that in this monochromatic colour scheme, the smoke from the ­industrial chimneys acquires a white shade, and looks almost pretty. This ambivalent treatment of environmental pollution will be discussed at a later point. Then, the boat carrying the camera continues to travel upstream and sail past Nanjing. In a township nearby, the camera follows

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a mentally impaired person, capturing him wandering around in the derelict part of the township and mumbling to himself as he scavenges the rubbish tip for food. No information is given about this person. This pattern of juxtaposition of images runs through the entire film: flattering sequences showing lustrous light from the cities are punctuated by those revealing run-down townships with individuals in precarious situations. They are poor, either suffering from mental illnesses, or homeless, or both. Their precarious situations stand in stark contrast with the brash modernity visible in the onshore cities. There is certainly a critical intention in the film to comment on the gulf between the haves and the have-­ nots in the wealthy provinces along the Yangtze River. However, no information about these individuals is offered except for one who is introduced with a few lines of subtitles explaining that he was allegedly harmed by his previous employers; his repeated petitions to the government to indict the people responsible for his unfortunate circumstances have been frustrated. Yet, the camera has not captured anything specific about this subject—except that his hands are bandaged—that differentiates his situation from the other precarious individuals featured. He is shown sitting around with no purpose and not interacting with the more lively people in the frame; then the camera closes in on his sad face; finally he slowly walks away with his back to the camera; but all this is also observed in relation to the other individuals. Sequence after sequence, the audience watches these marginalised people moving about in their shabby habitats captured in static shots with the real-time ambient sounds, without knowing anything about their circumstances. However, viewers soon become cognitively and affectively fatigued, and can only view such a subject as “yet another poor guy”. Without the necessary cognitive stimulation, these precarious people all merge into one another without distinctive identity. Instead of individuating the precarious, the film sweeps them into an abstract category by giving them very similar sequential and cinematographic treatment. Another moment with critical intent in the film is a sequence showing the river bank in a neighbourhood near the Three Gorges Dam. Brief titles appear to explain that the current water volume that flows past is artificially regulated by the dam, and that this new pattern has caused considerable damage to the ecology of the area. This is cut into a shot of the brash skyline of the new Wushan city, boasting high-rises and a sea of incandescent commercial lights. Again, this appearance of prosperity is immediately subverted by the brief titles that explain that the ancient town of Wushan is now under water, alluding to the controversy around the inundation of

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many valuable heritage sites, and by extension the speculation on the cause of recent large-scale earthquakes, as being the result of the geological disequilibrium caused by the construction of the dam. This is immediately followed by a shot showing local people dancing to party propaganda songs in the fancy new town square, with a huge screen in the background broadcasting Tibetan dancers performing in a highly institutionalised setting, and followed by a close-up image, still on the screen, of Xi Jinping, China’s current president, giving a speech, and then cutting back to the dance in the new town square. This montage sequence invites the viewer to equate the collective dance of the Tibetans and that of the people in the New Town Square, and consequently, the institutionalised and highly controlled ways of life experienced by the respective communities. The film is not short of sequences composed with critical intent. However, its overall formalism works against that purpose. For one thing, the visual fluency created by the scroll-painting aesthetics has to be sustained by a contrived flatness in sequential narration. As a result, the entire film is confined to a linear logic of images, limiting the possibility of a more nuanced treatment of the complex triangulation between development, the environment, and human existence. Of the three factors of this triangulation, the film’s treatment of the environment is particularly weak. The shots of the river and the environment, natural or spoilt, are always well proportioned, neatly composed, and skilfully executed, but lack imagination and reflective substance, thus serving as mere canvas against which the human activities portrayed are played out. To aggravate the problem, in some sequences, the aesthetic of shots work directly against the critique intended. It has been mentioned earlier that close-ups of industrial chimneys emitting substantial amounts of smoke are so prettily shot that such images of pollution are transformed into a source of visual pleasure. This kind of aesthetising treatment is even more evident in the shots taken of the Three Gorges Dam. The sequence creates a visual climax with the camera coming right up to the dam itself. It does not capture the dam in its entirety, but simply part of the structure, which already fills the entire frame and appears to exult in an air of immensity. Various sounds of metal dominate the soundscape of this sequence. Shots depicting the ­submersion of part of the dam structure and corresponding opening and closing of the dam, causing changes in the water level, are punctuated by frontal closeups of the water-level markings. As with all other shots in the film, all these are presented in beautiful composition with considerable cinematographic finesse, somewhat reminiscent of some shots in Antonioni’s Red Desert. This sequence can be interpreted to celebrate the power of modernity and

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technology. This cosmetic aesthetic has therefore prevailed over whatever reflective potential the film might intend, constituting a position that is ultimately more ambivalent than critical. Consequently, the emphasis on technical finesse in the film presents itself as somewhat problematic. Together with the stunning panoramic portrayal of the river, the film conforms to conventional use of film language that aims at projecting scenic lustre. This filmic vocabulary almost makes the environmental decay look romantic. Perhaps if the film were in colour, the complexion of reality might suffice to highlight the incongruity between form and content, thereby constituting an ironic visual effect. However, the film’s monochrome composition serves to an extent to remove the representation of the derelict environment from reality. This filmic aesthetic has sanitised the harshness of its phenomenological reality. The film’s beautiful cinematography refashions poverty into a source of visual pleasure, whereby both human and nonhuman elements are placed in a glass case, and packaged for the artistic gaze of the director and the appreciation of the spectator. Precarity, as portrayed in the film, is no more than a simulacrum of the real thing. If the film purports to offer a genuine critique, such an intention is compromised by the desire for aesthetic sophistication. Towards the end of this film, two sequences show good potential for a more environmentally aware treatment of the life along the Yangtze, but neither sequence was fully developed. First, in a township near the city of Chongqing in Sichuan province, instead of one single individual, the camera follows a group of homeless older men who take shelter under a pier structure resembling a bridge. Their cohabitants in this “home” are a pack of dogs. Although the men are poor, they take care to feed and care for the dogs. In this sequence, almost equal attention is paid to the dogs and the men, and the close relations between the two species: they live a simple, basic life together and find companionship in each other’s company. Nevertheless, the overall dominance of the human presence in the film as a whole limits the interpretation of this sequence within a framework that places men in a higher hierarchical position over other creatures affected by environmental factors. In this framework, the dogs function only on the symbolic level as an analogy to the men. The implicit comparison serves to highlight the men’s situation of having fallen outside the network of material development and social security. Second, in the closing sequence, the camera reaches the end of its journey at the source of the Yangtze River in a Tibetan region in Sichuan.

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Although the Tibetan people there receive the same aesthetically alluring, but intrinsically flat, treatment in the film, this inclusion of the Tibetan community in the film’s continuous representation of precarity—albeit as a simulacrum—could be developed to communicate a sense of “sociality and support”, in other words, a Butlerian sense of “Alliance”,2 between the Tibetan people at the source of Yangtze River and the Han Chinese communities downstream. To be sure, any meaningful contrast and comparison between the corresponding precarity of the minorities and of the Hans would require a lot more investigation than is afforded here, but this is at least an attempt on the filmmaker’s part to transgress the ethnic self of his creative subjectivity that determines the perspective of the film. However, the depiction of “Tibet” in this sequence resorts almost entirely to stereotypical images of temples, prayer banners, and religious activities. In the sequence, Xu appears content to stay within the parameters of conservative representation of ethnic minorities in China. Thus, the potential moment of Alliance between people of different ethnic groups faced with environmental degradation has not been realised in the film.

The Environment and Social Justice for Ethnic Minorities in China: Cotton [棉花] by Zhou Hao (2014) and Railway of Hope [希望之旅] by Ning Ying (2002) If environmental issues are politically charged in the Chinese mainland, the situation must be doubly, trebly, or even, ten times more charged in ethnic minority regions. This is because what is at stake in these regions is not simply the ruling party’s popularity, but China’s sovereignty over its borderlands. Studies such as those by Emilie Yeh3 and Wang Lixiong4 have traced a policy continuity from Mao’s era to the present in the ethnic minority regions of “greening the borderlands”, or “opening up farmlands”, and this policy has as much to do with Sinicising the borderlands for security reasons as it has with boosting food production. They all argue that the policy has taken priority, thereby disregarding the capacity of the lands concerned for sedentary subsistence farming, because Sinicising those regions is a strategic goal. If such observations are accurate, one might venture to conclude that the Chinese government has maintained the country’s sovereignty over the minority regions by destroying the natural ecological equilibrium upon which the indigenous peoples have based

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their ways of life. However, this aspect is hardly touched upon, let alone explored or critiqued, in independent Chinese documentaries. I will illustrate this point further with Zhou Hao’s 2014 film Cotton, and Ning Ying’s Railway of Hope made in 2002 as salient examples. Cotton traces the various labour forces along the industrial network of the cotton industry, from farmers in Xinjiang to merchandisers in Guangzhou, who export cotton garments. The film features and interviews individuals working at different points of this industrial nexus, thereby revealing the exploitation they are subject to. Cotton displays Zhou Hao’s signature diligence in creating diverse vantage points of inquiry by tracking down multiple sites of exploitation all the way along the industrial chain of the cotton industry. However, two significant elements are missing: first, the exploitation of the land by the over-farming of cotton encouraged by the government-initiated immigration of Han people into Xinjiang, and second, the indigenous Turkic people of Xinjiang themselves. If the mass immigration of the Han population into Xinjiang and the resulting change of the region’s demography is a way of Sinicising the region to maintain China’s sovereignty over it, then, in order to justify this mass immigration, over-farming becomes a policy necessity. The consequent blight inflicted on the land of Xinjiang, the most severely exploited link in the industrial chain, albeit nonhuman, receives no attention, nor even acknowledgement, of any kind in the film. An even more problematic absence in the film is that of the indigenous Turkic people, of whom the majority are Uyghur. The farmers featured in the film are Hui Muslims, and there is also a brief episode about Han women migrant workers from the mainland. Hui Muslims are often referred to as Tungan people by the indigenous Turkic Muslims.5 The term is also used as the designation of Chinese Muslims in the former Soviet Republics. They are neither indigenous to Xinjiang, nor representative of the experience of the majority indigenous Turkic populations in the region. They have a different history in Xinjiang, a different pattern of allegiance and tension, with their governors supported by the Nationalist Party in the Republic Era, and a different relationship with the present government. In the numerous scenes showing the farms and village in Xinjiang, not a single Uyghur or Turkic person is visible. This cannot be interpreted in any way other than a strategy of erasure for the expedient of avoiding the more fundamental question of social justice in the triangulation at the source of the cotton industry. This triangulation is composed of government policies, the environment itself, and the humans who

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inhabit the region, specifically, the indigenous people of Xinjiang. By ignoring this reality, the documentary has soft-pedalled on the core issue of social justice in the cotton industry, the very topic that the film purports to explore. However, although the erasure of the ethnic Other is inarguably problematic, one can almost feel the dilemma faced by the filmmaker. The choice of the Hui Muslim farmer is too astute to have been random. He is neither Uyghur nor Han. At least on the surface, as a subject, he is outside the controversy of Xinjiang’s sovereignty. To the government, the film does not pose any threat in advocating separatism; to pro-independence audiences or those who support minority rights, it does not come across as being supportive of Han dominance in Xinjiang. Perhaps for a film such as this, which is candidly critical of industry exploitation and borders on a veiled advocacy for labour rights, to be not only passed in China, but also circulated on CCTV, a certain pragmatism is necessary. One might argue that something has to give and that without such compromise, the voice of the exploited labourers could not be heard. This might be true, but what the film excludes, yet again, is the voice of the indigenous people of Xinjiang. In this respect, it comes across, almost uncannily, as similar to Chinese government propaganda which argues for the greater good of national security over minority rights. Once again, social justice for the ethnic minorities is deprioritised. While the voice of the industrial workers is heard loud and clear in this film, those of the indigenous people of Xinjiang are yet again muted. If one still chooses to sympathise with the filmmaker’s necessary pragmatism in Cotton in the context of Chinese censorship, it is much more difficult to justify the treatment of Xinjiang in Ning Ying’s 2002 documentary Railway of Hope. The entire film was shot on a train from Sichuan to Urumchi transporting farmhands to work in cotton fields in Xinjiang. These labourers are interviewed and asked to talk about their expectations of what their future life in Xinjiang will be like, and the prospects that their family can now envisage because of their earnings as migrant labourers in Xinjiang. Throughout the film, Xinjiang is constructed as the land of both hopes and fears. It is a place of unknown fortune or perils for the would-be farmhands. “Xinjiang” as an entity is treated as a passive receiver of these fortune hunters, one without subjectivity or agency. It is no more than a field to be ploughed, exploited, and penetrated. The portrayal of the migrant workers from the Chinese mainland is patently one-sided. They are depicted as victims, as the low-end population of rural China, and as the downtrodden. There is no attempt to understand the other dimension

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of their identity: wittingly or not, they are the willing tools of the Chinese government’s policy of over-farming and mass immigration of Han population to Xinjiang. Once they participate in this game, they are no longer just the precarious, but are also the accomplices of government policy in placing both the land and the indigenous people of Xinjiang in a situation of dire precarity. With the deliberate omission of this dimension of the issue, the audience are supposed to feel sorry for these workers and sympathise with their transportation to a mysterious, exotic, even frightful, place called Xinjiang, disregarding the consequences of their immigration to Xinjiang to the land and people of Xinjiang. If the film claims to be about social justice, it is only about social justice for the Han immigrants to Xinjiang. Social justice, even in the film, is unavailable to the indigenous peoples of Xinjiang in their own native environment.

Crisis or Hope? It should be emphasised that the aim of this chapter is not to dismiss these films, but to point out the crisis faced by the independent Chinese documentary movement. A Yangtze Landscape is far from being the only independent Chinese film that has succumbed to the pressure of prioritising aesthetics over critique, and Cotton is certainly not the only one that dodges highly sensitive issues that are not considered to be the core concern of the film. In recent years, more bureaucratic obstacles have been put in place to monitor and restrict production and distribution of independent films; a major one of these is China’s new film law (Chinese Film Industry Promotion Law), implemented in March 2017, delegitimising films that have not passed Chinese censorship for distribution and circulation, even overseas.6 Chinese filmmakers are increasingly reliant on success in major international festivals, so that the advantages such success would bring, such as the influence of their films, and the fund-raising potential of being an award-winning filmmaker, might offset whatever penalty they might be subject to for circulating the films. This new condition inevitably brings changes to the approach of Chinese independent films, both in respect to documentaries and feature dramas. For example, a definite turn has been observed from the rough and ready but realist approach to a style more conformist to classic Western cinemas. These newly adopted forms that are not born out of the content often result in a crisis of formalism, as is evident in A Yangtze Landscape. In the past we have already seen critical art movements in contemporary China being shorn of their critical vigour because of changes in their

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production and reception circumstances. For example, the ferociously critical “root searching” literary movement of the 1980s was interrupted by the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, and literature has seemed much more subdued from the 1990s up until today. Another example was the “folk music” scene of the second half of the 1990s. While the musical style of the “folk music” bands was gradually absorbed by the pop music industry in the early 2000s, the idealism associated with the movement was expunged or dissipated as the original “folk music” bands were pushed further out to the margins of the music scenes once their style had been copied by commercial music makers. Faced with the many changes in the circumstances and approaches to the production of independent documentaries in China, are we witnessing a crisis that will eventually lead to the decline of the present movement? Or is this a point at which Chinese independent documentaries mature and branch out into myriad approaches and orientations? Again, if we analyse how the factor of the environment is treated in these films as a way to gauge their social justice discourse, given the contemporary context of the close relationship between social injustice and government-led urban development in China, there are reasons for optimism. In the following section, two films will be used as examples to illustrate how sensitive treatment of subject matter and artistic experimentation can conjoin to break new ground in filmic environmental discourse.

1428 by Du Haibin (2009) Du Haibin’s 2009 documentary 1428 provides a good contrast to A Yangtze Landscape. It is about the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake. The crew spent extended periods of time in the quake zone in the months that followed the 2008 earthquake. The film affords no spectacular visual effects comparable to the masterly craftsmanship in A Yangtze Landscape, but considering the difficult filming conditions, it is very accomplished, especially in showing the extent of devastation and the scale of the zone affected. The film’s main focus is to express sympathy for the human lives devastated by the earthquake, and to criticise the government’s incompetence in administrating relief. One might not immediately relate it to environmental awareness, but on a closer look, the film has indeed established an alternative position that throws into question the current relationship between humans and nature, against which the disastrous earthquake and the relief work should be contextualised. This position is exemplified and

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embodied by three “outsider” figures—a mentally impaired young man, his father, and a group of pigs. The general flow of the film is organised around visual representations of the devastated areas and sequences of human activities, as is typical in direct cinema, but with the addition of comments from the earthquake victims about their situations, as they respond casually to comments and questions posed by the filmmaker behind the camera. This general flow is frequently punctuated by the appearance of a mentally impaired young man. The film does not only show him walking around town and as disconnected with all other people in the quake zone and their activities, but has also edited in single shots of him facing the camera and looking right into it, as it zooms in on him. Two functions are fulfilled by this figure. First, by showing him looking directly into the camera, the voyeuristic gaze inherent in direct cinema is broken. This transports the audience out of the sympathetic identification with the quake victims’ situation and establishes a psychological distance between the beholder and the beheld. Second, the foregrounding of this character, in terms of frame composition and narrative flow, creates a deliberate dramatic effect that conveys his estrangement from society, rendering him almost like the figure of the madman outsider in the Shakespearean sense. These two functions are classic strategies of alienation which prepare the audience for a more reflective mode of viewing, as well as for the questions to be implied in the film about the people and their activities in the quake zone. In a later section of the film, the madman figure is revealed to be the son of a man who lives in a shed amidst the rubble. He explains that he himself is the son of a peasant who never had the money to rent farmland in the old times, and he has no land of his own to farm. After the earthquake, he willingly stays there instead of fighting with other victims for more secure accommodation because he wants to take care of his son who will not move away. They share their sheds with a few stray cats and dogs. Numerous shots show one of the cats roaming about and showing affection towards the man. In one scene, he calls his son over to his shed and the three of them—the dispossessed man, the cat, and the madman—in a relaxed and composed manner eat some plain rice amid the earthquake rubble. These three figures have fallen out of the net of socialisation. The earthquake has impacted them differently from the way it has affected other people. They also respond to it differently. The mentally impaired man and the cat seem to have picked up their lives after the earthquake.

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The dispossessed man tells the camera that his material life has actually improved, ironically, thanks to the aid provided to earthquake victims. These three figures, as a group, provide a moment in the film that breaks away from the chain of logic with which socialised humans perceive the earthquake. Clearly, the film is not suggesting that their way of life is superior, but the juxtaposition between them and the ordinary village folk undoubtedly prompts the question: Is the present way human beings organise their life the best way of coexisting with nature? To further interrogate such human ways, the film presents two scenes of pigs being brutally handled by the earthquake victims. In the first scene, a woman talks to the camera about her children being killed in the earthquake. Instead of getting sympathy from her neighbours, she has heard them gossiping about her family. Some villagers say that she and her husband have lost their children because they “don’t have a good heart”. The camera stays on her when two men come into the frame, chasing pigs from the tent behind her. They are selling the pigs for cash to buy food and other necessities. The pigs are extremely frightened, and squeal as the men chase and kick them around. This scene then cuts to a close-up of the money the men are counting from the sale of the pigs. Then, in a later scene, the pigs are even more violently handled as they are ushered into the slaughtering cubicles. In the foreground is a pool of blood, obviously the result of a previous slaughter. The pigs squeal loudly and desperately fight to free themselves. The exposition of human brutality and cruelty exercised on other living beings casts further doubt on the human ways of dealing with the world. While expressing sympathy for the earthquake victims, the film also expresses scepticism regarding the human approach to nature. It is this self-reflective edge that has brought the film much closer than, for example, A Yangtze Landscape, to a comprehensive conception of social justice that also embraces nonhuman creatures and respect for the environment.

Behemoth [悲兮魔獸] by Zhao Liang (2015) In terms of its form, Zhao Liang’s 2015 film Behemoth is perhaps closer to A Yangtze Landscape than to 1428, but it shows an environmental awareness which even surpasses 1428. Like A Yangtze Landscape, the film has no plot narrative as such. The entire piece is composed of three groups of images: a stylised dream sequence about environmental destruction; a

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sequence of mostly realist images of a Mongolian family who herd sheep, of which some shots are deliberately arranged; and a documentary realist sequence of miners and industrial workers. These three groups of images are separate from each other, with sequences intercepting each other, and as a result, they contextualise each other effectively. The film starts with a sequence that belongs to the first group of images. An extreme wide shot in utter silence shows a barren land with nothing but a few heavy-duty dragline excavators on it. Suddenly, the stillness is violently broken by multiple blastings of the land, supposedly for mining purpose. This is cut into a shot of a hill that smokes at several spots, presumably also the result of blasting. The hills look as if they carry multiple wounds. The soundtrack of throat singing fades in to be followed by the film title, and then by a quotation from The Book of Job about a huge monster called a behemoth, which eats the earth. As the title fades out, the audience sees in the next shot the back of a naked man lying on the ground in a foetal position, with the voice-over (V.O.) speaking of his dream of a destroyed land. The V.O. then relates meeting a man in his dream. This man carries a mirror on his back and is his guide through this destroyed land. As the V.O. narrates about this character, he walks into the empty frame of a destroyed land. This stylised construction of the vision of a devastated environment returns at various points in the film. Both the back of the naked man lying in foetal position and the guide carrying a mirror on his back are recurrent motifs. The V.O. lamenting the destruction of the environment also recurs. The symbolism of these two characters cannot be clearer: one is the quintessential human who is merely part of nature. In one of the shots, this human figure is shown lying among heaps of earth on a grassland. At first it was difficult to notice him. He becomes visible after a few seconds when the visual image settles and the audience has the time to look at the details in the frame. The message is clear: human beings are but only one element on earth. The figure of the guide is also symbolic. He carries the reflection of the world on his back. He holds it up for the others to see and as a burden on his back. In other words, he is the artist. Such surrealist content is confined to the first group of images. The second group of images depicts a Mongolian family living in a yurt. They are first shown engaging in daily activities on a green pasture, such as riding and herding sheep. A naked baby is seen playing with his parents, with horses and sheep nearby, giving the feeling of pristine happiness in unspoilt nature. However, as this group of images develops, we see more details of their life. For example, in one of the sequences of images that belongs to this group,

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their sheep are shown grazing on a green pasture in the foreground with a barren cliff dropping down towards it in the background. A few excavator trucks are dumping soil from the top of the cliff onto the pasture. A herder on horseback at the periphery of the frame provides visual continuity between this scenario and the family going about their daily life happily on the grass outside the yurt. The stereotypical imagination of Mongolians living a simple and natural life is being thrown into question, and the antagonist destroying that way of life is the policy of development of the Mongolian grassland. Later on, in another sequence, the family is shown leaving with their possessions, suggesting that they are being pushed out from the area, since animal herding is no longer viable on the destroyed grassland. These two sequences have tackled the two issues avoided in A Yangtze Landscape and Cotton. These are: first, the representation of the lives of China’s ethnic minorities beyond the stereotypical paradigm; second, the destruction of both the environment and the ethnic minorities’ traditional ways of life as a result of development in ethnic minority regions. Most interesting in Behemoth is the way their compulsory move of home is observed: they carry their possessions in a single-line procession seen from the perspective of an aerial shot. One of them is carrying a television set, a shorthand symbol of modern consumerism. The Mongolian family does not stand outside the modernity which destroys the conditions of their traditional way of life. They are also consumers of modern commodities, and their lives are also infused with the desire for commodities of the modern world. Instead of a simplistic binary opposition between their way of life, which is relatively sustainable, and the environmental destruction wrought by modern industries, a more complicated relationship is shown. The third group of images depicts a group of miners. In some sequences, they are performing heavy-duty mining tasks as a group, although this is not always the case. In one shot-sequence, they are shown one by one in their blackened faces in a series of frontal close-ups. This sequence is placed adjacent to shots depicting them performing their daily activities. A young miner is sleeping on the floor in a train with an industrial mask protecting himself from the pollutants in the air. A woman is soaking her feet with her legs swollen from long hours of standing. Later on, there is a second sequence of close-ups of the faces of another group of miners. These are shots taken of them in their sick beds. Some of them are connected to tubes and relying on oxygen machines to help them breathe. This image is followed by a woman looking right into the camera, holding a framed picture of a deceased man, probably her husband or her son. She

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is then seen among a group of protesters in front of a banner demanding compensation for miners with lung diseases. However, there are no personal stories connected to the human figures. They are shown as a group, almost like a species, framed and conditioned by the environment that they inhabit, and in certain sequences, are shown as complicit in destroying. They are at once perpetrators and victims of the destruction of their habitat. However, the film is not a story only about them. With the ­environment consistently dominating the shot sequences and compositions, the film makes sure that it tells the story of the environment, with humans representing a factor in its destruction and sharing the consequence of this destruction. Like A Yangtze Landscape, Behemoth has drawn heavily from the aesthetics of Western classics. One might even suspect the influence of Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance. Also, like A Yangtze Landscape, Behemoth places much emphasis on art direction and cinematographic finesse. But Behemoth has managed to make compatible an accomplished aesthetic and a critical intention. For one thing, the film’s thoughtful and well-executed stylised cinematography has remained realist in its depiction of the spoilt environment. This is done with attention to details such as views of landscape through window panes stained with dirt, and the montage of juxtaposing a shot of industrial smoke with another showing a miner nearby wearing a heavy-duty face mask, like the one worn by firemen who tackle poison gas leaks. Expressive strategies commonly used in video art, such as fragmentation of the images, are also employed in the film to avoid creating visual pleasure without self-­ awareness. The use of V.O. lamenting environment destruction also provides an anchorage to ensure that the interpretation of the visual images accords with the critical intent of the film.7 Indeed, multiple insurances in a range of visual and audio tactics have been executed towards guiding the audience to view the film in a direction sympathetic to the environment. In some respects, Behemoth is not a complex film. It does not expose anything about the environment or people of which its audience is not already conscious. In this respect, it is not an investigative piece of work. It is not even informative, but instead eloquently expressive and emotionally suggestive, and effective. It is an imaginatively and creatively conceived statement about a kind of ubiquitous social injustice with nonhuman agents included in its scope. In its own idiosyncratic style, it has found a way for the enhancement, rather than mutual exclusion, of both aesthetics and social critique.

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Conclusion The Chinese independent documentary movement and the serialised television adaptation of the George R. R. Martin A Game of Thrones novels might not be immediately associated with one another, but the structure of reality in which these documentaries operate might not be so entirely different from the setting of the popular television series: while the freedom fighters and avengers for justice are engaged in struggles with autocratic powers, winter is coming. Climate is changing, the world will soon freeze over, and the ghosts that belong to the inhabitable realm threaten to terrorise the human world. Ultimately, the wiser humans must take heed of the potential horror of total destruction, and reprioritise their actions accordingly. Perhaps this can be used as an analogy with the contemporary world and the challenges faced by independent Chinese documentarians and the rest of humanity. Given that all kinds of environmental threats in the current Anthropocene age are looming over us, the need to reconfigure human priorities has become urgent. It is ironic, yet true, that concern for human lives alone, however egalitarian these concerns may be, are no longer adequate to help understand, let alone contribute to changing, the current conditions of lives. The imperative to take into account nonhuman factors, including other animals and the natural environment, is essential to documentaries that aspire to explore social phenomena in any comprehensive way. This may not be a main focus in many Chinese independent documentaries to date, but it is always the case when art seeks to develop new perspectives and articulate new ideas that it finds new forms of expression with which to do so. The Chinese independent documentary movement was born in the first place out of the need for a method to record and investigate social injustice that is impossible via officially sanctioned channels. At the present moment, having seen success cases such as 1428 and Behemoth, there is certainly hope for believing that there might be this new urgency for an environmental focus. Consequently, instead of presenting itself solely as a crisis scenario, this urgent need could turn out to be the catalyst for a new creative impetus bringing independent documentaries to new heights.

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Notes 1. Ban Wang, “Of Humans and Nature in Documentary: The Logic of Capital in West of the Tracks and Blind Shaft”, Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge, eds. Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 157–169. 2. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 84. 3. Emily T.  Yeh, “Greening Western China: A Critical View”, Geoforum 40 (2009): 884–894. 4. Wang Lixiong, My West Region, Your East Turkestan [Wo de xiyu, ni de dongtu], (Taipei: Locus, 2007). 5. Some Hui people from the Chinese mainland consider this a derogatory term, but there is no etymological basis for this view. 6. Film Industry Promotion Law 2016, The National Congress of the People’s Republic of China website: http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/xinwen/2016-11/07/content_2001625.htm. Accessed on 2nd September, 2018. 7. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, Stephen Heath ed. and trans., (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 40.

Filmography Du, Haibin. 1428. China. CNEX. 2009. Ning, Ying. Railway of Hope [Xiwang zhi lv]. China. Ning Ying for Happy Village Ltd. 2002. Xu, Xin. A Yangtze Landscape [Changjiang]. China. Xu Xin Documentary Film Studios. 2017. Zhao, Liang. Behemoth [Bei xi moshou]. China. Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). 2015. Zhou, Hao. Cotton [Mianhua]. China. Han Lei for Documentary Channel of SMG, Michel Noll for ICTV-Solferino Images. 2014.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text. Ed. and Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Film Industry Promotion Law 2016. 2016. The National Congress of the People’s Republic of China. http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/xinwen/2016-11/07/content_2001625.htm. Accessed 2 Sept 2018.

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Wang, Lixiong. 2007. My West Region, Your East Turkestan [Wo de xiyu, ni de dongtu]. Taipei: Locus. Wang, Ban. 2009. Of Humans and Nature in Documentary: The Logic of Capital in West of the Tracks and Blind Shaft. In Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge, ed. Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi, 157–169. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Yeh, Emily T. 2009. Greening Western China: A Critical View. Geoforum 40: 884–894.

CHAPTER 4

Recognition, Reinhabitation, and Recreation: Engaging Nature in Hong Kong Literature Enoch Yee-Lok Tam

In discussions about the early works in Hong Kong literature that engage the idea of nature, most critics celebrate the reimagination of the “lost homeland” through depictions of nature by the southbound writers of the 1950s and 1960s. These are the generation of writers who, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, fled mainland China to Hong Kong to escape the communist rule and to search for political security. Their removal from their homeland has engendered in them a sense of alienation in their lives in Hong Kong.1 They depicted the beauty of pastoral countryside in the north (to Hong Kong) as compensation for their loss on the one hand, and to counteract what they considered decadence in the way of life in Hong Kong.2 Writers such as Li Huiying, Li Kuang, Yi Junzuo, and Sima Changfeng have all depicted nature in two similar ways in order to express their sense of spatial and cultural ­displacement, and to show their nostalgia for their homeland: first, nature being a hostile entity; second, nature as an agent of invocation of pastoral beauty. The first image of nature functions as a trope for the destructive

E. Y.-L. Tam (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_4

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forces the exiles felt in their situations, while the second functions as an expression for these writers’ nostalgic urges for their homeland in the north.3 Nature, in the works of these writers, is often a symbol to lament their exilic situation and to express a longing for their lost homeland. What followed in the 1970s was a familiar story: Hong Kong underwent large-scale infrastructural construction and economic transformation, which brought economic prosperity and social stability. Although this sounds cliché, it is true that the 1970s was a time when Hong Kong people started to show a willingness to identify themselves with the city and to develop a sense of belonging to the city. Hong Kong writers at that time also became self-aware of this change and many explored this sense of belonging and identification, such as Xi Xi in her most acclaimed work of fiction, My City.4 It is worth noting that land, vis-à-vis nature, occupied a special position in both reality and imagination of this new Hong Kong story: as the government launched new policies, including the housing scheme and other infrastructural development, land reclamation and redesignation of land use were on the agenda. Consequentially, Hong Kong people’s newly developed sense of identification with the place in the 1970s also coincided with the overwhelming experience of losing rural land. It is in such a context that short stories of this period need to be read. For example, in one of Wu Xubin’s stories, a mountain would suddenly disappear. This was indeed the most tangible experience for Hong Kong people in the 1970s. Wu and many writers from the 1970s onwards have written works to investigate the relationships between humans and nature. For example, many of her short stories in this period reflect on the possibility of severing the old relationship between human and nature, and the depictions of nature that has already been lost carry a heavy accent of nostalgia. Her works show the urge to search for a new relationship based on new knowledge about nature acquired in the modern urban life of the city. I describe this phenomenon as re-cognition. Another Hong Kong writer, Xi Xi demonstrated in her works written in the 1980s two ways of engaging nature. One is “management of nature.” In her stories of Fertile Town [肥土鎮], human beings enter into conflicts and contestations with nature, and find new ways to manage nature as they live in it. I call this phenomenon re-inhabitation. The third phenomenon depicted in Xi Xi’s stories is described in this chapter as creation. Her stories written in the 1990s repeatedly situate their personas in “recreational” spaces where they rethink the possibilities of both recreation in nature, and re-creation of the self in nature. In the same period, many of Dung Kai-cheung’s works also

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demonstrated such a tendency. In the following sections, I will harness the notions of re-cognition, re-inhabitation, and re-creation to describe the human-nature relationship being explored in Hong Kong literature, and hopefully to shed new light on the works of the above-mentioned authors regarding how nature is understood in their works. It is perhaps time for nature to be a focus of literary criticism again.

Recognition: New Knowledge of Nature and Three Resulting Modes of Engagement with It Critics generally agree that the main theme of Wu Xubin’s works, whether fiction, poetry, or prose, is nature. Her works occupy a significant place in the present discussion not only because they give special attention to nature and animals, but also because, as Mary Shuk-han Wong suggests, she is also the most important Hong Kong writer who has inquired into ecological issues.5 As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, writers in the 1950s and 1960s have made use of nature as symbolism to express the spatial and cultural displacement they felt, and their nostalgic sentiments for their homeland. In their case, nature is not the real concern, but an affective symbol. Yet, Wu Xubin has departed from them. Her works show a genuine interest in nature itself, and does not simply make use of it as a “meaning-producing socio-political symbol.”6 Some critics have remarked on how she is inspired by forests and the wilderness7 and elaborates in her works her profound concern and love for nature, animals, and the environment.8 In terms of expression, she has found a unique commixture of modernism and magic realism to carry those contents. Most of Wu’s stories are initiation stories. During the process of initiation, the characters are “forced” into changing themselves in the dramatic actions in the stories. There is usually a father figure who functions as the contact point between the persona and nature, who can almost be considered “the mentor of the apprentice in the initiation.”9 Changes in the characters usually happen when they have acquired new knowledge about their living conditions, and such knowledge is never about human society or social structure, but about nature. I describe this as the phenomenon of re-cognition. The characters do not only acknowledge the existence of nature (the original meaning of the term “recognition”), but re-cognise (acquiring new knowledge about) nature. This new knowledge about nature is acquired as a result of their actions or having heard stories told by the father figures.

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Nature in Wu’s various imaginations is never homogenous. In her short story “Stone,” nature is destructive. In another of her stories, “The Hunter,” the son leaves the domesticated nature at home, follows the hunter, and responds to the call of the dangerous wild nature in the jungle, and finally, returns home with the knowledge of the rules of the jungle—the rigour of life and the violence of death. In “Mountain,” as in “Hunter,” nature also has two faces, but in a different way. In this case, the father is the one who responds to the summon of nature and follows a mountain seeker to find his dream-like mountain (nature),10 while his two sons stay at home to wait for the intrusion of the destructive force of nature to take over their house. These three stories show three modes of engagement with nature that are based on three kinds of different knowledge, or understanding, of nature. The first mode of engagement is a nostalgic one. The hunter in “The Hunter” yearns for some kind of lost origin in nature and the good old days that he has once experienced in it, while in “Mountain,” the mountain seeker also pursues a lost origin in nature. They represent the nostalgic position, but this is not an easy position. For the characters to lose the man-made shelters such as their houses necessarily entails hardship and suffering. Nevertheless, they expose themselves to the wild nature full of threats and dangers. The second mode of engagement with nature in Wu’s stories is to domesticate it, but much less attention is given to this mode in Wu’s writings, and it shows the least potential to facilitate reformulation of the relationship between humans and nature. The third mode is what Lo Kwai-Cheung, paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze, describes as the “becoming-nature.” Becoming-nature “is not a unidirectional projection or a harmonious union. Rather, it is a subtle relationship of interpenetration while at the same time highlighting the otherness of one another.”11 The notion of “becoming-nature” is a useful concept. It helps to explain how the characters in some of Wu Xubin’s stories open themselves up to, or situate themselves amidst, the destructive power of nature. This happens after they have acquired the knowledge of nature comprising not only a positive vital force, but also a negative destructive power. Interesting, the vital force and the destructive power of nature are never depicted as alternative or opposite of each other. Rather, they are the two sides of the same coin. To Wu, total rejection of the destructive force of nature would also cast away its vitalising potential, both of which are integral parts in the natural cycle. “Stone” is a good example of this. The story begins with Father collecting stones and arranging them in the shape of a dragon. This is his way of

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bringing wild nature to the living environment of his family. Initiation for the son takes place when he watches his father collect stones from “the rocky shores, the shallow streams, the caves in the hills, the mouth of the valley, and the layers of earth under the topsoil.”12 While he reflects on this very act, a new possible relationship between humans and nature—a new knowledge about nature—dawns on him. This knowledge is both inspired by and about the stones. The stones in themselves are important, and not taken as metaphors for other meanings, like in the writings of the nostalgic writers of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, it is the “changeable” quality of the stones13 that is of concern. Lo Kwai-Cheung argues that the stones are not stable and predictable, and this quality plays an important part in the process of the son “becoming-other.” Lo draws on Gilles Deleuze and suggests that “becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double capture, of non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns.”14 In “Stone,” incompatible entities are juxtaposed syntactically by employing conjunctions such as “like” or “as” to provide linkage. For example, “one [piece of stone] looks like a singing bird frozen into stone in the middle of a song, still calling shrilly although its singing has ceased.”15 This suggests “potential new arrangement of these elements and insisting to be re-born or to grow/regrow.”16 The singing bird is becoming stone and the stone is also becoming a singing bird. From Father’s obsession with the stones, the son learns that substance as solid and rigid as a stone can also be as fluid as liquid. Thus, Wu Xubin’s “nature” is not permanently unchanged and everlasting: “‘Nature’ can suddenly appear in a second but can also disappear without a trace. The speed of change is faster than any change brought about by civilisation.”17 In the later part of the story, a rusty red stone which has captivated Father intensely brings destruction to his house. The erodent scent of the red stone attracts various kinds of pests, such as black butterflies, blue flies, and red ants, causing Father’s house to decay, and finally, his death. Chung Ling asserts that “[t]he negative power is abominable and fearful, and has an immense destructive capacity. It is even more powerful than the vitalising capacity of nature.”18 This destructive capacity of nature gradually annihilates Father and his house. In this annihilating process of b ­ ecoming-­nature, Father and the red stone engage in a “double capture,” a “non-­parallel evolution,” and a “nuptial between two reigns.” Becoming suggests a potential new relationship between Father and the stone, but the result is not what Lo Kwai-Cheung predicts— “insisting to be re-born or to grow/regrow.” Instead, both decay and

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vanish. During this process the son learns that becoming-nature puts oneself at risk in the face of the destructive power of nature. Nevertheless, witnessing the destructive potential of becoming-nature, the son still chooses to follow his father’s path to collect stones to make the stony dragon, and to face up to the threats of the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature. At the end of the story, Father dies and his son buries him in a barren mountain. On the mountain, the son sees some verdant seedlings. He digs down to reach the roots of the plants and finds a small pebble. “This is my first stone. I shall pick this spot or even further away to build my house; and on the deep, sombre earth I shall erect my own stone dragon.”19 One cannot completely withdraw from nature, but can only look for ways to re-cognise it, so as to live in it. After all, there is no escape for humans from this ecosphere. The three modes of engagement with nature—nostalgia for the lost origin in nature, domesticating nature, and becoming-nature—that Wu Xubin depicts in her short stories are three possible ways of conceiving, or re-cognising human-nature relationship. She privileges the last mode, for most of her narrators finally decide to devote their lives to forging that kind of engagement. Luo Feng rightly points out that “[Wu] embraces nature in a reciprocal manner. Natural landscape, wilderness and forests in her poems [and her fictions] are actual locales to think and live in, not merely symbols with which she expresses her aspiration.”20

Reinhabitation: Collision of the New and the Old In their search for an antidote of the alienated lives of the city, ecocritics celebrate dwelling and reinhabitation in the rural. For Lawrence Buell, reinhabitation is “a commitment by settle-culture to long-term place-­based stewardship, conceived as a latter-day equivalent of first people’s interdependence with the land (hence the ‘re’), a commitment that would atone for prior abuse of indigenes and of land.”21 For Greg Garrard, reinhabitation (or to use his terminology, “dwelling”) “is not a transient state; rather, it implies the long-term imbrications of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work.”22 Gary Snyder, being the most fervent advocator of reinhabitation, asserts that reinhabitants are always aware of “the mystery of the rule of nature, of life and death, of taking life to live, of giving life back,”23 and of how to “take the responsibility for their own acts and keep contact with the sources of the energy that flow into their own lives.”24 According to these ecocritics, a reinhabitant should

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adjust the relationship between one’s life and nature in the long term so as to acknowledge the limit of nature and the interdependency between humans and nature. In the context of Hong Kong, the “re” in the notion of reinhabitation can be understood as Hong Kong people’s second attempt to think and reshape the relationship between humans, nature, and the city, particularly of the 1980s, when Hong Kong was well into the large-scale infrastructural building and the building of satellite towns in the originally rural and green areas, after the moment of the “first inhabitation,” when Hong Kong people first developed a sense of identification with and belonging to the city in the 1970s. Xi Xi’s 1982 short story “The Story of Fertile Town” can be read as a response to the rapid development of Hong Kong of that era.25 The author is well known for her fairytale-like and allegorical style in her Hong Kong stories. From My City to Flying Carpet, her imagination for the city abounds. In the 1980s, she wrote various stories to create the image of a fictional city called Fertile Town, and these stories accumulate into a comprehensive allegory of Hong Kong.26 Her critics describe this group of works as her “Fertile Town Series.”27 These stories are noted for the ways they problematise the prevalent discourse about the city as an economic miracle.28 Critics have also discussed how they yield and construct a new identity of Hong Kong people. All this is true, but the relationship between city and nature depicted in these stories is also worth discussion. “The Story of Fertile Town” weaves together the images of two houses to inspire reflection on the relationship between humans, economy, and ecology. Before elaborating on this, it is necessary to first examine the etymology of the words “ecology” and “economy.” The root of “ecology,” “eco-” (derived from the Greek word οικος), originally means “household,” and later, “nature,” while the second part, “-logy” (derived from the Greek word λóγος), means “knowledge.” The word “economy” has the same root as ecology in its first part, but its second part, “-nomy” (derived from the Greek word νέμω), means “management.” So, the word “ecology” originally means the knowledge of households and “economy” means the management of households. In “The Story of Fertile Town,” Xi Xi ingeniously brings together two houses which represent economy and ecology, respectively. The first one is Grandfather’s house while the other is a big, old house occupied by his two sons, First Bloom and Second Bloom. Grandfather’s house is divided into two parts, the upper floor is a living room where the whole Bloom family, including Grandfather and Grandmother, and the granddaughters Beauty Bloom and Everlasting

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Bloom, live. The lower floor is a store, named Easy Bloom, which manufactures and sells soft drinks.29 The attitude of the Easy Bloom family towards nature is represented by Grandfather and Beauty Bloom. Grandfather dominates the family and the business with Grandmother and other family members subordinated to him. His attitude towards nature is revealed in his treatment of the cats he keeps. He tames and domesticates feral cats by chopping off their tails. This is how he differentiates his cats from other feral cats.30 He treats the cats which are living creatures as dead entities subject to his domination. He marks those cats that belong to him. (The feral cats originally belonged to nobody.) Beauty Bloom is charged with the responsibility to feed and keep the cats, and she likes her charge very much. Grandfather, as well as Beauty Bloom, manage the cats in a dominating and manipulative manner, and impose their will on the cats without considering the feelings of the latter. In other words, they represent “economy”—management, manipulation, and domination. Things in the big, old house are very different. The house is occupied by Grandfather’s sons and is situated in the suburb far away from the busy town centre. The two sons were former sailors and they have travelled all around the world, only recently returned to Fertile Town. They are depicted as some ignorant scientists who lock themselves up in the house to read books and indulge themselves in their own research, isolating themselves from the outside world. Contrastive to the world of Easy Bloom, which is always busy and prosperous, the unnamed old house is desolate and deserted. Outside the house is a mud patch onto which they splash chemical solutions without considering the consequences. One would think that the chemical solutions would harm the land, but instead, the mud patch later becomes covered by numerous seedlings and gradually becomes fertile. The seedlings grow into enormous plants. Later on, the people of the town find out about this, and words reach Grandfather’s ears. This rouses his business sense and he immediately comes up with the idea of packaging the soil as a commodity for sale. He expands Easy Bloom and sets up a new company named “Bloom’s Fertile Soil Company” for the soil trading business. He erects fences around the former mud patch to set up a resort called “Bloom’s Garden.” Now the mentality of the grandfather is completely revealed. His propensity for economy—domination and manipulation—now extends beyond management of the cats to management of the fertile soil. Household economy now becomes the economy of commodifying nature. In Grandfather’s eyes, nature becomes

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what Martin Heidegger calls “standing-reserve.”31 Nature is no longer nature per se but natural resources out of which people can make profit. The industrialisation of the fertile soil has not only benefited the Bloom family, but the whole town has prospered. The town exports fertile soil as well as other horticultural accessories, and starts to develop, just like Hong Kong in the 1970s. At the same time, Grandfather’s sons (the scientists), who seem to possess some knowledge of science, cannot figure out why the mud patch is so fertile. If the world of Easy Bloom represents an economy of domination and commodification, then the big, old house occupied by Grandfather’s two sons represents a lack of knowledge about nature (ecology). Grandfather successfully manages and develops the household at the expense of nature by means of commodifying the soil. The short-­sightedness of Grandfather’s economy and his sons’ (lack of) knowledge of nature “conspire” to create the sudden prosperity of the town. (This is well suggested by the name of the Grandfather’s house—Easy Bloom.) Yet, this economy and management cannot keep the town from the catastrophe that is going to happen. “Everlasting Bloom” becomes only an unfulfilled aspiration. Grandmother represents another approach to nature. Her perception of the world is based on her folk belief that it is a sin to treat other living beings badly. However, in the patriarchal culture of the Bloom family, she has no power and cannot alter Grandfather’s attitude and the economy of Easy Bloom, so she can only show her animist belief by begging forgiveness from a supernatural goddess. Being suppressed under the domination of Grandfather, she has no access to the economy of the Bloom family. She is confined in the living space of Easy Bloom and her own expression of agency is to take care of the laundry. Interestingly however, the story gives her the last words. After the catastrophic flooding has subsided, the town is restored to its previous situation and Bloom’s Garden now becomes only a myth in people’s memory. There is no more soil trading business and Easy Bloom recommences its soft drink business, as if the sudden prosperity of the family and the town never occurred. At the end, Grandmother concludes the story by saying that “[a] town will not remain forever prosperous or forever poor. It’s just the same as human beings; there’s no everlasting happiness, and no endless sorrow either.”32 Grandmother’s words might sound like a conclusion to the story, but Eva Hung considers the ending ambiguous because “what happens after the fertile soil fiasco remains hidden from our eyes.”33 If the patriarchal structure of the Bloom family remains unchanged after the flooding, it is

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even more doubtful that Grandmother’s words could be treated with the weight of a conclusion. The ending creates a heteroglossic effect, which can be found in many of Xi Xi’s works.34 Two opposite tones compete— Grandmother’s ecology and Grandfather’s economy. Esther Cheung considers Grandfather’s voice as “the myth of Hong Kong as a capitalist miracle”35 while Grandmother continuously resists being incorporated into this miracle-imagination. The fact that the story ends with a catastrophe and the words of Grandmother in a conclusive tone, however weak her voice might sound, reveals the story’s intention to question the prevalent imagination of Hong Kong as an economic miracle. Chan Yin-ha argues that the story “is not going to praise the prosperous Hong Kong or to express the hope for prosperity and stability, but intends to proclaim the illusive nature of prosperity.”36 In this vein, the catastrophe and the last words from Grandmother yield a counter imagination—a call to consider the ecological dimension of Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability as well as of the future of the city. The story has outlined two competing attitudes to nature—namely economy and ecology. What is lacking is a third imagination that can resolve the conflict between the two. On the one hand, the story rejects the way Grandfather behaves; on the other, it dismisses Grandmother’s way as unrealistic in her circumstances. Then, how can the people of Hong Kong, if not surpass the contradiction between the pre-modern animism and modern capitalism, at least imagine a new mode of inhabitation in nature other than the two represented by the old couple? If neither are desirable forms of reinhabitation in nature, what alternatives are there?

Recreation: Gardens in the Middle of the City In the 1980s and 1990s, a new imagination of the human-nature relationship was explored in stories by Xi Xi and Dung Kai-cheung. I describe this imagination as re-creation. Recreational space like a garden or city park is the kind of space in which people can get close to nature even in the highly developed urban space of Hong Kong. Jonathan Bate points out that recreational spaces like city parks are “an artificial re-creation of the state of nature.”37 He emphasises the artificial nature of recreational gardens, which is created by humankind according to their cultural ideal of a natural space.38 Yet, in Xi Xi’s and Dung Kai-cheung’s stories, this kind of space is not just depicted as an “artificial re-creation,” but also a place for the protagonists to retreat

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from work and find recreational enjoyment in nature. This facilitates re-­ creating a new state of mind in them and helps in forging a new relationship between humans and nature. Xi Xi’s 1980 story “Bowl” is set in the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens.39 The garden is one of the few remarkable natural spaces in Hong Kong in which people can get close to vegetation as in nature. “Bowl” depicts how its protagonist temporarily gets away from the city and refreshes her mind in the natural surroundings of the garden. According to Chan Yin-ha, “Bowl” is another example of Xi Xi’s heteroglossic stories that weaves two contradicting mentalities together so as to “represent two opposite ways of thinking and place them side by side, so that they could enter into negotiation and contestation with each other.”40 The female protagonist Ye Zhenzhen was a primary school teacher but now unemployed. After acknowledging in a reunion gathering that she has no intention to apply for any jobs after resigning from her original school, her old secondary school classmate criticises her for living as a parasite on society. This mentality was common in the 1980s. Many people believed that everyone should get a job, or else the individual would find no place in society. In the later part of the story, Ye goes to the garden. She enjoys the calm that the natural environment makes her feel. She sits there to enjoy the sunlight and the sense of freedom, and she even imagines herself to be as free as a maple leaf, or a cloud. Chan Yin-ha comments on Ye Zhenzhen, At that moment her mind is at leisure and reaches a state that is simple, pure and primal. She can notice tiny things and appreciate the subtle changes in nature … [and] is appreciative in spirit, so that she is able to enjoy the unsurpassed beauty of and the kaleidoscopic changes in nature.41

This is a perfect illustration of the moment of re-creation. Ye’s mind is rid of all the reproaches from others, and all the burdens of mundane life in the city. She feels liberated. In this recreational space, she is able to re-­ create in her mind a space in which she can enjoy a rhythm of life that is very different from that of the city. The garden provides such a space to nourish her spirit. Interestingly, the narrative of the story does not follow a chronological order. The whole story is made up of four paragraphs. The last paragraph describes Ye Zhenzhen’s psychological liberation that happens in the natural environment of vegetation and under the clouds and the sky. However,

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in the second paragraph, the narration already relates that when Ye leaves from the garden, she wants to buy a bowl. In the context of Hong Kong, a bowl connotes a job, and a secure job in a good profession such as teaching which guarantees financial stability and a fair living standard is colloquially described as an “iron bowl” [鐵飯碗]. Ye’s intention to buy a new bowl implies her intention to find a new job. In other words, what happens in a recreational garden is a moment of re-creation of oneself, but she cannot stay in it as a modern georgic does in the agricultural space. A public garden is a place where one comes but also goes, and a re-creational space where people can seek relief from the fast-paced city life to renew themselves. It provides a space for people to reassess the values and ideology that crowd the overwhelming city life, and in this case, the object of reassessment is the social belief that every responsible person must have a job, and this is considered the only way to contribute to society. The garden provides a space for the protagonist to reflect on her situation and re-assess her options. However, she must eventually leave the garden and return to society. While Xi Xi’s “Bowl” is affirmative about recreational spaces facilitating psychological renewal, Dung Kai-cheung’s “Androgyny: Evolution of a Non-Existent Species” rejects any possibility of finding spiritual sublimation in a recreational garden. Indeed, the place the protagonist of “Androgyny” goes to is not a recreational garden per se. Rather, it is more like the places inhabited by the protagonists of Wu Xubin’s “Stone” and “Mountain”—a cottage on a hill in Hong Kong called Tai Mo Shan. However, here, this setting in “Androgyny” is understood to function like Xi Xi’s recreation garden for two reasons. First, the protagonist herself does not intend to inhabit the cottage for a long time. She only goes there to look for a creature called “Androgyny.” Her stay there is temporary. Second, it is a place where she temporarily reconnects to nature and re-­ creates herself, and in this process, she is never totally disconnected from the rest of the city. In other words, the locale is not a “garden” per se, but it functions as one. In the story, the female protagonist comes to a secluded house in the mountain to look for a lizard called Capillisaurus Varicaudata, which is a species exclusively female. The protagonist renames the species “Androgyny.”42 This is also the title of the story. Such an emphasis makes explicit the main theme of the story: it is about a female person searching in vain for a human evolution (or history) which consists only of females. The “garden” here provides the protagonist a space far away from her

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husband and from the patriarchal society, so that she can answer her desire for the assurance of the possibility of an only-female evolution in which females can survive without their male counterparts.43 No doubt the story is dominated by gender issues, but they are not the whole story. Nature is another major component in the narrative. From an ecocritical perspective, one cannot but notice the mountain, which functions, like Xi Xi’s garden, as a place for the female protagonist to immerse herself in nature in her attempt to look for an only-female history. Before she goes into the mountain, the female narrator lives with her husband as a typical middle-class family. She is not satisfied with her life and is reluctant to be confined in their home as a “good wife”—as society requires. So, she leaves her husband, escapes from the city, and goes to the cottage of her husband’s grandfather in Tai Mo Shan. This choice is inspired by her memory of the education she received in university when a Professor Kang encouraged her to get to know nature and is further enabled by the legacy of her husband’s grandfather in the form of a cottage in the mountain. When she recalls her college days, she identifies Professor Kang as her second father. “He led me to Mother Nature where the traces of natural lives unfolded in front of my eyes.”44 Her husband’s grandfather has also left behind a diary to her, which has recorded his experience in the mountain. She finds out by reading his diary that he once saw a Capillisaurus Varicaudata in the mountain. He has made two sketches of the encounter: one is of the lizard; and the other, a map that indicates the place where he saw the lizard. She hopes that the grandfather’s legacy can lead her to the lizard, and this has been her wish since she was a student. Interestingly, her desire to find “androgyny” is not only a desire for the possibility of asexual reproduction, but also a desire to inherit the grandfather’s legacy of a green life: “The spirit of the old man always disturbs me. I know if he could, he would let me bear an offspring of his family who can surpass the flaws of his son and grandson so as to inherit his passion for green life in his blood.”45 In the mountain, a savage-like man is hired to take care of the cottage. Symbolically, this character functions to represent humans in their primitive state. This primitive human is depicted to have a propensity for silence (as contrast to knowledge in the form of signification), a latent instinct of orientation (in contrast to the signifying system of orientation such as the compass and map), and an undeterred capacity for violence (as contrast to behaviour docilised by civilisation). In contrast, the “civilised” ways of the female protagonist are mediated by all kinds of signifying systems,

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i­ncluding maps, books, sketches, and notes of “androgyny.” For the savage-like man, language is no more than mere sounds, and these sounds are no different from beasts’ cries and birds’ calls. He has abandoned all signifying systems and depends entirely on his animal tactility to live in the wilderness. The female protagonist also discovers that the most reliable thing in the wilderness is not any map, but the man’s latent instinct, which helps them find orientation and become alert to dangers. Yet, she is ambivalent about adopting his ways. His instinct being natural transgresses all morals of human society. She envies him for feeling no shame as he takes off all his clothes and dives into the river for a swim on a hot summer day; that is something she does not dare to do. Gradually, his primal instincts become a threat to her. At the end of the story, he lets out the latent violence in his instincts, comes into the cottage and rapes her repeatedly. Re-creation in the wilderness is not as easy as the protagonist has thought. She imagines she can find a space in nature where she can escape from the oppression of the patriarchal society, but in reality, power and physical domination is everywhere, and it is not easy to achieve re-creation in an environment free of power. Although at the end she comes to realise that she does not possess the same primal instincts as that of the savage-like man, she has acquired in the process a new experience as she opens herself up to nature. One night, she goes into the wilderness without his protection, intending to expose herself to the danger in nature. In darkness, she could feel the animals around her, but cannot see them. She knows they can see her perfectly in the dark, but she cannot anticipate what they would do to her. That night, she suddenly discovers that inside her there coexist two different worlds: Many times in the endless nights, I did not feel I should be in a place like this. I feel a sense of dislocation. My body and my thoughts seem to be existing in two different places and two different worlds. The city is close by, only five, six miles behind the mountain. But at this moment, it is beyond my reach, and I don’t even feel its existence. Above my head are the stars, and beneath my feet is soil. The scent of wet vegetation enters my nose; the cries of frogs and insects my ears. I feel as if I have become a mixture of all these. I exist not for myself. Instead, I exist for the hills and the woods.46

At various points throughout, the story reminds its readers that the narrator is out of place in both the wilderness and the city, and never feels at home anywhere even at the end of the story. In the above quotation, she acknowledges that her person is in the wilderness but her mind has

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remained in the city. The epiphany evoked by the surroundings makes her feel, albeit temporarily, that she is a conglomeration of all the natural elements in nature, and that she does not live for herself, but for the forest. For a moment, she abandons her subjectivity, extends her self beyond her body, and unites with the elements in her surroundings. She follows Grandfather’s path to reconnect with Mother Nature, looks for the possibility of asexual reproduction and recreation of her self, and attempts to escape the psychological “violence” her husband imposes on her. However, the ending of the story is pessimistic: the savage-like man brings “Androgyny” to her and rapes her. Li Wan suggests that her attempt to keep a distance from her husband and escape from the routine of daily life by searching for a creature that lives independently of the male and eschews patriarchy has been in vain. Indeed, she is impotent in front of the men “who have the keys in their hand to unlock the doors.”47 At the end of the story, the protagonist is desperate and asks, What can I do with those books, maps and notes? Where can they bring me to? When I am suffocating in one world, can I escape to another? And in that other world, is it certain that I will find emancipation? Or, is there another kind of violence, another kind of oppression waiting for me?48

The female protagonist in Dung’s story cannot find emancipation in the recreational space. All she finally learns is only “the language of Androgyny; a language of silence.”49 This silence is different from that of the savage-like man. His silence represents the primitive state of humans, but her silence is much more complicated. On the one hand, it is the result of the acknowledgement of animality in her as she extends her self to merge into her natural surroundings. On the other hand, it is a metaphorical silence resulting from the oppression imposed on the female (body) by the violence of the male, not only in her personal experience, but in the course of human history.50 In this story by Dung, nature is first depicted as a place where the protagonist seeks new possibilities, but the ending brings to the foreground the violence of nature and the violence the male inflicts on the female; even in nature, both types of violence eliminate the possibility of re-creation for the protagonist. While Xi Xi is optimistic about the recreational space in Hong Kong, Dung shows his pessimism by showing that the oppressive patriarchal structure exists in any and every human society, rural or urban. In these recreational spaces, people can experience a moment of re-creating the

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relationship between themselves and society, and between themselves and nature. It is also a moment when they can release their mind from the entanglement with the details of city life. These natural spaces in the midst of the city open up a space for urban people to re-assess their situation without guaranteeing happy endings, but at least they offer the possibility of re-creation of the self.

Conclusion From the 1970s onwards, Hong Kong literature has seen a proliferation in explorations on the contestations between urban development and engagement with nature. During the 1980s, when Hong Kong had completed its transition into a modern city where rapid development in the urban space dominated, Wu asked how her generation can cope with the drastic change of the natural environment in Hong Kong. In her stories, the father-like figures pass on knowledge about nature to the younger generation, and the younger generation make use of such knowledge to recognise nature and reassess their relationship with it. If the southbound writers of her previous generations were sick at heart for losing their home in mainland China and experiencing an identity crisis caused by the change of regime in China, then Wu has problematised nostalgia for the ideal nature, and explored the possibility of fostering a new mode of recognising nature, which is to become-nature. In this midst of Hong Kong’s rapid changes of the 1980s, Xi Xi encouraged her readers to step back and think about the underlying problems caused by development. In “The Story of Fertile Town,” she compares two opposite approaches of engagement with nature: the pre-modern approach represented by Grandmother and the modern approach by Grandfather. Grandmother embodies the old folk belief of nature’s revenge while Grandfather embraces capitalist utilitarianism. With Grandfather’s efforts, the town transits from industrialism to commercialism, from an industrialist city to a capitalist city. His business shifts from manufacturing to trading, and the town changes from a factory site to an entrepôt. During this transitional period, the contestation between the pre-modern and the modern is highlighted, and she asks: After the irreversible change in the city’s nature environment, how should Hong Kong people re-inhabit in it? The story has not provided any alternative imagination other than the two approaches of the pre-modern and the modern. No solution is suggested.

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However, this lack of alternative does not have to be read as an inadequacy of the story. It could be a deliberate refusal to imagine any new modes of reinhabitation. In the 1980s and 1990s, Xi Xi and Dung Kai-­ Cheung both wrote stories to describe how the reality of that time blocked recreational imagination. In “Bowl,” social values impose restrictions on the protagonist’s choice. In “Androgyny,” patriarchal power is everywhere; and neither of the protagonists can stay in the recreational space forever. If the hope for the entire world to become a huge garden is unrealistic, at least the wish for a recreational/re-creational space is attainable. This chapter has discussed the works of three writers that exhibit three different types of exploration into the relationship between humans and nature during Hong Kong’s rapid urbanisation: re-cognition; re-­ inhabitation, and re-creation. Perhaps these cases serve to provide an inauguration of ecocriticism of Hong Kong literature which might even lead to a more comprehensive research of eco-literature in Hong Kong. So far, criticism of Hong Kong literature has focused on their urban dimension. Perhaps with the ecological crisis showing itself to be increasingly urgent, critics need to rethink the priority of their criticism.

Notes 1. See Nan Guo, “Xianggang de nanmin wenxue” [The Refugee Literature of Hong Kong], Wenxun zazhi 20 (October, 1985): 32–37. 2. See Ji Hongfang, Xianggang nanlai zuojia de shenfen jiangou [Identity Construction of Hong Kong Southbound Writers] (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2007), 157–158. 3. See Esther Mee-kwan Cheung, Crisis and Identity: Representations of Nation and Home in Hong Kong Cultural Imaginary (PhD Diss.: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997), 54. 4. Xixi, Wo Cheng [My City] (Hong Kong: Suye, 1996). Chan Chi-tak elucidates how My City interrogates the idea of citizenship against that of nationality, and explores the sense of belonging of the Hong Kong people as evoked in the story. See Chan Chi-tak, Jieti wocheng: Xianggang wenxue 1950–2005 [Disintegrate My City: Hong Kong Literature 1950–2005] (Hong Kong: Arcadia Press Ltd., 2009), 149–158. 5. See Mary Shuk-han Wong, Nüxing shuxie: dian ying yu wenzue [Female Writings: Film and Literature] (Hong Kong: Qingwen, 1997), 13. 6. Esther Mee-kwan Cheung, Crisis and Identity, 59. 7. See Liu Yichang, “The Short Stories of Xubin,” in Bison, trans., Ip Chi-yin (Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks, 2016), 7–9.

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8. See Chung Ling, “Xianggang nüxing xiaoshuojia bixai de shikong he ganxing” [Time, Space and Sensibility in the Fiction of Hong Kong Women Writers], in Xianggang wenxue tanshang [A Study of Hong Kong Literature], ed., Chen Bingliang (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. Ltd., 1991), 55. 9. Chen Bingliang, “Zai meng yu chenmo zhijian: Wu Xubin xiaoshou sitan” [Between Dreams and Silence: A Preliminary Study of Wu Xubin’s Fiction], Xianggang wenxue tanxiang [A Study of Hong Kong Literature], in ed., Chen Bingliang (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. Ltd., 1991), 239. 10. The mountain is a core symbol in Wu’s works. In an interview, she discusses the reason for her fondness for mountains: “I like sublime things. The mountain is vast and grand, and is a collection of unknown but beautiful elements. The characters in my novels pursue the beautiful world in the mountains.” Mountains here are described as beautiful. See Zhou Guowei, “Wu Xubin fangwen ji” [Interview: Wu Xubin], Luopan 1 (December, 1976): 14. 11. Lo Kwai-Cheung, Tade zaide: fanxun wenxue de pinglun [The Foreign and the Local: Literary Criticism] (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books Ltd., 2008), 225. 12. Xubin, “Stone” in Bison, trans., Diana Yeu, 20. 13. Lo Kwai-Cheung, Tadi zaidi: fangxun wenxue de pinglun, 221. 14. Gilles Deleuze and Caire Parnet, Dialogues (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 2. 15. Xubin, “Stone,” 20. My emphasis. 16. Lo Kwai-Cheung, Crossing Boundaries: A Study of Modern Hong Kong Fiction from the Fifties to the Eighties (MPhil. Diss.: University of Hong Kong, 1990), 97. 17. Lo Kwai-Cheung, Tadi zaidi, 222. 18. Chung Ling “Xianggang nüxing xiaoshuojia,” 56. 19. Xubin, “Stone,” 28. 20. Luo Feng, Qingwu chaoyue huangxian: Xianggang wenxue de shidai jiren [Please Stand Behind the Yellow Line: Traces of Time in Hong Kong Literature] (Hong Kong: Wenhua gongfang, 2008), 85. 21. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 69–70. 22. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 108. 23. Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), 185. 24. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 188. 25. Xixi, Huzi you lian [Bearded Face] (Taipei: Hongfan, 1986), 39–80. For the English translation, I refer to Eva Hung, trans., “The Story of Fertile

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Town,” in Marvels of a Floating City, ed., Eva Hung (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997), 29–64. 26. See, for example, Liu Su, “Xiang Xixi zheyang de Xianggang nü zuojia” [A Hong Kong Female Writer like Xixi], Dushu 114 (1988): 150; Yukiko Nishino “Kaifang de gushi: Xixi zuopin pingxi” [Open Ended Stories: Analysis of Xixi’s Works] in Huopo fenfan de Xianggang wenxue: 1999 nian Xianggang wenxue guoji yantaohui lunwenji [Hong Kong Literature  – Lively and Diverse: Anthology of 1999 Hong Kong Literature International Conference], ed., Huang Weiliang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Press, 2000), 544; and Chan Yin-ha, Fanpan yu duihua: lun Xixi de xiaoshuo [Rebellion and Dialogue: On Xixi’s novel] (Hong Kong: South China Research Center, 2000), 29. 27. Different scholars include different stories into the Fertile Town Series. Eva Hung and Esther Mee-kwan Cheung consider “The Story of Fertile Town,” “Town Curse,” “The Fertile Town Chalk Circle” and Flying Carpet as the Fertile Town Series while counting “Marvels of a Floating City,” “The Case of Mary,” and “Delights of the Universe: a Supplement” as related stories. Chan Kit-yee includes all the above stories as well as “Apple” in the series. See Esther Mee-kwan Cheung, Crisis and Identity, 167; Eva Hung, “Introduction,” in Marvels of a Floating City and Other Stories (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997), xix; and Chan Kit-yee, Yuedu Feituzhen: lun Xixi de xiaoshuo xushi [Reading Fertile Town: On the Narrative Strategies of Xixi’s Novel] (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 1. 28. See Daisy Sheung-yuen Ng, “Xixi and Tales of Hong Kong,” in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, ed., Joshua S. Mostow (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 582–583. 29. This mode of running business, that is, living space and working space coexist together in one house, was very popular in Hong Kong. 30. See Xixi, “The Story of Fertile Town,” 33–34. 31. See Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 283–317. 32. Xixi, “The Story of Fertile Town,” 64. 33. Eva Hung, “Introduction,” p. xv. 34. For the heteroglossical effect in Xixi’s polyphonic novel, see Chan Yin-ha, Fanpan yu duihua, chapter 3; also see Daisy Sheung-yuen Ng, “Xixi and Tales of Hong Kong,” 580. 35. See Esther Mee-kwan Cheung, Crisis and Identity, 178. 36. Chan Yin-ha, Fanpan yu duihua, 57. 37. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 63. My emphasis.

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38. See Bate, The Song of the Earth, 63–64, 132–136. 39. Xixi, Xiang wo zheyang de yige nüzi [A Girl like Me] (Taipei: Hongfan, 1984), 37–41. 40. Chan Yin-ha, Fanpan yu duihua, 46. 41. Chan Yin-ha, Fanpan yu duihua, 48. 42. See Dung Kai-cheung, Anzhuozhenni [Androgyny] (Taipei: Unitas Publishing Co., 1996), 17. 43. When the story was first published in 1996, many critics analysed it from a feminist perspective. See Shiouh-Jen Shyuu, “Huigui nüxing benzhi de wutuobang jiangou: lun Dong Qizhang ‘Anzhuozhenni’ de cixiong tongti yishi” [Back to Feminine Essential Utopia Construction: Discuss the Hermaphrodite Consciousness of Doong Chii-Jang’s “Androgyny”] Journal of Taipei Municipal Teachers College 29 (March 1998): 143–155; Mei Jialing, “Yue du ‘Anzhuozhenni’: cixiong tongti/nütongzhi/yuyan jianguo” [Reading “Androgyny”: Hermaphrodite/Lesbian/Discursive Formation], in Xingbie lunshu yu Taiwan xiaoshuo [Gender Discourse and Taiwan Novels], ed., Mei Jialing (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Co., 2000), 249–277; Ai Xiaoming, “Cixiongtongti: xing yu lei zhi xiangxiang” [Androgyny: The Imagination of Sexuality and Lei], Zhongshan daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 3 (1998): 50–57; Tan Zhinming, “Ziwo aiyu yu leyuan huigui: lun Dong Qizhang ‘Anzhuozhenni’” [The Return of Narcissistic Sexuality and Paradise: On Dong Qizhang’s ‘Androgyny’], in Xingtanxieying: Chen Bingliang jiaoshou rongxiu jinian wenxue yanyiu lunwenji [Collection of Profession and Outstanding: Prof. Chen Bingliang], ed., Xingtanxiejing bianji weiyuanhui (Hong Kong: Wenxing, 2001), 337–370. 44. Dung Kai-cheung, Anzhuozhenni, 34. 45. Dung Kai-cheung, Anzhuozhenni, 15. 46. Dung Kai-cheung, Anzhuozhenni, 60. 47. Li Wan “‘Anzhuozhenni’ de youhuo” [The Seduction of “Androgyny”], Dushuren 16 (June 1996), 31. Li Wan talks about keys because in the story the two men use keys to “break” into the protagonist’s private space. 48. Dung Kai-cheung, Anzhuozhenni, 67. 49. Dung Kai-cheung, Anzhuozhenni, 73. 50. Chen Lifen interprets the silence of androgyny in a different way. She argues that “androgyny, therefore, is the ultimate symbol of madness. She surpasses all the theories and discourses and silence is her language.” It means that the silence of androgyny is outside any discursive articulation and theorisation, and even out of any text, including Dung Kai-cheung’s own story. See Chen Lifen, Xiandai wenxue yu wenhua xiangxiang: cong Taiwan dao Xianggang [Modern Literature and Cultural Imagination: From Taiwan to Hong Kong] (Taipei: Bookman Books Ltd., 2000), 147–148.

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Bibliography Ai, Xiaoming. 1998. Cixiongtongti: xing yu lei zhi xiangxiang [Androgyny: The Imagination of Sexuality and Lei]. Zhongshan daxue xuebao (shehui kexue ban) 3: 50–57. Bate, Jonathan. 2000. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Chan, Kit-yee. 1998. Yuedu Feituzhen: lun Xixi de xiaoshuo xushi [Reading Fertile Town: On the Narrative Strategies of Xixi’s Novel]. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Chan, Yin-ha. 2000. Fanpan yu duihua: lun Xixi de xiaoshuo [Rebellion and Dialogue: On Xixi’s Novel]. Hong Kong: South China Research Center. Chan, Chi-tak. 2009. Jieti wocheng: Xianggang wenxue 1950–2005 [Disintegrate My City: Hong Kong Literature 1950–2005]. Hong Kong: Arcadia Press Ltd. Chen, Bingliang. 1991. Zai meng yu chenmo zhijian: Wu Xubin xiaoshou sitan [Between Dreams and Silence: A Preliminary Study of Wu Xubin’s Fiction]. In Xianggang wenxue tanshang [A Study of Hong Kong Literature], ed. Chen Bingliang, 239. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. Ltd. Chen, Lifen. 2000. Xiandai wenxue yu wenhua xiangxiang: cong Taiwan dao Xianggang [Modern Literature and Cultural Imagination: From Taiwan to Hong Kong]. Taipei: Bookman Books Ltd. Cheung, Esther Mee-kwan. 1997. Crisis and Identity: Representations of Nation and Home in Hong Kong Cultural Imaginary. PhD Dissertation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chung, Ling. 1991. Xianggang nüxing xiaoshuojia bixai de shikong he ganxing [Time, Space and Sensibility in the Fiction of Hong Kong Women Writers]. In Xianggang wenxue tanshang [A Study of Hong Kong Literature], ed. Chen Bingliang, 55. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. Ltd. Deleuze, Gilles, and Caire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. London: Athlone Press. Dung, Kai-cheung. 1996. Anzhuozhenni [Androgyny]. Taipei: Unitas Publishing Co. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London/New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings, ed. David Farell Krell, 283–317. New York: Harper & Row. Hung, Eva. 1997. Introduction. In Marvels of a Floating City and Other Stories. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Ji, Hongfang. 2007. Xianggang nanlai zuojia de shenfen jiangou [Identity Construction of Hong Kong Southbound Writers]. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press. Li, Wan. 1996. Anzhuozhenni’ de youhuo [The Seduction of “Androgyny”]. Dushuren 16: 31.

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Liu, Su. 1988. Xiang Xixi zheyang de Xianggang nü zuojia [A Hong Kong Female Writer Like Xixi]. Dushu 114: 150. Liu, Yichang. 2016. The Short Stories of Xubin. In Bison, trans. Ip Chi-yin. Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks. Lo, Kwai-Cheung. 1990. Crossing Boundaries: A Study of Modern Hong Kong Fiction from the Fifties to the Eighties. M.Phil. Dissertation, University of Hong Kong. ———. 2008. Tadi zaidi: fangxun wenxue de pinglun [The Foreign and the Local: Literary Criticism]. Hong Kong: Cosmos Books Ltd. Luo, Feng. 2008. Qingwu chaoyue huangxian: Xianggang wenxue de shidai jiren [Please Stand Behind the Yellow Line: Traces of Time in Hong Kong Literature]. Hong Kong: Wenhua gongfang. Mei, Jialing. 2000. Yue du ‘Anzhuozhenni’: cixiong tongti/nütongzhi/yuyan jianguo [Reading “Androgyny”: Hermaphrodite/Lesbian/Discursive Formation]. In Xingbie lunshu yu Taiwan xiaoshuo [Gender Discourse and Taiwan Novels], ed. Mei Jialing, 249–277. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Co. Nan, Guo. 1985. Xianggang de nanmin wenxue [The Refugee Literature of Hong Kong]. Wenxun zazhi 20: 32–37. Ng, Daisy Sheung-yuen. 2003. Xixi and Tales of Hong Kong. In The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, ed. Joshua S. Mostow, 580–583. New York: Columbia University Press. Nishino, Yukiko. 2000. Kaifang de gushi  – Xixi zuopin pingxi [Open Ended Stories  – Analysis of Xixi’s Works]. In Huopo fenfan de Xianggang wenxue: 1999 nian Xianggang wenxue guoji yantaohui lunwenji [Hong Kong Literature  – Lively and Diverse: Anthology of 1999 Hong Kong Literature International Conference], ed. Huang Weiliang. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Press. Shyuu, Shiouh-Jen. 1998. Huigui nüxing benzhi de wutuobang jiangou: lun Dong Qizhang ‘Anzhuozhenni’ de cixiong tongti yishi [Back to Feminine Essential Utopia Construction: Discuss the Hermaphrodite Consciousness of Doong Chii-Jang’s “Androgyny”]. Journal of Taipei Municipal Teachers College 29: 143–155. Snyder, Gary. 1995. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds: New and Selected Prose. Washington, DC: Counterpoint. Tam, Chi Ming. 2001. Ziwo aiyu yu leyuan huigui: lun Dong Qizhang ‘Anzhuozhenni’ [The Return of Narcissistic Sexuality and Paradise: On Dong Qizhang’s ‘Androgyny’]. In Xingtanxieying: Chen Bingliang jiaoshou rongxiu jinian wenxue yanyiu lunwenji [Collection of Profession and Outstanding: Prof. Chen Bingliang], ed. Xingtanxiejing bianji weiyuanhui, 337–370. Hong Kong: Wenxing. Wong, Mary Shuk-han. 1997. Nüxing shuxie: dian ying yu wenzue [Female Writings: Film and Literature]. Hong Kong: Qingwen.

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Xixi. 1984. Xiang wo zheyang de yige nüzi [A Girl Like Me]. Taipei: Hongfan. ———. 1986. Huzi you lian [Bearded Face]. Taipei: Hongfan. ———. 1996. Wo Cheng [My City]. Hong Kong: Suye. ———. 1997. The Story of Fertile Town. In Marvels of a Floating City, ed. and trans. Eva Hung. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Xubin. 2016. Stone. In Bison, trans. Diana Yeu, Hong Kong: Renditions Paperbacks. Zhou, Guowei. 1976. Wu Xubin fangwen ji [Interview: Wu Xubin]. Luopan 1: 14.

PART II

Nonhuman and Mythic Spectres

CHAPTER 5

The Eternal Return of Mythology: The White (Green) Snake Legend in Maoist China and Colonial Hong Kong Kenny Kwok-Kwan Ng

Anthropocene and Myth Criticism The proposal of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch where humans have changed the living planet beyond repair, and humanity represents the dominant and detrimental force on nature, has rekindled new interest in ancient mythology and fantasy narrative in relation to the uneasy interactions between nature, humanity, and society. C. G. Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, believed that myths and dreams were essentially expressions of the “collective unconscious” of human races, and myth was the narrative expression told in story form of the archaic and profound record of humankind’s inescapable connection with nature, manifested most potently in dreams. In the autumn of 1913, Jung dreamt of a monstrous flood of yellow waves cascading down from the North Sea through north-west Europe and down onto the Alps. In his autobiography, Jung recalled his apocalyptic dream vision:

K. K.-K. Ng (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_5

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In October [1913], while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision last about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.1

Jung dreamt of the “mighty yellow waves” that turned blood red amidst “the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands.” Two weeks passed and Jung’s vision recurred in his dream. An inner voice was disturbing him that his dreams could have been a premonition of an impending calamity for real. Still, when in that winter someone asked him about the political prospects of the world in the near future, Jung replied that he had no thoughts on the matter. He then drew the conclusion that the horrific visions had to do with his own self as he was apparently “menaced by a psychosis.” Nine months later, however, Jung recorded a more dramatic vision of natural disaster in a thrice-repeated dream. This time, he envisioned an Arctic cold wave that proceeded to freeze most of the European countries into lifeless lands. Soon afterward, in the spring and early summer of 1914, I had a thrice-­ repeated dream that in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice. I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings. All living green things were killed by frost. This dream came in April and May, and for the last time in June, 1914.2

In the third dream in June 1914, in which “frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos,” Jung encountered an unexpected end with a thread of hope. He found a “leaf-bearing tree,” and the frost had transformed its leaves into sweet grapes full of healing juices. Jung “plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd.” This vague optimistic anecdote in his dream, however, was soon overshadowed by Jung’s note in his autobiography of the gloomy reality in Europe: “On August 1 the world war broke out.” Only when the war broke out in August 1914 did the psychologist realize that the dreams were not so much about himself as they were some inchoate but telling images about Europe and its peoples.

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In Jungian psychology, the vision of flood is one of the characteristic primordial images or “archetypes,” which are defined as patterns of psychic energy originating in the “collective unconscious” and find their most common and most normal manifestations in myths, religions, or dreams.3 The “collective unconscious” denotes a memory of racial, tribal, or ethnological nature that consists of archetypes—primordial elements or narrative constructions embedded in myths of different cultures, and manifested in dreams of individuals. Given Jung’s lesson that imagistic dreams and myths resonate profoundly within our unconscious as “the deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity”4 across time and space, modern environmental advocates have found Jung’s dystopic visions of monstrous floods and cold waves a foreboding about the accelerating global ecocide as Anthropocene crisis. Mark Kernan warns that the giant moving glaciers and melting ice issuing from East Antarctica are moving slowly towards the Southern Ocean as an outcome of global warming, with the potential to raise sea levels by 3.5 metres in future decades.5 Associating Jung’s criticism of dreams and myths with modern-day Anthropocentric dystopian narratives, Kernan reminds readers that the ice and fire giants of Norse mythology—depicted as representations of the destructive forces of nature—are by now aptly understood as the ice monsters and vengeful behemoths seeking to revenge against humans whose actions (unsustainable industrial production and human consumption) are causing their demise. In this regard, Kernan believes that “an understanding of myth and metaphor can be especially useful in helping us come to terms with the spectre of anthropogenic climate change.” Jung’s prophetic dreams that presaged the war, however, were followed by his personal inertia and inaction. The idea of war could hardly have occurred to him until it happened. Jung was filled with anxiety and self-­ loathing, as he recalled his dream of witnessing the flood, in which he “was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.”6 This sense of numbness and gloom is also true in human nature: people only fall behind on what is remotely alarming in the deteriorating environments, and most choose to stay oblivious of the environmental dangers around us. Being short of imaginative connections with—or the apocalyptic imageries of—more-than-human worlds as they are traditionally provided by myths, legends, folklores, dreams, or by modern science fictions, even those who have felt an ethical urgency to act are prone to a sense of ­helplessness and inaction. Can thoughtful people react to the shock of the Anthropocene in a promptly conscious manner with recourse to myth and

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folklore for their encoded wisdom and hopeful dreaming that is not escapist? How can myth and fantasy conjure up our primordial piety and fears of the (super)natural, helping to restore the human connection with the natural rather than the supernatural? For Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), the popular American mythographer, the primary function of mythology is to “waken and maintain in the individual a sense of wonder and participation in the mystery of this finally inscrutable universe.” The awe-inspiring universe lays the foundation of myth’s “pedagogical” and moral aspects of guiding an individual’s development by “conducting individuals in harmony through the passages of human life.”7 Recasting as he does myth’s ancient teaching on mystical and cosmological levels on contemporary sociological and individual issues,8 Campbell expresses concern about the human transformation of nature and the Earth as an extremely thorny moral issue of humanity. He appeals to us to “learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.”9 Campbell emphasizes that the coded ecological wisdom in ancient mythology has nothing to do with pantheism or theology: “The idea is trans-theological. It is of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.”10 Myth’s contemporary lessons, as Campbell argues, derive no longer from the supernatural realm in which a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world. Myths are larger-than-life, imaginative stories that inform about our place in the more-than-human world, from which humans could learn to revive the connections with nature, and “with the animals and with the water and the sea.” The quest for a new mythology continued to capture Campbell with his fascination with the modern techno-driven world. Hesitant as he was in creating an entirely new mythology, Campbell had called for a new “philosophy of the planet,” alerting us to see that astronauts had shown us photographic proof that we lived interconnected lives on Planet Earth. During his interviews with Bill Moyers before he passed away in 1987, Campbell pointed to the image of Earth seen from space, and suggested a possible course for modern mythology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: And this would be the philosophy for the planet, not this group, that group, or the other group. When you see the earth from the moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. This is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.11

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Campbell encouraged us to look to Mother Earth and “the whole planet as an organism.”12 He emphasized that “[t]he only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it.”13 The challenge for humanity and futurity rested with how we could “relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos.” By “society,” Campbell meant the “society of the planet” that humankind inhabits with nonhuman lives in nature. For ecocritics of the new millennium, Campbell’s new mythopoeic imagination of the globe taken from cosmic standpoints, and his call for the ethical commitment to planet-society, would not be unfamiliar to comprehend. More recently, Ursula Heise has argued that visual images of the Earth from space—as in the popularized 1968 “Earthrise” photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew on 24 December 1968—was quickly appropriated by the environmentalist movement in the 1970s to forge a global environmental consciousness. The spatial vantage point that represents the Earth as a graspable whole, “as single entity, united, limited, and delicately beautiful,” in which all boundaries between nation, culture, ideology, and ecosystem have been erased in favour of a new conception of ecological connectedness.14 Campbell’s new mythology of the planet, inspired by the awe-commanding Earthrise image, acknowledges the aesthetic and mystic beauty of our Earth homeworld. It shares with the environmentalist paradigm, as in the sense of Heise, that “the Earth’s inhabitants, regardless of their national and cultural differences, are bound by a global ecosystem whose functioning transcends humanmade borders.”15 With Campbell’s evocation of the Earthrise image as a new mythology of the twenty-first century, how can myth criticism articulate a vision of non-anthropocentric life, in which humans are an organic part of the biosphere rather than the despotic rulers? If myth and fantasy remain viable vehicles for hopeful dreaming or critical conviction, modern mythology can challenge the anthropocentric world by taking on new relevance in innovative literary forms combining fiction, allegory, and epic. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), one of the earliest myth critics and German Neo-­ Kantian philosopher, demonstrates that beneath both language and myth, there lies an unconscious, pre-logical experience, which constitutes an archaic mode of thought that still holds enormous appeal for our expressions in language, poetry, and literature. For mythic consciousness, there is no reflective separation of the real and the ideal; the mythic “‘image’ does not represent the ‘thing’; it is the thing” (2:38). Myth is a “form of

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thought”: a fundamental “symbolic form” that is a means of responding to, and hence creating, our world. That is to say, mythic stories cannot be simply reduced to linguistic representations, mores, or superstition. In Jungian terms, they are the literal and complex stories embedded as imagistic snapshots in the unconscious of a culture. For Cassirer, myth represents the primal, emotion-laden, unmediated human experience and thought processes. And this literal, as opposed to representational, quality of myth, suggests that literature that taps into the recesses of mythic consciousness will reveal in powerful fashion the “dynamic of the life feeling” (2:38), which gives meaning and intelligibility to our world.16 To the modern audience, the word “myth” often connotes ignorance and irrationality. But its original meaning, rooted in the Greek “mythos,” is “tale, story, plot.” Myth criticism has become a commanding analytical scheme to unveil the structure and meaning of Western civilization in the study of Northrop Frye (1912–1991), a Canadian literary theorist, who convinces us how powerfully myth can organize our thinking about literature and culture. Drawing upon the anthropological and psychological bases of myths (and rituals and folklores), Frye views literature as the repository of mythic wisdom emerging out of archetypal structures based on recurrent patterns.17 Myth is embedded in literary form; in other words, myth and literature and storytelling are literally coextensive. Literary criticism is also a spiritual exercise to unlock the system of myth as the collective attempt of cultures to establish a meaningful context to human existence. Frye’s conviction that the mythopoeic structure extends beyond literature to religion, philosophy, politics, and history states that myth criticism can also broadly and incisively connect with larger cultural and political criticism in a society, and reading literature helps to restore the spiritual and existential contexts to the alienated, fragmented world governed by scientism and instrumentalism. If myth and fantasy are rudimentary storytelling vehicles for collective thinking, how do they operate—and resist—in the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century? The contemporary psychologist Craig Chalquist inherits the myth criticism and storytelling traditions in what he calls the “applied mythology,” by which he means “a way of retelling old myths to release fresh insights”; that is, “a return to the stories of our ancestors, stories retold to see how they apply to the challenges of our day.”18 Chalquist believes that retelling myths with inspiring sharing stories, even as they are rooted in a very old tradition and cultural system, can deepen our relations with the world, and “reenchant” our living world in facing the deep anthropocentric crisis.

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Chalquist reiterates Frye’s conviction that myths are the sacred stories once believed in by most hearers of the past, but that could be held as instructive and recurring moral fables by wisdom teachers in the modern, anthropocentric age. Whether a mythic story is factually true or not is beside the point. Myth and fantasy offer metaphorical grounding in social reality to reconceive questions about the meaning of ethics, justice, and happiness. What do these questions mean when China is now considered as one of the major game-changing players in altering the planet? How can Chinese cultural narratives stretch the imaginative capacities for the impending anthropocentric crisis not only by inquiring into the Chinese assaults of nature and global environments in the country’s growth and development, but also by looking inward towards the community, history, and human nature itself? This chapter explores the ways in which the Anthropocene and anthropomorphism are intertwined in longstanding Chinese mythologies, and the innovative ways in which modern Chinese theatre and Hong Kong fiction and film re-mythologize and story-tell old myths to reimagine the imminent cultural and political crisis of the Chinese communities. I study the historical evolution of the White Snake mythology and the contemporary adaptations of Lilian Lee’s (Li Bihua) Green Snake (Qing she) (1986) and Tsui Hark’s Green Snake (1993), two Hong Kong-oriented renditions of the Chinese legend.

Evolution of the White Snake Mythology The White Snake legend centres on a 1000-year-old snake who, through centuries of meditation and self-discipline, has elevated herself to attain human form. On a visit to China’s famous West Lake in Hangzhou, she falls in love with a young man and soon becomes his wife. But when a Buddhist abbot discovers her true origin, she has to fight for her marriage and her freedom to love. The mythic tale of love, integrity, and betrayal is considered to go as far back as the Tang Dynasty (618–907), and has developed over a period of 1000 years. But miscellaneous sources are only traced in oral literature as early as the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1278), talking about a snake demon having been captivated under the Thunder Peak Pagoda in Hangzhou’s West Lake. The mature printed version of the story dates from the late Ming Dynasty, when Feng Menglong (1574–1646) has included in his Stories to Caution the World (Jingshi tongyan) of 1624. It is number 28 in this collection of 40 stories, and carries the title “Lady White Is Imprisoned Forever under Thunder

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Peak Pagoda” (Bai niangzi youngzhen Leifengta). Feng’s Stories to Caution the World, however, had dropped from circulation by the end of the seventeenth century, only to be rediscovered in the early twentieth century. But elaborate versions of White Snake continued to be reprinted in vernacular stories and were documented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Qing-dynasty Buddhist-­teaching stories.19 The Chinese mythology continued to be played in theatres during the past centuries and underwent alterations and adaptations.20 The story has had many performative versions during the twentieth century too. According to Chie Lee, a Jungian psychiatrist who grew up in China, she saw a stage opera of the White Snake legend when she was five, which left indelible impressions on her. Her account represents a popular opera version of the tale in mainland China during the former decades.21 The play has it that dwelling in Mount Emei in Sichuan Province for 1000 years, a white snake and a green snake have acquired magical powers and transformed themselves into two beautiful young ladies, Lady White (Bai Suzhen), and Little Green (Xiaoqing)—White Snake and Green Snake. They see a man named Xu Xian, a young orphan and poor apothecary, at the West Lake of Hangzhou city in a rainy day of the spring season. White falls in love with Xu Xian at first sight. By borrowing an umbrella, White insures their meeting again by asking the man to her house—a splendid courtyard transformed from a deserted land under the woman’s spell. When dining, Green acts as a matchmaker to propose ­marriage between White and Xu Xian. Soon they are betrothed. The three move to a small town in Zhenjiang. White helps her husband to open a pharmacy. She writes prescriptions and dispenses the right herbal treatments that cure the various afflictions of the poor patients in the town. Their medical store quickly becomes well known and popular amongst the townsfolk. While the couple leads a peaceful life in the small town, one day, Xu Xian encounters a Buddhist monk, Fai Hai, from the Golden Mountain Temple (Jinshansi), who warns the man that his life is being threatened by his wife, who is a 1000-year-old white snake in human embodiment. Disbelieving the monk’s words, however, Xu Xian is suspicious enough to heed his warning. On the Dragon Boat Festival (the fifth of May in the lunar calendar), Xu Xian brings the realgar wine and asks his wife to drink it. He tells her about the monk’s advice that if she was really a demon snake, the wine would revert her back to her monstrous shape. White’s love for him overwhelms her judgement that her power could hold her

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human shortly after she gets drunk. Unfortunately, she has also become pregnant, which ails her power. She instantly falls into wretched pain after drinking, and crawls into her bed, begging the husband to leave her alone. Laden with doubt, Xu Xian cannot help but peep into her room. He faints and dies of fright right after seeing a huge white serpent lying on the bed with golden eyes and red tongue. White is devastated by Xu Xian’s death when she wakes up and resumes human form. She heads to Kunlun Mountain—said to be home to the most important Taoist deities and human immortals—to get the herb of immortality to save her husband. After severe battles with the guardian crane and deer in the mountain, she succeeds in acquiring the sacred plants and brings Xu Xian back to life. The man, however, is still fearful and conflicted. He eventually follows Fai Hai to the Golden Mountain Temple to become a monk himself. Furious at Fai Hai’s capture of her husband, White Snake and Green Snake summon a great army of underwater creatures for help, and create huge floods over the Golden Mountain Temple to fight against Fai Hai and his heavenly soldiers. The floods wreak havoc and vast destructions across the areas. White Snake’s pregnancy has weakened her, and she retreats to the West Lake and gives birth to a son during the fight. Meanwhile, Fai Hai manages to capture White Snake in his inverted golden alms bowl. As a punishment for the unleashing of her destructive power through the flood, the monk captures White Snake under the Thunder Peak Pagoda by the West Lake. Fahai declares that the creature will not be freed until the lake dries up or the pagoda falls. The plots of the White Snake legend have subscribed to considerably more complex alterations in varied adaptations of local theatre in the past centuries. In Feng Menglong’s seventeenth-century vernacular story, the young man is the central character, while the snake woman is the lustrous and threatening nonhuman creature that must be exorcized and expelled from the human world. In Feng’s male-centred ending, it is Xu Xian who betrays his wife by using Fahai’s begging bowl to subdue and trap an unsuspecting White Snake at home. Fahai then enters and captures Green Snake, and goes on to bury the two snakes at the Thunder Peak Pagoda. For traditional Chinese adaptors and readers, however, Xu Xian can be considered much less the heartless husband than a rational male who is aware of his dangerous liaisons with the nonhuman demonic spirits. There is no better symbol to celebrate man’s victory over the lure of the female with Xu’s and Fahai’s concerted effort to imprison the two women snakes beneath the erection of a pagoda.22

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Subsequently, multiple transformations of the stories from the eighteenth century on have added plots of the White Snake’s pregnancy and the birth of her son, the battle of floods between White Snake and Fahai and their deities, as well as the drama of the release of the imprisoned mother by her son. There has been the historical process of humanizing White’s character from a demonic spirit to a caring wife and loving mother, as her intense yearning for earthly love proves to be her primary desire, and the attachment between the snake woman and her husband is purely built on their sentimental and intense relationships. For example, the early Qing-dynasty playwrights Huang Tubi (1700–1771) and Fang Chengpei (1731–1780) extensively rewrote the legend as Thunder Peak Pagoda (Leifeng ta) in 1738 and 1772, respectively. Their elaborate plays have creatively added to the legend that White gives birth to a son before she is incarcerated under the pagoda. The single-parent Xu Xian raises the son, Menjiao. After Mengjiao discovers her mother’s identity, he successfully earns the top scholar degree in the imperial examination and his filial piety has touched heaven. White is released from pagoda to reunite with the family.23 The humanized drama, which ends with the scholar-son ­appealing to the heavenly power to release his mother, may have originated from the spectator’s wish for a happy ending, whereas the tale of the son saving his imprisoned mother would appear to be very much “the Chinese counterpart of the Freudian family complex.”24 The intricate tale of female seduction and patriarchal punishment, mother complex and the creation process, anthropomorphic divinities and demonic destructions, underwent multiple rewritings in the past centuries. The incessant Chinese obsession with and remaking of the snake woman figure may go beyond dramaturgy and performance, allowing us to explore the mythological, sociopolitical, and anthropocentric interests in the historical circulations of the mythology. From a comparative mythology perspective, there are parallel archetypes of the snake-woman in both the Judeo-Christian and Chinese traditions. The biblical myth of Eve’s affiliation with the snake in the Garden of Eden suggests a Western archetype of the snake-woman charged with transgressive sexuality and demonic energies. The female spirit is depicted as destroyer, the feminine as the enemy of reason and order, the yin of chaos.25 For Chinese Jungian analyst Chie Lee, the White Snake mythology could be traced to a revisionist writing of the ancient creation myth of the goddess Nüwa, a feminine personification of the snake in the embodiment of half-woman and half-snake.26

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The evolving legend, which narrates the battle between the snake spirit and a self-righteous monk, “evokes empathy for the indomitable spirit of the feminine principle, which was subdued but not destroyed.”27 Lee argues that White Snake embodies all three psychic levels: the divine, the human, and the instinctive. She is the goddess who longs for love, a (female) spirit descended to the human realm to challenge the existing human (male) hierarchy, represented by Fahai.28 Following its mythological strains, if the feminine snake spirit conjures up the Chinese fear of the supernatural as a revenant ghost, how can the humanization tendencies of White Snake—the animal-becoming-human story, the overcoming of the taboo of human-animal union (and conjugal copulation)—tells us about Chinese thinking of humanity’s relations to nature? The dramatic conflict of the characters in the White Snake tale lies in their ambition to transcend their roles and fulfil their personal desires to transgress nature’s boundaries. Xu Xian, as a human, finds it hard to rest in peace with a snake demon. White Snake remains a snake spirit who has defied heavenly laws to come down to earth and experience human love. The heroine has insatiable desire to be human, but she is overpowered by Fahai as the law enforcer. Buddha’s law of karma (the chain of causation) remains inexorable, though not without its final mercy. White has to practise self-cultivation and peace, dissolving her sins and crimes while she is imprisoned under the pagoda, in order to attain her own salvation.29 For the traditional Chinese, it could be argued, the plights and fates of White Snake were comfortably accepted. In Chinese theatre, spectators “did not look for plot solutions at the expense of the social and cosmological order.”30 The genesis of the myth has seen modern reinventions, with growing domestication and humanization of White Snake as a virtuous woman dedicated to both lover and family. Tian Han’s (1898–1968) modernized Beijing opera, finalized in 1955, which culminates in Green Snake’s vengeful destruction of the pagoda and “liberation” of her sister White Snake, bespeaks how animal symbols and myths are used in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Tian apparently rejected Feng Menglong’s story to cleanse the “feudalistic” and patriarchal themes from the traditional text in favour of Republican stage versions, which stressed White’s pure love rather than female sexuality and lust, with the heroine giving birth to a son before her imprisonment, and her eventual release followed by the happy ending of family reunion. Importantly, Tian’s modern

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rewrite has made significant alterations in the traditional plot, characterization, and theme to tailor to its revolutionary socialist outlook. He refashions the mythical snake-woman into the popularized image of the “new woman” to celebrate “free love,” women’s rights, and revolutionary spirit.31 The play f­urther exploits tendencies in the heroine that lean towards a real humanity and yet embedded in human struggle. Tian develops White Snake as an endearing woman and lover, bereft of the ferocious qualities of a demon snake in the traditional versions. The heroine is recast as a woman warrior effusing warmth, intelligence, bravery, and chastity. In Scene 6, “Guarding the Mountain,” when Xu Xian dies of fright after witnessing her real snake form, White goes to the lengths to procure the sacred herbs to save his life.32 Xu Xian, likewise, turns into a devoted lover with passion and duty for his wife. Tian eliminates the weaknesses in his personality as a suspicious and vacillating husband. The character of Fahai, however, undergoes radical change. The Buddhist monk no longer stands for the correcting, merciful power of heavenly laws; rather, he poses as the villainous threat of “feudalistic” and superstitious forces, now acting only as an obstruction to the couple’s pursuit of free love and peaceful family. Tian Han translates the archetypal conflict between White Snake and Fahai—the irreconcilable tension between demon and god—into interpersonal and power conflicts, which can be seen as human actions to resolve the larger struggle of social forces. Tian stages more elaborate fight sequences in Scene 12, “The Water Battle,” on top of earlier Republican stage performances of the scene without a full display of the oppositional forces. At Golden Mountain Temple: The Yangtze river flows angrily. With bitterness and anger, WHITE appears with a battle flag. After a few moments, she throws the flag to BLUE (GREEN). BLUE (GREEN) takes the flag and starts to call all the water animals. WHITE reappears among the water animals and calls to them.33

In the shadow of revolutionary rhetoric, White Snake cries with grief and anger on her face like the “bitterness and anger” of the Yangtze river. The woman warrior appeals to her water creatures and “comrades,” and launches her call to arms: “Brothers and Sisters, let us go and destroy Old Fa Hai (Fahai)!” “Tian Han has White rally the water creatures to attack Fahai’s temple in a fashion reminiscent of the storming of the Winter Palace

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during the Russian Revolution.”34 Tian presents “a more ­confrontational White Snake” on stage, as she is transformed into “a female warrior, an ordinary wife pushed to the edge of rebellion, similar to those righteous rebels in The Water Margin.”35 White’s deep hatred of Fahai stems from his cunning tricks to separate her family as well as his imminent threat to violate the happy lives of all animals and creatures, just like what he did to her. In this sense, Tian transforms White into a resolute lover-­warrior who has acquired a new (revolutionary) humanism to fight against the oppressor for the oppressed. By endowing White Snake with the superpower to summon up great floods in her fight against Fahai, Tian Han taps into the mythic sources of Chinese floods, but rewrites them for his purpose. Chinese flood myths usually tell about how the flood in ancient times imperilled the world, and how the heroes or heroines struggled to curb the flood and save the world from the disaster. A new cosmic order is rebuilt and a new civilization appears after the floods are tamed.36 In Tian’s rewrite, White uses floods as the natural weapon to attack an old heavenly order. Tian Han also revises the play for New China with a radical ending. Republican performances may have inherited the theatrical versions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which White’s son is the saviour who releases her from the prison pagoda and brings her back to the family. The filial son narrative actually confirms the sinful nature of female sexuality and the rightful patriarch as it did in traditional folk literature. Tian, as a progressive intellectual, has to do away with this filial son. For him, White Snake is not the victim of lust or passion, but the embodiment of human compassion and love.37 Nor does Tian allow the husband to play the saviour role, as he is an apothecary and a petit-bourgeoisie. In a blatant gesture to embrace feminine consciousness and (destructive) power, Tian assigns Green Snake—who in his version is White’s maidservant of minor social background—as the commander of the insurrections against the heavenly authorities. In Scene 16, “The Falling of the Tower,” Green acts as the leader of the “mass” of water creatures to storm the pagoda and free White. Tian forcefully subverts the traditional denouements of the White Snake tales, in which a higher authority such as the Buddha or the emperor comes in as a final arbiter. It is the rebellion of Green’s mass army of water creatures—the grassroots collective action—that ultimately topples the Thunder Peak Pagoda, an icon of the old patriarchal system. Tian subtly reinterprets the myth as an allegory of the historic struggle of the Chinese people against feudal oppression.

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Green Snake and the Chinese Anthropocene In Tian Han’s rendition, the snake spirit has acquired a “new humanism” with strong political implications, as White Snake appears “more humane than human” as the “new convert” in New China.38 Can the mythic tale help us rethink what it means to be human along the progressive paths of modernity and monstrous history? What are the stakes of being human and nonhuman (animal, deity, demon, and monster) in revolutionary China, as all myths and folklores and their archaic modes of thought had to be quarantined, filtered, or refashioned to fit into the reigning state ideologies? The Monkey King was a salient mythic figure, which was refigured and reformed to be a paragon of the underclass rebel in resisting dictatorship, as it was featured in Wan Laiming’s (1899–1997) animated picture Havoc in Heaven (Danao tiangong) in two parts in 1961 and 1964. Drawing on the superpower monkey hero from the sixteenth-­ century novel Journey to the West (Xiyouji), Wan and his brothers produced the first Chinese animation feature, Princess Iron Fan (Tieshan gongzhu) in 1941 in wartime Shanghai, and after their sojourn in Hong Kong, they would return to Shanghai to make Havoc in Heaven two decades later.39 Transformations of Wan’s animation may spell out the PRC politics of representation. The Monkey King in Princess Iron Fan arguably looks like Mickey Mouse, but he is much more “Sinicized” in Havoc in Heaven in terms of artistic styles, and more importantly of his characterization and his revolutionary mindset.40 As an immortal, Monkey King possesses supernatural skills with which to beat his opponent deities. He also has strong human will to defy the sacred power, wreaking havoc in the heavenly palace. His confrontation with the Jade Emperor, the highest commander of all gods, makes him a triumphant rebel to expose the intrigue of the Jade Emperor, making a mockery of the bureaucratic feudalism of divine rule. Wan’s ideal of creating Chinese animation in the wake of Disney’s techno-imagination is well known. Sergei Eisenstein, the radical Soviet filmmaker and theorist, saw great potentials of Disney’s animation, arguing that it promised to blend technological animism, totems, and myths in modern pictures, allowing the spectator to reimagine the archaic relationships between human and animal and nature.41 Wan’s mission was doomed in socialist China, as his creativity had to toe the party line by reconfiguring the Monkey King as a personification of “the people,” when Havoc in Heaven proves to be the “hypothetical erasure of mythology by a radicalized present.”42

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As perennial Chinese myths gave way to the Maoist mythmaking of socialist progress and scientific utopianism, political distortions of Chinese mythology on screen have contributed to what Daisy Yan Du criticizes as the “dis/appearance of animals in animated films.”43 Du argues that prior to the Cultural Revolution, animated films were replete with animals. As politicized human actions become the core of storytelling in film, animals systematically vanished from cinematic scenes. The socialist regime’s hostility and devaluation of animals should be taken as a part of the larger biopolitical scheme that subjected animals, unruly creatures, and all natural and anthropomorphic objects to the ideologies of evolutionary thinking and nation-building, applied to multiple media genres as well as to traditional storytelling of folklores, myths, fairy tales, and legends. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), Mao mobilized the people to “wipe out the four pests” (chu si hai) on highly coordinated countrywide campaigns to eliminate the undesirable creatures of “sparrows, rats, flies, mosquitoes.” The state called on the peasants to cut down trees on a massive scale to fuel steel-making projects in their “backyard furnaces,” causing irrevocable and devastating countryside deforestation. The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) only exacerbated the disappearance of animals on a large scale by intensifying the violence done on natural species by destroying their habitats, which found an uncanny synchronicity with the disappearance of animals in film.44 A similar rationale for marginalizing animals was used likewise to dehumanize the state’s class enemies. To sweep away the “ox-monsters and snake-demons” (niugui sheshen) was a call to eradicate the bourgeois and ideological antagonists, identical to the effort to wipe out unwanted wild creatures. The Maoist voluntarist ideology pits the people in a ferocious struggle against the natural environment, with the people’s concerted effort to conquer nature in order to achieve a socialist paradise. The fallacy that nature must yield to human will is given full expression in the massive social mobilization, manifesting the state’s deep-seated enmity against nature and all nonhuman subjects, and filled with references to a “war against nature” in political discourse.45 The contrast between the militarized Maoist approach towards the conquest of nature and traditional Chinese values of harmony and sustainability is sharp. Even the dominant anthropocentric Confucian tradition prescribes the “wise use” of natural resources, with an emphasis on the regulation and ordering of the nonhuman environment for the good of human society. The militarized Maoist political campaigns illuminate the adversarial dynamics of the human-nature relationship during the Maoist era.

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In light of the anthropocentric crisis in communist China, this chapter finally turns to contemporary Hong Kong adaptations of the White Snake legend as they imperceptibly throw a critical light on the human-animal-­ demon connections as they play out in the matrix of nature, humanity, and society. How does the metamorphosis of the White Snake mythology serve as Chinese criticism and poetic justice to inquire about power, heroism, feminism, victimhood, and group destiny? I discuss Lilian Lee’s ingenuous novel that puts Green Snake as the feminine centre of ­storytelling, which inspired Tsui Hark’s fantastic cinematic remaking. Lee sarcastically recasts the legend in a political light by adding time-travel episodes where both White Snake and Green Snake, after passing through their ordeals in a thousand years as legend has it, have found themselves struggling to survive in the Cultural Revolution in mainland China. The fantastic finale and the geopolitical present are nothing less than an admonition against the Chinese shock of the Anthropocene, given that Mao Zedong’s political campaigns from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution epitomized aggressive breaks from the traditional Chinese philosophical idea of a harmonious social and natural order, placing an extreme belief in the power of science and political power to master nature and humanity.46 Lee inscribes a most parodic and sardonic ending to the mythology’s genealogy by rewriting White Snake’s son as a Red Guard cadet who leads his fellows to topple the pagoda. The son bears the name Xiangyang, meaning “Facing the (Red) Sun,” a symbol for Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution. If Tian Han casts away the filial son in his modernized Beijing opera to embrace Green Snake as the woman warrior, Lee’s reinscription of the enfant terrible in no way boasts the revolutionary tenor of the times, but runs counter to it. As Little Green, who assumes narrative subjectivity to rewrite and subvert older versions of the mythology, presents her “perverse” vision of history and the destructive force of the Cultural Revolution: Cadets: Long Live the Cultural Revolution! Little Green: Come quickly to knock down the Leifeng Pagoda. What do you keep shouting at? What a trouble. Who is this “Chairman Mao”? What is this “Central Party.” I know nothing about it. I only hope they work in unison, and help to set my sister free.

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They are so desperate to destroy everything…. I also use my inner force, wave my sword, and give them some solid support. Eventually, the stones and bricks fall apart—the pagoda crumbles! The pagoda crumbles! After all these years, perhaps, the Leifeng pagoda and China are like a tooth hollowed out. They simply fall when they are shaken. Perhaps it is due to the power of the young rebels led by Xiangyang (the son). It is the contribution of the Cultural Revolution. Suzhen (White Snake) and I am appreciated for it. —White Snake is reborn!47

Lee’s rewrite seems to revert to Qing-dynasty and early Republican versions that assign the saviour role to the son, but the effect could not be more ironical to the discourse of the demonic. For it is the offspring of the snake spirit who plays a Red Guard leader and vows to drive out all the “ox-monsters and snake-demons” in the old establishments. Lee’s metafictional writing also invents an anachronism of the fall of the pagoda. The sudden collapse of the tower in 1924 was an event for Republican-era literati and Hangzhou people. (The current structure dates from 2002 and its construction was preceded by extensive archaeological research of the terrain.) Lu Xun immediately wrote an essay, “On the Collapse of the Leifeng Pagoda” (Lun Leifeng ta de daodiao), and he actually celebrated the collapse of the tower as an oppressive symbol of the feudalistic social order in the context of the White Snake lore. Tian Han’s play could have been a deliberate echo of Lu Xun’s critique, when Green Snake as figuring the collective brings to the fall of the tower. Lu Xun takes the decaying pagoda as the figure of ruins and ancient China that betray a cultural resistance to change.48 Lee inventively places the pagoda’s downfall in the Cultural Revolution, taking it to stand for China’s cultural heritage and historical relics being looted, destroyed, and hollowed out by revolutionary lunatics. A sympathetic light is beamed to sub-human animality and the natural world of insects. As Green Snake takes White Snake on their way home, they are accompanied by their fellow species—spiders, scorpions, earthworms, lizards, and centipedes—which are found to have been trapped under the tower with White Snake before it collapses.

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Tsui Hark’s 1993 Green Snake eliminates the whole Cultural Revolution episode from Lee’s novel, but highlights the moral and spiritual ambiguity between nonhuman creatures, humans, and the godlike superhuman as played by a young Fahai. The film begins as the monk stands aloof amidst a mob of disfigured faces and grotesque bodies. The hideous crowds carve devil heads, stage peacock fights, and have physical combats themselves. This is “human,” sighs the monk, suggesting the elusive boundary of men and beasts in humanity. The young exorcist takes it seriously to hunt down demons and spirits who have crossed over from their own realm into the realm of mortals. One day, Fahai encounters an old man in the forest; seeing through the man as actually a spider in disguise. He forces the man back into spider form, imprisoning him under a pavilion (a stand-in for the pagoda). Fahai ignores the spider’s appeal of release for he has been practising and meditating for 200  years to attain the current form, and he stubbornly insists that there should be no in-between for humans and nonhumans. The film highlights the confusion of Fahai as the supreme judge and superego of law and order. His arrogant religious mission to expel nonhumans and demons from the human world only culminates in grave mistakes and disasters. The self-righteous monk soon repents his act on the spider, and passes the spider’s Buddhist beads to two giant snakes— White Snake and Green Snake as it turns out—who are protecting a homeless woman in labour from splashing rains. The prologue spells out the film’s unique moral universe, in which “animals are kinder than humans, serpents are protectors of the homeless.”49 But it lays down a dramatic twist that, thanks to the magic beads, the two snakes attain human form more quickly. Much has been said about how Green Snake initiates her amorous relationships between White Snake, Xu Xian, and Fahai in Lee’s novel and Tsui’s film, the circumstances of which have subverted feminine subjectivity and gender in the mythological fantasy.50 It is tempting to explore the refiguration of Fahai as the failed guardian of his human-centred and anthropocentric moral universe, whose strict sense of order is starting to split at the seams and crumble like the pagoda. The monk strives to maintain his sense of righteousness in the sinful world of humanity, making it his mission to separate nonhumans, demons, and humans. But he is conflicted with his own lust when he is challenged by Green Snake, as he fails to prove that he can entirely unfetter his mind from her sexuality and seduction. Ashamed to accept his personal flaws, Fahai vents his frustration on Xu Xian. The monk tries to redeem himself by “saving” (and

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kidnapping) the young scholar from the clutches of White Snake and Green Snake, forcing the man into a Buddhist monastery of meditation and self-cultivation (shades of the “re-education camps” in the Cultural Revolution) to cleanse his perceptions and desires. The climactic rendering of the “water battle” scene in the White Snake story allows the filmmaker to cinematically create the monstrous flood as human violence and death. The main visual motif in Green Snake is water, “the constantly-changing essence of life.”51 The film explores the mythic and anthropocentric power of water in its fantastic, erotic, dreamy, and violent sequences. Water is presented as the reservoir of serenity when Fahai retreats into meditation. It invariably turns into the agent of transformation, vitality, and sexuality when the monk witnesses the half-naked mother giving birth under the rain-drenched trees, and when Green Snake seduces him in a lake. In the final confrontation between the monk and the snake-demons, monstrous floods are created. White Snake threatens to destroy the monastery and all the monks unless Fahai returns the husband to her. Green Snake, in protection of her sister, unleashes the flood and joins the fight. With his superpower, Fahai lifts the mountain to make his monastery stand above the waters, but his action fatally lets the flood into the nearby village, killing all its residents. With their combined power, the monk and the monsters could potentially prevent the catastrophe created by superhuman (or human) power, but they are so caught up in their battle that they fail to curb the rising currents by the time they realize their grave errors. The film begins and ends with the self-righteous Fahai, who commits acts of violence and destruction done with his moral intention and belief system. When asked about his recreation of Fahai as a frustrated personality, Tsui Hark said, “The monk is a reflection of people who have this ideology (‘human beings would think they are such smart creatures’), who are stuck in any position or level in our world, like government or officers. The character would be like all types of leaders in the spiritual world.”52 Tsui seems to have cautiously avoided a slip of the tongue as he did not ­mention the “political” leaders. The film’s final flood scene with the pending destruction of the world is as much a display of cinematic virtuosity as hidden political commentary. If Jung’s flood vision is an unconscious forewarning of the devastating war, Tsui’s disastrous flood can be taken as his repressed and retrospective anxiety of massive human and natural catastrophes done in the Maoist years, driven by a doctrinal leadership and the desire for ideological purity. In contemporary China, as

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Chie Lee has reported, the White Snake mythology has “new, cleaned-up versions”: Green returns and, with Buddha’s help, defeats Fahai. The happy ending confirms that the good triumphs over the bad, and the people defeat the evil feudal society.53 In this sense, the modern Hong Kong adaptations resonate more intimately with the mythic and moral universe of the White Snake legend by depicting the amorous, sympathetic, and more humane snakes and powerless creatures, creating lush and haunting human-­animal-­demon dramas to stake the risk of privileging the human species above all kinds of life, real and imagined, and inspiring us to become more human by knowing more about the nonhumans. The chapter examines how the ancient story of snake-human transformation and taboo are read as an Anthropocene mythology, in which the snake-heroines express their lust and desire to be human as well as revealing the limits to being human. The apocalyptic imaginaries of humanity are displaced by fantasies of the eternal return and its relentless reincarnation of animals and spirits into human forms.

Notes 1. C.  G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 175. 2. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 175. 3. “Archetypal Theory and Criticism,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 36. 4. C.  G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966), 69. 5. Mark Kernan, “Myth and Dystopia in the Anthropocene,” OpenDemocracy, 5 December 2017. Accessed 4 June 2018. https://www.opendemocracy. net/transfor mation/mark-ker nan/Myth-and-dystopia-in-theAnthropocene 6. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 175. 7. Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vol.1: The Way of the Animal Powers, part 1, Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 8–9. 8. Joseph Campbell, and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), 38–39. Mystical function: awakening a sense of awe by realizing the mystery of the universe that underlies all forms; Cosmological dimension: revealing the shape and mystery of the universe; Sociological function: supporting and validating a certain social order; Pedagogical function: guiding the individual through the stage of life, on how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.

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9. Campbell and Moyers, The Power of Myth, 40. 10. Campbell and Moyers, 40. 11. Campbell and Moyers, 41. 12. Campbell and Moyers, 40. 13. Campbell and Moyers, 41. 14. Ursula K.  Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. 15. Heise, 25. 16. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 29–59; Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover Publications, 1953), 23–43. 17. Frye argued that literature drew upon transcendental genres such as romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), irony/satire (winter), and comedy (spring). These four genres constitute a “central unifying myth.” He further codified these genres and uncovered their basic archetypal structures. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957). 18. Craig Chalquist, “A Folklore of Hope: Storytelling for a Reenchanted World.” 19. Wilt L. Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xi–xxiv. 20. Richard E. Strassberg, “Introduction,” in John D. Mitchell (ed.), The Red Pear Garden: Three Great Dramas of Revolutionary China (Boston: Godine, 1973), 20–27. 21. Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake: A Personal Amplification,” Psychological Perspectives 50 (2007): 235–39. 22. Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xix. 23. Fan Jinlan, Baishe chuan gushi xingbian yanjiu (Study of the White Snake legend and storytelling) (Taibei: Wanjuan lou tushu, 2003), 95–129. 24. Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xix. 25. Liang Luo, The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 179. 26. The popularity of the story of the white snake might have served to revitalize the creation myth of the Mother Goddess Nüwa, who created the Chinese from the yellow earth. Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake: A Personal Amplification,” Psychological Perspectives 50 (2007): 242. 27. Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake,” 235. 28. Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake,” 243. 29. Idema, 82. Buddhist teachings of the White Snake legend were delivered in the nineteenth-century narrative scrolls, The Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak (Leifeng baojuan). For an English translation of the texts, see Idema, 9–84.

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30. Strassberg, 24. 31. Strassberg, 25–26; Liang, The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China, 177–207. 32. Tian Han, The White Snake, trans. Donald Chang and William Packard, in John D. Mitchell (ed.), The Red Pear Garden, 80–84. 33. Tian Han, 98–99. 34. Strassberg, 25–26. 35. Liang, The Avant-garde and the Popular in Modern China, 204. 36. The Chinese flood myth emphasized the human conquest of the natural disaster and the origin of civilization rather than the flood that came to punish human sin as in the biblical or other Western flood myths. Famous classical flood myths include the story of the goddess Nüwa patching the sky with colourful stones and accumulating the reed ashes to stop the flood. See Lihui Yang and Deming An, with Jessica Anderson Turner, Handbook of Chinese Mythology (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 114–17. 37. Wilt Idema argues that later alterations of the White Snake stories may have followed the filial son prototypes of Dong Yong, Mulian, and Chenxiang, who save their mothers in Chinese folklores. See Idema, “Old Tales for New Times: Some Comments on the Cultural Translation of China’s Four Great Folktales in the Twentieth Century,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 9.1 (2012): 15–16; Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, xvi–xix. 38. Liang, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, 205. 39. Daisy Yan Du, “Suspended Animation: The Wan Brothers and the (In) animate Mainland-Hong Kong Encounter, 1947–1956,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11.2 (May 2017): 140–58. 40. Mary Ann Farquhar, “Monks and Monkeys: A Study of ‘National Style’ in Chinese Animation,” Animation Journal 1.2 (Spring 1993): 5–27. 41. Oksana Bulgakowa, “Disney as a Utopian Dreamer,” in Sergei Eisenstein, Disney, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa & Dietmar Hochmuth, trans. Dustin Condren (Berlin: Potemkin Press, 2013), 116–17; Eisenstein, Disney, 118–25; Jay Leyda, ed. Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 1986). 42. Sean Macdonald, Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media (London: Routledge, 2016), 23. For an account of Uproar in Heaven, see Macdonald, 15–47. 43. Daisy Yan Du, “The Dis/Appearance of Animals in Animated Film during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976,” Positions: Asia Critique 24.2 (2016): 435–79. 44. Du, ibid., 437.

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45. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67–93. 46. Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 86–89. Shapiro argues that ancient Chinese traditions manifest the wisdom of environmentalism. An anthropocentric Confucianism espouses human’s harmony with nature. Buddhism, a biocentric tradition, stresses reverence for the divine spark of life in all living beings, while Daoism, an ecocentric philosophy, embraces human alignment with nature’s flow of energy and “way.” Such traditions construct an understanding of nature in which humans stand not in opposition to it, but as part of it. 47. Li Bihua, Qingshe (Green Snake) (Hong Kong: Cosmos Book, 1986), 197–98. 48. Lu Xun saw the Leifeng Pagoda site as provoking thoughts on destruction and reconstruction of Chinese culture. See Eugene Y. Wang, “Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the Discourse of the Demonic,” in Judith T. Zeitlin, Lydia H. Liu, and Ellen Widmer (eds.), Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center), 2003, 488–552. 49. Lisa Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 2001), 107. 50. See, for example, Alvin Ka Hin Wong, “Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device: Transnational Adaptations of the Legend of the White Snake,” in Howard Chiang (ed.), Transgender China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127–58. 51. Lisa Morton, The Cinema of Tsui Hark (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 2001), 105. 52. Morton, 110. 53. Chie Lee, “The Legend of the White Snake,” 252.

Bibliography Archetypal Theory and Criticism. 1994. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 36. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bulgakowa, Oksana. 2010. Disney as a Utopian Dreamer. In Disney, ed. Oksana Bulgakowa and Dietmar Hochmuth, 116–117. Trans. Dustin Condren. Berlin/San Francisco: Potemkin Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1988. Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol.1: The Way of the Animal Powers, Part 1, Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers. New York: Harper & Row.

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Campbell, Joseph, and Bill Moyers. 1991. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books. Cassirer, Ernst. 1953. Language and Myth. Trans. Susanne K. Langer. New York: Dover Publications. ———. 1955. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 2: Mythical Thought. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chalquist, Craig. 2018. A Folklore of Hope: Storytelling for a Reenchanted World. Craig S. Chalquist Website. http://www.chalquist.com/a-folklore-ofhope-storytelling-for-a-reenchanted-world/. Accessed 10 Oct 2018. Du, Daisy Yan. 2016. The Dis/Appearance of Animals in Animated Film During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976. Positions: Asia Critique 24 (2): 435–479. ———. 2017. Suspended Animation: The Wan Brothers and the (In)animate Mainland-Hong Kong Encounter, 1947–1956. Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11 (2): 140–158. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1986. Eisenstein on Disney. Trans. Alan Upchurch. Kolkata: Seagull Books. ———. 2013. Disney. Berlin/San Francisco: Potemkin Press. Fan, Jinlan. 2003. Baishe zhuan gushi xingbian yanjiu [Study of the White Snake Legend and Storytelling]. Taibei: Wanjuan lou tushu. Farquhar, Mary Ann. 1993. Monks and Monkeys: A Study of ‘National Style’ in Chinese Animation. Animation Journal 1 (2): 5–27. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press. Idema, Wilt L. 2009. The White Snake and Her Son. Trans. and ed. Wilt L. Idema. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing. ———. 2012. Old Tales for New Times: Some Comments on the Cultural Translation of China’s Four Great Folktales in the Twentieth Century. Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 9 (1): 15–16. Jung, C.G. 1966. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1989. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books. Kernan, Mark. 2017. Myth and Dystopia in the Anthropocene. OpenDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/mark-kernan/Myth-anddystopia-in-the-Anthropocene. Accessed 4 June 2018. Lee, Chie. 2007. The Legend of the White Snake: A Personal Amplification. Psychological Perspectives 50: 235–242. Li, Bihua. 1986. Qingshe [Green Snake]. Hong Kong: Cosmos Book.

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Luo, Liang. 2014. The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Macdonald, Sean. 2016. Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media. London: Routledge. Morton, Lisa. 2001. The Cinema of Tsui Hark. Jefferson: McFarland Publishing. Shapiro, Judith. 2001. Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strassberg, Richard E. 1973. Introduction. In The Red Pear Garden: Three Great Dramas of Revolutionary China, ed. John D. Mitchell, 20–27. Boston: David. R. Godine. Tian, Han. 1973. The White Snake. In The Red Pear Garden: Three Great Dramas of Revolutionary China, ed. John D. Mitchell, 48–120. Trans. Donald Chang and William Packard. Boston: David. R. Godine. Wang, Eugene Y. 2003. Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the Discourse of the Demonic. In Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, ed. Judith T.  Zeitlin, Lydia H.  Liu, and Ellen Widmer, 488–552. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Wong, Alvin Ka Hin. 2012. Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device: Transnational Adaptations of the Legend of the White Snake. In Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang, 127–158. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yang, Lihui, Deming An, and Jessica Anderson Turner. 2005. Handbook of Chinese Mythology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

CHAPTER 6

Magic Realism as a Critical Response to the Anthropocene Wai-Ping Yau

The Anthropocene is understood in this chapter as an ecological crisis that requires a rethinking of the anthropogenic processes and the opening up of an alternative future. As Dipesh Chakrabarty stresses, the term “Anthropocene” suggests an “ecological overshoot on the part of humanity,” a deepening crisis that urges us to understand the close connections between natural history and human history, between ecology and modernization, from a species perspective in the sense of “a particular species— Homo sapiens—coming to dominate the biosphere to such an extent that its own existence was challenged.”1 Chakrabarty also stresses “the role of the arts and imaginative work in this crisis,” drawing particular attention to the ways in which storytelling can create a sense of agency that is based on a vision of humans interacting with “other materials” in an attempt to “make themselves at home in a planet that was not necessarily designed to see humans as the culminating point of its history.”2 This sense of pervasiveness and precariousness is shared by others who call for a cultural politics appropriate to the current age, one that not only “echoes post-colonial discourse” in its emphasis on “history and notions of ‘vulnerability’ and W.-P. Yau (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_6

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‘responsibility,’” but also develops a “mental ‘openness,’” an “improvisational agency” that is reflective and sensitive to a “human temporality” that “stretches back into forgotten pasts and on into unforeseen futures.”3 It will be argued below that an examination of magic realism in the fiction of Han Shaogong, Mo Yan and Tashi Dawa can contribute to a complex, nuanced understanding of the Anthropocene. These magic realist works will be considered in the ideological context in which they were published in the 1980s, when China put itself on the path of rapid economic development with its consequent social and ecological costs. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which developmentalism and other related forces underlying the anthropogenic processes are contested through fantasy, perceptual transformation, narrative disruption and the depiction of pre-modern practices. In particular, it will be argued that the use of landscape as a metaphor for the interaction between self and environment evokes a sense of place that provides a critical response to the Anthropocene, one that addresses issues of temporality and power relations in ways that allow for the emergence of a sense of agency that is both reflective and anticipatory.

Magic Realism But first, it is necessary to give a brief account of magic realism.4 Since it was coined by the art critic Franz Roh in 1925 in connection with German post-expressionist painting,5 the term “magic realism” has been associated with the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s concept of the “marvellous real,”6 and applied by the literary critic Angel Flores to fantastic writing in Latin America.7 Later discussions have also extended the term to film and postcolonialism.8 Rather than attempt to hold the term to a single definition, I will take advantage of the diversity and complexity of the developing critical studies on magic realism and highlight aspects that are particularly pertinent to the present discussion. First, magic realism as used in Carpentier’s sense of the marvellous real can be understood as an attempt to retrace the memories of tradition and history through a narrative that stretches the limits of the real to encompass mythic thinking and other marvellous experiences.9 Second, Flores’s understanding of magic realism as “the amalgamation of realism and fantasy” points to prominent features of the fantastic.10 In the magic realist work, “the unreal happens as part of reality,” as in Franz

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Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis”: the transformation of the human protagonist Gregor Samsa into an enormous insect is “accepted by the other characters as an almost normal event.”11 In this connection, it is important to note that if Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage enables us to see the ego as a cultural construction, then the fantastic can be seen as an attempt to “reverse or rupture the process of ego formation which took place during the mirror stage” and “re-enter the imaginary.”12 In particular, the multiplication of the selves of fictional characters in fantastic narratives functions to question dominant definitions of reality. Third, Frederic Jameson argues that magic realist films engage with history in new ways through (a) a “perforated” history that includes “gaps” and “traces” of an older way of life; (b) a “poetic transfiguration of the object world” that signals a return of the repressed; and (c) “denarrativization” by means of a “reduction to the body,” that is, the creative use of sex and violence as a device of deconstruction.13 Finally, Stephen Slemon argues that magic realist fiction embodies “a concept of resistance to the massive imperial centre and its totalizing systems.”14 In magic realism, the two opposing codes of fantasy and realism are never organized into a hierarchy.15 Slemon also argues that the social conditions of postcolonial cultures are often thematized in three ways: (a) the narrative is set in a localized region metonymical of the postcolonial culture as a whole; (b) history is foreshortened so that the shaping forces of the culture can be effectively brought into play; and (c) the pluralities and gaps produced by the colonial encounter are foregrounded.16 By recuperating lost voices and marginalized elements of the postcolonial culture, magic realism engages in a “dialogue with history” and effects a “re-­ visioning” of history.17 These aspects of magic realism are particularly applicable to the fiction of Han Shaogong, Mo Yan and Tashi Dawa. In their work, as will be discussed in more detail below, magic realism engages with history by drawing on mythic thinking and other marvellous experiences of peasant society, by signalling a return of the repressed through fantasy, by deconstructing ideological positions through denarrativization and perceptual transformation, and by foregrounding the pluralities produced by the colonial encounter. But to appreciate the implications for cultural politics, it is necessary to consider these works in the ideological context from which they came.

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Developmentalism Han Shaogong, Mo Yan and Tashi Dawa were among a new generation of writers emerging in the 1980s, whose search for cultural roots in the wake of the iconoclastic years of the Cultural Revolution earned them the label of “root-searching” (xungen).18 Inspired both by works of magic realism— in particular, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,19—and by the “culture fever” (wenhua re) that spurred debate about Chinese culture, the “root-searching” writers attempted to re-examine the heterogeneity of their cultural roots through means such as the assimilation of myths, folklore and cultures of ethnic minorities. Their work provoked much controversy. Some critics downplayed the role of fantasy in magic realism,20 while others faulted “root-searching” fiction for evading the burning issues of modernization.21 These apparently divergent responses—one stressing realism, the other a retreat from reality—showed the influence of critical realism, but also reflected concerns about the ideological climate, dominated as it was by developmentalism. As Arif Dirlik notes, developmentalism has been one of the most powerful driving forces for “human societies globally” ever since the Second World War.22 It is an ideology that fetishizes economic development, endowing it with “the power of a natural (or even, divine) force which humans can resist or question only at the risk of being condemned to stagnation and poverty.”23 Time is conceived of as linear progress, with nations competing for increasingly limited resources in the relentless march of economic development.24 Concomitant with this commitment to linear progress is an “unquestioning faith in science and technology” that sets economic development on a path of “unsustainability.”25 Developmentalism bears “the burden of colonial modernity,” a Eurocentric form of modernity “empowered by capitalism and nationalism.”26 It is also associated with “informal colonialism between and within nation-states” as they seek to further the interests of “elites” that form “part of a global class structure and the global organization of capital.”27 As Dirlik stresses, the environment is the first casualty of developmentalism: “The contradiction between development and the health of the environment is of the broadest concern not only because of its impact on human life but also because it points to the limits of development.”28 Post-Mao China has indeed been characterized by developmentalism and its attendant nationalism and authoritarianism, an ideology firmly inscribed in Deng Xiaoping’s catchphrases: “Development is the absolute principle” (fazhan cai shi ying daoli) and “The overriding need is for stability” (yadao yiqie de shi wending).29

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In fact, the 1980s saw the beginning of three decades of rapid economic growth, achieved under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has claimed to be “the paramount patriotic force and the guardian of national pride.”30 Economic development has been turned into “a national cause” and “a collective effort led by the Communist state,” with an emphasis on “national unity.”31 But China’s growing affluence has been accompanied by gaping inequality, rampant corruption, political repression and environmental degradation. In China, ecological harm has now reached unprecedented levels and cannot be adequately addressed without “effective application of the rule of law, greater citizen participation in the political process, and the strengthening of civil society.”32 These contradictions of developmentalism were already apparent in the 1980s and gave rise to the 1989 social movement that ended in the military crackdown on Tiananmen Square’s pro-democracy protesters. It is against this backdrop that we can best understand how the fiction of Han Shaogong, Mo Yan and Tashi Dawa uses fantasy and other features of magic realism to address issues of developmentalism and related anthropogenic forces. I will focus on four texts in this chapter: Han Shaogong’s short story “Homecoming” (Guiqulai), Mo Yan’s novel The Red Sorghum Family (Honggaoliang jiazu), and Tashi Dawa’s short stories “Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord” (Ji zai pishengkou shang de hun) and “Tibet, Days of Eclipse” (Xizang, yinmi de suiyue).

Homecoming The magic realism of Han Shaogong’s short story “Homecoming” (Guiqulai) is characterized by an uncanny sense of self and place that leads to an uncovering of what is suppressed by the dominant ideology.33 The uncanny, as Jackson notes, “uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar.”34 In “Homecoming,” the reader is placed firmly within the realm of the uncanny right from the beginning as the first-person narrator enters a remote village he is visiting for the first time: “Many people have said that once in a while, when they visit some place for the first time, they experience a feeling of familiarity they cannot explain. Now I too know this feeling” (21). This uncanny sense of place that pervades the story is created by a conjunction between narrative realism and the improbable nature of the narrated events that is characteristic of magic realism. An example:

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All this seems familiar, yet strange too, like a word you’ve been staring at for too long—now it looks right, now it doesn’t. Damn it, have I been here before or not? Let me take a guess: Down that flagstone path, past the banana grove, left at the oil mill, and just behind the blockhouse I should find an old tree—a gingko or a camphor—long dead from a bolt of lightning. Moments later I find I am correct—down to the last detail, including the hollow in the tree and the two youngsters in the foreground playing with a small bonfire. Nervously I try again: Behind the old tree there should be a low barn with piles of dung in front and a rusty plow or rake leaning against the side. And there they all are, clear as day, seeming to come toward me in greeting as I approach. Even the large stone pestle in its lopsided mortar, with the leaves and muck at the bottom—even these look familiar to me. Actually, the mortar in my mind’s eye is clean and dry. But wait—it stopped raining only a short while ago, and water running off the eaves would have been dripping right into the mortar. So once again a chill rises from my heels all the way up to the back of my neck. No, this is impossible, I cannot have come here before. I have never had meningitis, no mental illness, I still have my wits about me. Maybe I saw this in a movie once, or maybe it was in a dream that…Anxiously I rack my brains. (22)

Remarkably, what starts out as imaginary (“Let me take a guess”) ends up being confirmed as real, and the gap between fantasy and reality (“the mortar in my mind’s eye is clean and dry”) is traversed by a realist narrative (“water running off the eaves would have been dripping right into the mortar”). All this intensifies the feeling that the place is “familiar, yet strange,” which provokes anxiety but also thought (“Anxiously I rack my brains”). In “Homecoming,” this uncanny effect is also evoked through another feature of magic realism—the depiction of local ancient practices that are experienced by the outsider as an eruption of the marvellous. The narrator, for example, notes with interest how layers of meat are piled up at the dinner table “like bricks in a kiln—no doubt a custom dating back to the beginning of time” (32). The local dialect and tattoo designs seem sediments of complex meanings and faint memories of a distant past. Even more significantly, a chunk of meat is placed on a sheet of straw paper in front of an empty seat “for the enjoyment of the absent guest” (32). In fact, all these indigenous practices imply an absence, a past that has faded from the present. That the village is indeed filled with a haunting sense of

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absence is nowhere more evident than when a villager suggests that the narrator visit Third Grandpa, meaning “the solitary little hut where he used to live” (30). In this way, the fantastic and the marvellous real combine to create an uncanny sense of place that draws attention to absences and historical memories. In “Homecoming,” this uncanny sense of place is aligned with the interrogation of a unitary notion of self. In this remote village, the narrator finds himself strangely referred to as a certain Four-eyes Ma, a youth sent down to work as a teacher in the village during the Cultural Revolution. Unable to clear up the confusion, the narrator assumes the identity of Ma for the convenience it affords: “I presume that getting food and lodging for the night will be no problem, thank goodness” (25). But soon he is shocked to learn that Ma is rumoured to have killed a bully to avenge the wrongs done to the village community. Initially, the narrator denies to himself any connection with his assumed identity: “I want to say my name is not Ma at all, it is Huang—Huang Zhixian” (27). He also avoids memory of that which he would rather forget, the Cultural Revolution, preferring to “talk about the excellent situation today” (28), the term “excellent situation” (dahao xingshi) being an epithet for rapid economic development at the cost of the environment. Despite his denials, however, the narrator is drawn deeper and deeper into the village. He shares traits with Ma and even imagines himself as a double of Ma: “What if this Ma Whatshisname is really under a jinx, really rotting away in a jail somewhere? And here I sit in his place, drinking youcha and grinning stupidly” (26). He also finds himself slipping into the consciousness of Ma while conversing with Third Grandpa’s hut, which “talks to me in the rustling of the leaves” (35). Significantly, in response to a villager’s uncontrolled astonishment at Ma’s apparent return, the narrator remarks to himself: “I am not some hideous maggot. Why on earth is he carrying on like this?” (26)—clearly a nod to Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis” and a signal that “Homecoming” is to be understood as a magic realist text in the sense that the fragmentation of the narrator into Huang Zhixian and Four-eyes Ma can be considered as an attempt to “reverse or rupture the process of ego formation,” so as to reflect on a dominant definition of reality (“excellent situation”). This process of fragmentation causes anxiety but also leaves the narrator a changed person, indifference giving way to a fraternal spirit. What emerges is an uncanny sense of self (the narrator’s felt experience of his own body becomes “very unfamiliar, very strange”)35 that encourages a reflective, questioning attitude (“But…is

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there still someone in the world named Huang Zhixian? And this Huang Zhixian—is that me?” (40)) as well as the continuing expansion of experiences (“I will never be able to walk out of the enormity that is me” (40)). Thus, in “Homecoming,” fantasy blends with folklore to evoke a reflective self and a place marked by absences and all that has been swept aside by headlong economic development.

The Red Sorghum Family In Mo Yan’s novel The Red Sorghum Family (Honggaoliang jiazu), developmentalism as an anthropogenic force is contested through a critique of its conception of time as linear progress.36 This critique is effected by an imaginative reconstruction of the history of the “red sorghum family,” a history told not as a straight line, but rather through a narrative that works in circular movements towards a fresh experience and understanding of the narrated events. This storytelling structure is reminiscent of that of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which opens with the famous sentence: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.37

In a movement typical of the whole narrative, this sentence flashes forwards to a future point that recalls a memorable moment of discovery in the past. A similar narrative structure underlies The Red Sorghum Family, which recounts how the narrator returns to his birthplace to write a history about previous generations of his family, their home and their community. The novel begins thus: The ninth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939. My father, a bandit’s offspring who had passed his fifteenth birthday, was joining the forces of Commander Yu Zhan’ao, a man destined to become a legendary hero, to ambush a Japanese convoy on the Jiao-Ping highway. (3)

A little further on from this passage, which contains embedded references both to the past (“a bandit’s offspring”) and to the future (“a man destined to become a legendary hero”), the narrative gives a sense of this journey to battle through the heightened perception of the narrator’s father:

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Heaven and earth were in turmoil, the view was blurred. By then the soldiers’ muffled footsteps had moved far down the road. Father could still hear them, but a curtain of blue mist obscured the men themselves. (3)

Then the narrative jumps to a future moment that reminds the reader of the ongoing journey to battle: This was how Father rushed towards the uncarved granite marker that would rise above his grave in the bright-red sorghum fields of his hometown. A bare-assed little boy once led a white billy goat up to the weed-­ covered grave, and as it grazed in unhurried contentment, the boy pissed furiously on the grave and sang out: ‘The sorghum is red—the Japanese are coming—compatriots, get ready—fire your rifles and cannons—’ Someone said that the little goatherd was me, I don’t know. (3–4)

By disrupting linear chronology, and by juxtaposing vastly different moments in history that are intensely felt by the fictional characters, the narrative tells a “perforated” history in the sense used by Jameson, one that is full of gaps that provoke thought and questioning not just about the story, but also about storytelling (“Someone said that the little goatherd was me, I don’t know”). Moreover, Mo Yan’s attempt to rethink history through a structurally disjunctive narrative often results in a circular movement culminating in a revelation in the manner of One Hundred Years of Solitude (in the final chapter, for example, Aureliano Babilonia realizes that Melquíades’s parchments have long foretold the fate of the Buendía family). In The Red Sorghum Family, an early example can be found in the passage that immediately follows the above quotation: I used to have an intense love for Northeast Gaomi Township. I used to have an intense hatred for Northeast Gaomi Township. When I grew up, I studied Marxism and realized: Northeast Gaomi Township is without a doubt the most beautiful and most disgusting, most heavenly and most mundane, most sacred and most sordid, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world. People of previous generations who lived there loved eating sorghum, planting as much of it as they could every year. In late autumn, during the eighth lunar month, endless stretches of sorghum reddened into an enormous sea of blood. It was tall, dense and brilliant. It was sad, gentle and enchanting. It was loving, passionate and impetuous. The autumn winds were bleak. The sun was

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beaming down. White clouds, full and round, wafted across the bright blue sky, casting full round purple shadows onto the sorghum fields below. Teams of men lit by a light shade of red shuttled back and forth in the sorghum fields in the same way they had done for years. Like tragic heroes striding across the stage, they killed, they looted, and they fought for their country, making us, their unworthy descendants, pale by comparison. While we are making progress, I really feel there is a degeneration of the species.38

The passage follows the narrator’s long journey away from his childhood home and back again, a journey of discovery of the past that points towards new horizons by inspiring a sense of place that does justice to the memory and the imagination. As a child, the narrator’s feelings about his birthplace are so contradictory that he seems unable to articulate them in the same sentence (“I used to have an intense love for Northeast Gaomi Township. I used to have an intense hatred for Northeast Gaomi Township”). As a grown-up, and with exposure to intellectual resources that embrace the complexity and potential of modernity (“I studied Marxism”), he is able to see his birthplace in a new light. The apparent contradictions are now held together oxymoronically (“most beautiful and most disgusting”). Significantly, this synthesis is accompanied by a defamiliarization of the sorghum, which is transformed in a succession of vivid images until it becomes inextricably linked to the life and history of the people. Initially, the sorghum figures as a commodity, but importantly, it is one that contains an emotional component (“People of previous generations who lived there loved eating sorghum”). Then the vastness of red turns the sorghum into a movement, a fluidity that is at the same time visual, tactile and sensual (“endless stretches of sorghum reddened into an enormous sea of blood”). In the subsequent series of parallel sentences (“It was … It was … It was …”), the sorghum accumulates multiple layers of meaning that extend beyond a physical presence (“tall, dense and brilliant”) to include human qualities (“sad, gentle and enchanting”; “loving, passionate and impetuous”). This process of transformation becomes contagious when the sorghum, with all its superimposed meanings, imbues the scene with various hues of red (“full round purple shadows”; “a light shade of red”), suggesting new possibilities of meaning for the people who “shuttled back and forth in the sorghum fields in the same way they had done for years.” In fact, the defamiliarization of the sorghum has a comparable effect to the use of colour in magic realist films, that is, a “poetic transfiguration of the object world” that signals a return of the repressed. The sorghum, thus

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defamiliarized and woven into the fabric of the community, provokes a rethinking of history. For the past is now seen not as a pile of dead facts, but rather as a dynamic process encompassing heterogeneous content and contradictory extremes (“they killed, they looted, and they fought for their country”). History, brought to life with dramatic vividness (“Like tragic heroes striding across the stage”), returns to ruffle our self-­complacent conviction about progress (“While we are making progress, I really feel there is a degeneration of the species”). Thus, vivid images of memory and imagination coalesce to inspire a sense of place that is informed by an understanding of history which sees it as the complex life process of a community and a vital link to the future. In The Red Sorghum Family, the attempt to write a “perforated” history and effect a “poetic transfiguration of the object world” is accompanied by the “denarrativization” that Jameson notes in magic realist films, that is, a “reduction to the body” through the creative use of sex and violence as a deconstructive strategy. This strategy is at work in the critique of nationalism through the portrayal of Grandma’s resistance to patriarchy against the background of the anti-Japanese war. In public memory, Grandma is “fêted as a trailblazer of the anti-Japanese resistance and a national hero” (14), in conformity with the CCP’s nationalistic propaganda, in which people’s worth is measured by their contribution to the national cause. The nationalist ideology inscribed in this image of Grandma is contested through denarrativization, whereby narrative sequences are fragmented and recombined in a way that juxtaposes the violence of war with Grandma’s sexual awakening and love-making. Even as she lies dying on the battlefield, her thoughts alternate between her challenge to patriarchy (“I loved happiness, I loved strength, I loved beauty; it was my body, and I used it as I thought fitting. Sin doesn’t frighten me, nor does punishment” (76)) and the horrors of war (“hundreds of her fellow villagers, their clothes in rags, lie in the sorghum field, arms and legs writhing in a macabre dance” (78)). In this portrait, Grandma dies not a national hero, but a person who feels fulfilled (“Grandma has completed her liberation” (78)) in her chosen path (“My heaven … What is chastity then? What is the correct path? What is goodness? What is evil? You never told me, so I had to decide on my own” (76)). As the above discussion shows, developmentalism and its attendant nationalism can be contested through the narrative disruption and perceptual transformation that Jameson identifies as being characteristic of magic realism.

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Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord In Tashi Dawa’s short story “Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord” (Ji zai pishengkou shang de hun), fantasy combines with the marvellous real to evoke a sense of place that has particular relevance to a society being profoundly changed by modernization.39 The story begins with the narrator’s observation that modernization has caused some Tibetans to “break away from traditional ways of thinking” (138). As part of a project to write about the effects of rapid economic development, the narrator interviews a living Buddha who has decided that he will not be reincarnated. On his deathbed, the living Buddha tells the narrator a story about two pilgrims which corresponds almost exactly to an unpublished story written by the narrator. In the narrator’s story, Chiong, whose father is a traditional storyteller, embarks on a journey with Tabei, a young man who is contemptuous of the materialism of modern society and on a quest for “the road to our final deliverance from suffering and sorrow” (154). Unsure about how it should end, the narrator has left the story unfinished, but the living Buddha claims that “it was right here in his room that he had pointed out the road” for Tabei and Chiong (141). The narrative becomes metafictional when the narrator sets out in search of his fictional characters in a remote part of Tibet: The further I went, the more the scenery appeared deformed, or perhaps transformed.… Before my eyes passed a parade of pipal trees with egg-­ shaped leaves and brown, wizened limbs, filing by slowly and methodically like a forest sprung from a moving conveying belt. Yonder lay the ruins of an ancient temple. Ambling across a broad expanse of tableland was a huge elephant with legs as long as celestial ladders. The scene reminded me of Dali’s “The Temptation of Saint Anthony.” … Then, through the steam, I glimpsed what appeared to be relics from some long-forgotten era: gold saddles, bow and arrows, lances, suits of armor, prayer wheels, horns, even some tattered yellow banners—quite possibly the site of an ancient battle, I thought to myself. If I hadn’t been so tired I would have walked over to look at them more closely. Perhaps I would have been able to verify this spot as one of the battlefields described in the epic poem Gesar. But at the moment I could only sit and gaze upon all of it from a distance. Prolonged exposure to the heat of the springs had caused the metal objects to become so soft they were no more than a flaccid heap of anomalous shapes, oozing amorphously into one another until they had rearranged themselves into the hieroglyphs as abstruse as Mayan scripts. (162–63)

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The narrative evokes the marvellous real by retracing the memories of history and tradition through references to religion (“pipal trees”) and epic poetry (“Gesar”), but there is no simple, complete return to the origins of Tibetan culture. Rather, the landscape suggests a strong sense of ambiguity. The parade of pipal trees evokes the mechanization of modern society (“a moving conveying belt”), while the experience of mythic thinking (“huge elephant with legs as long as celestial ladders”) is compared to a surrealist painting. In other words, the narrator is prevented by his consciousness of modernity from a complete identification with traditional culture. Like “hieroglyphs,” the past requires constant active interpretation. Significantly, the narrative is left suspended between realism and fantasy, between the mimetic and the marvellous, between tradition and modernity, without settling into a hierarchy of discourses. This commitment to the dialogic nature of magic realism is crucial to understanding the work of Tashi Dawa as a half-Tibetan, half-Han author writing about Tibet in Chinese, a language imposed on the indigenous population.40 In “Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord,” the narrative refuses to allow the marvellous real to be read as a delusionary discourse to be discarded in favour of realism and modernization. The story remains open right to the end, when the narrator meets Tabei and Chiong in the palmprint-­like landscape that is the destination of their journey. The narrator is unsure about the living Buddha’s prophecy about the final triumph of Tibetan Buddhism, but he also feels genuine sympathy for Tabei’s pursuit of traditional ideals. When Tabei dies without fulfilling his quest, the narrator arranges the dead body into a shape that suggests: “a great hero lies buried here” (165). The narrative ends with the narrator returning with Chiong to the “real” world with an awareness of the “other” of the dominant culture, in an attempt to project a future-oriented vision—a vision which is pursued in the story “Tibet, Days of Eclipse” (“Xizang, yinmide suiyue”).

Tibet, Days of Eclipse “Tibet, Days of Eclipse” can be productively read in terms of Slemon’s discussion of magic realism as a postcolonial discourse.41 Set in a localized region metonymic of Tibet as a whole, the story offers a condensed history that mixes the marvellous real with constant references to the social and political reality in a way that enables us to examine the nature of developmentalism.

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The story is set in a remote part of Tibet where one is in daily contact with the marvellous real. For example, a “dumb idiot” who can only make “shrill noises and gestures” suddenly appears and sleeps with a beautiful orphaned girl; it is only discovered later that “the black fur the dumb idiot wore actually grew on his body” and the stranger is identified as a bear, but the girl has to leave with the bear as it has captured her soul (153). This account encapsulates the experience of an isolated community with a unique understanding of the world based on its own religion and its intimate relationship with nature. Significantly, the story is punctuated by constant references to the social and political reality, so that the marvellous real provides a perspective from which to interrogate the unquestioning belief in progress, science and technology that underlies developmentalism. For example, the early twentieth-century English expedition results in mutual frustration and incomprehension, because the English, with their pistols and binoculars, represent the advance of science and technology that is spurred on by the will to subject nature to the power of man, a way of thinking that is antithetical to the indigenous tradition—a point perfectly captured when the kiss of the Englishman leaves black moles on the face of a local child gifted with magical powers. With the victory of the Communist Revolution in China comes the increasing intervention of outside forces into the Tibetan landscape. But the modernization imposed by the CCP proves injurious, as is implied by the fact that wildlife disappears as soon as a dam is built to serve as “a symbol of man remaking nature” (187). Dissent is heavily punished. The arrogance and authoritarianism of this ideology is palpable when Cering Gyamo, an old lonely nun devoted to serving a religious hermit believed to be living unseen in a cave, is denounced as “a mad old woman” standing in the way of progress (189). In “Tibet, Days of Eclipse,” this antithesis between developmentalism and what it dismisses as a repressive tradition is addressed by multiplying the selves of Cering Gyamo, whose name recurs to cause deliberate confusion. The young wife shared by the three brothers of a nomadic family is also called Cering Gyamo, and the portrayal of the wife indicates important parallels with the nun, suggesting that the two different selves of Cering Gyamo are taking up the roles traditionally reserved for women. At one point, the wife goes on a trip with one of her husbands, but she returns alone and, when asked about the husband, claims that she has never known such a man. Later, we learn that the husband and wife who left home have joined the Communist Revolution and become party cadres. At the end of the text, another Cering Gyamo makes her appearance

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as a young doctor whose parents resemble the revolutionaries-turned-­ cadres. The narrative also suggests a connection to the nun when during fieldwork the young doctor discovers her dead body in a solitary house and “laid a white handkerchief on the face of her own grandmother” (196). This recurrence of a name, from nun to wife to revolutionary to cadre to doctor, evokes a characteristic of magic realism as a postcolonial discourse—a decentring process that produces a plurality of selves and points beyond the initial antithesis towards an open future.

Conclusion In the works discussed above, developmentalism as an anthropogenic force is contested through a variety of features characteristic of magic realism, ranging from the fantastic to the marvellous real, from narrative disruption to perceptual transformation. Of particular interest are the ways in which landscape is depicted to evoke a sense of place that addresses issues arising from the impact of developmentalism. To bring this point into even sharper focus, it is instructive to compare these works with Zhang Yang’s 2016 film Soul on a String (pisheng shang de hun), which is adapted from “Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord” and another Tashi Dawa story “On the Road to Lhasa.”42 Here I am not evaluating Zhang Yang’s film adaptation in terms of fidelity, an approach that is especially problematic in this case because the film script is co-written by Zhang Yang and Tashi Dawa. Rather, I will read the film alongside the magic realist narratives analysed above to shed light on their important differences. Soul on a String tells the story of Tabei who is on a mission to deliver a holy stone to a sacred mountain as part of an effort to cleanse his sins. Tabei is accompanied by Chung, a young woman who has fallen in love with him. They are pursued by different people: two brothers, one of whom is bent on revenge; two gangsters, who want to lay hands on the holy stone; and the writer Zandui, who turns out to be the creator of all the above characters. Soul on a String, which is a mixture of metafiction, the western and the gangster film, differs from the magic realist narratives discussed above in significant ways. In the film, instances of religious beliefs are primarily plot devices. For example, Tabei is hit by a thunderbolt and left with a pattern of scars that turns out to be a map to the sacred mountain. This contrasts sharply with the kiss of the Englishman that, as the symbol of an uncritical belief in progress, science and technology, leaves black moles on a Tibetan child in “Tibet, Days of Eclipse.” In the film, the name “Tabei” recurs frequently, but this is a

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device to drive the revenge story forwards, and not the fragmentation of a fictional character that questions a dominant definition of reality. In the film, the timeless, panoramic landscape serves mainly as the backdrop to the duels and other actions of the characters, with no reference to any social or political specificities. There is no attempt to stage a confrontation between tradition and modernity, between the city and the country. In the film, radio as an emblem of modern technology is entirely beneficial, providing entertainment and weather forecast. Rather than a tool of imperialist expansion, binoculars become a prop for the writer Zandui to keep track of his fictional characters. Tabei avoids cities not because he despises materialism, but because he is wanted by the police. Soul on a String seems more concerned to use the exotic landscape and pre-modern practices of Tibet to experiment with the generic conventions of the western and the gangster film, whereas landscape in the magic realist narratives discussed above is depicted in ways that offer a critique of developmentalism as an anthropogenic force. In particular, these narratives evoke a “hieroglyphic” sense of place, one that is marked by absences in ways that inspire the imagination to explore memory and understand history as the complex life process of a community and a vital link to the future. In this way, landscape is neither a background to the human drama nor a natural force predetermining the future of a community, but rather the outcome and the index of an ongoing interaction between human practices and the natural environment, a space where anthropogenic forces can be contested, and an alternative future can be opened up with a sense of agency that is both reflective and anticipatory.43

Notes 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Whose Anthropocene? A Response,” in “Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses,’” eds., Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan, special issue of RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, 2 (2016): 105, 111, accessed August 13, 2018, http://www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives/2016/2/article/whose-anthropocene-response 2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Whose Anthropocene? A Response,” 113. 3. Joe Smith, “Why climate change is different: six elements that are shaping the new cultural politics,” in Culture and Climate Change: Recordings, eds., Robert Butler, Eleanor Margolies, Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk (Cambridge: Shed, 2011), 20–21; Renata Tyszczuk, “On constructing for

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the unforeseen,” in Culture and Climate Change: Recordings, eds., Robert Butler, Eleanor Margolies, Joe Smith and Renata Tyszczuk (Cambridge: Shed, 2011), 24, 26. 4. For a wide-ranging discussion of magic realism, see Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 5. Franz Roh, “Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism,” trans. Wendy B. Faris, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 15–31. 6. Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvellous Real in America,” trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Bl Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 75–88. 7. Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” Hispania, 38 (1955): 187–192. 8. See, for example: Frederic Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” Critical Inquiry, 12 (1986): 301–325; Stephan Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” Canadian Literature, 116 (1988): 9–24. 9. Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 107. 10. Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” 189. 11. Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” 190. 12. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 90. 13. Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” 303, 311, 301, 319, 323. 14. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 10. 15. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 11. 16. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 12–13. 17. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” 15. 18. For a selection of representative works of “root-searching” fiction, see Li Tuo, ed., Zhongguo xungen xiaoshuo xuan [A Selection of “Root-searching” Fiction] (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1993). 19. Gabriel García Márquez was first introduced to Chinese readers in 1972 with a partial translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the Hong Kong literary journal Siji [Four Seasons]; but it was not until after 1984, when a full translation appeared, that the Colombian writer began to exert a huge influence on writers in mainland China. 20. See, for example: Chen Guangfu, Mohuan xianshi zhuyi [Magic Realism] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1986), 159; Chen Zhongyi, Mohuan xianshi zhuyi dashi: Jiaxiya Maerkesi [Gabriel García Márquez: A Magic Realist Master] (Zhengzhou: Huanghe wenyi chubanshe, 1988), 2–3.

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21. See, for example: Zhou Zhengbao, “Xiaoshuo chuangzuo de xin qushi— minzu wenhua yishi de qianghua,” [“A New Tendency in Fictional Writing: The Rise of Cultural Consciousness”], Wenyi Bao. August, 10, 1983; Li Zehou, “Liangdian zhuyuan,” [“Two Wishes”], Wenyi Bao. July, 27, 1985; Tang Tao, “Yisierxing—guanyu xungen,” [“Think Before You Jump: On ‘Root-searching’”], Renmin Ribao. April, 30, 1986. 22. Arif Dirlik, “Developmentalism,” Interventions, 16.1 (2014): 30–31, accessed August 16, 2018, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13698 01X.2012.735807 23. Dirlik, “Developmentalism,” 30–31. 24. Dirlik, following David Noble, suggests that developmentalism can be glossed as “progress without people,” in the sense that it sacrifices “immediate social needs as well as long-term natural consequences.” Dirlik, “Developmentalism,” 33, 45. See David F. Noble, Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance (Toronto: Between The Lines, 1995). 25. Dirlik, “Developmentalism,” 41. 26. Dirlik, “Developmentalism,” 35. 27. Dirlik, “Developmentalism,” 35. 28. Dirlik, “Developmentalism,” 33. 29. “Excerpts from talks given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai,” en.people.cn, accessed August 27, 2018, http://en.people.cn/dengxp/ vol3/text/d1200.html; “The Overriding Need is for Stability,” en.people. cn, accessed August 27, http://en.people.cn/dengxp/vol3/text/c1940. html. See also: Mark R. Thompson, “From Japan’s ‘Prussian Path’ to China’s ‘Singapore Model,’” in Asia after the Developmental State: Disembedding Autonomy, eds. Toby Carroll and Darryl S. L. Jarvis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 148–173; Suisheng Zhao, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Quest for National Greatness and Nationalistic Writing in the 1990s,” The China Quarterly, 152 (1997): 725–745; Suisheng Zhao, “Xi’s Maoist Revival,” Journal of Democracy, 27.3 (2016): 83–97. 30. Zhao, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Quest for National Greatness and Nationalistic Writing in the 1990s,” 725. 31. Zhao, “Chinese Intellectuals’ Quest for National Greatness and Nationalistic Writing in the 1990s,” 732. 32. Elizabeth C.  Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 264. 33. Han Shaogong, “Guiqulai” [“Homecoming”], in Han Shaogong, Youhuo [Lure] (Changsha: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 1986), 1–18. Unless stated otherwise, quotations are taken from “The Homecoming,” trans. Jeanne Tai, in Spring Bamboo: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories, ed. Jeanne Tai (New York: Random House, 1989), 22–40, and references are indicated in the text by page numbers in parentheses.

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34. Jackson, Fantasy, 65. 35. Han Shaogong, “Guiqulai,” 11. My translation. 36. Mo Yan, Honggaoliang jiazu [The Red Sorghum Family] (Beijing: Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe, 1987). Unless stated otherwise, quotations are taken from Red Sorghum, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Heinemann), and references are indicated in the text by page numbers in parentheses. 37. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: Pan Books, 1978), 9. 38. Mo Yan, Honggaoliang jiazu [The Red Sorghum Family], 2. My translation. 39. Tashi Dawa, “Ji zai pishengkou shang de hun” [“Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord”], in Mohuanxianshizhuyi xiaoshuoxuan [A Selection of Magic Realist Fiction], eds. Wu Liang, Zhang Ping and Zong Renfa (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1988), 199–222. Quotations are taken from “Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord,” trans. Jeanne Tai, in Spring Bamboo: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories, ed. Jeanne Tai (New York: Random House, 1989), 137–169, and references are indicated in the text by page numbers in parentheses. 40. But Tibetan landscape, religion and tradition are treated in a very different way in Soul on a String (pisheng shang de hun), a 2016 film with Tibetan dialogue, co-scripted by Tashi Dawa with the Han Chinese director Zhang Yang (see conclusion below). For a discussion of Tashi Dawa’s ethnic background, see Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, Tashi Dawa: Magical Realism and Contested Identity in Modern Tibet (2002), University of Pennsylvania, PhD dissertation, accessed August 25, 2018, https://repository.upenn. edu/dissertations/AAI3054992 41. Tashi Dawa, “Xizang, yinmide suiyue” [“Tibet, Days of Eclipse”], in Mohuanxianshizhuyi xiaoshuoxuan [A Selection of Magic Realist Fiction], eds. Wu Liang, Zhang Ping and Zong Renfa (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1988), 152–198. References are indicated in the text by pages numbers in parenthesis. Translations are mine. 42. Soul on a String, dir. Zhang Yang. He Li Chen Guang International Culture Media, 2016. 43. I wish to dedicate this work to the memory of Prof. P.  K. Leung, who taught me how to read, and much more.

Bibliography Bowers, Maggie Ann. 2004. Magic(al) Realism. London/New York: Routledge. Carpentier, Alejo. 1995. On the Marvellous Real in America. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 75–88. Trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2016. Whose Anthropocene? A Response. In Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses,’ ed. Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan. Special issue of RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2: 105, 111. http://www.environmentandsociety. org/perspectives/2016/2/article/whose-anthropocene-response. Accessed 13 Aug 2018. Chen, Guangfu. 1986. Mohuan xianshi zhuyi [Magic Realism]. Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe. Chen, Zhongyi. 1988. Mohuan xianshi zhuyi dashi: Jiaxiya Maerkesi [Gabriel García Márquez: A Magic Realist Master]. Zhengzhou: Huanghe wenyi chubanshe. Dirlik, Arif. 2014. Developmentalism. Interventions. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 369801X.2012.735807. Echevarría, Roberto González. 1990. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Austin: University of Texas Press. Economy, Elizabeth C. 2004. The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Flores, Angel. 1955. Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction. Hispania 38: 187–192. Han, Shaogang. 1986. Guiqulai [Homecoming]. In Han Shaogong, Youhuo [Lure]. Changsha: Hunan wenyi chubanshe. ———. 1989. The Homecoming. In Spring Bamboo: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short StoriesTrans. and ed. Jeanne Tai, 22–40. New York: Random House. Jameson, Frederic. 1986. On Magic Realism in Film. Critical Inquiry 12: 301–325. Li, Tuo. 1993. Zhongguo xungen xiaoshuo xuan [A Selection of “Root-Searching” Fiction]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing. Li, Zehou. 1985. Liangdian zhuyuan [Two Wishes]. Wenyi Bao, July 27. Márquez, Gabriel García. 1978. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. London: Pan Books. Mo, Yan. 1987. Honggaoliang jiazu [The Red Sorghum Family]. Beijing: Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe. ———. 1993. Red Sorghum. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. London: Heinemann. Noble, David F. 1995. Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance. Toronto: Between The Lines. People’s Daily Online English Edition. Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai. http://en.people.cn/dengxp/vol3/text/ d1200.html. Accessed 27 Aug 2018. ———. The Overriding Need Is for Stability. http://en.people.cn/dengxp/ vol3/text/c1940.html. Accessed 27 Aug 2018. Roh, Franz. 1995. Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 15–31. Trans. Wendy B. Faris. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Schiaffini-Vedani, Patricia. 2002. Tashi Dawa: Magical Realism and Contested Identity in Modern Tibet. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. https:// repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3054992. Accessed 25 Aug 2018. Slemon, Stephan. 1988. Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse. Canadian Literature 116: 9–24. Smith, Joe. 2011. Why Climate Change Is Different: Six Elements That Are Shaping the New Cultural Politics. In Culture and Climate Change: Recordings, ed. Robert Butler, Eleanor Margolies, Joe Smith, and Renata Tyszczuk, 20–21. Cambridge: Shed. Soul on a String. 2016. Directed by Zhang Yang. Beijing: He Li Chen Guang International Culture Media. Tang, Tao. 1986. Yisierxing—guanyu xungen [Think Before You Jump: On ‘Root-Searching’]. Renmin Ribao, April 30. Tashi, Dawa. 1988a. Ji zai pishengkou shang de hun [Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord]. In Mohuanxianshizhuyi xiaoshuoxuan [A Selection of Magic Realist Fiction], ed. Liang Wu, Zhang Ping, and Zong Renfa, 199–222. Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. ———. 1988b. Xizang, yinmide suiyue [Tibet, Days of Eclipse]. In Mohuanxianshizhuyi xiaoshuoxuan [A Selection of Magic Realist Fiction], ed. Liang Wu, Zhang Ping, and Zong Renfa, 152–198. Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe. ———. 1989. Souls Tied to the Knots on a Leather Cord. In Spring Bamboo: A Collection of Contemporary Chinese Short Stories. Trans. and ed. Jeanne Tai, 137–169. New York: Random House. Thompson, Mark R. 2017.  From Japan’s ‘Prussian Path’ to China’s ‘Singapore Model’. In Asia After the Developmental State: Disembedding Autonomy, ed. Toby Carroll and Darryl S.L.  Jarvis, 148–173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tyszczuk, Renata. 2011. On Constructing for the Unforeseen. In Culture and Climate Change: Recordings, ed. Robert Butler, Eleanor Margolies, Joe Smith, and Renata Tyszczuk, 24–26. Cambridge: Shed. Zhao, Suisheng. 1997. Chinese Intellectuals’ Quest for National Greatness and Nationalistic Writing in the 1990s. The China Quarterly 152: 725–745. ———. 2016. Xi’s Maoist Revival. Journal of Democracy 27 (3): 83–97. Zhou, Zhengbao. 1983. Xiaoshuo chuangzuo de xin qushi—minzu wenhua yishi de qianghua [A New Tendency in Fictional Writing: The Rise of Cultural Consciousness]. Wenyi Bao, August 10.

CHAPTER 7

Expansionist Ethnic Ecology: On Reading Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem Howard Y. F. Choy

The 2015 blockbuster Wolf Warrior (Zhanlang 戰狼) and its sequel Wolf Warrior 2 two years later, both directed by martial artist Wu Jing 吳京, have reminded critics of Jiang Rong’s 姜戎 2004 novel Wolf Totem (Lang tuteng 狼圖騰) with the lupine image and militarism in the war action films.1 Meanwhile, where Yuval Noah Harari attributes “the mentality of conquest” to European imperialism and ends his coverage of Chinese history with the great famine of 1959–61 in his Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,2 it is under China’s communism that an Asian anthropogenic transformation of the Earth system is found in Wolf Totem. In fact, both bestsellers are concerned with the Anthropocene in terms of their historical, spiritual, and cultural approaches to human beings as a planet-­ changing species. The Chinese political scientist and the Israeli historian also share their critical views about agriculture in that Jiang Rong laments the taming of the wild and the domestication of the nomadic, while Harari describes the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution (5000–8000 years ago) as “history’s biggest fraud” when Homo sapiens made the transition from H. Y. F. Choy (*) Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_7

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hunting and gathering to herding and farming, resulting in population explosions.3 Indeed, the earliest date of the Anthropocene is traced back to the beginning of agriculture 10,000–12,000 years ago.4 Paradoxically, ecological and expansionist worldviews are not opposed to but rather complementary to each other. Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem has been compared with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) since both novels became mass cultural sensations in China in 2004.5 While Jiang Rong (pseudonym of Lü Jiamin 吕嘉民), a former professor of political economics and democracy activist jailed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, intends his debut novel as a political fable to appeal for freedom and popular elections, this award-winning fiction is regarded in the commercial circles as a handbook for business applications of wolf wisdom in market competition.6 As a cultural phenomenon, its symbolism of the Mongolian wolf (Canis lupus chanco) became as celebrated as it is controversial: it critiques Confucianism in light of militarism, calls for environmental protection and sustainability according to the law of the jungle (or, in Jiang Rong’s own term, caoyuan luoji 草原邏輯 “grassland logic”), and advocates “peaceful” survival of the fittest through territorial expansion and space race. Wolf Totem is a quasi-autobiography of a Han Chinese urban intellectual’s personal experience on the steppes in north-central Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Chen Zhen, the author’s alter ego, spends a decade of nomadic life in the utopian Ujimchin Banner on the Chinese border of Inner and Outer Mongolia. It is in this contact zone that the protagonist ponders over the complex interrelationship between Mongolianness and Han-ness. He soon becomes fascinated with Mongolian wolves and Genghis Khan (1167–1227), the phantom of wolfish heroism that once occupied China and founded the largest empire across Eurasia. As Chen risks a clash with his hosts’ totem and taboos by adopting a wolfkin as a pet, he finds himself adapted to a nomadic brave new world, where he witnesses a lost paradise of the wilderness, particularly the disappearance of a beautiful swan lake, in the impact of internal colonization. The novel closes with Chen’s burden of guilt over having “snipped off the canines of the … cub, stripping him of his freedom with a chain during his short life, and in the end crushing his head.”7 As Lee Haiyan observes, in his “scientific experiment” of raising the cub, Chen Zhen’s “loving gaze that elevates it to a mythic being is also an epistemological gaze that reduces it to a lab creature.”8 Little Wolf is deified in totemism and objectified in Chen’s “wolfology” (langxue 狼學) at the same time.9

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The pleasure of reading is swiftly aroused in the beginning of the wolf lore with pages of breathtaking descriptions of wolf raids on gazelles and prized horses, followed by bloody wolf hunting. The problem of such pleasure is: the gory graphic details render violence not only delightful and entertaining, but also sublime and sacred. Moreover, violence is equated with existence; to be is necessarily to kill. In the personifying and mythic modes of representing the animal, wolves are portrayed as warriors and strategists, with their high team spirit and masterly hunting tactics in spying, encircling, ambushing, assaulting, and intercepting, and are mystified as messengers from Tengri (Tengger 騰格爾), the Mongol Heavenly Father.10 Nevertheless, the powerful parts of the narrative fail to develop an interesting story as they soon yield to the grandiose theory of evolution after one-third of the novel. As a novel, Wolf Totem lacks a round character. The personae act merely as the author’s mouthpieces for his confession of faith. “Ever since I prostrated myself at the feet of the wolf totem,” claims one of Chen’s fellow students, “I’ve been a Mongol” (Jiang 189; Goldblatt 294). Old man Bilgee—the last nomadic herdsman, renowned hunter, and enlightener of the Han educated youths—substitutes for Mao Zedong 毛澤東 as their surrogate father. Where Mongolian horsemen and shepherds are idealized as wise mentors and moral models, Han students and settlers are stereotyped as ignorant learners and selfish villains. Structurally, each of the 35 chapters opens with epigraphs excerpted from historical documents or studies. An eminent example is the legend about Mongolian ancestry from the opening of The Secret History of the Mongols (Menggu mishi 蒙古秘史): “At the beginning there was a blue-grey wolf, born with his destiny ordained by Heaven Above.”11 Yet, these quotations are hardly related to the plot, nor do they effectively enrich the story’s historical dimension; rather, they serve as intrusive “proofs” of the author’s banal didacticism. While their expunction in Howard Goldblatt’s English translation may be seen as scholastically “unfaithful” to the original, it is certainly an artistic way of streamlining the story. Even with the publisher’s cut, the Penguin edition of Wolf Totem is not short of preachy commentaries and lengthy expositions.12 Like Harari, who charts the 200,000-year human history into 400 pages, Jiang Rong packs 5000 years of Chinese history in the last 50,000 characters of his 500,000-character book to conform to his lupine illusion. The “dialogue” in the appendix, like many conversations throughout the novel, is in effect a monological lecture, which makes one wonder

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whether the fictional form is a compromise of an unfulfilled research paper. A national history is therefore one of treating the steppes, whose four-season landscapes—read “environment”—have been foregrounded to make history as geography in that wolves, gazelles, sheep, cows, horses, marmots, mice, rabbits, foxes, dogs, prairie dogs, wild boars, ground squirrels, swans, falcons, waterfowl, grey cranes, sand grouses, wild geese and ducks, together with locusts, mosquitoes, flies, and grass, all appear on the stage of history. Against the grain of Confucian historiography, all dynastic ups and downs are ascribed to the presence or absence of “wolf nature” in the national psyche. Thus the vicissitudes of regimes are interpreted by pendular swings between lupine and sheepish spirits in a farfetched account of a total history.13 The author concludes his grand narrative that the Chinese people are not so much “descendants of the dragon” (long de chuanren 龍的傳人) as “disciples of the wolf ” (lang de chuanren 狼的傳人) and that nomads are the ancestors of the Han farming people. Seeking a barbarian civilization in the term “civilized wolf ” (wenming lang 文明狼) as a modern transition from ancient “civilized sheep” to future “civilized man,” he advocates the need to nomadize peasant mentality and the necessity to Mongolianize Han culture. Unsurprisingly again, for the sake of readability, the jarring sermon that comprises the last one-tenth of the work is cut out in the English rendition. Yet more expurgation is exercised by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of the novel, so much—or less—that it no longer appears to be a national allegory. The 2015 film focuses on the first half of the fiction and alters the finale to a happy ending, with Little Wolf returning to mother nature instead of being killed. The camera renders the scenery of wilderness beautiful, and the scene of wolf raids breathtaking. As a production of ecocinema, Wolf Totem reinforces the revered ancient way of the minority’s nomad life and the ruthlessness of the Communist Chinese central government, reminiscent of the Oscar-winning director’s Seven Years in Tibet (1997). In the seven years of making the Mongolian movie, Annaud adopted an environmental friendly production process by employing labour power and horse-drawn carts in lieu of motor vehicles to transport his equipment as much as possible, and the wolves that Scottish animal trainer Andrew Simpson and his co-workers have raised and domesticated for three years retire at the team’s homes in Canada—though it remains highly debatable whether they should have tamed the wild animal, like Chen Zhen’s problematic “experiment” in the fiction, for the

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sake of shooting the consumerist spectacle without replacing the wolves with dogs, as is commonly practised in the film industry.14 Chinese critic Li Jianjun 李建軍 has pointed out that the novel is a product of an age of value vacuum and cultural crisis, when humanism retreats and science and technology advance, when the law of the market has become a new ideology, or rather, a new form of the Marxist-Maoist philosophy of struggle.15 Indeed, Jiang Rong’s extremism echoes Hitler’s Nazism in the name of “struggle for … human existence” in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf and Stalin’s social Darwinist statement about “the jungle law of capitalism” in his 1931 speech to industrial managers: “You are backward, you are weak—therefore you are wrong; hence, you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty—therefore you are right; hence, we must be wary of you.”16 In the wolf’s worldview, one either hunts or is hunted. To hunt is “to have” (haben), in the words of German American social psychologist Erich Fromm: “In the having mode, one’s happiness lies in one’s superiority over others, in one’s power, and in the last analysis, in one’s capacity to conquer, rob, kill.”17 Accordingly, in order to be, to exist, or to survive, one must rule, control, and dominate. Eulogizing European imperialism and Japanese militarism, Jiang Rong’s radicalism reveals ironically his misunderstanding of democracy as mobocracy and of environmental protection as elimination and expansion. The expansionism has turned ecology into an ideology. This is redolent of the American Nazi Party’s environmentalist statement to “eliminate pollution” as related to the racial elimination of non-Aryan population.18 In fact, the cruel fantasy of territorialisation through terrorization in Wolf Totem is labelled by Chinese and Western critics alike as “fascism.”19 As fascism is defined in terms of “spiritualized conception” and “against pacifism,” the mysticism and anti-pacifist spirit in Wolf Totem are evocative of Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism,” a doctrine that rejects universal peace: “War alone brings all human energies to their highest tension and sets a seal of nobility on the peoples who have the virtue to face it.”20 In effect, Jiang Rong’s jingoistic language divulges his patriotism rather than a pacifism. The ecological fascism or totalitarian environmentalism in Wolf Totem should be contextualized in the dominant discourse of new nationalism that has searched for national pride and power since the 1990s with the publication of the bestseller The China That Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu 中國可以說不).21 Such nationalism, however, is defended by Chinese scholar Li Xiaojiang 李小江 in the valance of “post-Mao utopian” or simply “post-utopian

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criticism” as China’s response to postcolonialism and postmodernism in the era of globalization.22 Li maintains that it is precisely the national border between Inner and Outer Mongolia that protects the fleeing wolves and the receding grassland, hence the function of the modern nation state: “In the trend of global Westernization, the state has become the national culture (minzu wenhua [民族文化]), the last refuge of cultural pluralism. State borders prevent a culture (and a power) from unlimited expansion, simultaneously protecting the basis of survival of another culture (and its people).”23 Yet, is the work in discussion anti-expansionist? In her engagement with Wolfgang Kubin’s disapproval of Wolf Totem, Li further argues that in the face of Western wolves, Jiang Rong’s Mongolian wolves are actually anti-imperialist and anti-autocratic—understood in the context as anti-global Westernization.24 Despite the disappearance of the grassland in the end of the story, Li affirms the improved standard of living with Deng Xiaoping’s 鄧小平 socio-economic target “well-off ” (xiaokang 小康) without any awareness of the “ecoambiguity” aptly pointed out by Karen Laura Thornber: “the Mongols believe themselves out of options, that improving their standard of living and providing a better future for their children depend on following Han Chinese directives to reshape the grassland’s ecosystems.”25 After an encyclopaedic analysis of the novel, Li concludes that post-utopian criticism is “striving tirelessly to restore and reestablish utopian ideals,” in particular “the ideal of benevolence” (xiangshan de lixiang 向善的理想)—a very Confucian conclusion ironically.26 And the repetitive use of the word “dream” at the end of her book finally points to Xi Jinping’s 習近平 nationalistic call for the “Chinese dream” (Zhongguo meng 中國夢) that aims at an economically, politically, diplomatically, scientifically, and, most importantly, militarily strong China as a superpower and a beautiful country with healthy environment and low pollution as the rationale for nationalism.27 It is clear that expansionism and environmentalism have been officially bundled together as indispensable parts of a grand narrative. While Li and other Chinese critics point out the non- or anti-­ anthropocentrism in the novel, others have categorized it as eco-literature and minority literature.28 The double label reveals the relation between ecology and ethnology. Such an ethnic ecology turns anthropocentrism into environmental racism that validates speciesism, or the dichotomy of human versus nonhuman, as well as against already marginalized ethnic groups for the benefits of the nation that is the ruthless majority, as shown in the literary work. The Anthropocene is thus not apolitical, and ecocriti-

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cism is inevitably political criticism as it involves everything from government policies to cultural and identity politics. Mainland Chinese critic Chen Hong even goes so far as to conclude: “Wolf Totem should be taken as a political rather than an ecological novel, for no one can deny the author’s political intention, whether it surfaces in his evaluation of national characters or hidden under his celebration of the ‘grassland logic’.”29 The Communist Party’s top-down approach to bringing the grasslands under cultivation and to exterminate the wolves have caused hungers and other natural disasters in Inner Mongolia, where environmental and ethnic ethics are inextricably related. Wolf Totem is reminiscent of Zhang Chengzhi’s 張承志 educated youth fiction of Inner Mongolia produced in the late 1970s and 1980s, including his novella “The Black Steed” (“Hei junma” 黑駿馬) and novel Golden Prairie (Jin muchang 金牧場), in which Zhang reconstructs his Hui identity by identifying with yet another minority nationality rather than the Han majority. In the context of Chinese literary history, Nicole Barnes considers “Wolf Totem the latest literary expression of a long-lived Chinese political identity crisis in which fear of emasculation drives Han men to their nation’s cultural frontier in an existential search for virility and assertiveness, qualities believed to be more abundant among the ethnic minorities than among China’s Han majority.”30 The antidote Jiang Rong prescribes for the “feminized” Han national character is the “blood transfusion” of Mongolian machoism. While the Han majority has taken pride in its ability to Sinicize all minorities, the novelist proposes to introject Mongolian otherness onto Han selfhood in antitheses of nomads/farmers, carnivores/herbivores, brutalism/domestication, liberalism/Confucianism, and wolf worship/sheep spirit. In these pairs of simple hierarchal binarism, the former is deemed good, brave, and intelligent, whereas the latter is bad (if not evil), weak, and stupid. Adam Trexler observes in his study of Anthropocene fictions that novels of climate change “are generally structured by conflict between two parties.”31 The two parties in Wolf Totem, as Gong Haomin sees them, represent “two contrasting views contesting for the dominant power to shape the ecological scene of the Olonbulag.”32 Yet, Jiang Rong’s animalistic allegorical oppositionalism presents to us not only a clash of nomadic and agrarian civilizations, but also, as the latter is derogated to the rudimentary stage of world history, a racist complex of superiority and inferiority. Although Jiang Rong’s alleged opposition to Han chauvinism in his ethnic epic turns the superiority of the Han majority and the inferiority of

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the ethnic minorities upside down, its representational construction remains homogeneous. A mere reversal of the binary relation is not an actual progression beyond oppression, but merely a re-enactment of colonization of the other through the cult of the other. Now the “other” is oneself, but the same mindset is at play. This kind of otherism simply inverts anthropologist Stevan Harrell’s three images of peripheral peoples in China—women (sexual metaphor), children (educational metaphor), and ancient (historical metaphor)—by presenting the Mongolian way as a masculine, mature, and mythic model for the modern majority Han people to follow; it also subverts the colonizer’s Confucian and Communist civilizing projects by criticizing Confucian passivity and Communist bureaucracy.33 Jiang Rong’s radical anti-Confucianism inherited from the May Fourth Movement and the Cultural Revolution reveals, in historian Lin Yü-sheng’s 林毓生 words, “the crisis of Chinese consciousness.”34 While it is understandable why Jiang Rong is accused for arousing ethnic antagonism at a time when the Chinese government advocates the construction of a “socialist harmonious society” based on Confucianism, it may be unfair to charge him with detriment of national unity.35 The fact that he complains about the English translation of Hanren 漢人 as “Chinese” reflects his anti-separatism.36 Of course there are reasons for Goldblatt’s word choice: firstly, unlike Mongols and Tibetans, the ethnonym Han is not widely known among Western common readers; secondly, the Han ethnic group as the majority is so predominant that “Chinese” has become a synonym of Hanren and Hanyu 漢語; thirdly and most importantly, the translator may consciously or unconsciously disagree with the irredentism that maps Mongolia as a necessary part of China. The battle of the “Chinese” author and his English translator on this single term is in fact an encounter of Sino-Western political views— though Han-ness, according to Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, is actually a slippery and multivalent designation.37 One may therefore wonder what kind of “outsider” the translator means when he notes that Wolf Totem is “the intelligent ethnological observations of a sympathetic outsider” (Goldblatt VI), and what sort of “sympathy” is provoked by the Han-Mongol relationship.38 Chen Zhen’s “sympathy” for his miserable Mongolian compatriots under the government’s wolf-eradication campaign is expressed in environmentalism—in the term’s two senses of ecological concern and belief in the influence of the milieu on the race. With population growth and the desertification of 28 per cent of the Chinese territory, Han colonizers

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are condemned for continuously cultivating the fragile grasslands into farmlands. Cultivation contaminates the pure landscape and tames its wild nature. From Mao’s industrialization to Deng’s marketization, the unchecked developments in the four modernizations and economic reforms have continually degraded the environment and diminished the stock of plants and habitat of animals, further jeopardizing many already endangered species. The loss of naturalness in the destructive process of Mao’s campaigns that “man must conquer nature” (ren ding sheng tian 人定勝天), followed by Deng’s materialism, is related to the withering of militaristic morale in Jiang Rong’s ecopoetics.39 Here, “natural” is not neutral, but allegorically points to the politics of essentializing ethnicity.40 “Natural” is the meat-eating Mongolian nomadism, whereas the grains-­ and-­greens Chinese diet is regarded as the reason for regression of the Han people. Like the degradation of Mongol horses due to the lack of training by wolves, Sinicized Mongols are denigrated for having been deprived of their wolfishness and having become “sheep-like” farming communities. Thus, the question of “being” has become “becoming”; to be is to become. In the same sense of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s reading of Kafka, the wolf totem aims at a metamorphosis rather than a mere metaphor or trope: the becoming-wolf is preferable to the becoming-sheep of the man.41 Yet, Kafka’s animal genealogy of beetle and dog is degenerative; Jiang Rong’s lineage of becoming-sheep is also devolutionary, but his wolf pedigree is to revitalize a wild humanity in a nomadic nostalgia, or rather, to recover an animality through atavism. As a matter of fact, Chen is becoming a “wolf father” in the process of raising his cub wolf, as the Mongolian grasslands have become a space of metamorphosis, where belief, custom, diet, and law are undergoing changes. When the ecological ethnography ends in a sandstorm in Beijing at the advent of the new millennium, Chen commiserates with the motorized horsemen’s dilemma between economic prosperity and ecologic poverty after the symbolic death of Bilgee, the last grassland guardian. As the Chinese ancestral land is relocated in the pristine Mongolian grasslands and the Chinese dragon totem is replaced by vibrant Mongolian wolves, China is reinvented in the familiar foreignness of the eco-romantic minority other. It is a “familiar foreignness” because the majority is always already a hybridity of minorities. However, by attributing sheepishness to Han Chinese, Jiang Rong actually reaffirms their self-assertion that the Chinese nation has always been peaceful and non-aggressive, and ignores

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their self-aggrandizements throughout history. Such ignorance is as dangerous as overlooking a wolf in sheep’s clothing, especially in the ongoing expansionist Belt and Road Initiative intended for China’s global dominance or, as some China watchers put it, “economic imperialism” through construction projects in 71 countries from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe and Africa.42

Notes 1. A shorter version of this chapter has formerly appeared online as the author’s book review of Wolf Totem (Apr. 2009), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center, http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/ wolf-totem/ (last accessed 6 May 2018). I thank Chong Cho Ting 莊楚婷 for some Chinese references. See, for example, Lucian T.  H. Hsu 徐子軒, “Cong Lang tuteng dao Zhanlang de Zhongguo shidai” 從狼圖騰到戰狼的中國世代 (The Chinese generation of Wolf Totem and Wolf Warrior), Pingguo xinwen 蘋果新聞 (Apple Daily), 11 Aug. 2017, https://hk.news.appledaily.com/local/ daily/article/20170811/20117967 (last accessed 20 Sept. 2018). The films are about a Chinese special force soldier confronted by a group of foreign mercenaries and the eventual victory of the People’s Liberation Army at home and abroad, namely, Africa. Prior to Wolf Warrior, Wu Jing has acted in Sha po lang 殺破狼 (Kill Zone, 2005) and Sha po lang 2 (2015) and co-directed Lang ya 狼牙 (Legendary Assassin, 2008) with Nicky Chung Chi Li 李忠志, but the three are police stories, not patriotic thrillers. 2. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011; New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 283–86, 379. 3. Ibid., 77. 4. Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 1. The other possible dates include 1784, when James Watt’s invention of the steam engine marked the Industrial Revolution, and the 1950s with the increase in background radiation from nuclear tests during the Cold War. 5. See, for example, Long Xingjian 龍行健 [Sun Yongli 孫永俐], Lang tuteng pipan 狼圖騰批判 (Critique of Wolf Totem) (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 2007), 59–63, 91–95, 207–208. Chinese translation of The Da Vinci Code was published by Shanghai renmin chubanshe in February 2004; Lang tuteng appeared only two months later. 6. See, for example, Yu Fan 凡禹 and Song Hongjie 宋洪潔, eds., Langdao da quanji: Qiangzhe de chenggong faze 狼道大全集:强者的成功法則 (The way of wolf: The rules of success) (Shanghai: Lixin kuaiji chubanshe, 2010).

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7. Jiang Rong, Lang tuteng (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 371; Howard Goldblatt, trans., Wolf Totem (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 521. Page numbers are hereafter noted parenthetically at the end of each quotation. 8. Haiyan Lee, “The Lord of the Wolves?” (19 June 2008), The China Beat, http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/06/lord-of-wolves.html (last accessed 6 May 2018). 9. It is questionable whether wolf is the (only) totem of the Mongols. The strongest denial comes from Mongolian writer Guo Xuebo 郭雪波 who, in his Sina blog including a 2007 postscript to his Langhai 狼孩 (Wolf child), a revised edition of his 2001 novel Damo langhai 大漠狼孩 (Wolf child in the desert), and an open letter to the Publicity Department dated 16 Feb. 2015, http:// blog.sina.cn/dpool/blog/s/blog_4dcda3030102va7m.html?tj=2?tj=2 (last accessed 21 Sept. 2018), accuses Wolf Totem and its film adaptation for forging Mongolian history and culture, and claims that Jiang Rong has asked for a copy of Damo langhai, a work of ecoliterature, and appropriated his idea of ecoculture. He also suggests that desertification is caused by centuries of cultivation, not extermination of wolf, and that other factors are mining, oil drilling, and global warming. Meanwhile, Xuezhu 雪竹 reports multiple totems, including wolf, horse, eagle, swan, dragon, deer, and bear, among different Mongolian tribes in “Mongguren de tuteng chongbai wenhua” 蒙古人的圖 騰崇拜文化 (The culture of totem worships among the Mongols), Nei Menggu chenbao 内蒙古晨報 (Inner Mongolia morning post), 2 Apr. 2010, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2010-04-02/081017313978s. shtml?from=wap (last accessed 21 Sept. 2018). 10. Tim Cope, who mentioned Wolf Totem in his book, has pointed out that Mongolians understand wolf’s howls as prayers to the sky god Tengri. See Cope, On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey through the Land of the Nomads (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), e-book, https://books.google. com.hk/books?isbn=1408839881 (last accessed 15 Sept. 2018). 11. Jiang 85; Igor de Rachewiltz, trans. and comm., The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill Academic Pub, 2006), 1:1. 12. The translator reveals that it was the publisher’s decision to excise the epigrammatic openings and the lengthy lecture in the epilogue, which I shall discuss below. See Michaela Kabat’s and Paul Pennay’s interview with Howard Goldblatt, “Beijing Bookworm International Literary Festival— Howard Goldblatt and Wolf Totem” (13 Mar. 2008), the Beijinger, http:// www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2008/03/13/Beijing-BookwormInternational-Literary-Festival-Howard-Goldblatt-and-Wolf-Totem (last accessed 6 May 2018). This is yet another case of the publisher’s active role in the task of translation.

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13. For instance, in order to force Zhou-dynasty (1045–256 B.C.) history into his story, Jiang Rong (374) equates jackals with wolves in a sentence about King Wu’s (r. 1045–1043 B.C.) army cited from Sima Qian’s 司馬遷 (145ca. 86 B.C.) Shi ji 史記 (The grand scribe’s records) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), 4.123, without researching to discover that the original text in the extant version of Shang shu 尚書 (The book of documents) lists neither wolves nor jackals, but panthers. 14. See the videos “Lang tuteng zhizuo teji zhi huanbao pian” 《狼圖騰》製 作特輯之環保篇 (Making of Wolf Totem: Environmental protection) and “Lang tuteng teji zhi ‘Langwang shi zenyang liancheng de’” 《狼圖騰》特 輯之“狼王是怎樣煉成的” (Special feature of Wolf Totem: How the wolf king was tempered) on Leshi shipin 樂視視頻, http://www.le.com/ptv/ vplay/21288578.html#vid=21288578 and http://www.le.com/ptv/ vplay/21578923.html#vid=21578923 (last accessed 28 Aug. 2018); see also the special feature of making of Wolf Totem, dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, DVD (Hong Kong: Edko Films, [2015]). For Annaud’s depoliticization of the original through universalization of the ecological and the ethics of eco-­filming, see Gong Haomin, “Transcendence and Transgression: Wolf Totem as Environmental World Literature/Cinema?” in Sheldon Lu and Haomin Gong, eds., Chinese-Language Ecocinema (London: Routledge, forthcoming). I thank Gong for sharing his manuscript with me before its publication. 15. Li Jianjun, introduction to Long, Lang tuteng pipan, ii-iii. Li describes Wolf Totem as “anti-humanism, anti-civilization.” 16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 229; J[oseph] Stalin, “The Tasks of Business Executives,” in his Problems of Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1947), 356. 17. Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 81, where he continues in a contrast with sein “to be”: “In the being mode it lies in loving, sharing, giving.” 18. See the American Nazi Party’s webpage, http://www.americannaziparty. com/platform/index.php (last accessed 6 May 2018). I thank Caroline Barth, my honours seminar student at Wittenberg University, for the reference. 19. See Long, Lang tuteng pipan, 227; interview with Wolfgang Kubin, “Deguo Hanxue quanwei ling yi zhi yan kan xiandangdai Zhongguo wenxue” 德國 漢學權威另一隻眼看現當代中國文学 (Authoritative German Sinologist looks at modern and contemporary Chinese literature with a ­different eye) (26 Nov. 2006), Deutsche Welle, Chinese edn., http://www.dw-world.de/ dw/article/0,2144,2249278,00.html (last accessed 6 May 2018), listed under “Wenxue yishu” 文學藝術 (Literature & art); English translation by Priest Liu, “Wolfgang Kubin on Contemporary Chinese Literature,” can be

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accessed at EastSouthWestNorth Culture Blog, http://zonaeuropa.com/ culture/c20061214_1.htm (last accessed 6 May 2018); also Linda Jaivin, review of Wolf Totem, Australian Literary Review, 7 May 2008; republished with an introduction by Geremie R. Barmé at Danwei, http://www.danwei.org/china_books/lupine_lactose_intolerant.php (last accessed 6 May 2018). Kubin’s view is followed by Arif Dirlik who, in his “Back to the Future: Contemporary China in the Perspective of Its Past, circa 1980,” boundary 2 38.1 (2011): 49–50, situates Jiang Rong’s “militaristic strains” in the Chinese “economic and political integration into global capitalism” and relates the Nazi statism to the “preoccupation with the sovereignty of the nation-state over both social problems and social relations” in China. 20. Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” trans. I. S. Munro (1933), in Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, ed. Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1952), 8, 15. 21. Song Qiang 宋强 et  al., Zhongguo keyi shuo bu—Lengzhan hou shidai de zhengzhi yu qinggan jueze 中國可以說不——冷戰後時代的政治與情感抉擇 (The China that can say no: Political and emotional choices in the post-cold-­ war era) (Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe, 1996). 22. Li Xiaojiang 李小江, Preface to Hou wutuobang piping: Lang tuteng shendu quanshi 後烏托邦批評:《狼圖騰》深度詮釋 (Post-utopian criticism: A penetrating interpretation of Wolf Totem), rev. ed. (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2013), 6, 8–9; Edward Mansfield Gunn, Jr., trans., Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian: A Chinese Perspective on Contemporary Western Scholarship (Leiden: Brill Academic Pub, 2018), XIV, XVI–XVII. Note that the nearly 600-page English translation is cofunded by the original Chinese publishing company and the official Shanghai Culture Development Foundation. 23. Li, Hou wutuobang piping, 406; Gunn, Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian, 412; emphases added. 24. Li, Hou wutuobang piping, 495, 506; Gunn, Wolf Totem and the Post-­Mao Utopian, 500, 512. 25. Li, Hou wutuobang piping, 276; Gunn, Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian, 278. Karen Laura Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 312. 26. Li, Hou wutuobang piping, 545, 549; Gunn, Wolf Totem and the Post-­Mao Utopian, 552, 556. 27. Li, Hou wutuobang piping, 556; Gunn, Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian, 563, 565. The “Chinese dream” or “China Dream” was put forward by Xi in Nov. 2012 and again in May 2013, a few years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics slogan tong yi ge shijie, tong yi ge mengxiang 同一個世界, 同一個夢想 “One World, One Dream,” for the “great rejuvenation [weida

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fuxing 偉大復興] of the Chinese nation.” The propaganda has aroused Western media’s fear of China’s “aggressive course of bullying its neighbors and confronting the United States” with its recent naval expansion and intensified territorial claims, as a writer of The New York Times portrays Xi: “his nationalism is proactive, riding the high road of patriotism and pride.” See Yang Yi, “Youth Urged to Contribute to Realization of ‘Chinese dream’,” Global Times, 5 May 2013, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/779169.shtml (last accessed 21 Sept. 2018); and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, “Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream,” The New York Times, 4 June 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/opinion/global/xi-jinpingschinese-dream.html (last accessed 21 Sept. 2018). Numerous articles and about ten books in English on the subject have been published, including Liu Mingfu’s 刘明福 China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (New York: CN Times Books, Inc., 2015), Steven W. Mosher’s Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), and fictionist Ma Jian’s 馬建 China Dream (New York: Random House, 2018). 28. Li, Preface to Hou wutuobang piping, 5; Gunn, Wolf Totem and the Post-­ Mao Utopian, XIII; Xue Xiaolin 薛曉林, Heng Qingjuan 衡慶娟, and Li Lingwan 李鈴婉, “Lang tuteng yu Bai ya zhong de shengtai sixiang zhi bijiao yanjiu” 《狼圖騰》與《白牙》中的生態思想之比較研究 (A comparative study of ecocriticism in Wolf Totem and White Fang), Zuojia 作家 (Writer), 2012, no. 6: 119–120; Wu Xiuming 吳秀明 and Chen Lijun 陈力君, “Cong Lang tuteng kan dangdai shengtai wenxue de fazhan” 從《狼圖騰》看當代生態文學的發展 (The development of contemporary eco-­ literature: A case study of Wolf Totem), Wenyi yanjiu 文藝研究 (Literature & Art Studies), 2009, no. 4: 25–29; and Wang Gaowa 王高娃, “Lun Menggu wenxue shengtai zhuti ji shenmei” 論蒙古文學生態主題及 審美 (On the theme and aesthetics of ecology in Mongolian literature), Zuojia, 2014, no. 2: 44–45. Zhu Yanhong 朱妍红, in her “The Human and the Beast: Humanity, Animality, and Cultural Critique in Contemporary Chinese Cinema,” Chinese Literature Today 7.1 (2018): 107–117, argues that while the original novel can be read through the Deleuzian lens of “becoming-animal,” the film adaptation has challenged the anthropocentric human-animal divide by granting agency to animals. Thanks to Wang Zhuoyi 王卓异 for the last reference after my presentation of this paper, in which I also adopted Deleuze’s and Guattari’s idea of becoming (see the rest of this chapter below), at the conference of Ecowriting: Tradition and Modernity, Lingnan University, 16–17 Mar. 2019. 29. Chen Hong, “Further Questions about the Ecological Themes of Wolf Totem,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23.4 (Nov. 2016): 767.

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30. Nicole E.  Barnes, “Coming Distractions: Wolf Totem” (24 Mar. 2008), The China Beat, http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/03/comingdistractions-wolf-totem.html (last accessed 6 May 2018). 31. Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions, 121. 32. Gong, “Transcendence and Transgression,” manuscript. 33. Stevan Harrell, “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” in Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 9–27. The third civilizing project, according to Harrell, is the Christian missionaries’ project from the West. 34. Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979). 35. Long, Lang tuteng pipan, 28, 215–246. There are sections discussing Confucianism in Long’s book, pp. 106–128, which are unfortunately too shallow and full of pitfalls in their understanding of the Confucian traditions and teachings. 36. Eric Abrahamsen, “Translation Course: Jiang Rong vs Howard Goldblatt” (28 Mar. 2008), Paper Republic, http://paper-republic.org/ericabrahamsen/translation-course-jiang-rong-vs-howard-goldblatt/ (last accessed 6 May 2018). Ruth Y. Y. Hung 洪如蕊, in her forthcoming paper “Against Allegory: For the Wolves in Wolf Totem,” 24, describes Jiang Rong’s grievance as “an unreflective insistence.”). I thank Hung for sending me her manuscript after her presentation at Hong Kong Baptist University on 5 Nov. 2018. 37. Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, The Han: China’s Diverse Majority (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). 38. Gong Haomin, in his “Transcendence and Transgression,” concludes that such sympathy can “become destructive” when universalized nature is displaced by transgressive ideologies. 39. It became a calamity in the late 1950s when Mao misread ren ding sheng tian, a phrase originally from the Lüshi chunqiu 吕氏春秋 (Spring and autumn annals of Lü Buwei 吕不韋 [290–235 B.C.]): tian ding ze sheng ren, ren ding ze sheng tian 天定則勝人, 人定則勝天 “When heaven settles, it surpasses man; when man settles, they surpass heaven,” in which the word ding is not the adverb “must” and does not mean to fight nature. Yet, Mao misinterpreted it for the purpose of promoting “people’s commune,” resulting in the 1959–61 great famine known officially as the three-year “natural disaster.” This is a case where a leader abuses his political power to distort language out of context and casts a negative impact on both the nation and nature. Interestingly, the classical sentence is immediately followed by another one related to our subject: gu lang zhong ze shi

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ren, ren zhong ze shi lang 故狼眾則食人, 人眾則食狼 “therefore, when wolves outnumber men, men are to be eaten; when men outnumber wolves, wolves are to be eaten,” which seemingly tells of the “grassland logic” of the distinction between eater and eaten. 40. Historian Timothy Weston, in his “A Defense of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem” (25 July 2008), The China Beat, http://thechinabeat.blogspot. com/2008/07/defense-of-jiang-rongs-wolf-totem.html (last accessed 6 May 2018), draws a close parallel between Han Chinese ignorance about the natural environment and their arrogance towards minority cultures but argues that they are not irredeemable: “Ethnicity is not treated in an essentialist fashion in this novel.” While it is true in Weston’s observation that there are indeed a few “good” Han Chinese like the protagonist and “bad” Mongols who are insensitive to the environment, the problem of Jiang Rong’s environmental ethnography remains: the Han would not become a “good ethnic group” unless they are Mongolianized, nor would some Mongols degenerate into a “bad ethnic group” were they not Sinicized. 41. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 22. 42. Lily Kuo and Niko Kommenda, “What is China’s Belt and Road Initiative?” The Guardian, 30 July 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/nginteractive/2018/jul/30/what-china-belt-road-initiative-silk-road-explainer (last accessed 17 Sept. 2018). I describe Belt and Road as “expansionist” especially when it becomes “debt-trap diplomacy” in exchange for disputed territories, such as that of Tajikistan, and overseas military presence, for example, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Support base in Djibouti.

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Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2013. Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream. The New York Times, June 4. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/opinion/global/xi-jinpings-chinese-dream.html. Accessed 21 Sept 2018. Kuo, Lily, and Niko Kommenda. 2018. What Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative? The Guardian, July 30. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/jul/30/what-china-belt-road-initiative-silk-road-explainer. Accessed 17 Sept 2018. Lang tuteng teji zhi ‘Langwang shi zenyang liancheng de’ [Special Feature of Wolf Totem: How the Wolf king Was Tempered]. Leshi shipin. http://www.le.com/ ptv/vplay/21578923.html#vid=21578923. Accessed 28 Aug 2018. Lang tuteng zhizuo teji zhi huanbao pian. [Making of Wolf Totem: Environmental Protection] Leshi shipin. http://www.le.com/ptv/vplay/21288578.html# vid=21288578. Accessed 28 Aug 2018. Lee, Haiyan. 2008. The Lord of the Wolves? The China Beat. http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/06/lord-of-wolves.html. Accessed 6 May 2018. Li, Xiaojiang. 2013. Hou wutuobang piping: Lang tuteng shendu quanshi [Post-­ Utopian Criticism: A Penetrating Interpretation of Wolf Totem]. Revised ed. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. ———. 2018. Wolf Totem and the Post-Mao Utopian: A Chinese Perspective on Contemporary Western Scholarship. Trans. Edward Mansfield Gunn, Jr. Leiden: Brill Academic Pub. Lin, Yü-sheng. 1979. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Liu, Priest. 2006. Wolfgang Kubin on Contemporary Chinese Literature. EastSouthWestNorth Culture Blog. http://zonaeuropa.com/culture/ c20061214_1.htm. Accessed 6 May 2018. Liu, Mingfu. 2015. China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era. New York: CN Times Books, Inc. Ma, Jian. 2018. China Dream. New York: Random House. Making of Wolf Totem. 2015. DVD. Hong Kong: Edko Films. Mosher, Steven W. 2017. Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Mussolini, Benito. 1952. The Doctrine of Fascism. Munro. In Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, ed. Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado. Trans. I.S. Munro. Athens: Swallow Press. Song, Qiang, et al. 1996. Zhongguo keyi shuo bu—Lengzhan hou shidai de zhengzhi yu qinggan jueze [The China That Can Say No: Political and Emotional Choices in the Post-Cold-War Era]. Beijing: Zhonghua gongshang lianhe chubanshe. Stalin, J.V. 1976. The Tasks of Economic Executives. In Problems of Leninism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Sun, Yongli. 2007. Lang tuteng pipan [Critique of Wolf Totem]. Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe.

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Thornber, Karen Laura. 2012. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wang, Gaowa. 2014. Lun Menggu wenxue shengtai zhuti ji shenmei. [On the Theme and Aesthetics of Ecology in Mongolian Literature]. Zuojia (2): 44–45. Weston, Timothy. 2008. A Defense of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem. http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/07/defense-of-jiang-rongs-wolf-totem.html. Accessed 6 May 2018. Wu, Xiuming, and Lijun Chen. 2009. Cong Lang tuteng kan dangdai shengtai wenxue de fazhan [The Development of Contemporary Eco-literature: A Case Study of Wolf Totem]. Wenyi yanjiu [Literature & Art Studies] 4: 25–29. Xue, Xiaolin, Qingjuan Heng, and Lingwan Li. 2012. Lang tuteng yu Bai ya zhong de shengtai sixiang zhi bijiao yanjiu [A Comparative Study of Ecocriticism in Wolf Totem and White Fang]. Zuojia [Writer] 2012 (6): 119–120. Xuezhu. 2010. Mongguren de tuteng chongbai wenhua [The Culture of Totem Worships Among the Mongols]. Nei Menggu chenbao [Inner Mongolia Morning Post], April 2. http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2010-04-02/081017313978s. shtml?from=wap. Accessed 21 Sept 2018. Yang, Yi. 2013. Youth Urged to Contribute to Realization of ‘Chinese Dream’. Global Times, May 5. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/779169.shtml. Accessed 21 Sept 2018. Yu, Fan, and Hongjie Song. 2010. Langdao da quanji: Qiangzhe de chenggong faze [The Way of Wolf: The Rules of Success]. Shanghai: Lixin kuaiji chubanshe.

CHAPTER 8

Too Inhuman to Die; Too Ethereal to Become a Ghost: Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts Victor Fan

What does it mean by being human at the age of precarity?1 How can the cinematographic or media image offer critiques and suggest ways by which humanity can be redefined and restored? These questions came to my mind when I first encountered the word ‘Anthropocene’. This term has been adopted and popularised by geologists and geographers since the late 1990s to denote our current geological era as one in which nature has been fundamentally transformed, violated, and reconstituted by human beings.2 However, such notion of the Anthropocene is based on a classical understanding of the anthrō pos, that one becomes conscious of being human as one comes face to face with physis (nature), whose ­overwhelming power one is compelled to tame and conquer.3 Yet, conquering nature is not an act of human will. Rather, as Bernard Stiegler argues, it is an act of reconfiguring the interdependent relationship between a living being and its environment via technē (understood here as technics), including language, social organisation, politics, and technology. Technē has therefore V. Fan (*) Department of Film Studies, King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_8

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always played a crucial role in redefining the relationship between beinghuman and being-in-the-environment.4 Politics as technē also performs another function: that political power is instantiated by dehumanising others. At the age of the Anthropocene, environmental construction and reconstruction have always been performed by individuals, social groups, and political communities upon those they dehumanise. They have done so by converting a living environment (be that polis or physis) to a technical milieu where dehumanised, deindividuated, and desubjectivised lives perform as technical beings deprived of the very technicity they build and maintain. Without technics, these lives are also stripped of their humanity and rendered dispensable. They can therefore be maintained, managed, and executed for the purpose of reproducing the political power of those who own the technical environment in which they dwell.5 As Judith Butler argues, neoliberalism is constructed upon a paradox. On the one hand, our society is configured as a technical milieu in which all lives are supposed to be fully individuated and are morally responsible for their own subsistence. On the other hand, corporate powers and government institutions systematically deprive these lives of their technical means of subsistence, thus rendering lives precarious and unliveable. If a life is entirely denied its humanity, thus occupying a liminal space between law and lawlessness, life and death, it is too inhuman to die. By the end of its abject existence, such life would merely be jettisoned and forgotten.6 Its existence would be too ethereal to leave any trace as an imprint, record, or image.7 In this chapter, I first explicate how Chinese and Euro-American philosophers have addressed the definition of being-human and being-in-the-­ environment. I then analyse Rong Guang Rong’s 2015 film Haizi bu jupa siwang, dan jupa mogui (Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts). In this film, Rong investigates into the suicide of a group of children in Bijie, Guizhou, in 2015. During his filming process, Rong’s footage was destroyed by the local police. Through still photographs, reconstructed footage, and animated re-enactment, Rong creates a poignant cinematic experience where the existence of these children, of their photographic traces, and of our own subjectivity is put into question. What is at stake, I argue, is that political dehumanisation has always been accompanied by a collapse of the implicit trust in the interdependency between photographic reality, its authenticity, and its credibility.8 Such interdependency was once put into question by left-wing film and

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media theorists during the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, it has since then been appropriated by political authorities to disturb our sense-certainty and intersubjectivity––or in Donald Trumps’ words, ‘fake news’. Such a collapse is often traced to the proliferation of the digital image in the 1990s and social media in the 2000s.9 With these two intersecting technologies, every life can leave its footprints in the media as public archives. Yet, these ethereal traces of individual existences are registered on technological ­platforms that are run, sanctioned, and instrumentalised by corporations and governments for surveillance. Hence, their reality claims, truth values, and authenticities are not intrinsic to the image. Rather, they are bestowed upon by a higher financial or political authority. Meanwhile, those who have no access to these corporate archives are actively having their digital and biopolitical existences erased.

Being-Human as a Political Problem Language, politics, economics, and social bonds are usually considered modes of organisation that enable individuals to relate to each other and form communities. However, as Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) and Stiegler argue, respectively, they can also be understood as media, that is, technics that allow preindividuated biological lives to assume a sense-­ certainty (individuation) and foster interpersonal relationships (transindividuation) within the larger technical milieu.10 As Stiegler proposes, it is not that individual human beings employ technics to work. Rather, it is technics that constitutes biological lives as humans and as members of a polis, a process that is by default both existential and political.11 This question has been debated in both Chinese and European philosophies. For example, the ‘Zhengming’ (Rectification) chapter in the Shiliu jing (Sixteen Classics) tells a story that suggests how early Chinese political thinkers conceptualised the relationship between technē, humanity, and polis. In this tale, there are three figures: Taishanzhiji, a negotiator between the will of heaven and human desire; the Yellow Emperor, a figure who exercises acts of violence, including turning his defeated enemy Chi You’s stomach into an aim for archery, beheading Chi You and using his head as a kickball, and mincing into meat and sharing Chi You’s flesh as a token of communal bond; and finally, Di—the god of high or august ruler, with its (since Di is not entirely human) divinity and humanity remaining ­arbitrary—who decrees his law by rectifying retroactively the acts of violence that the Yellow Emperor had enacted.12

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In the beginning of this chapter, Li Mo, a minister of the Yellow Emperor, is concerned that Chi You shows signs of ‘arrogance and conspiracy’ before the grandson of the Yellow Emperor, Gao Yang, has reached adulthood. The passage implies that Chi You, who is one of the six ministers (liu xiang), demands that the other ministers send him offerings. It also implies that Chi You may threaten the political order before the Yellow Emperor has a rightful successor. As a consequence, Li consults Taishanzhiji for advice. While some commentaries consider Taishanzhiji as another minister of the Yellow Emperor, classicists Yu Mingguang and Chen Guying consider it to be another name for the Yellow Emperor.13 Taishanzhiji then answers: Thou shalt not worry. This is because heaven acts according to the truth, [according to which] the sun and the moon do not stand still; once it begins, it will never slow down, and with this truth, heaven descends to the world. Life has its limits, which are excesses and overflow of desire; such excesses and overflow cause … loss.14

Here, Taishanzhiji suggests that Li act according to his understanding of the will of heaven, which is made up of not only eternal laws that govern the order of the universe, but also human desire, its excesses, and as a result, disorder. By overindulging and prolonging Chi You’s desire, his excesses would incite him to rebel against the political and economic establishment, which would eventually bring him to his own destruction. Taishanzhiji therefore acts as a negotiator between the will of heaven and human desire, and his constitutive power is dependent upon his ability to adjudicate on the difference between these two configurative elements. After the rebellion of Chi You begins, Taishanzhiji takes up his arms, thus yielding the constitutive power to the Yellow Emperor––a moment that also signifies Taishanzhiji’s withdrawal from the narrative. Then the Yellow Emperor exercises the three acts of violence: archery, kickball, and meat mincing. After that, Di emerges and systematises these acts of violence as the law for his people to observe. In this tale, Chi You’s desire––or one might say, political and economic ambition––is instrumentalised by the Yellow Emperor as a tool to usurp Chi You’s power and reduce him to an animal that can be killed without breaking the law. After Chi You’s defeat, the Yellow Emperor strengthens the communal bond among his own people by mincing and sharing Chi You’s meat. Today, under neoliberalism, every ordinary life’s desire to

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subsist and consume is instrumentalised by the economic and political authorities for the same purpose. The Yellow Emperor, meanwhile, is split into two roles: a warrior who exercises juridical violence outside the law and a wise adjudicator who, in the name of heaven, justifies the Yellow Emperor’s violence, systematises it into the law, and converts those lives who obey him as humans. In this story, violence serves as the ultimate technē that constitutes humanity as biological and political transindividuals. During the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), this question characterises the contention between Sima Qian (145–circa 86  BCE) and Dong Zhongshu (179–104  BCE). In the ‘Cike liezhuan’ (Biographies of the assassins) of the Shi ji (Records of the Grand Historian, completed circa 94 BCE), Sima argues that politics operates upon a principle: the active dehumanisation of those who are unwanted by, yet economically usable for, the ruling class. Such dehumanisation is done by classifying these people as natural lives that can be freely instrumentalised for profits or executed as animals. For Sima, these dehumanised lives have the right to rebel against the ruling class in order to reinstate their ren (humanity), so that the proper yi (intersubjective relationships among human beings) can be restored.15 Dong disagreed. For him, the emperor has the ultimate responsibility to listen to conflicting opinions within a community, adjudicate on their differences, and harmonise these lives and their opinions in order to promote the interest of the political order.16 Sima’s observation corresponds to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer. For Agamben, sovereign authority is instantiated as the ­monarch––or in a democracy, those who are in charge of making the law–– turns their political subjects into homines sacri, that is, bare lives that can be managed and executed. Such management and execution can be carried out freely without being answerable to any law. Yet, by the same token, the monarch also occupies a position where the law is absent. In other words, the monarch is also a homo sacer.17 Again, Stiegler, based on a re-reading of Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) and Simondon’s (1924–89) notions of technicity, argues that humanity has always been defined by technics.18 Therefore, political power is strongly associated with the possession of technology (e.g. language, mechanical tools, money, means of communication, and media). In other words, human beings are technical beings, and understanding what it means by being human requires us to situate human lives as part and parcel of a technical milieu. Dehumanisation is therefore not simply a banishment of those who are being governed as bare lives, but also a denial of their access to control and live with those technics that enable them to be human.

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Dong’s notion of the empire has been revised recently as shehui zhuyi hexie shehui (socialist harmonious society), a national policy adopted by the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on 19 September 2004. The Committee envisioned the party-state as an adjudicator (Taishanzhiji), who is capable of listening to and negotiating conflicting desires and opinions. By harmonising them, the party-state is supposed to carry out policies that can best represent the economic and political interests of the biopolitical lives it governs.19 But then, in the name of harmonising public opinions, workers, women, ethnic minorities, and LGBTIQ+ individuals have been dehumanised not simply by physical, police, legal, and political violence, but also by being actively denied access to technology and media. For a decade or so around the 2000s, ethnic minorities in China were able to get access to cameras, editing equipment, and online distribution platforms where they could document and exchange opinions on the gradual erosion and destruction of their own technical milieu by the party-state. As a result, new modes of subjectivities were in a process of becoming.20 Nevertheless, such accessibility has been increasingly limited in the past few years. On 1 April 2017, the Film Law came into effect, which criminalises the production and dissemination of any film and video works that have not been approved by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT).21

A Matter of Trust: Crisis of the Image One film that addresses this problem is Rong Guang Rong’s Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts. Rong was born in Beijing in 1984. He left home and went to Wenzhou at the age of 16 to study photography. In 2003, he moved back to Beijing to study with photographers Xu Yong and Yang Jingsun. During his stay in Beijing, he became friends with the documentarian Wu Wenguang and the Yi (ethnic minority) poet Shen Jie. In 2011, he and the Italian Sinologist Ambra Corinti founded the Zajia Lab, a self-financed art space located at the Hong’en Taoist Temple in Beijing, which has served as an open forum for local and international artists and independent filmmakers to ‘provoke reflections [on] and awareness [of] social issues’.22 I first saw Children at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), where it won the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) Award. I must confess that my first viewing, scheduled at midnight, was an extremely challenging experience. At first glance, the film seems ­structurally

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fragmented and disorganised. However, once the director’s predicament is clear, the film’s seemingly chaotic structure can be understood as an imprint of Rong’s own sense of emotional frenzy, anger, frustration, lost, and helplessness. As an independent filmmaker, Rong finds himself constantly under surveillance and state violence. As a human being, he witnesses the unapologetic dehumanisation of ethnic minorities. For Rong, these people are seen by the authority as too inhuman to die, and their existence is too ethereal to leave even a trace on the image. Yet, what is at stake is not simply their dehumanisation, but the impossibility to persuade anybody to trust him. Children opens with an extreme long shot of Bijie at night that lasts for 1′39″. This image is almost entirely dark. We can only see a few dots of light and hear dog barks, cricket chirps, and a few bird calls. This opening shot suggests a sense of secrecy, mystery, and potential horror, especially given the reference to death and ghosts in the film’s title. This shot will be shown again later in the film with its context explained. It turns out that after Rong’s attempted visit to the village to interview other children about the collective suicide, the police intervened and confiscated his footage. Out of frustration, he drove up to the top of the mountain late at night. In a long driving sequence seen from a low-resolution camera mounted on his dashboard, we hear the global positioning system (GPS) giving Rong conflicting instructions. Eventually, Rong parks his car at a vista point overlooking this village and he stays there until dawn. This shot was taken before daybreak. The village remains a secret, mysterious, and horrific site not because of it being out of the ordinary. Rather, it is rendered uncanny by a concerted effort of technological interference and a denial of the villagers’ and the filmmaker’s own access to technics. In this shot, the village lies open and visible to us in all its canniness. Yet, its image is entirely obscured by the darkness of nature––precisely because the location and its people are both rendered as part of physis. In Children, Rong never explains why the government wanted to eradicate the evidence of these children’s suicide or even the village itself. For most viewers, Bijie is a nameless location. Yet, Rong offers a hint in the beginning of the film by showing a text message from the Yi poet Shen Jie and a passing comment that the village was slated for redevelopment. Informed viewers would be able to make the connection: that the village was designated as part of the prefecture’s (now city) Sinicisation and modernisation project in 2011.23

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What haunts the viewers from the beginning to the end of the film is the unsettling structuration between fiction and reality. I use the term ‘structuration’ here because Children is not about locating the boundary where fiction ends and reality begins.24 Rather, it is about an ontological perturbation: that our implicit trust between photographic reality, authenticity, and credulity collapses entirely through police intervention. This implicit trust, according to Philip Rosen, has been the foundation of documentary and reportage, modes of filmmaking that Rong Guang Rong claims––at least in the film––he set out to do in the beginning.25 Brian Winston, for instance, traces this implicit trust to the motion studies of Edward Muybridge (1930–1904). For Winston, these studies were meant to be scientific evidence captured by the camera, details that would not be detected and revealed by the human eye. To a certain degree, medical technologies, including the X-ray and the MRI, were developed out of the same presupposition that imaging technologies are necessarily real, authentic, and trustworthy. In fact, Dziga Vertov regards what the camera (kino-eye) captures as kino-prvada (cinema truth). For him, the truth values of these images can be elevated to a rhetorical register, as editing can reveal those sociopolitical relationships that were hidden or only implied in individual shots. For John Grierson (1898–1972; classical documentary), Jean Rouch (1917–2004; cinéma vérité), and D.  A. Pennebaker (Direct Cinema), truth may be deliberately concealed by the performers or even filmmakers in the raw footage. However, by letting the image be and by using editing to bring to the fore the performativity of the photographed subjects, the camerawork itself, and the process of editing, ­spectators can potentially access a level of truth, of which both subjects and the filmmakers might not be aware during the shooting process.26 In the context of Chinese independent cinema, this implicit trust was both seductive and questionable. The vulnerability of this trust was foregrounded during the traumatic aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. In a press conference on 6 June 1989 hosted by Yuan Mu, spokesperson of the State Council, and Zhang Gong, Commander of the Martial Law Unit of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Yuan claimed that contrary to the image seen on Hong Kong and Euro-American television, the Martial Law Unit did not use tanks to run over any protestors: We did not run over any people; we did not run over a single human being. Currently, some people in the [international] society claimed that the PLA ‘bathed Tiananmen Square with blood’. They even said that the PLA had

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killed so and so number of people and that their bodies were cremated on Tiananmen Square. These are all rumours. Such things never happened. I believe that these rumours were fabricated by a small number of people with ulterior motives.27

When being asked how he could explain the indexical traces these acts of violence have left on the video footage, Yuan contested that media images can be fabricated.28 As independent documentaries and fiction films emerged precisely during the aftermath of the crackdown, the seductiveness and vulnerability of our implicit trust in the image underlined the by-now famous technique of xianchang, a term first coined by Dai Jinhua.29 Luke Robinson explains: The term has two meanings. One is material: the location, or literally ‘the scene’, of the documentary shoot. This is the actual physical space in which an event must occur, and where a director must be present, for the act of documentation to take place. Wu Wenguang has succinctly captured this latter prescription by describing xianchang as being ‘in the “here” and “now”’ (‘xianzai shi’ he ‘zai chang’), while artist and critic Qiu Zhijie has simply stated that ‘Xianchang means: at the time you must be there’. Both therefore clarify that the practice has a temporal and spatial dimension that is bound to embodied presence. Being ‘on the scene’ is critical, because it guarantees the ontological truth of documentary representation: ‘it [xianchang] is the basic quality [benshen] of things and people that a producer [shezhiren] observes with his or her own eyes in real life’. Yet xianchang describes not simply a physical space, but also the space of the screen. In this sense, the term signifies precisely the documentary poetics that caused so much comment in the early 1990s. Zhang Zhen has described this aesthetic as ‘a particular social and epistemic space in which orality, performativity, and an irreducible specificity of personal and social experience are acknowledged, recorded, and given aesthetic expression.’ The techniques that supported xianchang––the handheld camerawork, the long takes and tracking shots, the natural sound and lighting––were thus meant to capture the experience of shooting ‘on the scene’. However, they also expressed a desire to describe a changing reality, and to reflect on the evolving relationship between the director, his or her environment, and in the human subjects of the filmmaking process.30

The seductiveness and vulnerability of the media image are not a crisis specific only to China. In the 1990s, the emergence of the digital image, editing technology, and distribution platforms began to worry both film-

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makers and scholars. The core of the crisis is that with these new technics, there is no longer a guaranteed relationship between the image and the physical reality from which the image is supposed to be captured, ­preserved, and reactivated. Today, a lifelike image can be composed from scratch based on minimum cues from facial gestures and bodily movements registered as data and algorithm. Furthermore, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the left-­ wing rhetoric during the 1970s and 1980s that media images are ideological constructs has been fully appropriated by right-wing politicians and philosophers. For Renaud Camus, the philosopher whose ideas inspired the identitarian movement in France and the alt-right in the United States, a human being (i.e. a white European man) does not need scientific evidence to prove that he is in danger of being invaded, and a culture (i.e. white, Christian, European culture) does not need data to corroborate it being violated by Islam. He believes that images are all simulacra framed within ‘ideologies’ (left-wing politics). The only medium that is to be trusted is the body of a European man. What counts is this man’s affective responses to his immediate environment.31 In other words, reality claims, truth values, and authenticity of a media image are not given. Instead, they are pure affective surfaces that must be questioned, defended, contested, and redefined from the moment of shooting to the moment of reception.

Performing Reality Is Children really the result of Rong’s attempt to investigate into the suicide of these ethnic minority children because of police interruption or is such an attempt entirely fabricated in the first place? To this question, Rong refused to answer in person. And he certainly does not offer a clue in the film itself. But perhaps the point is not whether the film is a documentary of a piece of fiction or a fictional representation of a failed documentary. Rather, it makes sensible that under neoliberalism and party-state postsocialism, these two modes of approaching reality have been collapsed into one––in the cinema and in our lived reality. Towards the beginning of the film, Rong states in a subtitle that Children is a work of fiction. Yet, he also provides a set of clues to indicate that the film is based on reality that has been rendered fictional under the pressure of the police. For example, the text messages from Shen Jie, and later, Wu Wenguang, which offer Rong advice on how he should proceed

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with his filming after the police intervention, engage the audience in his actual process of filmmaking. The core of this process is to resist surveillance and violence from the police, which seeks to eradicate the trace of these children’s suicide and de-authenticate Rong’s truth claim. Perhaps more disturbingly, Rong’s viewers, who are mostly intellectuals in film festivals, are well-informed about the intricate relationship between the cinematographic image and reality, which does not always guarantee the image’s credibility and authenticity. In other words, what the authority does is to capitalise on the potential unreliability of the image to render anything Rong claims as incredulous. In other words, by interrupting the mutual dependency between reality, authenticity, and credibility that constitutes the documentary image, the authority not only eradicates the trace of reality of these children, but also the authenticity of their existence and the credulity of any film image. For example, as Rong drives through the village, his low-resolution digital camera shows an extremely grainy footage shot in low light. In this footage, the viewers see women sweeping the street, preparing food, or simply talking to each other, as though they were utterly indifferent to the tragedy that occurred recently. The camera also sees children running down the street. Meanwhile, in a voiceover, Rong tells the viewers that he has been trying to interview these people, especially the children, in order to persuade them to tell him more about the victims. Yet, none of them was willing to appear in front of the camera or tell him anything. At one point, the camera films a group of abandoned children. Gradually, the viewers begin to identify them as the actual children who killed themselves. As the viewers see a girl putting a sugar cube into a plastic bottle and filling it with water so that her sister can drink it, Rong claims in the voiceover that those children who committed suicide were abandoned by their parents, who had to go into the city in order to make a living. Meanwhile, the eldest sister had to bear the responsibility to take care of her siblings by feeding them whatever food she could find, sometimes simply a lump of cane sugar. In so doing, the voiceover corresponds to the image as though whom we see are the actual children who committed suicide. The interaction between these low-resolution shots and Rong’s voiceover recalls Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan (Land Without Bread, Louis Buñuel, 1933). In Land, Buñuel shows grainy black-and-white footage of children and animals living in extreme poverty and matches this footage with a narrator’s voice, which authorises the image’s reality, credulity, and

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authenticity. Alternatively, we can also see that such process of authorisation works both ways: that the image authorises the narrator’s voice as much as the other way around. The experience of watching these images in Children therefore generates a tension in the viewers’ minds: that no matter how touching Rong’s story is, there is a good chance that our affects are manipulated by technics. On a day-to-day basis, we believe that since we have bodies, we can feel and generate affects. We tend to forget that it is because of our feelings and affects that we become conscious of our bodies. In other words, technics constitutes not only the reality represented on screen, but also our viewing bodies. They are made present by the film as an embodied experience. While Buñuel’s film may be considered a more classical mode of self-­ reflexivity, which informs the viewers the potential unreliability of the image, Rong’s film goes one step further. The point is that our bodies and our consciousnesses are entirely built upon a technical or media environment in which all images are, by default, unreliable. In other words, our bodies and consciousnesses are made up of sense-perceptions that have no fundamental reality claim, truth value, or credulity. Moreover, even though these images are entirely fabricated, such fabrication is made necessary because of real police intervention and party-state’s political violence exercised upon independent filmmakers and ethnic minorities at large. In this sense, these fabricated images are attempted representations of an actual condition that the filmmaker has failed to communicate because of police interruption. But then, is this the end of the story? In the film, Rong inserts still photographs of those children who committed suicide taken from Sina. com, the official news portal of the Communist Party of China (CPC). In the voiceover, Rong suggests that the news about this tragedy was first reported by Sina.com. However, shortly after the report came out, it was taken down from the internet. These pictures, which were authorised and authenticated by the party-state in the first place, are not verifiable by Rong or by any other journalists who wish to investigate into it. Nonetheless, while watching the unbearably tragic images of these abandoned children and photographs of the emptied room where these children committed suicide, the viewers may begin to ask: Who says that the claim that Sina.com had reported this suicide is not Rong’s fabrication in the first place? Who says that the journalists in Sina.com did not fabricate this piece of news? Whom shall we trust? Whose side are we on?

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Today, social media are indeed filled with images that make contestable sociopolitical claims. These images do not aim to raise rhetorical questions. Rather, they are meant to be pure affective surfaces that reaffirm our own established beliefs. If I were a supporter of the CPC, I would take this tragedy as a piece of fiction. If I were a liberal, I would take these images as pieces of evidence that prove the party-state’s violation of these children’s rights. While we may want to scream out to these villagers on screen, ‘Look at this tragedy and the tragic world we live in!’, these villagers have equally persuasive reasons to reply, ‘What tragedy?’ Our bodies and consciousnesses––including our political consciousnesses––are nothing more than an imprint of our technical environment: a fabric of unreliable images that not only stimulates but also constitutes our sensoria. The problem with this mode of social mediation is not the circulation of fake news, but the constitution of fake consciousnesses. Nonetheless, by foregrounding what we see on screen as a performance that is fully capable of generating real affects, we are increasingly uncertain about the reality, authenticity, and credulity not only of the image, but also of our own subjectivity. One way by which Rong counteracts such intervention is to make prominent the reality and immediacy of the viewers’ affective responses to the image. For instance, Rong reconstructs the process by which local villagers, hired by the police, throw animal faeces at his car. Shot from a camera concealed in a bag and underneath his car, these images enable the spectators to sense the physical impact of being attacked by these villagers. However, the viewers cannot help but remember that this is simply a reconstruction. By the same token, despite the fact that this is nothing but a performance, we can still feel the filthiness, anger, and frustration as though we were being violated by police brutality. Almost contrary to this re-enactment, about 20 minutes into the film, Rong presents a sequence in which his own daughter re-enacts the police interruption of his filming by animating stuffed animals and plastic figurines. In this sequence, the filmmaker and the villagers are represented by a stuffed giant panda and a monkey, respectively, while the government is played by a plastic dinosaur (see Fig. 8.1). The entire sequence is shot with contrasting purple and white lights. Occasionally, the daughter would be seen within the frame. Other times, we hear her making sounds that imitate police siren with her off-screen voice. She animates these toys with her hands only. Meanwhile, Rong narrates the story in a voiceover and the narration is conducted entirely with metaphors: a huge dragon (the police) finds a giant panda interviewing the monkey, chases them into a cave, and

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Fig. 8.1  Rong’s traumatic experience is retold as a fairy tale enacted by his daughter with stuffed animals and plastic figurines

eventually devours the panda and tells the monkey that it had seen nothing, that no children had ever died! In one register, this animated sequence tries to convey Rong’s traumatic experience by means of humour. In another register, the sight of watching Rong’s daughter playing with these toys and re-enacting the scene of police intervention suggests that the young generation has been acculturated to accept such civil-right violation as normal. In yet another register, Rong has effectively transformed his experience into a fairy tale, which he transmits to his daughter by asking her to enact it as a puppet play. In other words, he suggests that parents today have a moral responsibility to teach their children that police and party-state violence is not normal. Otherwise, these children will grow up believing that their utter deprivation of rights (comparable to death) is their normal conditions, whereas fabricated anxieties about people who are willing to violate police authority in order to protect their rights (ghosts) would be considered anomies. This metaphor is then transferred to a meta-narrative level. Throughout the film, Rong’s voiceover repeatedly insinuates that those children who committed suicide chose death over their fear of ghosts (i.e. party-state intervention, police harassment, or even abuses from other ­villagers)––and so did we!

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In the absence of any image of the actual children who committed suicide, Rong films a family of siblings who were being abandoned by their parents. They lived in a decrepit house with no food supply. In the middle of the film, the moving image gives way to a sequence of black-and-white snapshots, which arrest these children in the middle of their actions. These images recall the kind of photojournalism in Life magazine or National Geographic, which uses the technique of ‘catching life unaware’ to authenticate the photographic image (what Vertov would call ontological authenticity; see Fig. 8.2).32 Yet, what the image does is to overwhelm the beholder with a pure sensation of the dehumanisation it claims to witness. For an uninformed audience, such sensationalism then deters them from questioning the reality, credulity, and authenticity of these images. It also persuades the viewers to sympathise with these children on the level of humanity, thus erasing the political context and purpose of such dehumanisation. Nevertheless, to an intellectually informed audience, these images are at once overwhelming and suspicious. In other words, as a politically informed viewer, I cannot help but be moved by these images. Yet, my being moved by these images is based on my willingness not to question why I am moved and the ideological and political reasons behind these children’s dehumanisation. In this light, sensationalism is produced if and only if the photographer and the beholder enter into an ideological and

Fig. 8.2  A photojournalistic image of a family of abandoned children

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political contract by which dehumanisation is conducted consciously via photographic mediation. In other words, when I am moved by these images, I am touched not necessarily because I trust that the image must be real, authentic, and credulous, but because I forget to ask whether they are real, authentic, and credulous. But perhaps more disturbingly, when I begin to question the reality, authenticity, and credulity of these pictures, I begin to question if these children had ever really existed, especially since the police had supposedly destroyed Rong’s footage. In this sense, the existence of the photographic image, of these children, of the piece of news reported, and of my own political subjectivity has been tactfully put into question via such intervention. Yet perhaps this is precisely the point. Under neoliberalism and postsocialism, children––both literally and metaphorically, that is, ordinary lives under the party-state––are rendered precarious and dispensable. They are dehumanised, abandoned, and ostracised by the community at large, though ironically, the community is made up of children who are by default dehumanised and ostracised. In other words, these precarious lives who are excepted from the polis are not exceptions. Their living conditions and mode of existence are the norm. By the same token, every ordinary life is an abandoned and ostracised child who somehow subscribes to a belief that their state of exception is ordinary. If the photographic image is an imprint of the existential value of the photographed being, these children have no fundamental existential values. In the eyes of the political authority, their existence is too ethereal and dispensable to be registered. They are free to die. In fact, their death is not death in an existential sense. Rather, they are merely disposed of by the system. In this context, Rong’s camera restores these children’s humanity by recalling their images and by reminding us that they too leave us an imprint of their existence. The penultimate scene of Children is a dream shot in which we see a dark and deserted street with industrial buildings on frame right and a bright red neon sign of a restaurant on frame left. A man walks down the middle of the street and the soundtrack is completely silent. All of a sudden, the man collapses. We then hear a child’s voice calling, ‘Dad! Dad!’, in the soundtrack. The film then cuts to a long shot of Rong asleep on his chair in front of his Final Cut Pro workstation. We then hear the off-screen voice of the child whispering, ‘Dad! Dad!’. After that, Rong wakes up and turns his chair towards the camera. Rong’s son enters the frame as he climbs on top of the table (immediately in front of the camera). The son then sits down. Rong then asks the son to go to him so that he can give his son a hug (Fig.  8.3). In the final sequence of the film, the camera

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Fig. 8.3  Rong wakes up from his dream

observes Rong’s son and his friend playing with a froglet in the backyard. On the one hand, by framing the entire film as a dream, Rong seems to offer a momentary comfort for the viewers that all those traumatic images and the sense of uncertainty and anxiety we experienced were, after all, only a fantasy. On the other hand, watching two children who chase after a froglet as a toy reminds the viewers the way the police and the party-state at large treat those children who committed suicide and violate Rong’s rights. It seems to suggest that the dinosaur is not necessarily the party-­ state, but generations of children who grew up––and will continue to do so––believing in the political power and structure we have just witnessed. Or in fact, these children have grown up or will do so to constitute the very political authority that instantiates its power through violence.

Conclusion Children Are Not Afraid of Death, Children Are Afraid of Ghosts addresses the problem of political dehumanisation, desubjectivisation, and deindividuation on at least two different, but intertwining, levels. On one level, these children are considered too inhuman to die, and their existence is too ethereal to leave a trace on the image. What complicates matters is that these children might have never existed, and I say this without any possible

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way to know whether this is a fact or a work of fiction. The perturbation is that political power is instantiated not only by the dehumanisation of these lives, but also by a conscious interruption of our habitual trust in the interdependency between photographic reality, authenticity, and credulity. In the 1960s, we were told by left-wing film theorists and political activists to question this trust. Today, we are told by the state authority in China, the alt-right in the United States, the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, the identitariens in France, and the pan-Slavic unionists in Poland and Russia to actively violate this trust.33 Political dehumanisation has therefore gone hand in hand with a much more disturbing deterioration of the mutual trust and sense-certainty not only between humans, but also between humans and technicity. Rebuilding this trust is impossible and perhaps not necessarily helpful, but it is time for us to reimagine a new technical milieu where our mutual dependency can be initiated. When we think about the concept of the Anthropocene, we may want to avoid limiting ourselves to the idea of how human beings violate, transform, and reconfigure nature. Rather, we need to rethink how technics has constantly redefined what it means by being-­ human and being-in-the-technical-environment. We must take into account that under neoliberalism, we are not treated by any economic or political establishments as individual beings who collectively work towards conquering nature. Rather, we are educated and acculturated to believe in the myth that we are, by default, individuated human beings. But beneath this myth is a constant erosion of the very concept of humanity and a wilful acceptance of the fact that dehumanisation is humanisation. Life is precarious under neoliberalism. There is nothing fearful about death because we are already dead; rather, we are haunted by the prospect of staying alive.

Notes 1. The term ‘precarity’ comes from Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 2. See, for example, Gisli Palsson, Bronislw Szerszynski, Sverker Sörlin, et al., ‘Reconceptualizing the “Anthropos” in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research’, Environmental Science and Policy 28 (April 2013): 3–13. 3. This idea is discussed in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998); and The Open: Man and Animal (2002),

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trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). This is also the underlying assumption of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970). 4. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994), trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998); Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958; repr., Paris: Aubier, 2012). 5. This is the thesis of Agamben, Homo Sacer. 6. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 15–16. For the definition of the abject, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1–2. 7. André Bazin, ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ [‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, 1945], in Qu’est que le cinéma? (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1958), 1:14. This idea is based on Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1940), 44. 8. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 225–64. 9. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘A Bazinian Half-Century’, in Opening Bazin, eds, Andrew and Joubert-Laurencin, 7–8; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6; Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1990), trans. James Benedict (London & New York: Verso, 1993), 4; William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007); Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Electronic “Presence”’, in Materialities of Communication, eds. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994), 83–106; Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 10. Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (1989; repr., Paris: Éditions Aubier, 2007), 173–246; Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1. 11. Stiegler, 185–203. 12. Shiliu jing [Sixteen classics], in Huangdi Sijing, ed., Mawangdui Hanmu boshu [Silk manuscripts unearthed in Mawangdui Han tombs, circa Warring States Period to 7 CE] (Beijing: Wenwu chuban she, 1980), 1:67. 13. See Leo S. Chang and Yu Feng, The Four Political Treatises of the Yellow Emperor: Original Mawangdui Texts With Complete English Translations

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and an Introduction (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), 156 n. 3; Yu Mingguang, Han Ying duizhao Huangdi Sijing jinzhu jinyi [The Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor with Modern Annotations, and Translations in Modern Chinese and English] (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1993), 118 n. 2; see also Chen Guying, Huangdi Sijing jingzhu jinyi [The four classics of the Yellow Emperor with contemporary annotations and translations] (Taipei: Taiwan Shangwu yinshuju, 1995), 309 n. 4. Chen compares the ‘Rectification’ chapter with the other chapters in the Sixteen Classics and argues that Taishanzhiji uses the same term the Yellow Emperor uses to address himself, that is, wu jiang or wo jiang (I shall). Hence, for Chen, rhetorically, the two figures can be identified as the same person. 14. Shiliu jing, 1:67; my translation. 15. Sima Qian, ‘Cike liezhuan’ [Biographies of the assassins], in Shi ji [Book of the Grand Historian, 109–91  BCE] (1959; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2008), juan 86, chapter 26. 16. Dong Zhongshu, Chunqiu fanlu [Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals], ed. Zhong Zhaopeng (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 2005). 17. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1–2. 18. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, 185–203; Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1977); Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective. 19. ‘Minzhu fazhi, gongping zhengyi, chengxin youai, chongman huoli, anding youxu, ren yu ziran hexie xiangchu’ (Democratic rule of law, fairness and justice, honesty and fraternity, energy and liveliness, stability and order, and the harmonious coexistence between human and nature), People’s Daily, 12 October 2006, www.people.com.cn/GB/32306/54155/57487/ 4913154.html, accessed 25 August 2015; ‘Shiliujie Liuzhongquanhui kaimu; zhuozhong yanjiu goujian hexie shehui wenti’ (The 16th Central Committee of the CCP opened: On the construction of a harmonious society). People’s Daily, 8 October 2006, theory.people.com.cn/ GB/40557/44459/44461/4890703.html, accessed 25 August 2015. 20. For a substantial discussion of this issue, see, for example, Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 28–55. 21. ‘Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Dianying chanye cujin fa’ [Law to expatiate the (development of) the film industry of the People’s Republic of China], 7 November 2016, http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/xinwen/2016-11/07/ content_2001625.htm, accessed 8 August 2017; my translation.

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22. See the Facebook page of Zajia Lab, https://www.facebook.com/ zajialab/?ref=br_rs, accessed 3 January 2018. 23. Xiang Kaiwen, ‘Guowuyuan pizhun Bijie chedi sheshi’ [State Council permits Bijie to revoke its prefectural status and reconstitute itself as a city], CPC.people.com.cn, 12 November 2011, http://cpc.people.com.cn/ GB/64093/64387/16226005.html, accessed 6 September 2018. 24. The term ‘structuration’ comes from Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). 25. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 225–64. 26. See John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, (ed.) Forsyth Hardy (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1966); Iain Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (New York: Routledge, 1990); Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, (trans.) Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); D.  A. Pennebaker, D. A. Pennebaker: Interviews, (eds.) Keith Beattie and Trent Griffiths (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). 27. ‘Guowuyuan fayanren Yuan Mu juxing jizhe zhaodaihui: Jielu fangeming baoluan zhenxiang’ [Spokesperson of State Council Yuan Mu hosted press conference: Revealed the truth of anti-revolutionary riots], Renmin ribao [People’s Daily], 6 June 1989, 1–2. 28. ‘Guowuyuan fayanren Yuan Mu juxing jizhe zhaodaihui: Jielu fangeming baoluan zhenxiang’, 2. 29. Dai Jinhua, Yinxing shuxie: 90 niandai de Zhongguo wenhua yanjiu [Invisible writing: Chinese cultural studies in the 1990s] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1999), 291; qtd Luke Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 29. 30. Robinson, 29. In this passage, Robinson cites Wu Wenguang, ‘Xianchang: He jilu fangshi youguan de shu’ [Xianchang: A book about documentary], in Xianchang [Document 1], (ed.) Wu Wenguang (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 2000), pp. 274; Qiu Zhijie, ‘Xuyan: Zhongyaode shi xianchang’ [Preface: The scene is what’s important], in Zhongyaode shi xianchang [The scene is what’s important] (Beijing: Zhongguo Renmin daxue chubanshe, 2003), 2; Wu Wenguang, Jingtou xiang ziji de yanjing yiyang [The camera is like my eye] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2001), 215; Yingjin Zhang, ‘Rebel without a cause? China’s new urban generation and postsocialist filmmaking’, in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century, (ed.) Zhen Zhang (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007), 20. 31. Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement, Introduction au remplacisme global (Plieux: Chez l’auteur, 2017). For further references, see Alain de

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Benoist and Charles Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance (London: Arktos, 2012); see also, de Benoist, View from the Right: A Critical Anthology of Contemporary Ideas. Volume 1: Heritage and Foundation (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2017). 32. Vlada Petric, ‘Dziga Vertov as theorist’, Cinema Journal 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 31. 33. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance (Budapest: Arktos Media, 2012).

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Rodowick, D.N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosen, Philip. 2001. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rouch, Jean. 2003. Ciné-Ethnography. Trans. and ed. Steven Feld. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1940. L’imaginaire. Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Shiliu jing [Sixteen Classics]. 1980. In Huangdi Sijing, ed. Mawangdui Hanmu boshu [Silk Manuscripts Unearthed in Mawangdui Han Tombs, Circa Warring States Period to 7CE]. Beijing: Wenwu chuban she. Shiliujie Liuzhongquanhui kaimu; zhuozhong yanjiu goujian hexie shehui wenti [The Sixteenth Central Committee of the CCP Opened: On the Construction of a Harmonious Society]. 2006. People’s Daily, October 8. theory.people.com. cn/GB/40557/44459/44461/4890703.html. Accessed 25 Aug 2015. Sima, Qian. Cike liezhuan [Biographies of the Assassins]. 2008. In Shi ji [Book of the Grand Historian, 109–91 BCE], reprint. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Simondon, Gilbert. 2007. L’individuation psychique et collective: À la lumière des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité, reprint. Paris: Éditions Aubier. ———. 2012. Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, reprint. Paris: Aubier. Sobchack, Vivian. 1994. The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Electronic ‘Presence’. In Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, 83–106. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wu, Wenguang. 2000. “Xianchang”: He jilu fangshi youguan de shu [“Xianchang”: A Book About Documentary]. In Xianchang [Document 1], ed. Wu Wenguang, 274. Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan chubanshe. ———. 2001. Jingtou xiang ziji de yanjing yiyang [The Camera Is Like My Eye]. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. Xiang, Kaiwen. Guowuyuan pizhun Bijie chedi sheshi [State Council Permits Bijie to Revoke its Prefectural Status and Reconstitute Itself as a City]. 2011. CPC. people.com.cn, November 12. http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64093/64387/ 16226005.html. Accessed 6 Sept 2018. Yu, Mingguang. 1993. Han Ying duizhao Huangdi sijing jinzhu jinyi [The Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor with Modern Annotations, and Translations in Modern Chinese and English]. Changsha: Yuelu shushe. Zajia Lab. 2011. Facebook Page. https://www.facebook.com/zajialab/?ref=br_rs. Accessed 3 Jan 2018.

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Zhang, Yingjin. 2007. Rebel Without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking. In The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Zhen Zhang, 20. Durham: Duke University Press. Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Dianying chanye cujin fa [Law to Expatiate the (Development of) the Film Industry of the People’s Republic of China]. 2016. The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China. http:// www.npc.gov.cn/npc/xinwen/2016-11/07/content_2001625.htm. Accessed 8 Aug 2017.

PART III

Ethnicity and Im-purity

CHAPTER 9

The “Nature” of Ethnic Tensions: Under the Flaming Mountains as Xinjiang’s First Novel Laikwan Pang

Being the area cohabitated by more than 40 nationalities and bordering with 8 countries, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has been one of the most politically unstable regions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). But its most volatile period of the twentieth century was indeed introduced by the Han Chinese. In the words of James Millward: By far the largest and most violent incidents of unrest in PRC Xinjiang have had little to do with minority peoples. Instead they involved Han Chinese factions fighting a near-civil war during 1967–68, the high point of the Cultural Revolution (1965–76). At times during these clashes, 50,000 bingtuan workers marched on Urumqi; air force, militia and Red Guard units fought pitched battles over the railway line near Hami; the control of the Lop Nor nuclear test facility was even in doubt.1

L. Pang (*) Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_9

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While the entire country was bathed in countless civil wars in those years, the situation in Xinjiang was even more detrimental, as the class struggles intertwined with the existing ethnic tensions, creating deep wounds, which have never been healed. The Cultural Revolution is still widely considered as a major historical root to many of the problems now. This is not an essay to recount the history of the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang, which is urgently needed.2 Here I want to focus on one novel to explore its ethnic politics. How could the abstract notion of continuous revolution be promoted in the minority region without further upsetting the existing ethnic tensions? This is probably the biggest concern of propaganda. The novel I study here is Under the Flaming Mountains (克孜勒山下; Qizil Tagh Étikide), which is widely considered the first published book-­ length novel written by any Uyghur Chinese writer.3 Allegedly, the author, Qeyum Turdi (柯尤慕. 吐爾迪 or 克尤木. 吐爾迪) (1937–1999), started to write his first novel Lights on the Flaming Mountains (克孜勒山上的燈光) in 1964. The scripts were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.4 The author rewrote the novel in 1972, and the Uyghur novel titled The Heroes on the Flaming Mountains (克孜勒山上的英雄) was published in 1974.5 It was then identified by the newly resumed People’s Literature Press, and the author was invited to go to Beijing to rewrite it and assist in the translation project.6 Following the practice of the time, this novel was revised under the supervision of the responsible publishing house.7 The Chinese translators Ma Junmin (馬俊民) (1934–) and Liu Fajun (劉發俊) (1932–) assumed salient roles in shaping the final product, and they revised and added new materials to the original novel.8 In addition to the editorial tutorage, the attempt to write a novel could also be seen as a mimetic effort. With the training provided by the Party, the Uyghur learned how to conduct their revolution, and they also learned how to write a novel. Traditionally the Uyghur people tell stories in musical and lyrical forms, while the novel is an imported modern cultural form, which presents a coherent story with linear narrative and casual relationships. Unlike the traditional Uyghur poetic and musical culture which emphasizes emotional identification and lyrical beauty, the novel introduces many characters whose personality, decision-making, and network of relationships are all subsumed under the singular plotline—in this case the Maoist proletarian’s simultaneous victory over the class enemy and Mother Nature. Obviously, Under the Flaming Mountains is not the only Uyghur literature produced then, and there are also short stories, poems, and reports. But being the only extensive Uyghur novel published at that time, it offers

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us a rare window to understand the ethnic propaganda logic during the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang. With the aim to repress and redirect, this propaganda effort inevitably reveals the hidden clashes and frustrations of the time. In the following I will begin with a general introduction to the Maoist cultural governance of ethnic minorities to supply the needed background to understand the novel as propaganda. I will then offer careful textual and contextual analysis from two perspectives. First, I am interested in Han-Uyghur relations depicted: the emulation discourse of Han teaching Uyghur on the one hand and the objectification discourse of the Han desire for exotic Xinjiang sound, image, and romance. Secondly, I will relate these unresolved ethnic tensions to the way nature is portrayed, representing both the most precious resource and yet the most ferocious opponent of the people. It is only under the common will to subdue nature that the Han and the Uyghur can unite. The battle against nature becomes the vehicle to devour the ethnic tensions of this turbulent time.

Socialist Cultural Policy PRC’s ethnic cultural policy has always been trying to strike a balance between ethnic aspiration and national unity, although the political pendulum swung between one end to another in different times, and the former must serve the latter ultimately. Generally speaking, ethnic autonomy was more respected during the 17-year period (1949–1966) to seek the ethnic subjects’ identification and volunteer integration. Local ethnic minorities were also increasingly found in leadership positions at the provincial and local levels.9 Cultural differences were largely respected, but only restricted to those larger minority groups which can maintain hegemony in the region. In Xinjiang, for example, the Uyghur language and culture were favoured over other smaller cultures. In fact, following largely the United Soviet Socialist Republic’s “affirmative action” policies, the PRC, although not giving the nationality the right to secede as the USSR did, promoted ethnic cultures and assisted economic and education development among the ethnic minorities. Dru Gladney also identified an “Islamic card” strategy the PRC began to develop in the 1950s, promoting its Muslim cultures and offering positive policies towards its Muslim minorities to gain favour with Middle East countries.10 We can say that ethnic loyalties among the Uyghurs increased during the 1950s, particularly with the fact that the Uyghur language, not the other minority languages also spoken there, was widely used and taught in the region.

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The education policy during that decade encouraged the Uyghur children to view their ethnic culture with pride and the Xinjiang territory as their homeland.11 The Sino-Soviet split which took place at the turn of the decade caused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to halt its “Islamic card” policy, and Turkic people and culture were particularly attacked as associated with the Soviet Union, which promoted local nationalism. As James A. Millward and Nabijan Tursun claim, “What was the anti-Rightist campaign in China was focused in Xinjiang primarily on Islamic figures and ‘local nationalists’ and became in effect a de-Sovietizing purge of non-Han political elites.”12 The Cultural Revolution further intensified existing ethnic tensions, as traditional minority cultures were mostly considered feudalist and “class” was held as the only legitimate category of social identity. Ethnic identity was tolerated only with the clear prospect that it would ultimately disappear. Traditional culture was equated as religious superstition and therefore must be eradicated. Many Uyghur people today still remember how the Red Guards attacked the Uyghur religion, destroyed their mosques, and forced them to wear Han clothes and eat pork.13 Needless to say, these individual and collective memories are reinforced today due to the intensified racial policing under the repressive regime of the current President Xi Jinping. From the state’s perspective, the official Maoist ethnic policy was “consolidation of all nationalities” (民族團結), and there were plenty of arrangements to facilitate communications between the Han and the non-­ Han. Translation became a prime policy concern. We know that the Uyghur language is rooted in the Turkic language and does not have much relation with the Han Chinese language, not to mention the many other languages also spoken in the region. There were very few Han Chinese who knew the Uyghur language at that time. There was a state effort to set up teams of translators in the early 1950s for the purpose of promoting communication among different ethnic groups. However, there were many more systematic efforts to translate Han Chinese writings to ethnic minority languages rather than the other way around. The China Ethnic Languages Translation Bureau (中國民族語文翻譯局) was established in 1955 directly under the State Ethnic Affairs Commission of PRC (國家民族事務委員會).14 The Bureau, which had already existed as a translation department under the Ethnic Affairs Commission, was upgraded in 1955 with the primary aim of translating state and party documents to all kinds of ethnic languages. It quickly became an important

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arm of the national propaganda apparatus, allowing “central” ideology to reach the “margin” populations of the vast nation. In contrast, there were significantly fewer efforts devoted to translating materials written in minority languages to Chinese.15 Overall, we can say that the Han Chinese knew much less about their fellow “Chinese” nationalities than the minorities understood about the Han. Literature translation was one of the few state efforts which facilitated the Han population to understand ethnic minority culture. These translations were often organized by and published in state-sponsored literary journals. The first official arts and literature journal specifically for works in the Xinjiang area was Literary Arts of Xinjiang (新疆文藝). It was published in Chinese and lasted for only three issues within the year 1951. In these three issues we discover that the works produced by local writers were of many genres, from folk songs to traditional poetries to kuaiban,16 and there were also a small number of modern short stories published by local writers. The sister literary journal, Literary Arts of the Xinjiang Army (新疆部隊文藝), was devoted to the works by the Han writers associated with the military units. Both journals were forced to be closed under the “Three-Anti” Movement (三反運動).17 Under the auspice of the Double-­ Hundred Movement, Tianshan (天山) debuted in 1956 and continued the editorial direction of Literary Arts of Xinjiang. According to one estimate, 70% of the works published in Tianshan were works translated into Chinese from ethnic minority languages, and only 30% were originally written in Chinese.18 The journal was restructured into Xinjiang wenxue (新疆文學) in the late 1950s and was shut down in the Cultural Revolution, as the entire publication establishment in China came to a halt. The publishing industries slowly resumed production entering the 1970s. ­ Xinjiang Pictorial (新疆畫報) was reissued in 1972, released in both Chinese and Uyghur versions. A new version of Literary Arts of Xinjiang also started publication in 1974, circulated in three language versions, Han Chinese, Uyghur, and Kazakh. The publication of Under the Flaming Mountains could be seen as another effort of the state to correct the previous extreme integration policies and to acknowledge the legitimacy of non-Han ethnic identities and cultures. Meanwhile, a new generation of local writers were trained, and many aspired to produce novels to prove their own Uyghur cultural modernity. Back in the 1940s, many young intellectuals began to encounter novels and novellas of China and the Soviet Union, and they also began to produce their own short stories.19 Among this first generation of Uyghur writers

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­ uent in both Chinese and the Uyghur languages, Qeyum Turdi was a repfl resentative figure.20 He graduated from the Xinjiang Minzu Institute, now Xinjiang University, which was restructured and upgraded by the Party after the Liberation with the specific purpose of training local Xinjiang cadres and professionals. At the same time, the state also trained a new generation of translators. The translators Ma Junmin and Liu Fajun are Han Chinese trained in the minzu institutions to become representatives of the PRC and cultural bridges between the Han and the Uyghur. Ma Junmin learned the language in the Northwest Minzu Institute and became a lecturer, and later professor, at universities in Xinjiang. He has translated many Uyghur literary works into Han Chinese. Liu Fajun served in the military since 1949 and was transferred to Xinjiang’s Propaganda Department in 1952, responsible for translating Uyghur literatures in Chinese and introducing socialist ideologies in Xinjiang. The authors and the translators represent two sides of the PRC minority governance, with the newly trained local intellectuals loyal to the PRC on the one hand, supervised by those Han Chinese fluent in the local language and culture on the other hand. The power invested in the two sides of the structure was by no means equal: the Han assumed the position of teacher and ­gate-­keeper. However, the ultimate concern is always national unification. One of the most common themes of Xinjiang literature at that time was the “fish-water” harmony between the military and the local folks (軍民魚水情), with the aim to nullify the ethnic tensions created by the military occupation.21

The Exotic and Erotic Uyghur The story of Under the Flaming Mountains unfolds around a drought descending in the area. The novel conveys the clear message that the Uyghur people must learn from the Han Chinese to become a modern people by suppressing the class enemies and controlling natural resources. The main hero of the story is Sabir (沙比爾), who is the Party Secretary and Head of the Revolutionary Committee of the New Land Brigade in People’s Commune of Qizil Tagh (the Flaming Mountains of Turpan). The story begins with Sabir coming back home after a learning tour from Dazhai, China’s foremost model village. On the train he meets Zhao Tian (趙田), the Han sent-down youth who has just graduated from the Beijing Institute of Water Resources. When Sabir arrives home, he is hurt to see the two neighbouring brigades, New Land Brigade and Lake Aiding Brigade, fighting for water supply. With the lessons learnt from Dazhai, Sabir collaborates

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with Zhao Tian and his comrades to do the impossible—conducting water from the Kunlun Mountains to their fields. While the novel is ultimately about this water channelling, the human dramas develop around the struggles between the good and the evil. On the good side, in addition to Sabir and Zhao Tian, there are also Jalimah (澤彤乃慕), the beautiful and tough Iron Girl of the Lake Aiding Brigade who falls in love with Sabir while busily rejecting the approach of Qasim, and Sun Mei (孫梅), daughter of the Party Secretary Sun Zhenxing (孫振興) and determined to be the local community’s doctor. On the evil side, there are the class enemies, Naman (納曼) the landlord, Suleiman (蘇來曼) the spiritualist, as well as Hussein (侯賽恩) the Kuomintang spy. Between the two sides is the swaying middle character, the Irrigation Officer of the Commune, Qasim (卡斯穆), who accepts bribe by members of both brigades to give them water and is manipulated by Naman to destroy the water passageway. The novel is clearly about the struggles between the two sides, following a bipolar moral structure as well as the triangular “Three Prominences” (san tuchu) aesthetic composition common to all Cultural Revolution cultural productions.22 While Under the Flaming Mountains follows a hackneyed Cultural Revolution formula of universal class struggle and political enlightenment, the production team behind his novel, including the Uyghur writer, the Chinese translators, as well as the entire editorial team, was also very conscious of this project as a minority cultural product. But the emphasis on the ethnic identity must not invite frictions. During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing, struggling hard on its own to maintain some coherent government, was particularly worried about the unrest in Xinjiang, which might have invited the intervention of the neighbouring Soviet Union, as well as the occupation of the nuclear facilities at Lop Nor by all kinds of enemies.23 If the central concern of the PRC ethnic minority policy has always been “consolidation of all nationalities,” this was an even more urgent task in the 1970s, as confrontations on any level could lead to extremely grave consequences. This novel was clearly tasked to promote ethnic cohabitation. The novel constantly reminds the readers of the genuine friendships between Sabir and Zhao Tian, and Jalimah and Sun Mei for the cause of communism. In addition to the direct depiction of friendship, the novel brings the two cultures together through the depiction of two common objects of desire: Jalimah and water. Let me focus on the first here. The Han readers consume this book as an “attractive” ethnic cultural product, but in order to prevent the ethnic other to become a threat to the Han, this ethnic “otherness” is

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domesticated by the mutual desiring between the Uyghur and the Han, and the Uyghur represents a pure beauty. This is most evident in the visual and musical components. The novel includes altogether 14 illustrations: ten to open each of the chapters, and four as stand-alone plates printed on photo-­ quality paper. The chapter-opening illustrations are rendered in wood-­block style, outlining the major scene of the chapter with simple outlines. The four plates are pencil drawings, with more subtle shadings and details. While the chapter-opening illustrations aim to provide the readers a still image of the background of the actions, the plates offer more vivid ­depictions of the characters, and they emphasize the people in actions or in dialogue. The retail price of the novel is slightly higher than average, priced 0.66 RMB compared with many other contemporary novels, which were usually sold in around less than 50 cents, probably to cover the high production costs. Many novels published at that time included illustrations, but very few would be so invested in the quality of the print, with the clear purpose of giving the readers some visual consumption of the Uyghur people, landscape, and culture. The illustrations were produced by the Uyghur painter Ghazi Ehmet (哈孜·艾實提) (1933–2017), the most famous Uyghur painter in China at that time. His oil painting “Evil Judgement” (罪惡的審判) (1964), which depicted how a girl was given to a local landlord by the religious court, was collected by the National Art Museum of China. Since then, he became the leading figure of the then new Xinjiang arts. He was admitted into the Department of Fine Arts in the newly established Xinjiang Academy in 1954, which was highly influenced by the Soviet academic style. Ghazi Ehmet specialized in human portraits of the Uyghur people, which largely defined the new Xinjiang arts, because portraitures were considered unreligious in traditional Islamic arts. The importance of figure paintings in the new Xinjiang arts at that time was also a result of the Han’s desiring gaze. Two very famous Han painters of the time, Huang Zhou (黄胄) and Ye Qianyu (葉淺予), also specialized in Xinjiang figure paintings, although the two Han painters used primarily Chinese inkbrush, while Ghazi Ehmet produced oil paintings. Huang and Ye produced many beautiful Uyghur female dancers in motion, often highlighted in singular or standing out from a crowd, emphasizing their cultural pride and body shapes. These ethnic minority figures are mesmerizing, sexy, and exotic, both following and contributing to the socialist minzu stereotypes consolidating in the 1950s. While we do not see any obvious objectification of female bodies in Ghazi Ehmet’s illustrations, the meanings of the visual could not escape the overall ethnic ideology. I will explore two in the following.

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Uyghur music is also a very important component in this novel. For example, at the end of the first chapter of the novel, thinking of the beautiful body of Jalimah on a quiet night, Sabir suddenly hears the music produced by a flute and a rawap, which further fuels his romantic fantasy. A brief footnote is given by the translators to explain the instrument rawap (36). These footnotes are scanty in the novel, but they provide important details to prove the Uyghur cultural identity of the book. As Wong ­Chuen-­Fung demonstrates, the Uyghur musicians did find the spread of the fervent Maoist propaganda in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution a precious opportunity to revise their music.24 In contrast, we seldom see singing and dancing scenes, however restrained, in the Chinese novels published at that time. The yangbanxi dance pieces, such as The White-­ Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women, feature European elitist ballet, which is meant to inject an internationalist aura to the Chinese revolutionary culture. Traditional folk dances, on the other hand, were allowed only by ethnic minorities, seen in pieces like When the Red Guards on the Grassland See Chairman Mao (草原上的紅衛兵見到了毛主席), which portrayed the elation of a group of Mongolian Red Guards arriving into Tiananmen Square to see the Chairman. Historically the Han has always associated the ethnic minorities with singing and dancing, and there are many stories about the dangers of indulging in “barbarian” music found in early Chinese texts.25 This kind of exotic depiction must be operated under an essentialization of the cultural other. Xinjiang is a culturally diversified area, but in Under the Flaming Mountains we see only two ethnic groups: Han and Uyghur. Rachel Harris reminds us that in Xinjiang, the different musical styles of different ethnic origins coexisted, mutually influenced, and engendered new innovations.26 However, the music and culture portrayed in the novel must be culturally unified.  Xinjiang’s cultural exoticness is constructed with the assumption that this music represented the essence of an ancient culture, which is now happily welcomed into the big family of new China. Any attention called to Xinjiang’s own cultural plurality might upset the simple centre-versus-margin dichotomy: Han as the homogenous whole embracing and tolerating the singular minorities. The ethnic minority status of the novel is also attested in the romantic relationship between Sabir and Jalimah, as romance was a taboo in the Han Cultural Revolution culture, or else it was highly repressed.27 Romance was considered bourgeois and corrupted, so that the heroes and heroines could only be united by their class affinity. Comparatively, this

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Uyghur novel is much more direct in celebrating the love between the hero and the heroine, as well as the intense jealousy of Qasim as regards Sabir. The romanticization of Xinjiang, and all other ethnic minorities in China in this regard, by Han Chinese as the spiritual homeland of purity and harmony with nature is a running part of the PRC cultural history.28 Ethnic minority people are also more prone to falling in love. As they are considered less advanced, they are less capable of following the higher puritan revolutionary ethics. In a way, their lowly humanity status allows them to be more human. We find an important scene in the novel where the visual, the musical, and the romantic overlap. After a day of hard labour and an evening with an intense work meeting, Sabir invites Zhao Tian to attend a party. Sabir explains to Zhao Tian that in this culture toddlers acquire the skills of singing and dancing along with their learning of speaking and walking (234). The readers will then follow Zhao Tian’s perspective to enter the party, where he would be mesmerized first by the music, then by the dances and the dancers, particularly the romantic pairs of Ay gül (阿依慕谷麗) and Turdi (托赫迪) on the one hand and Jalimah and Sabir on the other hand. The two women are both from the Lake Aiding Brigade, while the two men are members of the New Land Brigade. Their romantic relationships clearly symbolize the union of the two brigades. This scene is visualized through an illustration (Fig.  9.1) and is also supplemented by the most elaborate musical and dancing depictions, with six pages full of descriptions of musical instruments, lyrics, movements, and rhythms of the Uyghur muqam music (235–240). The lyrics praise and glorify Mao and the CCP, but the overall atmosphere is clearly non-Han, full of ­romantic flirtations as well as singing and dancing duets between men and women: In a dancing party such as this one, both Sabir and Jalimah can dance to a marvellous level. Their dances are as free as easy. The dancing style of Sabir is elegant, robust, and forthright, giving us a sensation of vitality and youthful dynamism. The steps of Jalimah are characterized by dexterity, lightness, and beauty, and her two fingers keep producing rhythmic ticking sounds. The two make effortless and easy rotations in ways that are both free-­floating and controlled. (240)

Both the two Han youths are invited to the party: while Zhao Tian, the newcomer, is completely embarrassed and simply has to flee, Sun Mei, who grew up in the community, engages in the dancing party with heart

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Fig. 9.1  Jalimah and Sabir dancing, with Sun Mei also dancing in the background

and soul. As mentioned, the readers are introduced to the scene through Zhao Tian’s Han curiosity and objectification of the ethnic minority ­culture. However, the scene ends with Qasim, the admirer of Jalimah, watching this uplifting dancing duet with resentment. Burning with jealousy, he witnesses the courtship helplessly, and he casts his evil curses on the irrigation construction project. “Sabir! Throwing an egg to a stone?

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You will be smashed into pieces” (240). This curse ends both the scene and the chapter, and we will see how Sabir turns himself over to the class enemy. This scene offers us a glimpse of the complicated ethnic ideology of this novel. On the one hand, the coalition formed between Qasim, the middle character, and the class enemies Naman and Suleiman seems to reinforce the ethnic stereotypes, as they now collaborate to destroy the water passageway project, obstructing the modernization brought in by the Han youths as well as by Sabir’s Dazhai experience. However, one of the most urgent propaganda purposes of this novel should be to promote the unity between the Han and the Uyghur. We observe part of the tensions and reconciliation in the objectification of Jalimah. This scene begins with Zhao Tian’s perspective, which ends up overlapped with Qasim’s, whose burning desire for her also prompts the readers to cultivate the same affect. While Qasim is portrayed as a problematic character, we also observe a hidden angle of the narrative which actually identifies with Qasim, so that Jalimah’s body could be legitimately consumed by the readers with erotic desire. The scene therefore achieves two opposite effects: while the two cultures are dichotomized by the opposite positions between Sabir and Qasim, they are also unified through this objectification of Jalimah. As Qasim is such a problematic character, representing both the Han readers’ desire of Qasim and enemy, the dangling ethnic tensions are not resolved.

Nature as the Object of Reform In addition to the dancing party, we also find another elaborate depiction of women’s bodies: here the female peasants sing with one another while engaging with labour in a cotton field (39–40). This scene is also represented pictorially in the opening page of Chapter 2 (Fig. 9.2). Here we can again see how the novel emphasizes the relationship between visuality and singing/dancing, and how women are presented to gauge the readers. The dialogues among the women peasants criticize the ways men deplore women singing in public, while the women are empowered by singing and labouring in public together. The female team leader says: “Those men who don’t allow us to sing should go to hell; we would not care about them.” “Labour is a happy thing; singing is the friend of labour, right, Jalimah?” Ay gül asked wittingly.

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Fig. 9.2  The illustration opening Chapter 2 “Right,” Jalimah is helping out with picking up the cotton into a bag. “Labour with freedom, this is such a delighted task for female labourer. It is also fantastic to sing during labour, as only those who are happy would sing.” (40)

In addition to music and women, in this scene, one more symbolic element, labouring, is added, making up the amorous saviour of the new Xinjiang image in socialist China. Here I would like to focus on this element of labouring because it represents another very important ideological rhetoric to promote ethnic unification: the Han and the Uyghur work together to conquer nature. Right after this labour scene, Jalimah leaves the women team and reaches the wheat field, and she is upset by the dry soil. She criticizes the team leader for wasting the valuable seeds on such dry land (42–43). Afterwards she meets her father and continues to discuss the water problem. While the chapter begins with the singing and labour of the newly liberated Xinjiang women, it ends with Jalimah’s frustration with the drought problems, with the enormous amount of snow accumulated on the top of the Kunlun Mountains in the background. This chapter shows the connection between these new Uyghur women and new China on two

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levels: while the newly acquired gender equality and women’s freedom are bestowed by the new regime, this gender equality is utilized for the more important objective of development. The newly released women’s labour force is channelled for national production, so that they can truly transcend their domestic place to become a useful part of the national economy. We should not stop short of exploring the larger political economy by staying at the gender analysis. It is the larger development logic which claims to solve all the tensions created: between the two genders, the two ethnic groups, and the two brigades. As I have mentioned, this novel develops around the struggles of the two Tupan brigades over droughts and water distribution. When Sabir returns home from Dazhai, one of his first observations is the tensions between the two neighbouring brigades around water distribution after a year of severe drought. Quickly he learnt that Qasim gave the priority to the Lake Aiding Brigade to use the little water the reservoir held, enraging the people in the New Land Brigade. Sabir is also very upset on observing the poor quality of cotton his brigade sold to the state due to the drought. Along the Maoist “Yugong-moving-mountain” logic, one of the young Uyghur folks responds to Sabir’s query: “Drought is like a huge mountain pressing us on our head. We must topple this huge mountain” (23). Sabir later explains to his fellows what he learnt in Dazhai: “If we follow the right political line, we will definitely have our harvest. If we can follow Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line, heaven will change, earth will change, and our mind will change. Mountain and water can be re-arranged” (28). The novel proceeds precisely according to this Maoist conviction, in order to rechannel the water accumulated in the Kunlun Mountains to the fields of the two brigades. One of the most important drives of the Cultural Revolution is the construction and the destruction of the same enemy object. Needless to say, the class enemy, in this case the Naman-Suleiman-Hussein coalition, is the main stock of this ideology. Still, the overall class enemy was more a rhetorical concept than a realistic reference in the Cultural Revolution. After more than two decades of brutal suppression and collective dispossession, the class enemy was primarily an empty signifier waiting to be filled in by the shifting power struggles. On the other hand, there is a second enemy constructed in the novel, the Kunlun Mountains, which store water as snow but also block it from reaching the dry soil of the Turpan area. The removal of this physical item is a much more credible drive of the plot. As most local people shared the same frustrations about

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the water shortage and extreme weather in the region, the collaboration of the two local brigades and the two ethnic groups to build the water tunnel was a much more true-to-life project the people could identify with than isolating a Naman in their own community. In addition to women’s bodies, the novel presents water as the ultimate object of desire. Yet more interestingly, the novel does not treat nature simply as an object to be removed, but the local people keep discussing how to subdue the “agency” of nature by their own. At one point, when the brigade members are frustrated with their failure in blasting the rocks with the strongest bull pricks and even dynamite, a young villager exclaims: “I thought the strongest elements on our earth is steel … but you see, even the bull pricks are deformed. Stone is probably the strongest element” (249). Sabir then responds: “No, little brother … neither steel nor stone is hard …. It is true that these stones are very tough, but in front of the strong-willed people, they are only paper tiger … If we have the will for revolution, our will power is stronger than stones hundreds or thousands of times. No forces can stop us” (250). Here we see how the rocks blocking the people to reach the water are portrayed as resisting. They are not inert, only that they do not want to be disturbed. In a later scene where many brigade members volunteer to work overtime at night to construct the tunnel, one of the volunteers share his feeling with Timur the elderly: “Uncle Timur, you see, these rocks are really strange …. They seem to fear us more at night than during the daytime. Therefore, we cannot allow them to rest peacefully” (268). The stones are not simply treated as objects, but they also have their independent existence. This is an interactive world where nature might or might not wish to participate in the human development project. To achieve the new communist world, nature must comply; or, the people must force nature to comply with their will. The Xinjiang province has been a major agricultural centre in China, and it plays an important role in the socio-economy of China. But drought is the most significant factor that impairs the agriculture of this region.29 Turpan is the hottest place in China, with the temperature reaching 50 °C during the summer time. The mountain range is in fact a major site in the Chinese novel Journey to the West. When Sun Wukong the Monkey King wreaked havoc in Heaven, he was finally subdued by the god Erlang and to be burnt into ashes in Laozi’s Eight Trigrams Furnace. The Monkey King persevered, and he kicked over the furnace. Some of its bricks fell to the earth and became the Flaming Mountains. Later in the classical novel,

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the Xuanzang team was blocked by the same Flaming Mountains in their west-bound journey, and the Monkey King had to borrow the fan of the Princess of Iron Fan to extinguish the fire. This act is also an important symbol signifying the Monkey King’s repentance. Under the Flaming Mountains does not refer to this great Han classic at all, but the actual geographical conditions do not disappear. Indeed, during the Cultural Revolution, the severe political struggles also led to tremendous economic suffering in Xinjiang, and the Cultural Revolution damaged Xinjiang’s economy more seriously than it did to many other parts of China. It is reported that while the grain production in Xinjiang did not increase during the Cultural Revolution decade, the region’s population grew by over 40%, with most of the increase contributed by the vast incoming Han population. Han Chinese raised their share of the population in Xinjiang from 6.7% in 1949 to around 40% by 1976.30 The waves of internal colonization were composed of the many administrative and military personnel and their families sent by the government in the 1950s, as well as of the large number of rusticated youth arrived during the Cultural Revolution. This mass migration turned Xinjiang from a grain-surplus region into a grain-deficit region.31 Also, recurrent droughts took place in the area in the 1950s to the 1970s, and there was also overall an upward trend of drought severity and a downward trend of agricultural output in the years between 1950 and 1997.32 Unlike the Flaming Mountains portrayed in Journey to the West, this area is no longer a threshold between China and its west which is destined to be passed, but it is now a place where human suffering and ethnic conflicts abound. The concern is how to make sure this newly liberated socialist region becomes an integrated part of the new PRC state. I have mentioned on another occasion that water conservation is a major theme found in many PRC novels at that time, and water can be seen as the allegory of both material scarcity and the supreme moral force.33 Drought is an even more urgent issue in Xinjiang’s climatic environment. Thus, the drought depicted in this novel reflects the overall Maoist mandate, real local suffering, and the policy of ethnic unification. As such, Under the Flaming Mountains is ultimately a story of irrigation, and people desire water as they desire truth and communism. The Kunlun Mountains, the geographical icon of the culture, are then portrayed as the greatest block to the new communist utopia.

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Frank Dikötter criticizes that most of the water resource construction projects built during the 1950s were mostly dysfunctional: “Throughout the country the irrigation projects, built by hundreds of millions of farmers at great human and economic cost, were for the main part useless or downright dangerous. Many violated the laws of nature result[ing] in soil erosion, landslides and river siltation … Large irrigation projects that had disrupted the natural flow of water with stopbanks, culverts, reservoirs and irrigation channels only aggravated matters.”34 Dikötter’s claim reflects primarily a general impression, and there are more serious academic discussions trying to understand the impacts of those socialist infrastructures on the ecology of contemporary China.35 We know that water has always been a major part of the Chinese civilization. The dragon worship is intimately connected to the people’s fear of water.36 Likewise, irrigation is also a prime PRC concern because the vast Chinese land has always been under the spell of water: manifested as both draught and flood. The Maoist desire and motivation to improve irrigation were genuine, and many reservoirs built in the 1950s and 1960s are still providing water reserve, hydraulic power, and flood control functions to the population today. As projected in the novel, once controlled, water became merciful, from destroying agriculture to providing people the promise for life. This imagination is clearly not a modern one, but water has been a critical part of China’s political, social, and economic history for thousands of years. Between the battle against class enemies and the battle against the drought, we can say that the former is only a political rhetoric in the novel, while the latter is the real struggle, with the destructive determination to upset the existing inertia of nature. As shown in this novel, the new Chinese unification dream is legitimized by the promise of an affluent future, which can only be attained by submitting nature to our use. The novel might have retained a non-anthropocentric view by allowing the stones and nature to keep their agency, but this agency must be subservient to humans’. As such, the continual revolution ideology would never leave nature alone. The novel does not end with a dancing party or feast celebrating the completion of the water passage project, but another morning with the broadcast of Dazhai slogans and the local muqam music: “Such music agitates our hearts, calling us to enter new battles” (309). The Dazhai lessons and the muqam music are unified for the course of continual struggles, in which nature is the object of reform.

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Notes 1. Millward, James A. Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment (Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004), 7. 2. It is unfortunate that comprehensive studies about Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution were extremely rare, due to many levels of difficulty. One of the very few comprehensive studies can be found in Donald H.  McMillen, Chinese Communist Power and Policy in Xinjiang, 1949– 1977 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1979). 3. Keyoumu Tuerdi (柯尤慕. 吐爾迪; Qeyum Turdi), Kezilashan xia 克孜勒 山下 (Under the Flaming Mountains, Qizil Tagh Étikide), Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1975. 4. Xia Guanzhou 夏冠洲 et al. ed., Xinjiang Dangdai Duominzu Wenxueshi 新疆當代多民族文學史 (The multi-ethnic literary history of Xinjiang) (Urumqi: Xinjiang renmin chubanshe, 2006), 53. 5. Ibid.; see also Deng Meixuan 鄧美萱, “‘Yige juyou gongchan zhuyi pinzhi de laoren’ – tan Keyoumu Tuerdi de ‘Wulazi yeye’” “一個具有共產主義品 質的老人”——談克尤木·吐爾迪的《吾拉孜爺爺》(“An elderly with communist character”  – A discussion of Qeyum Turdi’s Elderly Wulazi), Journal of Xinjiang Normal University (Social Sciences) 新疆師範大學學報 (社會科學版), no. 2 of 1982: 67. I am not able to locate a copy of this Uyghur novel. 6. Xia Guanzhou ed. 53–54. 7. Pang Laikwan, The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017), 65. 8. Interviewed by Li Wei, in Li Wei 李煒, “Xinjiang Duominzu wenxue ticai leixing yanjiu (1949–1966)” 新疆多民族文學題材類型研究 (1949–1966) (The genres of Xinjiang’s multi-ethnic literature, 1949–1966), PhD dissertation, Jinan University, PRC, 174. 9. Shale Horowitz, Peng Yu, “Holding China’s West: Explaining CCP Strategies of Rule in Tibet and Xinjiang,” Journal of Chinese Political Science no. 20 (2015): 451–457. (462). 10. Dru Gladney, Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2004), 235. 11. Chris Hann, “Smith in Beijing, Stalin in Urumchi: Ethnicity, Political Economy, and Violence in Xinjiang, 1959–2009,” Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 60 (2001): 108–123. 12. James A. Millward and Nabijan Tursun, “Political History and Strategies of Control, 1884–1978” in Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, ed., S. Frederick Starr (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 93. 13. Linda Tsung, Language Power and Hierarchy: Multilingual Education in China (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 94.

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14. Another major state effort in translation was the establishment of Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (中共中央編譯局) in 1953, whose main tasks were to translate classical Marxist, Leninist, and socialist works into Chinese. 15. Li Xiao-feng 李曉峰, “‘Bu zaichang de zaichang’: Zhongguo shaoshu minzu muyu de chujing” “不在場的在場”: 中國少數民族母語的處境 (“Presence of absence”: The situation of China’s Ethnic Minority Language Literature), 北方民族大學學報: 哲學社會科學版 (Journal of Beifang University of Nationalities: Philosophy and Social Sciences volume), no. 1 of 2014:83–89. 16. Kuaiban is a traditional Chinese street performance, a vocal delivery with strong rhythm accompanied by the clapping of bamboo boards. 17. Auyang Kexing 歐陽可惺 and Zhong Min 鍾敏, Quyu wenxue de lüdong: “Tianshan” liubian yu Xinjiang dangdai wenxue 區域文學的律動:《天山》 流變與新疆當代文學 (The rhythmic movement of regional literature: Changes of “Tianshan” and contemporary literature in Xinjiang) (Guangzhou: Jinan daxue chubanshe, 2014), 22. 18. Cheng Xiangli 成湘麗, “Wenhua renting yu minzu jiaorong—ershi shiji wushi zhi bashi niandai Xinjiang hanyu xiaoshuo minzu yuansu” 文化認同與 民族交融--20 世紀 50 至 80 年代新疆漢語小說中的少數民族元素 (Cultural Identification and national mingling: The elements of ethnic minorities in 1950s to 1980s Xinjiang Han literature), Journal of Shihezi University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) 石河子大學學報 (哲學社會科學版), no. 4 of 2015: 36. 19. The 60,000-word novella Land of Blood (血地) written by Muhemmet’imin (買買提伊敏·托乎塔耶甫) in 1945 was considered the first novella of the Uyghur. It was translated into Chinese and published in the journal Northwest Arts and Literatures 西北文藝 in 1951. There were also short stories and novellas published sporadically in other literary journals and newspaper, some of which are collected in Xinjiang Wenxue zuoping Daxi 新疆文学作品大系 (Major collection of Xinjiang’s literary arts) (Urumqi: Xinjing meishu sheying chubanshe, 2009). 20. Other writers include 馬合木提 . 買合買, 阿扎提 . 蘇里坦, and 亞黎昆 et al. 21. Cheng Xiangli, “Wenhua renting yu minzu jiaorong,” 37. 22. This “Three Prominences” doctrine stipulates that “Among all characters the positive characters must stand out; among all positive characters the heroic characters must stand out; and among all heroic characters the major heroic characters must stand out.” This forms a rigid but well-balanced pyramid structure, with one single hero on the foreground, Sabir in this case, supported by increasingly numbers of supporting characters in layers following. 23. McMillen, Chinese Communist Power and Policy in Xinjiang, 205–206; 209–210.

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24. Chuen-Fung Wong, “The West Is Red: Uyghur Adaptation of The Legend of the Red Lantern (Qizil Chiragh) during China’s Cultural Revolution,” in Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics and Cultural Continuities, edited by Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, Tsan-huang Tsai, 147– 165 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 25. Wai-yee Li, “Anecdotal Barbarians in Early China,” in Between Philosophy and History: Rhetorical Uses of Anecdotes in Early China, eds. Sarah Queen and Paul van Els (New York: State University of New York Press, 2017), 113–144. 26. Rachel Harris, Singing the Village: Music, Memory and Ritual among the Sibe of Xinjiang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 54. 27. Romantic relations could not be completely cleared from the cultural productions at that time, and they could be found in short duet dance between Xi’er and Dachun in The White-Haired Girl, as well as in the widely circulated underground literature such as The Heart of a Young Girl 少女的心. 28. See, for example, L.J.  Newby, “The Chinese Literary Conquest of Xinjiang,” Modern China 25, no. 4 (1999): 451–474; also Kwai-Cheung Lo, “(Un)Folding Hollywood and New Chinese Subjectivity through PRC’s Minority Nationality Films in the 1950s and 1960s,” American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, eds. Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip (London & New York: Routledge, 2015), 80–81. 29. Qiang Zhang et  al. “Spatiotemporal Properties of Droughts and Related Impacts on Agriculture in Xinjiang, China,” International Journal of Climatology 35 (2015): 1254–1266; Yuling Shen and Haakon Lein, “Treating Water as an Economic Good: Policies and Practices in Irrigation Agriculture in Xinjiang, China,” Geographical Journal 176 (2010): 124–137. 30. Shale Horowitz, Peng Yu, “Holding China’s West: Explaining CCP Strategies of Rule in Tibet and Xinjiang,” Journal of Chinese Political Science no. 20 (2015): 451–457. (462). 31. Millward and Tursun, “Political History and Strategies of Control,” 90, 96. 32. Jiang Fengqing 姜逢清, Li Zhen 李珍, Hu Ruji 胡汝驥, “Ershi shiji xiabanye ganhan dui Xinjiang nongye de yingxiang ji zaihailian xiaoying” 20 世紀下半葉乾旱對新疆農業的影響及災害鏈效應 (The impact and chain of disasters created by drought in Xinjiang during the second half of the twentieth century) Arid Land Geography 乾旱區地理, no. 4 of 2005: 465–473 33. Pang, The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (London & New York: Verso, 2017), 77–78. 34. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker & Company, 2010), 180.

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35. There are many recent scholarships reviewing the Great Leap Forward water conservatory projects published in the PRC. Although they might be motivated by different political agendas, overall we can see a general “hit-­and-­miss” assessment: blaming the general inefficiency and rashness of the time on the one hand and commending the foundation they laid for future projects on the other. For a comprehensive review, see Wang Ruifang 王瑞芳, 大躍進時期農田水利建設得失問題研究評述 (Research and Criticisms of the Agricultural Water Management Projects Constructed during the Great Leap Forward). The History of the People’s Republic of China, http://www.hprc.org.cn/gsyj/zhyj/200909/t20090905_29907. html; accessed June 14, 2018. 36. Li Bozhong, “Water and the History of China,” Social Sciences in China 39, no. 1 (2018): 120–131.

Bibliography Auyang, Kexing, and Min Zhong. 2014. Quyu wenxue de lüdong: “Tianshan” liubian yu Xinjiang dangdai wenxue [The Rhythmic Movement of Regional Literature: Changes of “Tianshan” and Contemporary Literature in Xinjiang]. Guangzhou: Jinan daxue chubanshe. Cheng, Xiangli. 2015. Wenhua renting yu minzu jiaorong—ershi shiji wushi zhi bashi niandai Xinjiang hanyu xiaoshuo minzu yuansu [Cultural Identification and National Mingling: The Elements of Ethnic Minorities in 1950s to 1980s Xinjiang Han Literature]. Journal of Shihezi University [Philosophy and Social Sciences] 4: 36–37. Deng, Meixuan. 1982. ‘Yige juyou gongchan zhuyi pinzhi de laoren’  – tan Keyoumu Tuerdi de “Wulazi yeye” [‘An Elderly with Communist Character’ – A Discussion of Qeyum Turdi’s “Elderly Wulazi”]. Journal of Xinjiang Normal University (Social Sciences) 2: 67. Dikötter, Frank. 2010. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. New York: Walker & Company. Gladney, Dru C. 2004. Dislocating China: Reflections on Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hann, Chris. 2011. Smith in Beijing, Stalin in Urumchi: Ethnicity, Political Economy, and Violence in Xinjiang, 1959–2009. Focaal  – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 60: 108–123. Harris, Rachel. 2004. Singing the Village: Music, Memory and Ritual Among the Sibe of Xinjiang. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horowitz, Shale, and Yu Peng. 2015. Holding China’s West: Explaining CCP Strategies of Rule in Tibet and Xinjiang. Journal of Chinese Political Science 20: 451–462.

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Jiang, Fengqing, Zhen Li, and Ruji Hu. 2005. Ershi shiji xiabanye ganhan dui Xinjiang nongye de yingxiang ji zaihailian xiaoying [The Impact and Chain of Disasters Created by Drought in Xinjiang During the Second Half of the Twentieth Century]. Arid Land Geography 4: 465–447. Li, Wei. 2013. Xinjiang Duominzu wenxue ticai leixing yanjiu (1949–1966) [The Genres of Xinjiang’s Multi-ethnic Literature (1949–1966)]. PhD Dissertation, Jinan University. Li, Xiao-feng. 2014. “Bu zaichang de zaichang”: Zhongguo shaoshu minzu muyu de chujing [“Presence of Absence”: The Situation of China’s Ethnic Minority Language Literature]. Journal of Beifang University of Nationalities: Philosophy and Social Sciences 1: 83–89. Li, Wai-yee. 2017. Anecdotal Barbarians in Early China. In Between Philosophy and History: Rhetorical Uses of Anecdotes in Early China, ed. Sarah Queen and Paul van Els, 113–144. New York: State University of New York Press. Li, Bozhong. 2018. Water and the History of China. Social Sciences in China 39 (1): 120–131. Lo, Kwai-Cheung. 2015. (Un)Folding Hollywood and New Chinese Subjectivity Through PRC’s Minority Nationality Films in the 1950s and 1960s. In American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows, ed. Lisa Funnell and Man-Fung Yip, 80–81. London/New York: Routledge. McMillen, Donald H. 1979. Chinese Communist Power and Policy in Xinjiang, 1949–1977. Boulder: Westview Press. Millward, James A. 2004. Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington. Millward, James A., and Nabijan Tursun. 2015. Political History and Strategies of Control, 1884–1978. In Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, ed. S. Frederick Starr, 90–96. London/New York: Routledge. Newby, L.J. 1999. The Chinese Literary Conquest of Xinjiang. Modern China 25 (4): 451–474. Pang, Laikwan. 2017. The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution. New York: Verso. Shen, Yuling, and Haakon Lein. 2010. Treating Water as an Economic Good: Policies and Practices in Irrigation Agriculture in Xinjiang, China. Geographical Journal 176 (2): 124–137. Tsung, Linda. 2014. Language Power and Hierarchy: Multilingual Education in China. London: Bloomsbury. Turdi, Qeyum. 1975. Kezilashan xia [Under the Flaming Mountains]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Wang, Ruifang. 2009. Dayuejin shiqi nongtian shuili jianshe deshi wenti yanjiu pingshu [Research and Criticisms of the Agricultural Water Management Projects Constructed During the Great Leap Forward]. The History of the People’s Republic of China. http://www.hprc.org.cn/gsyj/zhyj/200909/ t20090905_29907.html. Accessed 14 June 2018.

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Wong, Chuen-Fung. 2016. The West Is Red: Uyghur Adaptation of the Legend of the Red Lantern (Qizil Chiragh) During China’s Cultural Revolution. In Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution: Music, Politics and Cultural Continuities, ed. Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-huang Tsai, 147–165. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Xinjiang Dangdai Duominzu Wenxueshi [The Multi-ethnic Literary History of Xinjiang]. 2006. Ed. Xia Guanzhou et al. Urumqi: Xinjiang renmin chubanshe. Xinjiang Wenxue Zuoping Daxi [Major Collection of Xinjiang’s Literary Arts]. 2009. Urumqi: Xinjing meishu sheying chubanshe. Zhang, Qiang, et al. 2015. Spatiotemporal Properties of Droughts and Related Impacts on Agriculture in Xinjiang, China. International Journal of Climatology 35: 1254–1266.

CHAPTER 10

“Original Ecology” Style of China’s Minority Performing Arts: Examples from Uyghur Music Chuen-Fung Wong

Introduction Early formulations of performing arts as primarily sociocultural constructs, as common in ethnographic and other music research published in much of the second half of the twentieth century, have come under scrutiny from recent critiques that seek to bring about a heightened awareness in the material presence of musical sound in the ecological world. “(Ethno) musicological studies of place,” as Nancy Guy explains in her essay on music and ecocriticism, “have focused predominantly on social perception and musical construction with far less attention being paid to environmental materiality, to the affective bonds with nonhuman elements (sentient or otherwise), or to the perception and experience of the physical environment.”1 At its core, the inquiry represents a renewed interest in the ways music mediates among various conceptions of nature and culture, and how sounds and performances engage and address concerns about

C.-F. Wong (*) Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_10

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s­ ustainability and environmentalism2 at a time when the human presence in the biosphere has become an undeniable threat. The performing arts of China’s minority nationalities present a unique case here to examine the relationship between music and ecology, one that was hardly conservationist at the outset. Accounts that relate the aborigines and other ethnic and racial groups inhabiting China’s geographic peripheries to nature abound in the nation’s well-documented past, often relegating these marginal peoples and cultures to a kind of simplicity and primeval status that awaits enlightenment.3 To some extent, such chauvinist discourse is inherited and expanded in modern Chinese representation of minority performing arts. Elsewhere I have identified and analyzed two common narrative frames in minority-themed modern Chinese compositions created since the 1950s primarily by Han Chinese musicians. Minorities are in the first place commended as talented musicians who are born, in a clichéd Chinese saying, “good-at-singing-and-dancing” (nengge shanwu). This “motif of the music-making minority,” as Helen Rees terms it, has imprinted the minorities as an “exotic alternative to the more staid and sober Han,”4 a dialectical construction that pervades a broad range of minority representations in modern China.5 The innate musicality is often framed as a similarly inherent affinity to nature: minority musicians and their music are often portrayed as possessing certain primordial passions that have bestowed them with a sense of innocence and brought them closer to the natural world. The minority performing body, as such, is constituted as carefree merrymakers, skillful at entertaining guests with festive music that are primarily joyful, easy-listens, and for immediate corporeal pleasure.6 At a deeper and more nuanced level, minority arts have often been approached—in scholarly research and otherwise—through their assumed connection with pre-modern forms of human societies and cultures. The well-studied examples are the songs and instrumental music traditions of the Dolan, a sub-ethnicity of the Uyghur residing primarily in the southwest of the Uyghur territories in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The soaring vocal timbre and the improvisatory impulses found in Dolan music contrast sharply with the more controlled and refined styles of other Uyghur singing and instrumental genres. Its perceived musical wilderness and connection to the natural world have invited musicologists to speculate Dolan’s connection with “hunting cultures” in prehistoric human societies. Dolan performing arts, these scholars argue, retain features of nomadism that mark it distinct from other sedentary oasis traditions in Uyghur music (examples and discussion of Dolan music will return below).7

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This is complicated after 1949 by the musical place inhabited by minority arts in socialist China, where the value of literature and arts, in Mao Zedong’s classic indoctrination,8 should be inextricably linked to the expression of the broad masses composed of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Artists and youths were sent en masse during political campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s to remote countryside and minority borderlands to live among the peasants and workers. Rurality emerged to become a favorite and popular aesthetic trope often invoked in a wide range of socialist expression in both Han and minority arts and musical genres. A glimpse through the catalogs of the propaganda songs created during the first three decades after the founding of the People’s Republic to represent the life of the minorities will bring us to such titles as “The Village Girl” and “My Friends Are in the Country” (both Uyghur songs),9 as well as programmatic references to mountains, rivers, and rural landscapes in lyrics, musical arrangements, and textual descriptions. The image of untroubled minorities singing and dancing in the countryside so concocted for political mobilization serves here as a renewed frame that elaborates on the aforementioned motif of music-making minority subjects. Partly as a consequence of this, traditional performing arts, regardless of their history and origin, have often been indiscriminately considered “folk” and represented as “coming from the people” in official representations. Rachel Harris notes that muqam, a centuries-old music and literary tradition descended from sixteenth-century Uyghur courts, is often designated a “‘folk classical’ music (khalq kilasik), both ‘high culture’ and ‘of the people,’” as a strategy to “protect the Twelve Muqam from future extremes of left-wing politics.”10 Organized trips to the countryside to “conduct fieldwork” remain commonplace for performers and composers in professional troupes today to learn from village musicians and get inspired by the purportedly more authentic styles and performing practices preserved there. In many significant ways, the music of the minorities has always been listened to in the realm of nature through connections with the rural place and its folk imaginaries. Audiences also conceive of the minority borderlands through musical and acoustic gestures derived from such association. It is thus important not to understand the ongoing craze for authenticist styles and discourse in China as mere outcomes of some overwhelming global influences that obliterated and replaced existing aesthetic preferences and their political implications. Despite optimistic analyses and speculations,11 public expression and representation of minority

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­ erforming arts remain tightly regulated by the state and align closely to p the changing preferences of middle-class Han Chinese urbanites, both of which are firmly informed by the cultural logistics and representational enterprise in which minority performing arts have been situated over the past nearly seven decades in China. The brief trajectories outlined above shed light on the shifting and politically charged notions of folk, rurality, and nature, while also serving as a context for the emergence of the “original ecology” (yuan shengtai) style in late-twentieth-century minority performing arts.

The “Original Ecology” Style Uyghur music did not find its way into the global circulation of world indigenous sounds at noticeable scale until the final decade of the last century, when it was heard in the world music marketplace alongside other vernacular traditions through audio-visual recordings, music festivals, and scholarly publications. The Uyghur soundscape most prominently featured in the world music industry today departs significantly from the reformist and representational styles that have dominated the official staged minority performances since post-1950s China. Among other folk singing and traditional instrumental music, the most high-profile Uyghur candidate of this late-twentieth-century world soundscapes is the music of the Dolan, whose distinct musical styles have set themselves apart from other Uyghur and Central Asian traditions found among the oases of the Tarim Basin. Ethnographic recordings of Dolan music made in the 1980s by musicologists Jean During and Sabine Trebinjac and released on two­CD set Turkestan Chinois/Xinjiang: Musiques Ouïgoures (Ocora 1990) were among the earliest to bring global attention to this otherwise little known tradition. Inhabiting the Yarkand River Valley in the southwest of Uyghur territories, known as Xinjiang in China today, the Dolan speak a close dialect of standard Uyghur and are believed to be successors of a variety of sung and instrumental genres that are more ancient than their Uyghur counterparts. In musical terms, traditional Dolan music is marked by its layers of raw vocal and instrumental timbres, often played in ensemble settings that feature intense heterophony and highly interactive improvisation. Despite sharing names and sometimes repertoires of their mainstream Uyghur counterparts, Dolan musical instruments are distinguished by their

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e­ xtensive use of sympathetic strings (such as those on the plucked lute rawap and the spike fiddle ghéjek)—and hence their unique resonating timbre—as well as by sound qualities that are uniquely Dolan (such as the plucked string on the trapezoidal zither qanun). The multi-sectional classical suites that comprise singing and instrumental music, known as muqam and found among the Dolan, are typically shorter compared to other Uyghur varieties. The performance of a typical Dolan muqam suite lasts for around ten minutes or less. It starts with an unmetered section called muqadimme to cultivate the modal and melodic context. This is followed by a few metrically varied songs and instrumental pieces, each featuring a distinctive rhythmic mode, such as chékitme (a six-beat meter), senem (a four-beat meter), and sérilma (a five-beat meter). Poetic expressions in the lyrics are often more upfront than the elaborated and refined On Ikki Muqam (Twelve Muqam) and its varieties found among other Uyghur traditions. All these have made Dolan music appear to be less sophisticated, and despite being also researched by the Chinese musicologists dispatched to collect and study Uyghur music in the 1950s, it remains outside the purview of the modernist music reform project implemented during the 1960s and beyond (Fig. 10.1). The music of the Dolan was brought under the national spotlight in the late 2000s when staged performances of Dolan music were televised on China’s Central Television Station at a program called the CCTV National Television Award Contest for Youth Singers (Quanguo qingnian geshou dianshi dajiangsai). Started in 1984 as a biennial singing competition that incorporates various levels and styles of singing for both Han and minority contestants, the Contest introduced for the first time a stylistic category called “Original Ecology” (yuan shengtai) in its 12th season in 2006 (Dolan musicians contested and received awards in both 2008 and 2010). This effectively ended China’s tripartite division of vocal styles into “national” (minzu), “bel canto” (meisheng), and “popular” (tongsu), the so-called three singing styles (san zhong changfa) that were eventually abolished in 2014. In essence, this means that the minzu style—which blends vaguely national Chinese styles into what is essentially bel canto vocal projection, often with rearranged melodies and texts accompanied in European instrumentation and harmony, and sung by professionally trained performers in Mandarin—became inadequate to label a variety of purportedly “untouched” singing styles that were previously considered unfit for staged performance but are now welcomed for their authenticity.

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Fig. 10.1  Dolan musicians performing at Tanz- und Folkfest Rudolstadt 2012. The Dolan instruments played by musicians sitting at the center of the ensemble are, from left to right, rawap (plucked lute), qanun (plucked zither), and ghéjek (spike fiddle). (Photo by the author on 8 July 2012)

A wide range of minority singing genres are enlisted in this new category of “Original Ecology,” including Mongolian urtin duu long song and khöömii overtone singing, polyphonic singing of the Dong known as dage (grand songs), among many others. Dolan musicians from various towns have since then continued to appear in a number of similar contests and showcases, including the CCTV Televised Folk Contest of the Western Region (Xibu min’ge dianshi dasai), held in early 2014. The Uyghur entry in this contest, an ensemble of Dolan musicians from the town Merkit, was described in the promotional video as playing music that “assembles the primordial power of simplicity and wilderness.” Started as a new category in primarily singing contests, “original ecology” was soon picked up as a discursive approach in the late 2000s in a wide range of other genres and performing contexts. Contests and festivals

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tagged “original ecology” blossomed from small towns to large cities all around the country, often with substantial official input and commercial sponsorship. Of particular relevance here is the “National Competitions for Original Ecology Folksongs of Ethnic Minorities” (Quanguao shaoshu minzu yuan shengtai min’ge dasai), inaugurated in Gansu in 2015. An official coverage of the contest by the local Gansu television station describes that “original ecology songs” are about “equality among humans, and peaceful relations between human beings and the nature.” Similar to other similar contests, songs should be “sung in indigenous minority languages” in order to exhibit the “original values and flavors” of minority “original ecology” music.12 Altogether the movement signals an aesthetic turn that is premised on rediscovering and embracing stylistic attributes undesired in earlier reformist projects and official performances. The root of the “original ecology” style can be traced back to the 1980s as a part of the liberalization of cultural expressions following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Many have understood the movement as a dialectic response to excessive urbanization, reformist endeavors, and wide dissemination of foreign popular styles, which altogether have threatened the conservation of traditional styles and genres and contributed to their demise.13 Concerns over the disappearance of music traditions as a result of homogenization and de-contextualization have brought about a heightened sense of cultural preservation. According to the musicologist Fan Zuyin, this was first realized at a singing contest held in 2001 in association with the opening of a new tourist site in Zhejiang province, in which contestants were required to sing in their mother tongues. The term yuan shengtai was then officially used in the subsequent season of the contest held in August 2004  in the province of Shanxi.14 The neologism soon became a sensation across China, widely deployed in media, businesses, and the tourist industry to cater to the expanding consumerist interest in products and services marketed in ecological languages. Broadly speaking, the term “original ecology,” a favorite buzzword in tourism and the music industry in China today, celebrates a wide range of loosely defined genres that have previously come under categories such as folk, traditional, national, and ethnic. In essence, as a stylistic label, it takes up an environmentalist-preservationist frame that celebrates musical species uncontaminated by modernity and performed in natural, original habitats. Helen Rees offers a useful summary of the term’s definition and scope based on scholarly publications in the mid-2000s:

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1. The term “original ecology folksong” draws inspiration from scientific and environmental concepts. It has wider implications than the phrase “traditional folksong”—it emphasizes the environment in which the singing naturally occurs, as well as traditional singing style, dialect, subject-matter, and so on. Invention and use of the term are implicitly tied to rising concern for intangible cultural heritage preservation, and to a recognition that absolutist value judgments derived from the norms of European classical music cannot be applied indiscriminately to other traditions. 2. “Original ecology folksong” may be equated with “folk style” and “authenticity,” and while some commentators note the historical connections between different styles, it is generally characterized as being the opposite of “national singing style,” “conservatory style,” “stage folksongs,” and “created” works.15 It is important to note, however, that the term often exists more as a discursive trope than as actual styles or practices. Performance branded “original ecology” has ranged from staged, pseudo-minority shows to highly critical reconstructed presentations of traditional music. Meanwhile, the sweeping popularity of the term “original ecology” also prompted critical scholarly discussion over its meanings and validity. Some have celebrated the movement as heralding a proactive, hopeful narrative that advances the long-standing scholarly quest for preserving traditional, authentic performing styles and practices.16 Others have cast doubt upon the format of staged singing competitions as antithetical to the very notion of performing music in its original habitat, as prescribed by the term. The idea of applying more or less a single set of criteria to rank the performances of vastly different styles and genres coming from incompatible cultural and social contexts is for many critics also inconsistent with ideals of cultural preservation.17

Ecologizing Music To be sure, “original ecology” is not a label confined to specific genres. The term has been applied to both Han and minority traditions as far as they are perceived as fulfilling, sometimes rather loosely, some or all of the conditions summarized above. In media and commercial usage, it is often conflated with notions of traditional, ancient, indigenous, historical, and authentic. Dolan music was first recognized as such for its marked stylistic

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differences from other modern Uyghur and other minority genres. Indeed, to many local musicians, government officials, and other cultural brokers, the transnational success of traditional styles serves as an exemplar and a promise for other genres to reinvent themselves for the national and global marketplaces. This is realized by a recently released collection of recordings, titled Arzu (wish),18 of folk songs by the much beloved Uyghur folk vocalist Sanubar Tursun, who accompanies herself on the dutar, a long-­necked plucked lute with two silk or nylon strings, which, for its soft and intimate timbre, has been considered in modern times as primarily a domestic and somewhat amateurish instrument. She sings and writes music in traditional Ili styles from the northwest of the Uyghur territory, a genre that is marked by a melancholic subtlety that is absent in the celebratory soundscapes of official singing-and-dancing shows. A Chinese tagline printed on the spine of this three-CD box set, which is otherwise almost entirely in Uyghur, praises Sanubar as an “internationalized original ecology singer” (guojihua yuan shengtai gezhe), which is at best a head-­scratching comment to many in her Uyghur audience. Yet it is unambiguous that the authenticity of the singer and the ecologist appeal of her music are at the core for the marketing of a traditional genre little known to the outside audience. I recounted elsewhere parts of a conversation I witnessed in spring 2005 between the director of an official professional performing troupe in Urumqi, the provincial capital of the Uyghur territory of Xinjiang, and a Han Chinese musicologist currently in residence at a local higher institution for music and performing arts. The Uyghur director, a conservatory-­ trained percussionist himself, said to the Han musicologist that his troupe had recently received a generous grant from the Cultural Bureau for their performance and research activities. The Han musicologist, who spoke in a commanding tone as if he was invited to offer comment on the performance of the professional troupe, urged the Uyghur director to reevaluate the existing approach (assumed to be reformist and inflexible) by introducing practices of improvisation as seen among Dolan performances. The Uyghur director, otherwise rather submissive throughout the meeting, was evidently perplexed by this particular comment. He frowned as he responded with an embarrassing and reluctant smile, “isn’t improvisation simply that all voices and instruments sing and play together in chaos? I’m afraid that wouldn’t be very feasible for our ensemble.” Toward the end of the meeting, the Han musicologist demanded the Uyghur director to send him a recording of their rehearsal after improvements are made. After the Uyghur director left, the Han musicologist said to me that these

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musicians in the troupe could not properly understand the importance of playing traditional music in the original and authentic style (a comment that echoes widely across China) and needed to be better informed.19 The troupe eventually brought four Dolan musicians from Merkit to Urumqi to teach the professional musicians traditional Dolan singing and dancing, in order for the troupe to prepare for an upcoming large-scale public performance in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. I attended two of these rehearsals in summer 2005. In one of these, the Dolan musicians taught a Dolan song to the vocalists of the troupe line by line and orally, a practice that was previously considered “unscientific,” with its practitioners musically “illiterate.” The vocalists worked hard to follow a transcribed notation and showed amusing expressions at phrases or notes that are difficult to follow. The leading Dolan musician was clearly displeased at one occasion after the professional vocalists failed to imitate a short phrase appropriately after over two dozen attempts. A vocalist I talked to notes that Dolan singing was difficult and exhausting, and she had never encountered anything similar in her conservatory training. Another vocalist of the troupe, after this initial encounter, went on several trips to the Dolan areas to make field recordings and eventually incorporated elements of Dolan music into a number of traditional and pop songs he sang. These brief ethnographic episodes, which took place shortly before the category “original ecology” was created at the CCTV National Television Award Contest for Youth Singers in 2006 (and the subsequent Dolan participations in the contest), are notable in a number of ways. Significantly, this new stylistic preference represents a primarily market-oriented and policy-driven reassessment of over half a century of reformist aesthetics and its clichéd singing-and-­dancing motif in minority performing arts, by introducing sound ideals and performing practices that look back to the past, imagined or otherwise, not merely as raw materials to be processed but as exemplars and authoritative sources for imitation in contemporary performance. The conservationist narrative implicated in this new soundscape appeals at once to the academics, urban consumers and tourists, professional musicians, as well as to the broader transnational audience, to whom the music is at best unfamiliar and incomprehensible. To a certain extent, this new aesthetics is built not on established logics and tastes but rather on negating styles and practices “contaminated” by modernist influences. Professional music training as internalized in modern techniques, repertoires, and aesthetics needs to be undone in order to play in the ways that are considered “original ecology.” The style is ultimately defined not

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by what it is but rather by what it is not. In some sense, the incomprehensibility of the lyrics and styles is itself an authenticity to cultural outsiders and audience of the “original ecology” style. What connects the various minority traditions across China in the early twenty-first century is thus a process of what I call the “ecologization” of traditional music, which, with its language of primordial authenticity, keeps indigenous music relevant and recognized in the national (and global) music marketplace. Responses to the movement among Uyghur musicians and audiences have varied, often contingent upon the discursive contexts. While the idea of performing in “original ecology” style does not always make sense to many professional musicians and their audiences, as the example above shows, it is fair to say that, against the escalating censorship, surveillance, and persecution in the Uyghur territories today, the movement has at least been welcomed by some as an opportunity to showcase and safeguard traditional performing arts in ways that are least damaging. That Uyghur songs may now be legitimately sung to non-Uyghur audiences in the Uyghur language is also felt by many as a temporary relief from the intensified policies to minimize the use of minority languages in the region. This being said, the deprivation of agency and its colonial implication should not be overlooked. In many ways, the movement and its new aesthetics speak to China’s shifting strategies and preferences for consuming minority cultures in the new century. Early reformist aesthetics and the representational model manifested by staged singing-and-dancing performances have become somewhat obsolete and inadequate to sustain the curiosity of the rising urban middle-class audience. Performing arts now subsumed under the “original ecology” frame offer a refreshing set of exotic commodities to further “otherize” minority performing arts in order for them to stay incomprehensible and unfamiliar, qualities that contribute to their appeal. What is deeply ironic here is also that, after over half a century of highly regulated cultural expression and aesthetics, Uyghur and other minority musicians are being told once again by the incoming Han Chinese “experts” about the right ways to perform their own music.

Original Ecology Singing as Intangible Cultural Heritage Textual and musical references to the natural world abound in traditional Uyghur music, which predates the rise of the original ecology movement. This is particularly the case among the folk singing tradition inherited by the Uyghur inhabiting the Ili Valley. Marked by its melancholic subtleties

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and highly elaborated melodies, Ili folk songs—traditional or composed— are filled with imaginaries of natural landscapes of the Uyghur homeland. Together with Dolan genres, Ili folk singing has been recognized as yet another favorite model for the “original ecology” style. References to mountains, steppes, rivers, and lakes are abundant in lyrics and music videos, often accompanied by a deep sense of nostalgia associated with national legends. A good example here is a “Ili Boyliri” (“Banks of the Ili River”), a well-­ known modern folk piece composed by Nurmuhemmet Rozi based on a text by Qasim Sadiq.20 The Ili River, which flows from eastern Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang through the main city Ghulja (or Yining in Chinese) and the Ili River Valley into Lake Balkhash in southeast Kazakhstan, has been a major theme in Ili folk singing. River (derya) is a recurrent theme in Uyghur literature and music. A number of these rivers in the Uyghur territory, such as Tarim River and Ili River, are often metaphorically linked to the nation in Uyghur poetry and novels. Imaginaries of the riverbanks of the Ili River serve here as an anchor in each of the three stanzas of the lyrics, each of which has four lines. Each line has nine syllables and is rhymed throughout (translation is mine): “Ili Boyliri” Ejep gülgün Ili boyliri, Zoqi küchlük bahar ayliri. Yurtimizning qizil gülliri, Shéhitlarning tökken qanliri.

Really beautiful, the riverbanks of Ili, Delights of the lush months of spring. Red flowers of our homeland, Shed blood of the martyrs.

Ejep otluq Ili boyliri, Hékmetke bay öngkür-sayliri. Jaranglaydu Sadir naxshisi, Nozugumning yangraq küyliri.

Really bright, the riverbanks of Ili, Caves along the river valley are wisdom and wealth. Sadir’s song is sung, In the resonant melodies of Nuzugum.

Ejep sirliq Ili boyliri, Köz yummaydu hetta tünliri. Oyghitidu tanglarni chillap, Bulbularning changqaq ünliri.

Really mysterious, the riverbanks of Ili, Don’t shut your eyes even at nights. Dawns will be awakened, By the parched voice of the nightingales.

“Ili Boyliri” follows a rather typical melodic design found in many other modern Uyghur folk songs. It is written in a sour-sounding modal scale that features two fluctuating pitches on the sharpened second and flattened seventh steps. The melody of each stanza is arch-shaped, moving from the lowest register in the first to the highest in the last. The song is driven by a syncopated, somewhat limping rhythm. Sadir (Palwan) and

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Nuzugum, mentioned in the second stanza, are nineteenth-century Uyghur heroes and heroines known for their resistance against the Manchu/Qing regime.21 By connecting these historical figures—alluded to as martyrs here—to the natural landscapes of the Ili riverbanks, the song provides a powerful allegory that speaks to most Uyghur today. To many who listen to the songs through a nationalist frame, celebrating and preserving nature is often not a different commitment from safeguarding the nation. This song has been recorded and publicly performed by many vocalists. One of the best known of these is Abduweli Dawut (b.1953), aka Weli, a Ghulja-based master folk singer of the Ili tradition, included on his 2006 album Ayding Axsham (Evening of Moonlight). Scenes of flowing water, riverbanks, and mountains are lavishly shown in the music video, often featuring the singer strolling around in nature and singing, a common filming strategy in many Uyghur pop and folk videos. Scenes of Weli visiting the mazar (shrine) of Sadir Palwan (located in a close suburb of the city of Ghulja) alternate and juxtapose with episodes where he stood on the Ili River bank, frowned as he overlooked the flowing water (see Figs. 10.2 and 10.3).

Fig. 10.2  Weli is seen visiting the mazar of Sadir Palwan in the music video of “Ili Boyliri”

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Fig. 10.3  Weli is seen standing on the Ili River bank in the music video of “Ili Boyliri”

Known for his deep guttural voice, soaring timbre, and profound intensity, qualities that are highly acclaimed by many in his audience, Weli’s vocal style has invited mixed receptions; a number of Urumqi-based musicians and scholars have described Weli’s singing to me as similar to “animal roars.” Nonetheless, Weli is a proud living inheritor of the Ili repertoire of Uyghur folk music and classical muqam. Unlike many professional musicians in his generation, Weli has never attended any music school and does not read notation. He also has never been employed by any of the official singing-and-dancing troupes. Shortly before I first met him in early fall 2009, Weli had received a phone call from a local official, informing him that a crew from a television station in Beijing would come shortly to Ghulja to film his singing and interview him for a documentary about minority music performed in the style of yuan shengtai, a Chinese neologism that Weli, who spoke only a minimum of Chinese, was yet to fully understand. A few years later he would go on to become a spokesperson of the Ili folk singing and officially named a “representative bearer” of an Intangible Cultural Heritage (another neologism he was yet to comprehend) of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region for his mastery of the tradition.22 More recently, he appears—rather proudly and enthusiastically—as a chief judge of the

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popular televised singing contest “Yengi Nawa” (New Nawa) aired weekly on Urumqi Television Station. In late spring of 2016, I found myself in Ghulja, assisting Weli to gather the documents and to obtain permissions required for him to travel to Hong Kong for a performance tour I organized. It was no surprise that bureaucracies for a Uyghur to travel abroad were highly frustrating and unpredictable, but things became more complicated for Weli as a folk musician who did not have an orun, or “work unit” (referring to the fact that he was not employed at any performing troupes, institutions, or businesses). We were told that approvals were needed starting from the neighborhood/sub-district administration, district police station, all the way to the Cultural Bureau of the city government of Ghulja, and probably the Party officials of the county. On our way to meet the head (idare bashliqi) of the Cultural Bureau, a Uyghur official who was apparently quite unpopular among local musicians, we were accompanied by a staff dispatched from the Office of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Sufficiently annoyed by the never-ending procedures and paperwork, I asked the staff member, who is an ethnic Manchu, why her office, which is under the city’s Cultural Bureau, needed to be involved. Sounding a little apologetic, she explained, in perfect Mandarin Chinese (the only language she could speak, I later learned), “you know, regardless of what, Weli is our … how to say it … regardless, he’s our ‘ethnic person,’ and you know he’s also a person of the society [shehui renshi, meaning he’s not affiliated with a ‘work unit’], and you know … terrorism is rampant these days.” I was somewhat irritated, although not entirely surprised, by her association of terrorism with the minorities and raised my voice a bit, “but then why does his application to travel abroad to play music need to be approved by the office of Intangible Cultural Heritage?” After thinking it over for a short while, very carefully, she started to explain: Weli had already been proclaimed a bearer of Intangible Cultural Heritage on the Autonomous Region level, and now her office was working to file an application to make him (along with a composer and a storyteller in Ili) a bearer on the national level, which would presumably be a higher level of recognition and prestige. Given the perceived political risk associated with international trips, the Cultural Bureau certainly would not want any trouble on the way of promoting him from a provincial-level bearer to a national bearer of this distinctively local cultural heritage. Yet there was a second message: for these proclaimed cultural bearers, it is important to report all major

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­ erforming activities to the Office of Intangible Cultural Heritage because p these activities belong to and should be regulated by the office.23 To put it differently, minority musicians whose performing traditions are now reframed under the new discourses of “original ecology” and “intangible cultural heritage” have become assets of the bureaucratic system on multiple levels. What is deeply troubling here is that the Intangible Cultural Heritage system serves effectively as yet another hierarchy of manipulation. Musicians often find themselves having to obtain more permission and approval, but only with more uncertainties.

Concluding Thoughts Traditional music among many of China’s minority nationalities has had well-established expressive means of connecting the natural world to other domains of human experiences. In many ways, the Original Ecology movement in the early twenty-first century reflects an aesthetic turn that speaks less about minority performing arts but more about the shifting preferences of Chinese consumers. After over half a century of representational tactics that seek to gaze at the minority “other” through a primarily modernist Chinese perspective, the movement speaks to “an increasing tendency toward the presentational and the mimetic,” which has come to “seek the ‘real presence’ of the Other rather than a represented abstraction.”24 Minority performing arts, especially in their presumably primordial forms and styles, appear as convenient objects to go to when cultural purity is desired. Meanwhile, expressions of the authentic national self in mainland China are also increasingly dependent on the inclusion of traditional performing arts of the minorities. Uyghur and other minority performing arts have been mainstays of the numerous “original ecology” singing-and-dancing contests, awards, and showcases held all over the country. Two of China’s four UNESCO-proclaimed intangible cultural heritage entries are from the minorities: Uyghur muqam and Mongolian urtin duu (both proclaimed in 2005). It is also notable that the other two entries, qin seven-­ string zither and kunqu operatic singing, represent the most refined of Han Chinese musical and theatrical forms. These contrast sharply with the assumed rawness found in the music of the Dolan, which formed the main part of the materials China submitted for the UNESCO proclamation of Uyghur muqam. In other words, the otherness of minority performing arts is constructed upon a sense of primitivism, which, despite being

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somewhat positively received under the “original ecology” frame, remains problematic if excessively connected to Han Chinese cultural traditions. Similar to Nimrod Baranovitch’s analysis of the rediscovery of minorities in the 1990s in Chinese cultural expressions as a result of what he calls the “disillusionment with the primitiveness of the Han self,” minority music framed in the “original ecology” discourse today is “remote enough not to hurt [Han’s claims to modernity], but close enough to be considered Chinese.”25 To assert authentic, indigenous Chinese-ness for the global music marketplace in the new century, minority genres and styles “uncontaminated” by outside influences remain some of the most convincing and favorite candidates. In this sense, the mimetic approach and aesthetics championed by the “original ecology” movement work not so much to repeal earlier stereotyping tactics. Minority exotics, despite being operated on a different hierarchy, remain firmly in place in the construction of Chinese selfhood. The notion of “Original Ecology,” as explained earlier, serves more as a discursive trope than as actual styles or practices. Its manifestation is also highly manipulated by and contingent upon official preferences and representational needs.

Notes 1. Nancy Guy, “Flowing down Taiwan’s Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination.” Ethnomusicology 53.2 (2009): 219. 2. See, for example, Jeff Todd Titon, “The Nature of Ecomusicology.” Música e Cultura: Revista da ABET 8.1 (2013): 8–18; Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, “Ecomusicologies,” Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge, 2017), 1–16. 3. See, for example, Steven Harrell, “Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them,” Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 1–36; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: Chicago University, 2001); Dru Gladney, Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 4. Helen Rees, “Intangible Cultural Heritage in China Today: Policy and Practice in the Early 20th-First Century,” Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Policy, Ideology, and Practice in the Preservation of East Asian Traditions, ed. Keith Howard (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 23–27.

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5. See also Gladney, “Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities,” The Journal of Asian Studies 53.1 (1994): 92–123. 6. Chuen-Fung Wong, “Representing the Minority Other in Chinese Music,” Reading Chinese Music and Beyond, eds. Joys H.  Y. Cheung and King Chung Wong (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong, 2011), 121–145. 7. See Guan Yewei, “Cong minzu yinyuexue de jiaodu shitan “Duolan” ji qi yinyue” (A preliminary research on Dolan and its music from an ethnomusicological approach), Xinjiang yishu 5 (1988): 21; Mao Jizeng, “Renlei shoulie shehui de wenhua yicun—Daolang mukamu” (The cultural heritage of human hunting societies—Dolan muqam), Xinjiang yishu xueyuan xuebao (Journal of Xinjiang Arts University) 4.3 (2006): 8–26; for a few much cited publications on this topic, see Zhou Ji, “Xuyan” (Introduction), in Daolang mukamu de shengtai yu xingtai yanjiu (The ecology and morphology of Dolan Muqam), (Beijing: Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan, 2004), 3–86. 8. See Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art (1942),” Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, trans. Bonnie McDougall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 57–86. 9. These songs may be found on the album Vocal Music of Contemporary China, Vol. 2: The National Minorities (Folkways 1980), which collected 18 of these minority propaganda songs released in the 1950s on 78-rpm vinyl discs by China Record Company. 10. Rachel Harris, The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 41. 11. See, for example, Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 54–107. 12. Refer to the website of Gansu television station at http://www.gstv.com. cn/news/folder45/2015-10-29/78422.html (accessed 1 August 2018). 13. Qiao Jianzhong, “Yuanshengtai min’ge’ suoyi” (Incidental remarks on “original ecology folksongs”), Renmin yinyue 1 (2006): 26–27. 14. Fan Zuyin, “You ‘yuan shengtai min’ge’ yinfa de sikao” (Thoughts generated from the idea of “original ecology folksongs”), Huangzhong 1 (2007): 94–96. 15. Helen Rees, “Environmental Crisis, Culture Loss, and a New Musical Aesthetic: China’s “Original Ecology Folksongs” in Theory and Practice,” Ethnomusicology 60.1 (2016): 58. 16. See, for example, Qiao “Yuanshengtai min’ge’ suoyi,” 26–27.

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17. See, for example, Tang Pulin, “Minzu yinyue wenhua yu pingbi: Dui suowei ‘yuan shengtai min’ge’ pingbi de zhiyi” (Doubts on assessing the so-called “original ecology folk singing”), Renmin yinyue 4 (2008): 56–57. 18. Sanubar Tursun, Arzu (Urumqi: Dilküyi, 2013). 2 CDs and 1 VCD. 19. The meeting took place on 13 April 2015 at Üzüm Restaurant on Yan’an Yoli in Urumqi. Names are concealed here to preserve anonymity. The year of the meeting was erroneously printed in a previous publication, in which this was also mentioned. It should be 2005, not 2015. There is a similar typo for the rehearsal I described in the same publication, which took place in 2005, not 2015. See Chuen-Fung Wong 2017. “Intercultural Encounters, Global Circulations, and the ‘Original Ecology’ Style of Uyghur Music in the Late 20th Century and Beyond,” Sketches of China (Intercultural Music Studies series no. 21), ed. Bernhard Hanneken and Tiago de Oliveira Pinto (Berlin: VWB, 2017), 218, 224n4 and 224n5. 20. This song should not be confused with equally famous Ili folk song titled “Ili Derya Boyliri” (Banks of the Ili River) and certainly not with “Ili Hepan” (Banks of Ili River), a modern Chinese appropriated instrumental piece written for the zheng 21-string zither by Cheng Gongliang (1940–2015). 21. For a study on the Nuzugum legend, see Kara Abramson, “Gender, Uyghur Identity, and the Story of Nuzugum,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71.4 (2012): 1069–91. 22. Intangible Cultural Heritage is an official system of proclaiming and protecting cultural heritage developed since the early 2000s and somewhat modeled after the UNESCO initiatives. It is implemented on the municipal, provincial, and national levels over the entire country. The logic and criteria of the Intangible Cultural Heritage proclamations are closely connected to ideals embraced in the Original Ecology movement. An extensive list of national Intangible Cultural Heritage entries has been compiled, with hundreds of officially recognized bearers. See China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage webpage at http://www.ihchina.cn/ (accessed 1 August 2018). Also refer to Rees (2012: 23–54). 23. The conversation took place in the afternoon on 7 June 2016. 24. Martin Stokes, “Music and the Global Order,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 49. 25. Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 81.

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Bibliography Abramson, Kara. 2012. Gender, Uyghur Identity, and the Story of Nuzugum. The Journal of Asian Studies 71 (4): 1069–1091. Allen, Aaron S., and Kevin Dawe. 2017. Ecomusicologies. In Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, ed. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Baranovitch, Nimrod. 2003. China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fan, Zuyin. 2007. You “yuan shengtai min’ge’” yinfa de sikao [Thoughts Generated from the Idea of “Original Ecology Folksongs”]. Huangzhong 1: 94–96. Gansu Television. 2015. http://www.gstv.com.cn/news/folder45/2015-10-29/ 78422.html. Accessed 1 Aug 2018. Gladney, Dru C. 1994. Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/ Minority Identities. The Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1): 92–123. ———. 2004. Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Guan, Yewei. 1988. Cong minzu yinyuexue de jiaodu shitan “Duolan” ji qi yinyue [A Preliminary Research on “Dolan” and Its Music from an Ethnomusicological Approach]. Xinjiang yishu 5: 21. Guy, Nancy. 2009. Flowing Down Taiwan’s Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination. Ethnomusicology 53 (2): 219. Han, Guohuang. Producer. 1980. Vocal Music of Contemporary China, Vol. 2: The National Minorities. New York: Folkways Records, CD. Harrell, Steven. 1995. Introduction: Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them. In Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Stevan Harrell, 1–36. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Harris, Rachel. 2008. The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. Hostetler, Laura. 2001. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago: Chicago University. Mao, Zedong. 1980. Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art”: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary. Trans. Bonnie McDougall. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mao, Jizeng. 2006. Renlei shoulie shehui de wenhua yicun—Daolang mukamu [The Cultural Heritage of Human Hunting Societies—Dolan Muqam]. Xinjiang yishu xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Xinjiang Arts University] 4 (3): 8–26. Qiao, Jianzhong. 2006. Yuanshengtai min’ge’ suoyi [Incidental Remarks on “Original Ecology Folksongs”]. Renmin yinyue 1: 26–27.

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Rees, Helen. 2012. Intangible Cultural Heritage in China Today: Policy and Practice in the Early Twentieth-First Century. In Music as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Policy, Ideology, and Practice in the Preservation of East Asian Traditions, ed. Keith Howard, 23–27. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. ———. 2016. Environmental Crisis, Culture Loss, and a New Musical Aesthetic: China’s “Original Ecology Folksongs” in Theory and Practice. Ethnomusicology 60 (1): 58. Stokes, Martin. 2004. Music and the Global Order. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 49. Tang, Pulin. 2008. Minzu yinyue wenhua yu pingbi: Dui suowei ‘yuan shengtai min’ge’ pingbi de zhiyi’ [Doubts on Assessing the So-Called “Original Ecology Folk Singing”]. Renmin yinyue 4: 56–57. The Intangible Cultural Heritage in China. 2006. http://www.ihchina.cn/. Accessed 1 Aug 2018. Titon, Jeff Todd. 2013. The Nature of Ecomusicology. Música e Cultura: Revista da ABET 8 (1): 8–18. Tursun, Sanubar. 2013. Arzu. Urumqi: Dilküyi, 2 CDs and 1 VCD. Wong, Chuen-Fung. 2011. Representing the Minority Other in Chinese Music. In Reading Chinese Music and Beyond, ed. Joys H.Y. Cheung and King Chung Wong, 121–145. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong. ———. 2017. Intercultural Encounters, Global Circulations, and the “Original Ecology” Style of Uyghur Music in the Late Twentieth Century and Beyond. In Intercultural Music Studies 21, ed. Bernhard Hanneken and Tiago de Oliveira Pinto, 218–244. Berlin: VWB. Zhou, Ji. 2004. Xuyan [Introduction]. In Daolang mukamu de shengtai yu xingtai yanjiu [The Ecology and Morphology of Dolan Muqam], ed. Ji Zhou, 3–86. Beijing: Zhongyang yinyue xueyuan.

CHAPTER 11

Animals, Ethnic Minorities, and Ecological Concerns in Chinese Digital Cinema Kwai-Cheung Lo

Lu Chuan’s wildlife film Born in China (2016), co-produced by Disney Nature and released on Earth Day—April 22—in the United States, is considered part of China’s soft power strategy to offer the world a more appealing image of the nation, with a shift of focus to its cute untamed animals and gorgeous pristine wilderness rather than its bustling smog-­choked urban areas notoriously covered by international media. Appearing like a digital nature documentary that follows various endangered wild species, including giant pandas, snow leopards, golden snub-nosed monkeys, and chirus (or Tibetan antelope), over a course of a year to track down their footprints and fortunes in the wilds of China, Born in China is actually a pre-scripted environmental movie featuring animal characters, with all animals given baby names in the voiceover narrative. The film crew has selected shots that are relevant to the pre-conceived plot and put them together through laborious editing. Although the film is made mainly in the Tibetan Plateau and the Southwest ethnic regions, and one of the animals is even named Dawa, a common Tibetan ethnic name, there is no appearance of any indigenous K.-C. Lo (*) Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_11

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ethnic people onscreen, with the simultaneous invisibility of both civilized Han-ness and Chinese state authority. While showing to the world that China cares for the nature and its wildlife, Born in China, as indicated by its title, firmly claims absolute sovereignty over its natural environment and all sorts of lives surviving in it. The film’s meditative tone attempts to anthropomorphize the wild creatures as harmless human-like beings by some manipulative editing tricks for the audience’s entertainment and forces conventional narrative on the animal lives, but it gives neither voice nor agency to its non-Han ethnic natives inhabiting within the same ecosystem. If environmentalism in today’s world is the only socio-political movement leading the sustained critique of progress, the Chinese government has been shrewdly capitalizing on the increasing concerns about the nation’s deteriorating physical living conditions by designating itself as an “ecological state” (shengtai liguo 生態立國) and as the architect of China’s “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming 生態文明).1 The state-led ecological modernization is legitimized for promoting further national growth and tighter control over the ecologically vulnerable borderlands. The Chinese state is committed to institutionalizing an aggressive environmental governance from a top-down approach by emphasizing economic development and technical solutions to deal with all ecological problems. However, the critical parties and other stakeholders confront such state-centred technical-managerial methods with the notion of political ecology. They highlight the political, historical, and cultural dimensions which are inherent in many environmental problems and advocate political democratization as the more effective means to handle China’s human-environment relations and to bring about environmental justice. Whether the authoritarian regime’s endeavours to solve China’s environmental problems at one stroke with some game-changing new technologies, and hence to avoid any political change, are plausible remains an open question. Still, the significant role of new technology may have created great and irreversible impacts on ecology, even though technology is always moulded by the struggle over its uses. Ecological effect is not confined to the conventional boundaries of habitat and place as the condition of existence but includes the repercussions of spatio-temporal changes in the environment for living beings. Thus, the ecology shaped by new technologies is not only a green one but also a grey one, as Paul Virilio has put it.2 This “grey” supplement to ecological concepts expands the concern beyond the natural and draws our attention to the centrality of the acceleration of technological innovations, worldwide interconnectedness, and

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capital flows that have drastically transformed the environmental conditions which facilitate as well as constrain life. The wide use of digital media in China and the digitization of its cinema may have already induced some ontological provocation in the conditions of space and time that make up the fabric of everyday-life reality. New agency has been actively delegated to the popular use of digital videotaping or filmmaking, which gives a different form to the world in the oppressive milieu of contemporary Chinese politics. It is believed that the advent of digital media could exert influences, in light of Félix Guattari’s notion of “three ecologies,”3 on the three interacting and interdependent ecologies of mind, society, and environment. The transversal integration of the three ecological registers requires a reorientation of thoughts to reflect on and understand one’s self, the society we live in, and the ecosystem all species inhabit. The convergence mediated by the digital may change the existing life and system, which is of course a potentially reality-­transforming event. As the digital revolution has changed the infrastructure of the living world, thereby it is alleged to change what it means to be human. If the Anthropocene discourse has assigned humans at the centre in the new narrative for their impacts upon the earth at geological time scales but also removes their agency for their failures in balancing the ecosystem in the way that they catastrophically generate the climate change and the possible “sixth mass extinction,”4 the discourse of the digital is also ambivalent to the role of humans. The digital has deprived the ­privilege enjoyed by particular human perspectival vision in favour of a totally manipulatable and calculable electronic data set and an entire automation of machinic sight. Digital image could have no reference to any observing position in the real optical world belonging to an organic life. However, just like what the Anthropocene discourse enables a rethinking of the relations of humans with nonhumans and nature, the advent of the digital also calls for a challenge to the human agency and a reconfiguration of human vision itself. Earlier studies of digital cinema in China have put their primary focus on digital documentary and its lens-based recording function of realities.5 The so-called digital turn of Chinese filmmaking beginning in the 1990s mainly refers to the general availability of digital filmmaking technologies (such as the easily manipulated digital camera and computer editing) for non-professional amateurs, the affordable production cost, portability of its production equipment, and easy reproducibility and dissemination of its work, thus enabling film production to evade stringent state censorship, facilitating democratic aspiration, constituting its style of “on-the-­spot

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realism” (jishi zhuyi 記實主義), and contributing to activist and interventionist filmmaking. Not falling into the trap of technological determinism, the argument states that Chinese filmmakers value digital video not for its ability to manipulate image (like the Western counterparts, such as Hollywood), but only for its technological ability to capture immediate reality in a direct and engaging way so as to generate “immediacy, spontaneity, and contact with lived experiences.”6 However, the emphasis is still placed on the extrinsic values of the digital, while the notion of cinematic realism remains largely unexplored. Whether this gives rise to a digital aesthetic that is remarkably different from the previous mode of cinema has already been asked in earlier studies.7 As Chinese digital documentary is socio-politically committed for its filmed subjects, digitization is intended to empower human capacity and enhance the ability for photographic recordings of real events in order to actively engage in social politics. But what can digitization bring to fiction films in China? Would the digital paint programme create some convincing illusion of dynamic reality to serve a political or even governing purpose? While digitization has already been manipulated by the state authorities for surveillance, monitoring, and political control, onscreen digital images under the sponsorship of state apparatuses and/or corporations may subvert the ontological distinction between the imaginary and the real so as to carry out ideological work more effectively. Apparently, those film studios that produce big-budgeted works, such as Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and The Great Wall (2016), or Raman Hui’s Monster Hunt (2015) and its sequel, as well as those China-Hollywood co-productions such as that by the Wanda Corporation-owned Legendary Pictures Pacific Rim Uprising (2018), or Skyscraper (2018), and Asura (2018) financed by Alibaba, are the only production companies that can afford to pay for digital equipment and for the intensive labour involved in creating spectacular digital effects. They also closely comply with the official ideology, undoubtedly. However, there are some digital fiction films made in China which, other than photographing what existed before the camera, have created some optical effects in order to convey certain messages. Instead of creating images that have never been filmed but made possible by computers, these works are more inclined to digitally modify and manipulate the live-­ action footage, while not giving up the reality effect (or cinematic realism) based upon narrative form. These fiction films draw their focus on China’s ethnic minorities and nonhuman animals in relation to larger ecological concerns, which have played a rather significant part in their narrative.

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Instead of using digitized (or computer-generated) animals on the screen (which is a common practice nowadays in Hollywood-model productions to avoid the controversy of the ethical implication of manipulating nonhuman living things), many movies about China’s ethnic minorities are inclined to filming real living beasts. The reasons behind such anti-digitization move could include that the low-budgeted ethnic films by minority or Han filmmakers cannot afford the production cost of the cutting-edge technology to create a realistic-looking computer-­generated (CG) animal. Additionally, even if some productions can, the intention provided by JeanJacques Annaud, the director of Wolf Totem (2015), was that “digital can’t capture the soul or the instinct of an actor – human or animal.”8 In spite of this sentiment, he obviously has used CGI (computer-generated imagery) and VFX shots (visual effects) for post-­production fixes. The crew of this state-backed blockbuster adapted from a bestselling novel had raised a dozen newborn baby wolves from a local zoo in China’s northern city of Harbin and then trained them to trust and interact with humans for more than four years to facilitate the movie shooting. Perhaps the twenty-first century has arrived at a point where filmmakers and audiences no longer derive authenticity from what looks mimetically “real,” given that the word “real” is extremely flexible. While “nature” is a problematically loaded term,9 being natural does not necessarily go against the reel nature. Feature films about nature, wildlife, animals, expeditions, and indigenous people in the natural habitat are not small in numbers. Yet in what way do film technologies influence the development of these films about nature and animal, especially if they are able to bring into focus the environmental issues? The digital technology may enable feature films to forge a reconstructed documentary style or mode of expression. These dramas are more capable of conveying a sense of unstable actuality by playing with the digital aesthetics and the idea of authenticity, thus offering more room for intervention.

Becoming-Animal: Environmental Politics in Ethnic Minority Regions It is said that as long as you bring your portable digital video (DV) camera to China’s ethnic minority regions, the exotic landscapes, wild and tamed animals, as well as the ecological features and footprints there could be easily captured in digital images, which are readily disseminated through the internet and social media within the reach of numerous people across

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the world. Although the digital turn on a mass scale had already happened in China more than a decade ago, the environmental issues, especially in the ethnic borderlands, conveyed through media remain a highly sensitive concern subjected to the state’s stringent censorship. While it is usually the brown pollution problems that draw more immediate social attention, the green issues of accelerated environmental resource degradation are actually more crucial to long-term ecological sustainability. These green forests, nature reserves, and grasslands in China almost completely coincide with the lands inhabited by non-Han ethnic minorities. Unlike other rural areas suffering from ecological injustice where local struggles for the (re-)distribution and access to natural resources are at least recognized, the contentious environmental politics in the ethnic minority regions have often been categorized by the state apparatuses as simply ethnic (separatist) revolts threatening national security. Any protest about the environmental problems in the ethnic areas would be seen by the state authorities not merely as an ecology protection issue but rather as some illicit ethnic motive at best, or those involved could even be accused as accomplices of separatist movements at worst. By charging the environmental activists in the ethnic regions of inciting national separatism, the officials could effectively suppress, with the label of ethnopolitics, the rural resentment and ignore the complicated factors arising from political ecology.10 Ironically, the trendy Chinese term “yuan shengtai” (literally “original ecology”) is almost fully overlapped with the image of ethnic minority groups.11 The Chinese state’s active engagement in national-scale ecological modernization and conservation measures from the top-down has been carried out always at the expense of the marginalized ethnic minority communities. Nevertheless, it was the peripheral Tibet that played a constitutive role in the development of the mainstream Chinese environmental movement in the 1990s. The rare golden snub-nosed monkey in northwest Yunnan and its neighbouring areas of the Tibet Autonomous Region is endangered by habitat loss caused by logging industries. The campaign to stop logging in order to save the species from extinction began in the mid-1990s and gradually became a significant incentive to galvanize China’s environmental protection movement. Another major campaign for ecological justice in China took place in late 1990s about Kekexili, a high-altitude area in Qinghai, which has been desolated by illegal gold mining and illegal poaching of the endangered Tibetan antelope on a large scale. The illegal poaching of Tibetan antelopes was triggered by a rise in consumer demand for shawls made of the antelope’s

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down hair. The protection campaign soon gained its national momentum, and its advocacy for halting the trade of antelope’s skin has even been circulated worldwide. The story of the self-organized Tibetans patrolling in the region for illegal hunters was adapted into a film entitled Kekexili: Mountain Patrol directed by Lu Chuan in 2004. The platforms of these two major environmental campaigns were all located at the Tibetan Plateau (also known in China as the Qinghai-­ Tibetan Plateau) and associated with animals and Tibetan culture. The 1990s was also the time that popular Chinese representations of Tibet resonated with the Shangri-la fantasy from the Western world, in which Tibetans were exoticized as simple but spiritual people with ancient wisdom and mysterious attachment to nature. The general notion that Tibetan traditional culture and religion (such as sacred land practices) are beneficial for nature conservation and biodiversity became popularized in Chinese media. It may not be too surprising that cultural Tibet (not merely the Tibet Autonomous Region) has occupied the heart of the early Chinese environmental protection movement because the Tibetan Plateau remains home to much of China’s endangered wildlife. Additionally, animals became the focal point of the environmental campaigns in China because conservation of wildlife was regarded as a relatively safe and non-­ political issue in comparison to the movement against pollution from some factories or big state enterprises. It was also the time that Tibetan activists could appropriate environmentalism to assert their cultural identity and to promote their tradition as a source of ecological inspiration to the majority.12 However, in the twenty-first century, accompanied by the digital turn of filmmaking, the space that had been open to the environmental politics in the ethnic minority regions is no longer there, and the positive popular image of Tibet after the 2008 Tibetan unrest has also been replaced by the old prejudices and official propaganda that Tibetans were dirty, superstitious and violent barbarians to be liberated by modern China, even if waves of romanticizing Tibet as a pure land are recurring in later periods.13 As a result, any concerns about the environmental problems in relation to the ethnic communities could not be expressed in a direct, straightforward manner. Animals thus become one of the possible metaphors in the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic sense to deal with the ethnic politics, given the historical reality that imperial China has classified its barbarian ethnonyms with the association of nonhuman animals, and the historical entanglement of species and races. It is by no means accidental

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that the written Chinese names of the non-Han groups within or in the vicinity of the Han-based Chinese empires contain components that intentionally associate those peoples with animal or wilderness.14 Non-Han ethnic groups living beyond the influences of Confucian civilization have been considered as “lesser man,” “lesser human,” or “bare life,” whose lives are not counted as civilian lives and generally excluded from the membership of human community. They are reduced to the vagaries of natural wilderness and connected to nonhuman species. As mentioned earlier, there is rarely any computer-generated animal in the films about China’s ethnic minorities for various reasons (Raman Hui’s Monster Hunt series and Stephen Chow’s Mermaid [2016] probably cannot be counted as ethnic minority films). Still, I would argue that, thinking digitally, the political potential of becoming-animal could be an option in these productions. If the digital can be understood philosophically or ontologically, to digitize means to divide the one into two.15 The operation of the digital is the process of making discrete of the fluid or the integral by turning everything into a binarism of zero and one; that is to say, the one is extended beyond its bounds by splitting itself into an external object. It is a process of producing and maintaining identity differences between two or more elements. At a first glance, digitization is a mechanical process of encoding or translating information into binary language (discrete amount of zeros and ones) that can be programmed by a computer. Seemingly, digitization makes all materials, such as films, photographs, sound recordings, the same, in order to homogenize them machine-readable by the strings of binary codes, of bits and bytes. While splintering things into standardized binary atoms, digitization also produces relations for different aggregates of entities that may have absolutely nothing to do with one another. In other words, the digital always transcends and traverses the condition of its own being by connecting with the other, but not merging the differences into the one. While cinema may be reborn through the digital, the digital image can be produced in the computer from a data set but not necessarily recording from the indexical reference of any reality. In other words, the human perspectival perception could be entirely replaced by a totally manipulated data space of machinic vision, as mentioned earlier. The ontology of digital image is radically autonomous from any natural or cinematic vision. That explains why Deleuze in his Cinema 2 book has attempted to establish a prerequisite for the cinema of digital image: he thinks digitization is worthless in itself if it is not put to the service of a powerful “new will to art.”16

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So must art affirm its bodily origin, and the processing of computer data remains correlated with embodied organic (human or animal) capacities. The decreasing role of human perception in cinematic digitization may urge Deleuze to underscore the aesthetic correlationism, of which digital image cannot be thought apart from a subject, language, affection, or will. As digital cinema brings out the fact that image no longer necessarily exists for the human subject and thus can have the potential to provide a third perspective that would allow a differentiation between things as they appear to human vision or being structured by human mind, and things as they are in themselves, the digital operation thus has the potential to connect with the ecological politics through its depiction of the animal from a non-anthropocentric vision. As Timothy Morton points out, “thinking ecology is about thinking relationships,” since ecology is an open-ended structure without centre or edge.17 The digital and the natural, though distinct and both being independent of human will or belief, perhaps could be conjoined as parts of a greater connective force. Such connection could be grasped as a kind of becoming. Becoming-animal may function as a strategy to the oppression of state politics, a kind of negative politics against the delimitation imposed by the state’s political normativity. Animal condition of life can be an integral part of the bio-political management regulated by the state bureaucratic mechanism, but it can also be a potential flight from the political control of the state. In the anthropocentric perspective, animals are judged to be unable to demand a right to justice in the face of a wrong done onto them. The protection of animal lives and their welfare are usually carried out in the name of the progress of human ethics and of sustaining the ecosystem. Due to its lack of agency, an animal would not be counted as anything significant in any political relationships. That means becoming-animal will never develop into any political programme that can present itself as an explicit challenge or subversion against the state authority, and a rebellious political programme as such would only invite the state surveillance and even rapid suppression. In that sense, becoming-animal is more like a subtle form of resistance (or a hidden transcript) that pushes politics and political concept beyond their anthropocentric or anthropomorphic limits.18 Becoming-animal is a zone of being-at-the-edge or at-the-border which opens up the boundary between human and animal. This borderline experience of becoming-animal is about getting in touch with the animality or the affects of animal within us by traversing or crossing over to the animal

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zone. The affects do not define and delineate a concrete space, but some kinds of feeling or sensation of pain or wrong committed against a human or animal. This zone of animal is not an external space, but an adjacent space that may sidestep from the capture of the state apparatuses. It is an affective connection or a communicative feeling that human and animal can share. The affective zone is not predicated on any language or logocentric system. Nor can it be easily rationalized, articulated, or represented by anthropocentric rhetoric. When the outside becomes more and more impossible, there may be a possibility to look for an alternative by resisting from within, that is to say, one can do it by connecting to the adjacent space. Becoming is a double process in the sense that, by becoming-­ animal, one remains a human (at least in corporeal form). However, something imperceptible is also taking place by deterritorializing one from the anthropocentrism and traversing us toward the animal affects. As Deleuze and Guattari say, “what is animal, vegetable, mineral, or human in us is now indistinct.”19 But becoming-animal is not a thorough fusion between human and animal. It is not a Hollywood-styled special effect of morphing or transforming a human body visibly through a seamless transition into an animal form. Instead, it is more subterranean that something invisible is occurring at the edges of the human form, closing into an adjacent space that remains as a blind spot to the gaze of the state apparatuses. The politics of becoming-animal is a kind of micro-politics or molecular politics intended to set free the intensive multiplicities that exceed and escape the codification of the state apparatuses that coercively impose a restricted national identity on the governed.

Animal Films in the Chinese Ecological State Post-socialist China has designated itself as an environmental state, advocating the principle of sustainable development with the double focus on environmental concerns and economic growth in the narrative of ecological modernization, a dream scenario for resolving the antagonism or contradictions generated by the new development. As China aspires to become a world leader of digital transformation, the regime has also begun to integrate its digital revolution with the project of ecological civilization. Through the intelligent use of big data, the government experiments with new ways of cyber system to manage water, energy, traffic, waste, and food flows in those “smart cities.”20 State-led digital development has been put to use in ecological management. The state territorialization at the

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borderlands appears in the forms of modernization, economic development, and rescue mission on the ecologically threatened areas mostly in China’s Northwest, and the state’s development projects with environmental protection schemes in these regions have been creating new nationalized spaces to replace the ancestral places of origin of the ethnic minority groups who assert their rights based on “primitive” historical links between humanity and nature. The nationalization process at the ethnic border areas is carried out through a modernization campaign with a relatively high profile of a discourse of state environmentalism. Such nationalization, however, cannot be entirely equivalent to internal colonization, since it is not merely about the unilateral expropriation of resources at the peripheries to the greater benefit of the cultural-political core and the extension of the core through the migration of the Han population with civilizing imperative to the borderlands. For instance, the “Open Up the West” campaign (xibu dakaifa 西部大 開發) from the 1990s aims at achieving economic growth, social stability, and environmental protection at the borderlands by integrating the ethnic regions with better-developed central areas to deepen the interdependence between the core and the peripheries. While the establishment of closer core-peripheries relations through ecological modernization seems nothing but just another hierarchical system, China’s further growth counts on the domestic energy and other natural resources from the ethnic minority regions, instead of importing them from abroad. Hence, these new ecological construction programmes of the Great Western Development campaign actually imply a reinforcement of the long-­ standing territorialization of western China as the provider of natural resources as well as of ecological services needed by the rest of China. Yet such reinforcement of the western regions as the ecological service provider also reveals the ecological vulnerability of the core. In more than a symbolic sense, the ethnic regions have been “digitized” by the central government with the reinforcement of dividing the one into two (i.e. centre and peripheries) by connecting them in a more effective way while not merging them in the sense of eliminating the hierarchy of the two. While avoiding directly tackling the socio-political realities, some ethnic minority films by Western, Han, and ethnic minority filmmakers, such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem; Wang Xuebo’s Knife in the Clear Water (2016); Pema Tseden’s The Grassland (2004), Old Dog (2011), or Tharlo (2015); and Ning Cai’s Season of the Horse (2004), with its focus on the animal issue, deal with the human relationships with animals (as

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wildlife, pet, and domesticated beasts) in order to explore and investigate human nature (including human instincts, drives, greed, capability, and behaviour). In comparison to the animals, these films show us that man actually knows very little about nature, including his own. For example, in Knife in the Clear Water, a story about the Hui community in Ningxia Province, the male protagonist laments that he does not know when his natural death will come. But the ox his family is going to slaughter for religious rituals becomes aware of its imminent death and stops eating weeks before the doom day comes. These films tell us how animal has been perceived by human, and such perception reveals more about humanity than about the animal: animal as pet implies the human desire for control and manipulation of things other than himself; animal as a form of wisdom informs human self-reflection of his own limits; and animal as an admirable quality that human lacks but attempts to emulate; some human is as vulnerable as animal in a so-called civilized world. Animals in these films about ethnic minorities stand for a world of nature and beauty that seeks an unlikely autonomy from the wrecking and reconstruction of state-led (ecological) modernization. Digital cinema, for these filmmakers, remains to record and reflect reality, though in a twisted sense. In Pema Tseden’s Old Dog, the Tibetan mastiff has become a precious object to newly rich Han Chinese to show off their class status. This rare breed, being nullified of its ability to herd and protect sheep, is now sold for feverish prices as urban rich people’s pets. If the Tibetan owner refuses to sell the dog, the mastiff is destined to be stolen. The world the Tibetans inhabit in Old Dog is coated with mud and dust, a middle of nowhere between a rundown town and a developing resettlement (representing a new place of loss, alienation, and dehumanization), which has silenced the majority of life in that world and rendered many of the survivors sterile or mentally inactive—lacking history or continuity, necessarily sterile in the reproduction (of a national narrative). The digital video, with the technique of DI (digital intermediate), intentionally makes the Tibetan community look dismal, contrasting the scenic Tibet image viewers usually have in their minds. Those Tibetans with means might have left the villages to make their homes in this semi-modernized town. Those remaining in the rural area raise animals, but the effects of economic development keep penetrating and disturbing their pastoral lives. The state policy of “tuimu huancao” (退牧還草, restoring pastures to grasslands) to implement nature conservation and to fight against deserti-

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fication by banning grazing (permanently or for some periods of time) and resettling the ethnic herders to small towns effectively enhances the government’s control over the territory.21 The ethnic communities develop stronger resentment and suspicion against the state’s greening governance as a conspiracy to expropriate their grassland (with short-term subsidies) in the name of ecological protection and to urbanize their cultures (through ecological migration resettlement programmes) in order to eliminate their ethnic differences. Pema Tseden’s film does not directly touch on such politically sensitive issues, though hints can be detected. There is a scene in Old Dog captured by the DV camera: a sheep which is alone on the other side of a barbed-wire fence struggles single-mindedly to jump over the fence in an attempt to return to its flock in real time without editing. Failing repeatedly to leap over the wire, the sheep finally finds a hole that it can pass through to return to its band. Although the scene is not planned, the fence that creates the drama is not there by accident. The state’s enforced policy of fencing the grassland in the name of environmental protection for grazing restrictions has actually created more difficulties for the Tibetan pastoralists. The Tibetan herders may benefit slightly from the government’s compensation and free fencing, but they also have to greatly reduce the livestock numbers, and some even need to give up their traditional lifestyle altogether and resettle in the newly built towns created by the government. Throughout the scene, the patient long take with the mostly static DV camera in natural lighting makes the desperate action of the sheep unfold from a distance. The animal is in embedded communication with the concerned audiences, enriching and substantializing their understanding of the immediate circumstances Tibetan herders and their animals are facing. Becoming-animal in this sense is sharing the emotions with the animal and also is a sympoiesis, a making together, rather than a self-making (autopoiesis). The sheep here is more than a metaphor, or a companion to humans. Its feelings and senses become part of the human subject who thinks and acts with it (Fig. 11.1). Identifying with the affect of the animal can also be found in other work, though the implication could be very different. In the novel Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, the wolf is more a metaphor than a living being, and it is associated with masculinity, strength, aggressiveness, and toughness. These attributes of the wolf are characteristics the author feels Han Chinese must relearn for China to become a competitive nation in the aggressive domain of the international stage. Yet in Annaud’s adaptation, the nation-

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Fig. 11.1  The sheep attempts to cross the barbed wire in Old Dog

alist inclination of the novel has been toned down and the story shifts its focus on ecological balance and becomes more sympathetic to the Mongolian nomads. Surprisingly, the movie did not closely toe the party line, though it cautiously avoids any sensitive issues related to its Cultural Revolution historical setting. Perhaps the Chinese authorities really want so much to submit this film to the Oscar’s foreign-language entry that it is allowed to assert itself on behalf of the ethnic minority and to direct explicit criticisms at the Han settlers and even the Communist cadres in the Mongolian steppes. The film rather anachronistically uses the contemporary environmentalist discourse to criticize the 1960s and 1970s China but not the current society. Annaud’s film puts great emphasis on the ecological message of natural balance that plays an important part in the Mongolian relationship with the animals and landscapes around them, and it implicitly acknowledges how a centuries-old nomadic lifestyle is quickly being destroyed by the country’s modernization campaign. Through the mouth of the Mongolian grandfather Bilig, audiences learn how grass, gazelles, and wolves all exist in balance as part of a larger whole. None of them should be eliminated. Nor should they grow too fast. It was primarily the Han majority who represent the so-called progressive force of modernization that wrecks the delicate balance of nature on the plains in the ethnic minority region.

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The Han people destroy the animals’ food sources in order to make quick money—meat and fur are highly sought-after commodities—and they kill the wolves’ young cubs. As a result, the wolves are angry and they come back to the human world for revenge. The Han communities burn the grassland and begin sedentary agricultural farming in the unsuitable soil. Even the Han “zhiqing” character (知青, literally educated youth, or sent-­ down youth, who have left, voluntarily or unwillingly, the urban areas to live and work in the countryside under the calling of the Cultural Revolution) from Beijing, who identifies himself very much with the Mongol tribe, has made a stupid mistake: his decision to adopt and rear a wolf cub has almost toppled the natural order and brought disaster to the village. The Party official supports such a move, which has been considered insane from the Mongolian viewpoint. Unlike the novel, in the film adaptation, it is the young wolf the Han protagonist adopted that becomes the surviving wolf after the extensive hunting in the grassland. In the last scene of the movie, the Han protagonist, after departing with his released young wolf, saw a CGI wolf cloud in the blue sky, which probably suggests that only the virtual animal can survive in the steppes undergoing drastic changes. But such an ambivalent ending may also imply that the future belongs to the wolf species hanging up in the sky (Fig. 11.2). Ambiguities could also be easily found in Knife in the Clear Water, the debut by Wang Xuebo, who produced Pema Tseden’s Tharlo. The story offers a rare glimpse into the Hui community, a Chinese-speaking Muslim group, as well as into their faith and views about life and death. Adapted

Fig. 11.2  Cloud in the shape of wolf in Wolf Totem

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from a novella by a Hui writer, Shi Shuqing (石舒青), the film quietly observes a Ningxia Hui village’s dire poverty and probably disappearing agrarian lifestyle. The villagers struggle to farm the bare soil under the inhospitable nature of their environments. The old man wants his son to return from the town to help him farm, but the son believes it is easier to find jobs in town to feed the young mouths at home, suggesting the age-­ old agricultural community is already on its way to dissolution and disappearance. Though the second largest of China’s ethnic minorities, the Hui have been seldom represented on the big screen during the past 60-odd years in the PRC’s film history. The Chinese-speaking Hui’s less exotic and colourful culture, their assimilation into the mainstream society, their dispersal in many Chinese cities, and, in sum, their lack of distinguishable cultural differences, even though some of their communities are located in often very poor regions, may explain for their relative neglect by Chinese filmmakers. Not being a Muslim himself, the Han director Wang depended heavily for years on his ethnic Tibetan assistants to find the appropriate unprofessional cast in the local Hui villages in Ningxia to come up with the ideal setting and suitable actors. Wang was fascinated by the original novella to make up his mind in carrying out the film project. Some projection of the “ecologically noble native” trope may have evoked the notion that the Hui village life being unadulterated by modernity could be in harmony with the environment. The sentimental longing for a primitive lifestyle that is still in complete harmony with nature indeed prevails in contemporary Chinese society under the consumption craving for “original ecology.” The film may cater to the mainstream desire for a pure, simple environmental other. General Chinese viewers, including the state authorities, probably did not see the film as saturated with strong ethnic or religious contents: it is just the story of a peasant family that happens to be ethnic Muslim, with similar environmental issues and financial pressures as anybody else in such a situation. And with its non-professional cast, little dialogue, and focus on often inexpressive faces, the film mainly lets the audience decide what the characters are feeling and thinking. Like many other peasant films, this one draws from the usual arty toolkit of thin dramatic content, peasant ­characters against bleak but stunning landscapes, introverted exchanges of dialogue, little explanation of who the characters are, and a deliberate absence of music. No explicit comment is made on the traditional mode of subsistence farming or the sustainable development connected with

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modernization. The setting of the film is a rather isolated village with low population density, minimal technology, and self-sufficiency orientation. Producing melancholic visions of Northwest China, the film shows the family is struggling to sustain itself by securing basic things like water, grass, and even soft earth (for the bull’s pen) in an arid moonscape or desert-like landscape. A sudden downpour of rains provokes a joyous scene of the village family utilizing every pot and pan they have to catch the rain before it is lost. There is no running water or electricity, and the farming community scrapes by growing potatoes, herding sheep, and gathering wild grass for their livestock. The film was shot on-location at Xihaigu (西海固) in southern Ningxia, which is considered a place unsuitable for human habitation because of its infertile land and lack of water. The Chinese state would boast that, in such a notoriously inhospitable region, extensive relocation programmes have been undertaken by the authorities, since no one in their right mind from the state perspective actually wants to live there, however photogenic it may be. While the film does not unequivocally touch on any sensitive issue related to the sustainable development launched in the region, critics have already pointed out that the investments brought by the state-led Western Development Campaign are limited to some specific spectacular infrastructure projects, but these construction works of great magnitude do not directly and immediately benefit the local communities. Those projects related to the environment would even lead to opposing effects in terms of lowering local residents’ income and living standards and of exacerbating poverty.22 What has not been stated in the film is that Hui villagers prefer harvesting rainwater to the state’s centralized piped water system because this new water system means more centralized control and management from the state power.23 Yet woven into this rugged and often destitute existence is the prevailing spirituality of Islamic ritual that informs every part of the Hui community. Ceremonies of prayer and meditation infuse meaning into every occasion—from the slaughtering of livestock to the blessing of a newborn child. The absence of any scripted musical soundtrack in the film is compensated by the chorus of daily chants and spontaneous prayers. On the day of his wife’s burial, the old villager Ma has to plan for the Muslim religious observance ceremony to be held on the 40th-day mourning period after her passing. No longer interested in continuing the family’s farming, his son pleads with him to slaughter their only bull to feed the large number of guests who will come to pay respects. The farmer has

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no grounds to refuse: his wife deserves to be honoured for working hard all her life, and the bull is old and has little strength left to plough the fields. Yet, he cannot part with the animal that, much like his wife, laboured submissively for him all its life, especially since he has already lost his closest companion. As he has developed a kind of grumpy companionship with the animal over the years, the old man tenderly cares for the bull, washing it and feeding it. Hui’s traditional wisdom holds that when an animal has been marked for slaughter, the beast can see the reflection of a knife in the way (the butcher’s knife being sharpened in clear water) and reacts with fear. As if aware of its impending doom, the bull loses its appetite and stops eating and drinking. The old Hui peasant may see something of himself in the loyal old beast. In this sense, human and animal are not in a binary relationship. Instead, they are engaged in a kind of co-­ evolution, coexistence, and collaboration. Both of them are approaching the end of their natural lifespans, as is the infertile, hardscrabble land that characterizes their village. The film reveals a shared vision between human and animal about a world based on fate, and a vision about the animal as part of a religious community and more than just a tool for livelihood. It also conveys the peace and piety of the Hui community during worship even if it is in severe poverty. The film also conveys how the Islamic faith is dominant in the community. The Imam’s advice transcends the old man’s guilt towards the bull, turning the consultation into a lesson on how to accept one’s role in God’s chain of being. Some silent scenes in which the old man reads the Quran under a frail, swaying oil lamp at night, and how he uses a very small amount of water to clean his body before praying present a strong Muslim devotion to religion. Quiet and detached depiction of everyday Islamic ritual in rural China, including prayers, ablutions (water purification), and other practices, radiate a sense of inner tranquillity. The frame of the film is converted to a 4:3 aspect ratio to present an aesthetic akin to a rotating gallery of oil paintings. Defying the common practice of screening windswept rural landscapes in the widest proportions possible, the film is making a statement that there is no mere exploitation of exotic geographical vistas. Its dark lighting of primitive, electricity-free household interiors and blending of human figures into striking images of dry, barren mountainous terrain in Ningxia decidedly evoke a sense of rural lyricism. The digital film in this sense does not serve as an indexical media of recording reality, but functions like a subgenre of painting.24 Depicting in a still-image-like mode the peasant subjects, rural scenes, and

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how these human figures are in complete harmony with their surroundings, Wang’s film may be rather similar to many other Chinese ethnic literatures in that its sole aim is to aestheticize ethnic figures and their activities with no drama or story told. The aesthetic representations of the landscape of resigned austerity, along with the misery and ragged clothes of the Hui peasants, may capture the dignity and strength of these people in a rather universal sense. The digitized aestheticization of the images as oil paintings (suggesting a sense of slowness not necessarily in contrast to but covering up the digital acceleration) may depoliticize the ethnic subject matters in the specific social context and also convey an aura of spirituality that carries political implications and imbrications. Historically, the Hui Muslim community has been considered as a violent ethnic group that has a long rebellion record against the state. The film however portrays the old Muslim and his bull as passive animals accepting their fate and adverse conditions of life with strong religious faith. What is revealing in the film is that it is the Islamic faith that sustains and transcends their hard life, not the government-led development. Islam’s commitment to its religious moral order has posed challenges to the materialist model of Chinese modernity and the secular state sovereignty.25

Coda The concept of political ecology challenges the universality of the Anthropocene discourse by unearthing the strata of class, racial, sexual, and other differences buried under the supposedly undifferentiated “Anthropos.” Complex and messy politics have been played out in different domains as China has shifted the blame of the Anthropocene to the West for its adverse effects of colonialism and capitalism, while the Chinese state-sponsored modernization campaign has ravaged the ethnic regions and exploited the resources there. With the double meanings of the Anthropocene—that humans triumph in their all-conquering activities and the possible collapse of their civilization, the distinction between human and animal in the multispecies context as traditionally defined and policed in the apparatuses of knowledge and power could be questioned, and a less human-centred vision brought by the digital image can be further explored as well. The mechanism of animalizing both humans and animals as a conventional oppressive tool and strategy to rationalize violence against the marginalized groups has been reflected in those films

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discussed earlier. The digital films about China’s ethnic minorities and their living conditions endeavour to create a different space of environmental imagination and to actively reshape the inherited cultural forms and subjectivities in the ongoing and indeterminate historical transition. The Anthropocene has a strong implication that human activities, with the (ab)use of machines for profit-making and political control, are rapidly steering the planet towards an environmental condition to which machines are more adaptable while the human or all organic bodies are not—turning atmosphere, soil, and water by their toxic excretions and carcasses into a circumstance that is poisonous to mammals, fish, birds, frogs, or even most multicellular life forms. The Anthropocene does not merely mean the age of human destruction, but the times that the machines are transforming the Earth into their liveable milieu, hostile to organic life. Eventually machines will outcompete humans for resources—that superior robotics or artificial intelligence would surely affect humans as biological humans have affected countless species. Didn’t digitization already reveal such a looming picture?

Notes 1. Both the eighteenth and the nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012 and 2017, respectively, have announced plans to build an “ecological civilization” for the Chinese nation. See, also, Jiahua Pan, China’s Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization (New York: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg & China Social Sciences Press, 2016). 2. See Paul Virilio, Grey Ecology, trans. Drew Burk (New York: Atropos Press, 2009). 3. The concept of three interconnected ecologies in the scale of self, society, and nature was originally formulated by Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, in which ecology is understood more than a concern for the environment, but an epistemological system. See Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London & New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone Press, 2000); Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (London & Northvale, N.J.: 1987). 4. Scientists found that billions of populations in both common and rare nonhuman species have been lost in recent decades. They blame human overpopulation and overconsumption for the crisis and warn that a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and is more severe than previously

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feared. See Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R.  Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo, “Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines,” PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) 10 July 2017, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/05/1704949114 5. See, for instance, Lü Xinyu, Jilu Zhongguo: dangdai Zhongguo xinjilupian yundong (Recording China: Contemporary Chinese New Documentary Movement), (Beijing: Joint Publishing Co., 2003). 6. Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, “Introduction,” The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: for the Public Record. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 3–13. 7. Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, “Introduction,” DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), 10. 8. Anne Thompson, “How Jean-Jacques Annaud Made Mongolian Survival Tale ‘Wolf Totem,’” IndieWire, 23 September 2015, http://www. indiewire.com/2015/09/how-jean-jacques-annaud-made-mongoliansurvival-tale-wolf-totem-exclusive-video-180974/ 9. See, for instance, Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 10. Emily Yeh, “The Politics of Conservation in Contemporary Rural China,” Journal of Peasant Studies 40.6 (2013): 1165–1188. 11. The term was first used to refer to traditional folksongs. See Qiao Jianzhong, “Yuan shengtai minge suoyi” (Some Observations on Native Folksongs), Renmin yinyue (People’s Music) 1 (2006): 26–27. See also the chapter by Chuen-Fung Wong in this anthology. 12. Emily T.  Yeh, “Tibet in China’s Environmental Movement,” in On the Fringes of the Harmonious Society: Tibetans and Uyghurs in Socialist China, ed. Trine Brox and Ildikó Bellér-Hann (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2014), 235–262. 13. For a detailed analysis of the 2008 unrest in Tibet, see Robert Barnett, “The Tibet Protests of Spring, 2008: Conflict between the Nation and the State,” China Perspectives 79 (2009): 6–23. For China’s recent craving for Brand Tibet, see the chapter by Chris Berry in this anthology. 14. Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Animal Other: China’s Barbarians and Their Renaming in the Twentieth Century,” Social Text 29.4 (2012): 57–79. 15. Alexander R.  Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2014), 52. 16. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989), 266.

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17. Timothy Morton, “Ecology,” Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, ed. Claire Colebrook (London & New York: Routledge, 2014), 41. 18. For the politics of becoming-animal, see Irving Goh, “Becoming-Animal: Transversal Politics,” Diacritics 39.2 (2009): 37–57. The term “hidden transcript” comes from James C.  Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 19. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 174. 20. “China’s ‘smart cities’ to number 500 before end of 2017,” China Daily, 21 April 2017, http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-04/21/ content_29024805.htm 21. Studies have shown that the compensation offered by the government to the herders is too low, and the herdsmen have difficulties finding new jobs when they give up their animals and traditional livelihoods because of such ecological policy. See, for instance, Zhao Chengzhang, Wang Xiaopeng, et  al., “Tuimuhuancaoqu nongmumin jiatingshouru jiegouzhuanxingxiaoyi” (退牧還草區農牧民家庭收入結構轉型效益 The Effects on Income Restructuring of Agro-Pastoral Families under the Policy of Restoring Pastures to Grasslands), Jinji deli (Economic Geography) 31.3 (2011): 470– 475; Chen Jie, “Qinghai sheng Sanjiangyuan tuimuhuancao he shengtaiyimin kaocha” (青海省三江源退牧還草和生態移民考察:基于瑪多縣的調 查分析 Survey on the Policy of Restoring Pastures to Grasslands and Ecological Migration in Sanjiang County in Qinghai Province), Qinghai minzu yanjiu (Qinghai Ethnic Studies) 19.1 (2008): 110–115. 22. David S. G. Goodman, “The Campaign to ‘Open Up the West’: National, Provincial-Level and Local Perspectives,” The China Quarterly 178 (2004): 317–334. 23. Afton Clarke-Sather, “State Power and Domestic Water Provision in SemiArid Northwest China: towards an Aleatory Political Ecology,” Political Geography 58 (2017): 93–103. 24. Lev Manovich argues how digital cinema is no longer an art of indexical reality, but is more like animation or painting. See his “What Is Digital Cinema?” The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 2000), 172–266. 25. David Kerr, “Paradoxes of Tradition and Modernity at the New Frontier: China, Islam, and the problem of ‘Different Heavens,’” in China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy, ed. William A. Callahan, & Elena Barabantseva (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 143–179.

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Bibliography Barnett, Robert. 2009. The Tibet Protests of Spring 2008: Conflict Between the Nation and the State. China Perspectives 79: 6–23. Bateson, Gregory. 1987. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. London/Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc. Berry, Chris, and Lisa Rofel. 2010. Introduction. In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, ed. Chris Berry, Xinyu Lu, and Lisa Rofel, 3–13. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Ceballos, Gerardo, Paul R.  Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo. 2017. Biological Annihilation Via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Signaled by Vertebrate Population Losses and Declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/05/1704949114 Chen, Jie. 2008. Qinghaisheng Sanjiangyuan tuimuhuancao he shengtaiyimin kaocha: Jiyu maduoxian de diaocha fenxi [Survey on the Policy of Restoring Pastures to Grasslands and Ecological Migration in Sanjiang County in Qinghai Province]. Qinghai minzu yanjiu [Qinghai Ethnic Studies] 19 (1): 110–115. China’s ‘Smart Cities’ to Number 500 Before End of 2017. 2017. China Daily Online, April 21. http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-04/21/content_29024805.htm. Accessed 17 Aug 2018. Clarke-Sather, Afton. 2017. State Power and Domestic Water Provision in Semi-­ Arid Northwest China: Towards an Aleatory Political Ecology. Political Geography 58: 93–103. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Fiskesjö, Magnus. 2012. The Animal Other: China’s Barbarians and Their Renaming in the Twentieth Century. Social Text 29 (4): 57–79. Galloway, Alexander R. 2014. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Goh, Irving. 2009. Becoming-Animal: Transversal Politics. Diacritics 39 (2): 37–57. Goodman, David S.G. 2004. The Campaign to ‘Open Up the West’: National, Provincial-Level and Local Perspectives. The China Quarterly 178: 317–334. Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London/New Brunswick: The Athlone Press. Kerr, David. 2011. Paradoxes of Tradition and Modernity at the New Frontier: China, Islam, and the Problem of ‘Different Heavens. In China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy, ed. William A. Callahan and Elena Barabantseva, 143–179. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lü, Xinyu. 2003. Jilu Zhongguo: dangdai Zhongguo xinjilupian yundong [Recording China: Contemporary Chinese New Documentary Movement]. Beijing: Joint Publishing Co. Manovich, Lev. 2000. What Is Digital Cinema? In The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld, 172–266. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Morton, Timothy. 2014. Ecology. In Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, ed. Claire Colebrook. London/New York: Routledge. Pan, Jiahua. 2016. China’s Environmental Governing and Ecological Civilization. New York: Springer/China Social Sciences Press. Qiao, Jianzhong. 2006. Yuan shengtai min’ge suoyi [Some Observations on Native Folksongs]. Renmin yinyue [People’s Music] 1: 26–27. Scott, James C. 1992. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thompson, Anne. 2015. How Jean-Jacques Annaud Made Mongolian Survival Tale ‘Wolf Totem’. IndieWire, September 23. http://www.indiewire. com/2015/09/how-jean-jacques-annaud-made-mongolian-survival-talewolf-totem-exclusive-video-180974/ Virilio, Paul. 2009. Grey Ecology. Trans. Drew Burk. New York: Atropos Press. Yeh, Emily T. 2013. The Politics of Conservation in Contemporary Rural China. Journal of Peasant Studies 40 (6): 1165–1188. ———. 2014. Tibet in China’s Environmental Movement. In On the Fringes of the Harmonious Society: Tibetans and Uyghurs in Socialist China, ed. Trine Brox and Ildikó Bellér-Hann, 235–262. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Zhang, Zhen, and Angela Zito. 2015. Introduction. In DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations After Independent Film, ed. Zhen Zhang and Angela Zito, 10. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Zhao, Chengzhang, Xiaopeng Wang, et al. 2011. Tuimuhuancaoqu nongmumin jiatingshouru jiegou zhuanxing xiaoyi [The Effects on Income Restructuring of Agro-Pastoral Families Under the Policy of Restoring Pastures to Grasslands]. Jinji deli [Economic Geography] 31 (3): 470–475.

CHAPTER 12

Pristine Tibet? The Anthropocene and Brand Tibet in Chinese Cinema Chris Berry

Introduction How might awareness of the Anthropocene shape our critical practice as analysts of Chinese cinemas? This chapter offers one answer to that question by examining the representation of Tibet in contemporary feature films from the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—both those made by Tibetans and those made by non-Tibetans. These films are part of a “Tibet fever” (Xizang re [西藏熱]) that has swept across China in the last few decades, at more or less the same time as the idea of the Anthropocene has taken off globally. The Anthropocene is a highly debated concept, but it is widely understood to mean that human activity has altered the physical condition of our entire planet irreversibly and is endangering our survival. In contrast, the Tibet fever is invested—in every sense—in a brand image of Tibet as pristine and pure. In these circumstances, representations of Tibet in Chinese film, as part of the pristine Tibet image, are part of a zone of imagined exception to the Anthropocene and a way of thinking that constitutes a blockage to engagement with the Anthropocene. As such, they

C. Berry (*) King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_12

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constitute a privileged site for a critical reading practice that can enable a deeper understanding of that way of thinking and also search for the loose threads that might help to unravel it. The idea of the Anthropocene began to take off with the new century. In 2000, the Nobel laureate and atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer argued in Global Change, the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, that “it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind [sic] in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.”1 Some scholars within the field of stratigraphy have questioned the applicability of the concept from a strict geological perspective.2 However, Crutzen and Stoermer’s idea has struck a chord well beyond stratigraphy; the term has acquired a capital letter, and the focus of the field of debate about the Anthropocene has moved on from questions about its existence to questions such as when it started. In their original article, Crutzen and Stoermer date the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Susanne Weigelin-­ Schwiedrzik notes that in China, discussion of the Anthropocene began very soon after the term was coined in English.3 Liu Dongsheng (劉東生), the geologist in whose papers she traces the translation of “Anthropocene” as renleishi (人類世), has an even more long-term view than Crutzen and Stoermer. He dates the origin back 10,000 years to when humanity began using and exploiting natural resources.4 In contrast, a more recent English-­ language article signed by over two hundred scholars selects the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945 as the watershed moment.5 This is now perhaps the most commonly accepted date. At stake in the different datings of the Anthropocene are both its definition and its implications. As Weigelin-Schwiedrzik astutely notes, choosing an early starting point implies a more moderate definition such as measurable human impact. If this definition means the Anthropocene has already been underway for thousands of years and we are still here, it can imply less urgency over the need for action.6 On the other hand, the 1945 atomic explosion was followed by global fallout, and therefore defines the Anthropocene as marking not just measurable human impact but the point of irreversible and global human impact, albeit impact that may be felt in different ways in different places. Furthermore, atomic fallout signifies that this impact is extremely dangerous. This chapter works with that definition and the attendant need to face the consequences of the Anthropocene if we are to ensure sustainability.

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Of course, Liu Dongsheng’s position in his 2004 essay does not mean there remains low awareness of the dangers of human impact on the environment in the PRC. Perhaps the most notorious evidence of this is the viral popularity of the 2015 online documentary about pollution by Chai Jing (柴靜) called Under the Dome (穹頂之下), which attracted 300 million viewers before being suppressed.7 Yet the suppression of that documentary also indicates reluctance to engage with the idea of pollution and environmental damage as part of a larger existential threat. In what follows, I trace the rise of pristine Tibet as a popular brand image in the market economy of the People’s Republic, and therefore as a zone of imagined exception to the Anthropocene that constitutes a blockage to engaging with it. The chapter argues that, as a way of thinking, pristine Tibet constitutes a reversal of the denigrating image of Tibet that was dominant in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) until quite recently, but that it is still part of a larger pattern of othering. Therefore, although issues of ethnic minoritization and the blockage around the Anthropocene cannot be conflated, they are parallel structures that may be mutually reinforcing. In other words, does challenging the pristine Tibet image with its implication of a zone of exception to the Anthropocene also challenge the thinking that others Tibet and affirms the PRC’s advanced status? If so, a precondition to engaging with the Anthropocene is challenging minoritization and othering of Tibet, and vice versa. The final two sections of the chapter explore how a critical reading practice might be conducted as part of that process of challenging othering and engaging with the Anthropocene. These sections argue that combating othering requires reading against the grain in the case of films about Tibet by non-Tibetan filmmakers working inside the PRC to undo the imagining of a pristine Tibet. In the case of recent cinema by Tibetan filmmakers, the texts themselves challenge othering, but still require an active reading process if they are to be brought into an engagement with the Anthropocene.

Pristine Tibet If the rising discourse around the Anthropocene is evidence of increasing worry about the health of the planet and sustainability, the image of Tibet in Chinese popular culture seems to stand as a zone of imagined exception. Scholarship on place branding is usually associated with strategy and focuses on government policies and promotional campaigns.8 Yet the emergence of a kind of “Brand Tibet” in the Sinosphere can also be

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­ nderstood through examination of cultural products and patterns of conu sumption. For example, Bloomberg News reported in 2013 that a Beijing entrepreneur was launching a “Pristine Tibet” brand of canned air in response to anxiety about smog in northern China.9 Numerous bottled water companies have similarly exploited the presumed pristine purity of Tibet’s alpine springs.10 In the notorious case of Tibet Spring 5100, the brand was revealed in the Panama Papers to be part-owned by Deng Xiaoping’s niece and run through an offshore company.11 Donghui He has also pointed out that “Tibet is typically referred to in tourist guides as an accessible Buddhist ‘pure land’ (jingtu), two words that allude to the paradisiacal realm of Amitabha Buddha but are now used to evoke a land that is culturally innocent and uncontaminated by industrial pollution.”12 Indeed, current commentaries go further and explicitly mark Tibet’s imagined exceptional status in relation to the polluted Chinese heartland by referring to it with phrases such as “China’s last pure land” (Zhongguo zuihou yifang jingtu [中國最後一方淨土]).13 The commercial promotion of Brand Tibet is part of a larger “Tibet fever” that has swept across the PRC.  When the high-speed railway to Lhasa opened in 2007, three million tourists arrived that year. By 2013, the annual numbers had jumped to 13 million, 97 per cent of them being Chinese domestic tourists.14 In 2002, Zhongdian County in northwest Yunnan, which is part of the larger Tibetan cultural areas of the PRC, extending beyond the province itself, renamed itself Shangri-la (Xiangelila [香格里拉]). This renaming is a process of “place-making” that Åshild Kolås points out is also marked by the reinvention of Tibetan culture.15 Ben Hillman has noted that the tourism boom that has followed this renaming of Zhongdian as Shangri-la has also spurred the revival of Tibetan culture in the area, including Tibetan Buddhism, albeit in tourist-­ friendly forms.16 Just as Chinese travellers have flooded into Tibet, Tibetan culture has also become popular all over China. For example, elements of Tibetan Buddhism have also been adopted widely by Han Chinese Buddhists across the PRC.17 Around the same time that the high-speed railway arrived in Tibet, He Ma (何馬) began publishing his phenomenally popular ten-volume series of novels known in English as The Tibet Code (藏地 密碼). Among the reasons given for the success of the books is the introduction of numerous details about Tibetan culture in a form that is easy for non-Tibetans to understand.18 There was no modern literature produced by Tibetans in the PRC before the 1980s, but when it took off, not

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Table 12.1  Feature films directed by Pema Tseden and Sonthar Gyal Tibetan title གཙང་པ།ོ ང་ཡ་ིཆང་གསལོ་རགོས། ཎི ། གཡང་མདའ། ཐར་ལ།ོ ལག་དམར།

།

Chinese title

English title

Director

Year

太陽總在左邊 河 阿拉姜色 靜靜的嘛呢石 尋找智美更登 老狗 五彩神箭 塔洛 撞死了一隻羊

The Sun Beaten Path River Ala Changso The Silent Holy Stones The Search Old Dog The Sacred Arrow Tharlo Jinpa

Sonthar Gyal Sonthar Gyal Sonthar Gyal Pema Tseden Pema Tseden Pema Tseden Pema Tseden Pema Tseden Pema Tseden

2011 2015 2018 2005 2009 2011 2014 2015 2018

only was it prolific but was also written in both Tibetan and Chinese, at least partly to supply the huge Chinese market.19 Tibetan pop music is another new form popular across China and sung in both languages.20 The production and consumption of feature films have also been participants in the Tibet fever that has formed the new Brand Tibet image. This participation has included the emergence of feature films made by Tibetan directors, amongst whom the most prominent are Pema Tseden ན།, 萬瑪才旦]) and Sonthar Gyal (also known as Wanma Caidan [ ཟ ོ ན ་ཐར་ ། (also known as Songtai Jia [ , 松太加]), both of whom mostly make art films. Their feature films to date are listed in Table 12.1. There have also been many films set in the Tibetan areas of the PRC and directed by non-Tibetan Chinese. Some have been major box-office successes, such as the 1997 historical romance Red River Valley (Hong Hegu [紅河谷]), directed by Feng Xiaoning (馮小寧), and Lu Chuan (陸 川)’s 2004 eco-thriller, Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (可可西里). There are now many hundreds of feature films produced in China each year, so identifying and viewing all of those set in Tibetan areas would be difficult. Still, researching for this chapter has led me to additional films directed by non-­ Tibetan Chinese and made since 2000. Some fall into commercial genres, such as historical romances, sport films, and revolutionary history films. They are listed in Table 12.2. I emphasize that I make no claim that this is a comprehensive list. Viewing those films in Tables 12.1 and 12.2 available to me or looking at their publicity materials reveals that they all feature conventional motifs of Tibet and Tibetan culture, including prayer wheels, mani stones, monks and monasteries, snowy peaks, grasslands, and more. These motifs have

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Table 12.2  A list of some Chinese film productions set in Tibetan areas of the PRC and made since 2000 by non-Tibetan directors Chinese title English title (if known)

Director

Year

Song of Tibet Kekexili: Mountain Patrol 崗拉梅朵 Ganglamedo 西藏往事 Once Upon a Time in Tibet 康定情歌 The Love Song of Kang Ding, a.k.a. A Tibetan Love Song 天脊 The Summit 生死金天鵝 Life and Death Golden Swan 轉山 Kora: One Mile Above 阿米·走步 Friends 藏獒多吉 The Tibetan Dog

Xie Fei (謝飛) Lu Chuan (陸川)

2000 Romance 2003 Eco-drama

Dai Wei (戴瑋) Dai Wei (戴瑋)

2006 Historical romance 2010 Historical romance

Jiang Ping (江平)

2010 Historical romance

益西卓瑪 可可西里

Zhao Peng (趙鹏) Zhou Yupeng (周 玉鵬) Du Jiayi (杜家毅) Ya Ni (亜妮) Kojima Masayuki (小島正幸) 雲中的郎木 Langmusi, My Xu Hongjun (徐 寺 Dreamland 鴻鈞) 華锐嘎布 The Glorious Plains Xu Hongjun (徐 鴻鈞) 馬奈的新娘 Manai’s Bride Han Wanfeng (韓 萬峰) 唐卡 Thangka Hasichaolu (哈斯 朝鲁) 門巴將軍 A Doctor, A General Ma Huilei (馬會 雷) 浮雲 Zero Thousand Li Under Andrew Cheng the Clouds and Moon (程裕蘇) 甘南曼巴 A Doctor’s Choice Zhou Yupeng (周 玉鵬) 德吉的訴訟 Dekyi Metok Wang Yi (王熠) 國旗阿媽 The Salute to the Flag Wang Wenjie (王 文杰) 西藏天空 Phurbu and Tenzin Fu Dongyu (傅東 育) 甘南情歌 The Devil Incarnate Gao Liqiang (髙 力强) 岡仁波齊 Paths of the Soul Zhang Yang (張 揚) 皮繩上的魂 Soul on a String Zhang Yang (張 揚)

Genre (if any)

2010 Sports 2010 Revolutionary history 2011 Sports 2011 Sports 2011 Children’s animation 2012 Historical drama 2012 Family drama 2012 Tragic romance 2012 Family drama 2013 Revolutionary history/ historical romance 2013 2013 Historical romance 2013 Legal drama 2013 Revolutionary history/ biopic 2014 Historical drama 2014 Historical romance 2015 2016 Legendary epic (continued)

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Table 12.2  (continued) Chinese title English title (if known)

Director

Year

Genre (if any)

金珠瑪米, a.k.a. 巴烏, 巴烏 七十七天

The Chainbreakers

Yang Rui (楊蕊)

2017 Historical romance

Seventy-Seven Days

2017 Sports

尋找羅麥

Looking for Rohmer

Zhao Hantang (趙漢唐) Wang Chao (王 超)

2018 Romance

been around for a long time, but what is relatively recent in the PRC is their mobilization as part of a positive image of Tibet.

Othering and the Challenge of Sustainability That the recent Chinese enthusiasm for all things Tibetan represents a big change from the past, “prompting a reevaluation of people once thought to be backward or barbaric,” is widely acknowledged.21 A 2003 essay quotes the Chinese documentary filmmaker and convert to Tibetan Buddhism Wen Pulin, who attributes the older negative image of Tibet to a high-profile 1964 film, usually known in English as Serfs (Nongnu [農奴]): From the Chinese point of view, before the 1970s the totality of the understanding of what people from China proper call “Tibet” came from the film The Serf … The influence that this violent imagery and the vision of this film had on people in the 1960s created the impression of a Tibet that was a hell on earth … a feudal society of unbearable violence, with a dark and terrifying religion.22

This attitude has disappeared almost entirely from the films and other cultural products made in the new century. The last prominent negative example may have been Ma Jian’s 1987 novel, Stick Out Your Tongue.23 Perhaps the storm of protest that followed from all quarters indicated the “hell on earth” depiction was no longer tenable.24 However, Yangdon Dhondup’s comment on the music videos that often accompany the new Tibetan pop music indicates that positive imagery can also “other” Tibet as an exotic object of consumption:

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[M]ost depict colourful Tibetan festivals or picturesque Tibetan scenery, advertising the exotic beauty and ‘Otherness’ of Tibet. Reflecting the increasing popularity of Tibet as a tourist venue for wealthier Chinese, these videos simulate a fixed image of Tibet at the same time as promoting the song, not unlike tourist brochures that present a Tibet that is uniformly religious, with colourfully dressed Tibetans who dance, sing and laugh.25

Like the renaming of Zhongdian as Shangri-la, the combination of attractive (“beauty”) and stereotyped (“Otherness”) in Yangdon’s description of the music videos confirms that the pristine Tibet brand echoes and, in some aspects, draws explicitly on the much older Euro-American fantasy of “Shangri-la.”26 This Euro-American discourse is also part of the well-known pattern of orientalism, as detailed and analysed by Edward Said.27 For Said, orientalism is a way of thinking that enables governance and power by imagining the governed as not only an objectified other but also as backward and lagging behind. This imagination can take both negative, denigrating and positive, idealizing forms. Serfs is an excellent example of the denigrating form of orientalism, where the Chinese People’s Liberation Army liberates the serfs from “hell on earth” and brings Tibetan society forwards into modernity. The Euro-American “Shangri-la” discourse exemplifies the idealizing form. And now, in the PRC, “the last pure land” tag from tourist brochures mentioned above also exemplifies the idealizing form, where backwardness is what allegedly saves Tibet from the problems of contemporary Chinese modernity. How can we understand the relationship between othering and the Anthropocene here? If the Anthropocene is defined as a global condition, there is no true “pristine” space left. Or, to put it another way, the Anthropocene is a condition of coevalness that encompasses other differences and demands responses that acknowledge a shared condition.28 In this circumstance of the Anthropocene as coeval, the idea of a radical and clear line between “them” and “us” that othering is predicated upon must be challenged to enable engagement with the issues of the Anthropocene. However, it is important to add that this does not mean the issues of the Anthropocene can be conflated with issues concerning ethnic difference, power, and governance. Nor is it the case that challenging othering as a necessary first step towards engaging with the Anthropocene will also deal with problems based on the treatment of minority ethnic populations, or vice versa. Yet the two problems run in parallel; undermining the othering of Tibet and Tibetan culture, even in an idealizing form, is necessary, both

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because it challenges a cultural and political structure that makes China subject and Tibet object by instead thinking Tibetans and Chinese as part of one larger community, and because it acknowledges that the coeval status is a precondition to tackle the challenge of the Anthropocene. To make this argument is to suggest that engaging with the Anthropocene in the analysis of Chinese cinema requires a critical reading practice. Presumably for fear of political controversy, representations alluding to the challenge of the Anthropocene in Chinese feature films that have passed censorship are rare. A notable exception is the Stephen Chow (周星馳) hit from 2016, The Mermaid (美人魚), which represented a world profoundly damaged by greed-generated pollution. However, in the face of a way of thinking like the pristine Tibet brand image, which amounts to a form of disavowal and even denial, an active process of working with the text is required. The idea of a critical reading practice stems from some of the important insights of semiotics. As Barthes developed his thinking, he came to argue that meaning is not an inherent truth of the text waiting to be excavated. Rather, meaning results from the interaction between the reader or viewer and the text, and each reading will produce different results depending on what the reader brings. In this sense, the reader is “a producer of the text.”29 But that does not mean that a text can mean anything at all; the reader works with what the text offers to them, too. None of the feature films being made about Tibet and Tibetan culture in the People’s Republic of China that I am aware of engages directly with the issue of the Anthropocene. The final two sections of the chapter therefore consider further how we can engage these films with the Anthropocene through critical reading practices. First, I look at films made by non-Tibetan directors, and I use as a primary example the 2015 film by Zhang Yang, Paths of the Soul. The final section considers the films made inside the People’s Republic of China by Tibetan directors, using Pema Tseden’s Tharlo as its case study.

Zhang Yang’s Paths of the Soul: Films by Non-­Tibetans and Reading Against the Grain Most of the films made by non-Tibetans about Tibet and listed in Table  12.2 are commercial genre films. Only one of them directly acknowledges the existence of environmental problems in the Tibetan areas of China, and this is Lu Chuan’s Kekexili: Mountain Patrol. Kekexili

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is a nature reserve located in today’s Qinghai Province, and famous as a home of the endangered Tibetan antelope species. The film focuses on the violent and ongoing disputes between the rangers protecting the antelope and poachers who kill the antelope to get their underfur for use in making shawls.30 Threatened extinction of species can be understood as a clear example of the Anthropocene in its larger sense extending beyond the geological. Because the problem has emerged with the adoption of the market economy in the PRC and the country’s entry into the globalized capitalist consumer system, the particular issue presented by the film can be understood as part of a global problem.31 Nevertheless, although Kekexili does suggest that the Tibetan antelope’s crisis of survival is the result of globalization and over-exploitation, what it does not do is position the specific issue of the Tibetan antelope as part of a systemic problem of the planet’s physical well-being. Indeed, as Shuqin Cui points out in her article on the film, the narrative is set in an environment that is portrayed as “pristine nature” and a “virgin land.”32 Cui argues that the film feminizes both the victim antelope and the land, making both “the desired images that the camera tries to capture.”33 That the filmmaker and, by extension, the audience are masculinized and implicated in this imagined relationship is certainly correct. Still, by representing the landscape and nature as “sublime” and therefore beyond our touch, the film also forecloses on the question of the larger human impact on the Tibetan environment and the Anthropocene. The film implies that just as human action has imperilled the vulnerable antelope, so human action can save it. However, the question of what impact both hunting and saving the antelope have on the environment is beyond the imagination of the film; the implication is that the environment remains “pristine.” Nearly all the other films made by non-Tibetan filmmakers in Table 12.2 that I have been able to see so far also represent the Tibetan environment in this sublime mode, as exotic, awe-inspiring, and pristine. Issues of the impact of human activity are simply out of sight. This is part of a larger pattern of othering Tibet in these films, most of which focus on and are told from the perspective of outsiders, most of whom are Han Chinese. Three generic patterns dominate within these films. In the historical melodrama, an older Chinese person is often prompted to take a trip back to Tibet by memories of their role in the early days after what is known in China as the “peaceful liberation” (和平解放) of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army in 1951. A number of these films were made to mark the sixtieth anniversary of 1951, including A Tibetan Love Song, A Doctor’s

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Choice, and A Doctor, A General, all included in Table 12.2. In all cases, the mountainous snowy landscape of Tibet, so different from the stereotypical plains of China, symbolizes the exotic lure of the country and its otherness. In the variants that involve flashbacks and a journey to Tibet in the present, liberation has led to development, but the exotic landscape remains untouched and as appealing as ever, displayed in extreme long shots as stretching into the distance before rearing up into mountains. A second genre is the romance, usually between a non-Tibetan man and a Tibetan woman, and also often historical. This pattern was started before the new century by the success of Red River Valley in 1997. Set against the backdrop of the British Youngblood Expedition that invaded Tibet from 1903 to 1904, the film also featured a love story between an English interpreter unconnected to the expedition and a Tibetan princess. Within the films included in Table 12.2, this pattern of a good Western man and a Tibetan woman is repeated in Once Upon a Time in Tibet. That film is set during World War II and its protagonist is a shot-down American pilot flying over the “hump” of the Himalayas to bring supplies to the Kuomintang Chinese government in its wartime capital of Chongqing. He also falls in love with a Tibetan woman. Other examples feature Chinese men and Tibetan women, sometimes combining this second genre with the first genre, as in the case of The Love Song of Kang Ding, in which a Chinese male engineer returns to Tibet in his old age to search for the female Tibetan serf he rescued and fell in love with. In all these films a pattern of idealized othering feminizes both the pristine landscape and the beautiful Tibetan woman. The third genre pattern is the sports film. Here the Tibetan environment is usually othered as part of the challenge to be overcome. For example, 2011’s Kora: One Mile Above by Du Jiayi is about the challenge faced by a Taiwanese man cycling from Yunnan to Lhasa. One of the other characters says to him, referring to a popular Taiwanese cycling challenge that has also become a local film genre, “this is not a round-the-island ride!”34 Indeed, the altitude changes and extreme cold weather conditions would be unfamiliar to a rider from Taiwan. On the road, he befriends another rider whose hope is that the clouds above the 13 peaks of Meili Snow Mountains in Deqin County of Yunnan Province will clear and bring him good fortune. He addresses the mountains directly, blows a whistle, and even strips his clothes off in an effort to prove his sincerity, as though the mountain is a goddess, but the clouds do not clear. Seventy-­ Seven Days (2017) by Zhao Hantang is about a man from low-lying

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Shanghai who decides to become the first person to trek alone from west to east across the “no man’s land” area in the north part of Tibet Province, and almost dies in the process. In all three of these genres of films about the Tibetan areas of the PRC, the landscape forms an eternal and immutable backdrop that is the lure for the usually Chinese male protagonists. In the many cases where there is a Tibetan woman who is the object of his affections, she, Tibetan culture, and the landscape are all merged into one pristine attraction, which, furthermore, is enhanced but somehow untouched by the development brought to the country by the Chinese protagonists. Individual films will perhaps merit further attention in another essay, but within the concerns of this chapter, these films are prime examples of the pattern of idealized othering that imagines Tibet as a pristine zone of exception, and therefore are in a structural position of denial in regard to the Anthropocene. However, in this group of films about the Tibetan areas of the PRC by non-Tibetan directors in Table 12.2, one film stands out from the crowd in various ways. A low-budget film, it is also reputed to have been an unexpected box success. This is Zhang Yang’s Paths of the Soul, which documents a pilgrimage to Lhasa and on to the holy mountain Kang Rinpoche (also known as Kailash), which is the Chinese title of the film. Taking a few steps and then prostrating themselves all the way, the journey of these pilgrims is a gruelling one. In a sense, this is an extension of the sports film, with the gruelling topographical and climatic conditions functioning as physical challenges to overcome so that the pilgrims can reach their goal. However, the pattern of the Chinese male protagonist and the feminized Tibetan landscape found in the genre films is broken in this film because all the pilgrims are Tibetan and only Tibetan is spoken. So, how “authentic” is Paths of the Soul? Is it really a radical break from the pristine Tibet pattern of idealized othering found in the genre films discussed above? Regarding authenticity, the all-Tibetan cast speaking only Tibetan is certainly a step up from the deployment of Chinese actresses to play Tibetan female leads, as Ning Jing (宁静) does in Red River Valley, or having Tibetan casts speak largely in Mandarin, no doubt because the primary target audience for these films is Chinese. Nevertheless, although the film may document a pilgrimage, I am told that the different Tibetan accents of the actors make it clear to Tibetan audiences that the collection of villagers who go on the pilgrimage have been recruited from far and wide and are not the actual inhabitants of the village the film’s opening scenes are set in.

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As far as idealized othering is concerned, Paths of the Soul very much continues the pattern found elsewhere. Despite 60  years as part of the PRC, including huge destruction during the Cultural Revolution decade (1966–1976),35 the religious culture of the Tibetans is portrayed in Paths of the Soul as entirely unaffected, or at least as conforming to the image of Tibetan Buddhism that circulates outside the Tibetan Buddhist world. The only exception is a structuring absence—the unsurprising but complete omission of any mention of the Dalai Lama throughout the film. From the beginning, characters’ explanations for why good or bad things have happened to them or their motivations for going on the pilgrimage all have to do with karma and the need to either make up for bad things they have done in the past or to store up karma against future problems. Near the beginning of the film, the character Nyima’s uncle notes that his elder brother always wanted to go on pilgrimage to Lhasa but died before he was able to fulfil his wish, giving Nyima the idea of organizing the trip. The village butcher’s conscience is bothered by having taken so many animals’ lives, and so he wants to come along, too. Another character notes that this is the year of the horse and that is Mount Kang Rinpoche’s sign, too. Therefore, a pregnant woman decides to join because the horse will also be her baby’s sign and visiting the mountain that year will bring the baby good fortune. Once they are on the road, they are helped by various people who meet them along the way and offer shelter, in return for which they help out in other ways. In Lhasa, their landlady lets them stay free in return for making 100,000 prostrations on her behalf, as her health is not good. Two things are strikingly absent: Chinese people, and the impact of any other value systems on the thinking of the Tibetan people, be it socialism or the market economy. The cinematography complements this representation of the pilgrims by setting them against the pristine Tibetan landscape, with repeated use of extreme long shots—a technique that occurs in nearly all films about the Tibetan areas of China. The film alternates between being in the wide and open spaces of the road and scenes in very confined spaces, like the tents that the pilgrims stay overnight in on their journey, or their crowded homes back in the village. In the interior scenes, the camera often pans or tracks laterally across the people in the room as they talk. Point-of-view and shotand-reverse shot structures are avoided. Not only does this discourage identification with any individual character on the part of the audience, but also it gives a sense of almost ethnographic observation and distance of the pilgrims as a mass, because they all share the same values and culture.

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From the perspective of the Anthropocene, Paths of the Soul is as much in denial as the other films discussed above. Analysing how that state of denial is signified through this idealized othering certainly can help us to understand this way of thinking that blocks recognition of the Anthropocene. But how might we go further? Is there a kind of reading against the grain that we might deploy to begin to unravel or undermine these structures from within? Such work can perhaps draw inspiration from the efforts of second-wave feminist film scholars who worked with Hitchcock films.36 Hitchcock is no feminist, but his films both enable a deeper understanding of patriarchal ideology and, some argue, contain glimpses of resistance. In the case of Paths of the Soul, perhaps the multiple accents of the Tibetan actors are one element that resists the film’s apparent simulation of a documentary and inscribes the work of the invisible Chinese filmmakers, challenging the image promoted by the film of the Tibetan parts of China as untouched by betraying Chinese intervention. Following this line, the attentive eye can soon pick up one other prominent piece of evidence of Chinese presence: the tractor that accompanies the pilgrims until an accident 100 kilometres outside Lhasa has a slogan in Chinese characters on its mudguard. Fupin Kaifa (扶貧開發) means “poverty alleviation and development.” It is the slogan of the Chinese government’s assistance programmes directed at less developed areas throughout the country.37 At approximately 48 minutes into the film, the camera captures a milestone on the highway and a title repeats what is written on it: “National Highway 318, 3570 km” (318國道3570公里). This is the longest national highway in China, running from Shanghai to the Nepalese border, and the 3750-kilometres mark is measured from Shanghai. It is inside Tibet Province, 1100 kilometres from Lhasa.38 Both the poverty alleviation and development programme and the highway are no doubt intended to have positive connotations in the film. Certainly, the tractor and the paved road are helpful to the pilgrims. But they also run counter to the film’s efforts to suggest that Tibet is entirely separated off from China, pristine and untouched. And for those who wish to take the reading against the grain further, questions can be asked about the purpose of this highway. It is, after all, unlikely that it was built with pilgrims in mind. And the pilgrims themselves note the large number of trucks on the highway. From here, it is not difficult to start to develop a reading that would engage with the debate around resource extraction in Tibet and its environmental impact,39 leading on to the question of the

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role of those resources in the Chinese economy and global consumption, and from there to the issue of the Anthropocene that this film and most of the others by non-Tibetan filmmakers foreclose upon by attempting to imagine the Tibetan areas of the PRC as a pristine zone of exception.

Coevalness and the Anthropocene: Pema Tseden and Tharlo If an effort to read against the grain is needed to overcome the idealized othering that imagines a pristine Tibet in the films produced by non-­ Tibetan filmmakers, the situation is different with Tibetan filmmakers. The very fact that the subjects and the objects in the filmmaking process are all Tibetan means that othering is unlikely to be structured into the film. Of course, all the criticisms of Zhang Yimou for alleged self-­ orientalizing in his pursuit of Western audiences show that participation in the other structures that sustain the pristine Tibet brand image and block engagement with the Anthropocene on the part of films directed by Tibetans cannot be discounted entirely.40 Audiences work with what filmmakers have provided in unpredictable ways. For example, the pilgrims in Zhang Yang’s Paths of the Soul show no interest at all in amassing wealth, and they place a much higher priority on attaining merit. However, it is reported that Chinese venture capitalists were particularly fond of the film, and one of them told a reporter that “the hardships of entrepreneurship are also a form of self-cultivation.”41 No doubt, it is possible that other viewers will see motifs like snow-capped mountains behind wide open landscapes, prayer wheels, mani stone piles, and so on in films by directors like Pema Tseden and incorporate them into the pristine Tibet image. However, this closing section of the chapter focuses on the ways in which Pema Tseden’s films resist some of the typical elements composing the idealized othering of Tibet and, without in any way challenging the distinctiveness of Tibetan culture, suggests that Tibet should be understood as a coeval part of Chinese and global modernity. First, in contrast to most of the films by non-Tibetan directors, Tibetans are not shown as locked into a fixed and eternal cultural paradigm, but rather to be part of a changing world that is diverse and engaged—for better or worse—with modernity. Second, the characters in Pema Tseden’s films react to change in different ways—some resist and some embrace it, and some suffer from it and some benefit. Third, Pema Tseden’s camerawork and editing style, while not following the dramatic patterns of Hollywood classical editing,

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are also not ethnographic and distancing. However, despite resisting othering, it can also be seen that Pema Tseden’s films do not directly engage with the Anthropocene, and so, although they leave the way open, an active critical reading practice is still required. For reasons of space, Tharlo serves as the primary example. If there is one theme that runs through all of Pema Tseden’s films it is the complex, varied, but universal impact of social, cultural, and economic change on the Tibetan areas of the PRC. Dan Smyer Yu claims a transition from a more positive vision of Pema Tseden’s homeland in The Silent Holy Stones to a more pessimistic one in The Search and Old Dog.42 In The Silent Holy Stones, a little monk is distracted by a video of Journey to the West. In The Search, a director is driving around as he attempts to cast a film based on the traditional Tibetan Opera Drime Kunden. The opera involves a self-sacrificing character who offers not only his own eyes but also his wife and children to others. Although this hero is traditionally considered as exemplary, modern values lead characters in the film to question whether he had the right to give away his wife and children. In Old Dog, the fashion for Tibetan mastiffs among Han Chinese triggers a conflict between a son who wants to realize the commodity value of the family dog and his father, who sees the dog as part of the family. The impact of modernity is presented in a particularly bleak fashion in Tharlo. The eponymous main character is a herder on the mountain, drawn down into the city by the very modern need to have an identity (ID) card made. For the card, he needs a photo, and before the photo, he visits a hair salon to tidy up. The woman hairdresser he meets there goes on to seduce him and ends up stealing all his money. Things get even worse, and the film is a downward spiral. Optimistic or pessimistic, this pattern where everyone is caught up in the transformations wrought by modernity in Pema Tseden’s films is quite different from the continuation of age-old values and customs in Paths of the Soul. Although the stories may still be very Tibetan, Tibet does not stand here as a zone of imagined exception to modernity or a place where modernity can consist of material improvements like tractors, asphalt highways, and hospitals, but no changes in culture. In this way, Pema Tseden’s films inscribe the coevalness of the Tibetan parts of China. Furthermore, another aspect of othering that is challenged in Pema Tseden’s films is the possibility of thinking of Tibetans as a single group— a “them,” as opposed to an “us.” Whereas everyone in Paths of the Soul shares the same self-sacrificing and group-oriented religious values, in

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Pema Tseden’s films, characters react to experiences of modernity in very different ways. As indicated above, if the need for an ID card leads to Tharlo’s ruin, the woman who steals all his money does very well out of the situation materially, although she is certainly doing serious damage to her karma. However, many other characters, including the police and the photo studio owner—also a woman business owner, like the hairdresser— seem more benign. Anup Grewal speaks of this diversity as the signification of a “heterogenous Tibetan subject … that resists homogenizing and re-naturalizing a singular Tibetan voice.”43 Furthermore, as Jessica Yeung notes, Tharlo resists nostalgia about the old way of life in a manner that few of Pema Tseden’s previous films have done. This is signified through the owner of the sheep that Tharlo looks after. When some of the sheep are killed by wolves, he drives up to physically attack Tharlo and humiliate him, reminding us of the class differences in the old way of life and the culture that grows out of it.44 Finally, although the camera in Pema Tseden’s films is also sometimes observant and detached from the perspective of individual characters, the long shots that track and pan in ethnographic observation in Paths of the Soul are absent. Because the characters in the film are diverse, and all his films have a clear central protagonist, the audience is invested in, if not identified with, a character. Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of Pema Tseden’s cinematic style is his ability to use it to encourage us to get concerned with characters, but at the same time to question them. This occurs in Tharlo, for example, when Tharlo comes to town and encounters the hairdresser who will ultimately ruin his life. When he enters her salon and has his hair washed, we view the scene in the mirror, and side-on, in a very long take. We can see her checking him out as she washes his hair without him being aware of it. When she is drying his hair, we can see their exchange of glances via the mirror and the beginnings of a mutual attraction. When he leaves the salon, we stay inside with her and watch him over her shoulder. But when he gets to his motorbike, we see him look back at her (and almost at us). This is a more complex play of feelings, where we both sense with the characters and look on from outside at the same time. Again, by putting us in their positions and then drawing us back to reflect, it is part of a pattern that works against any othering of the Tibetan characters as a collective “them.” Overall, Pema Tseden’s films resist the othering, idealized or otherwise, that is a fundamental block to engagement with the Anthropocene. There is no pristine Tibet here, nor is Tibetan culture some medieval horror

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fantasy, as in Serfs. Still, just because Pema Tseden creates a coeval Tibet does not mean that his films directly engage with the Anthropocene. There is no direct engagement with environmental issues related to long-­ term climatic change, for example. For this, as with Paths of the Soul, an engaged reading process will be required that seizes upon features like the proliferation of motorcycles to draw out questions concerning challenges to the physical condition of the planet. Although such an engagement may not grow directly out of any of the films about the Tibetan areas of the PRC considered in this chapter, it is encouraging to grasp that those that block engagement with the Anthropocene can be challenged, and those that imagine the Tibetan areas as coeval provide an opening for that work.

Notes 1. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” in Global Change Newsletter no. 41 (2000), 17. 2. Whitney J. Autin and John M. Holbrook, “Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture,” GSA Today, 22, no. 7 (2012): 60–61. 3. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, “Doing Things with Numbers: Chinese Approaches to the Anthropocene,” International Communication of Chinese Culture 5, no. 1 (2018): 19. 4. Liu Dongsheng 劉東生 2004, 開展 “人類世” 環境研究, 做新時代地學 的開拓者—紀念黄汲清先生的地學創新精神 (A Pioneer Who Launched “Anthropocene” Environmental Research and Renewed Geology: Remem­ bering the Geological Creative Spirit of Huang Jiqing) 《第四紀研究》 Quaternary Sciences 24: 4 (2004): 369–378. 5. Jan Zalasiewicz et  al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-­ Twentieth Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quaternary International 383 (2015): 196–203. 6. Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik, 20. 7. Dan Edwards, “300 Million Clicks: Under the Dome and the Chinese Documentary Context,” Senses of Cinema no. 76 (2015), accessed August 1, 2018, http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/documentary-in-asia/underthe-dome-chinese-documentary/http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/ documentary-in-asia/under-the-dome-chinese-documentary/ 8. See, for example, Robert Govers and Frank Go, Place Branding: Glocal, Virtual and Physical Identities, Constructed, Imagined and Experienced (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 9. Kirsten Salyer, “Choking in China? Try ‘Pristine Tibet’ Air in a Can,” Bloomberg January 30, 2013, accessed July 8, 2018, https://www. bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-01-30/choking-in-china-try-pristine-tibet-air-in-a-can

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10. Liu Hongqiao, “China’s Bottled Water Industry Eyes Up the Tibetan Plateau,” The Guardian November 16, 2015, accessed August 1, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/nov/16/ chinas-bottled-water-industry-eyes-up-the-tibetan-plateau 11. Anon., “We Need to Talk about China,” Business and Finance May 27, 2016, accessed August 17, 2018, https://businessandfinance.com/weneed-to-talk-about-china; Hai Yan, “More Relatives of Chinese Leaders Found to Have Hong Kong IDs,” Voice of America, May 5, 2016, accessed August 17, 2018, https://www.voanews.com/a/more-relatives-chineseleaders-found-have-hong-kong-identity-cards/3317107.html 12. Donghui He, “‘Reconstructing the God-Fearing Community’: Filming Tibet in the Twenty-First Century,” in Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, eds., Sheldon H.  Lu and Jiayan Mi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 271. 13. Anon., “Bi Xizang Geng Xizang, Ta Shi Zhongguo Zuihou Yifang Jingtu!” (More Tibet than Tibet, It Is China’s Last Pure Land! [比西藏更西藏, 它 是中國最後一方淨土!]), accessed August 1, 2018, http://www.zjsxmedia.com/m/view.php?aid=453. For another example, see anon., “Xizang—Shijie Shang Zuihou Yipian Jingtu” (Tibet—The World’s Last Pure Land [西藏—世界最後一片淨土]), accessed August 1, 2018, https://www.mafengwo.cn/i/3482406.html 14. Gabriel Lafitte, “Learning to Consume Tibet,” in The Changing Landscape of China’s Consumerism, ed. Alison Hulme (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2014), 57–82. 15. Kolås, Åshild, “Tourism and the Making of Place in Shangri-La,” Tourism Geographies 6, no. 3 (2004): 262–278. 16. Hillman, Ben, “Ethnic Tourism and Ethnic Politics in Tibetan China,” Harvard Asia Pacific Review, 10, no. 1 (2009): 3–6. 17. Alison Denton Jones, “Contemporary Han Chinese Involvement in Tibetan Buddhism: A Case Study from Nanjing,” Social Compass 58, no. 4 (2011): 540–553. 18. Xiong Yuqing, “The Tibet Code,” Global Times, August 22, 2013, accessed 14 July 2018, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/805794.shtml 19. Patricia Schiaffini, “The Language Divide: Identity and Literary Choices in Modern Tibet,” Journal of International Affairs 57, no. 2 (2004): 81–98. 20. Yangdon Dhondup, “Dancing to the Beat of Modernity: The Rise and Development of Tibetan Pop Music,” in Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Cultural and Social Change, eds., Robert Barnett and Ronald D. Schwartz (Leiden, Holland and Boston: Brill, 2008), 285–304. 21. Hillman, “Ethnic Tourism …,” 6. On film, see Vanessa Frangville, “‘Minority Film’ and Tibet in the PRC: From ‘Hell on Earth’ to the ‘Garden of Eden,’” Latse Journal 7 (2013): 8–21.

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22. Chenaktshang Dorje Tsering, “Reflections on Tibetan Film,” in Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Cultural and Social Change, eds. Robert Barnett and Ronald D. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill), 273. For further discussion of Serfs, see Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 181–4. 23. Ma Jian, Stick Out Your Tongue, trans. Flora Dew (New York: Picador, 2007). 24. Patricia Schiaffini, “The Language Divide,” 191–2. 25. Yangdon Dhondup, “Dancing to the Beat of Modernity,” 295. 26. Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-la: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On its contemporary persistence, see Donald Sewell Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Orville Schell, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-la from the Himalayas to Hollywood (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). 27. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 28. The key work arguing for the coeval as a response against othering in the context of colonialism is usually acknowledged to be Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 29. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 4. 30. Anon., “Tibetan Antelope,” World Wildlife Fund, accessed 19 August 2018, http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/tibetan_ antelope/ 31. For example, Zhang Jia-ru [張嘉如], “Chapter 7: Cong Difang dao Quanqiu de : Kuaguo Shangye Celüe, Dongbao Yishi yu Jingshen Shengtaizhuyi” [從地方到全球的《可可西里》: 跨國商業策略, 動保意識 與精神生態主義] (Kekexili: Mountain Patrol from the local to the global: Transnational Business Strategy, Preservation Consciousness, and Eco-­ Consciousness)in Quanqiu Huanjing Xiangxiang: Zhongxi Shengtai Piping Shijian [全球環境想像 : 中西生態批評實踐] (Global Imagination of Ecological Communities: Western and Chinese Ecocritical Praxis) (Zhenjiang: Jiangsu University Press, 2013). 32. Shuqin Cui, “Kekexili: Mountain Patrol: Moral Dilemma and a Man with a Camera,” in Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 158, 154. 33. Cui, 154. 34. Sheng-mei Ma, “Island’s Irony: Virtual Pilgrimage Circum-Taiwan in Search of the High Cs,” in The Last Isle: Contemporary Film, Culture and

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Trauma in Global Taiwan, eds. Neil Campbell and Christine Berberich (London & New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 27–44. 35. See, for example, Melvyn C. Goldstein, Ben Jiao, and Tanzen Lhundrup, On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: The Nyemo Incident of 1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 36. See, for example, Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988). 37. See, for example, the annual Yearbook of China’s Poverty Alleviation and Development [中國扶貧開發年鑒], published by China Financial and Economic Publishing House [中國財政經濟出版社]. English editions available for most years. 38. Baidu, “318 國道” (“National Highway 318”), https://baike.baidu. com/item/318国道/2849270?fromtitle=g318&fromid=11174789&fr= aladdin#1, accessed 30 August 2018. 39. See, for example, Michael Buckley, Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia (New York: St. Martin’s, 2014); Gabriel Lafitte, Spoiling Tibet: China and Resource Nationalism on the Roof of the World (London: Zed Books, 2013). 40. In English, the seminal text would be Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). In Chinese, two key texts are Wang Yichuan [王一川], Zhang Yimou Shenhua de Zhongjie: Shenmei yu Wenhua Shiyezhong de Zhang Yimou Dianying [張藝謀神話 的終結: 審美與文化視野中的張藝謀電影] (The End of the Zhang Yimou Myth: Zhang Yimou’s Films from the Perspective of Aesthetics and Culture) (Zhengzhou [鄭州]: Henan Renmin Chubanshe [河南人民出 版社], 1998); and Zhang Yiwu [張頤武], Quanqiu Houzhimin Yujingzhong de Zhang Yimou [全球後殖民語境中的張藝謀], in Lun Zhang Yimou [論張藝謀], ed. Ying Xiong [應雄] et al. (Beijing [北京]: Zhongguo Dianying Chubanshe [中國電影出版社], 1994), 54–68. 41. Liu Fang and Han Wei, “Why are China’s Venture Capitalists Going Gaga Over a Tibetan Pilgrimage Film?” Caixin, July 17, 2017, accessed 21 August 2018, https://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-07-07/101112052. html 42. Dan Smyer Yu (2014), “Pema Tseden’s Transnational Cinema: Screening a Buddhist Landscape of Tibet,” Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15:1 (2014): 134. 43. Anup Grewal, “Contested Tibetan Landscapes in the Films of Pema Tseden,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10:2 (2016): 135. 44. Jessica Yeung, “Introduction,” in Tharlo: Short Story and Film Script by Pema Tseden (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017), 48–49.

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Bibliography Autin, Whitney J., and John M. Holbrook. 2012. Is the Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture? GSA Today 22 (7): 60–61. Baidu Baike. 318 Guodao [National Highway 318]. https://baike.baidu.com/ item/318国道/2849270?fromtitle=g318&fromid=11174789&fr=aladdin#1. Accessed 30 Aug 2018. Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Berry, Chris, and Mary Farquhar. 2006. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. Bi Xizang Geng Xizang, Ta Shi Zhongguo Zuihou Yifang Jingtu! [More Tibet than Tibet, It Is China’s Last Pure Land!]. 2017. Zhongjiao Shixian, October 27. http://www.zjsxmedia.com/m/view.php?aid=453. Accessed 1 Aug 2018. Bishop, Peter. 1989. The Myth of Shangri-la: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buckley, Michael. 2014. Meltdown in Tibet: China’s Reckless Destruction of Ecosystems from the Highlands of Tibet to the Deltas of Asia. New  York: St. Martin’s Press. Chow, Rey. 1995. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F.  Stoermer. 2000. The “Anthropocene”. Global Change Newsletter 41: 17. Cui, Shuqin. 2008. Kekexili: Mountain Patrol: Moral Dilemma and a Man with a Camera. In Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry, 154–158. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Dhondup, Yangdon. 2008. Dancing to the Beat of Modernity: The Rise and Development of Tibetan Pop Music. In Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Cultural and Social Change, ed. Robert Barnett and Ronald D. Schwartz, 285–304. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Edwards, Dan. 2015. 300 Million Clicks: “Under the Dome” and the Chinese Documentary Context. Senses of Cinema 76. http://sensesofcinema. com/2015/documentary-in-asia/under-the-dome-chinese-documentary/ http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/documentary-in-asia/under-the-domechinese-documentary/. Accessed 1 Aug 2018. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Frangville, Vanessa. 2013. Minority Film’ and Tibet in the PRC: From ‘Hell on Earth’ to the ‘Garden of Eden. Latse Journal 7: 8–21. Goldstein, Melvyn C., Ben Jiao, and Tanzen Lhundrup. 2010. On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: The Nyemo Incident of 1969. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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CHAPTER 13

Conclusion Jessica Yeung

After completing a book (whether reading it or writing it), one experiences an almost scholarly-existential state of reflection, and one asks oneself, “What is the point of this book?” Such reflection brings one back to the endless question of the triangulation between reality, its artistic representation and criticism of such representation. For the present book, there are two specificities in this process of triangulation. One is related to its specific bearing on Anthropocene awareness in China in arts and literature, while the other refers to the critical perspective adopted in these chapters, arguably conveying a more acute Anthropocene awareness than the original works themselves. It is evident because most of the foregoing chapters are concerned with excavating the potential of Anthropocene critique in the works they discuss, rather than responding to such critique already apparent in the texts. This differs from the typical critical process where critics explicate the main concern of the works that they interrogate. Many of the Anthropocene-aware chapters in this collection are obliged to depart from the main themes and issues of the works of art they discuss, in order to reveal their potential for an Anthropocene critique. On the one hand, this is a salient example of what criticism should do, but on the other, one must ask: why does criticism need to conduct excavation into

J. Yeung (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K.-C. Lo, J. Yeung (eds.), Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_13

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creative works in order to discuss the Anthropocene in China? Are there not more pertinent creative examples in contemporary China that engage with the Anthropocene crisis directly? This is certainly a complicated question that calls for answers from ­multiple perspectives. Perhaps one of these perspectives is determined ­primarily by how global communities perceive and conceive of China. In a lecture held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in 2017, Akbar Abbas characterised China as being opaque to external analysts. Such opacity is definitely related to the nation’s lack of transparency as a consequence of its political censorship. However, to understand Abbas’s comment merely on this level would be a gross over-simplification of the issue. In fact, a large part of China’s opacity has to do with the thickness of its quotidian reality resulting from the tortuous Politics and politics of life under the current regime; it is also generated by the multiple layering of its valuesystems that both reinforce and contradict each other, as they form and inform the behaviours of individuals, danwei (單位 work units) and its government. We should equally bear in mind that 1.4 billion people participate in this layering. To disentangle all the interlocking parts of this layering process is already a gargantuan task for critics. Focus is inevitably placed on the more visible participants (both as agents and as recipients) of change, namely, on human beings. This is especially the case in the binary structure of human affairs, consisting, on the one hand, of government agents charged with the imperative of transformation, and, on the other, the seemingly passive recipients of government actions known as “the people.” Although this paradigm is effective in constructing a quick and clear understanding of the general situation of the country, it is restrictive and simplistic. It fails to take into account the more complex scenario of shared interests and conflicts of interest, nor does it allow for the convoluted guanxi (關係 relations) permeating the binarism of government and people. Equally, it fails to take into consideration the perspective of nonhuman participants in the development of China—the landscape, scarred from industrial d­evelopment, and the destroyed flora and fauna. This latter perspective is particularly significant, since it has the potential to bring about a paradigm shift in the way we understand power relations in China; a different u ­ nderstanding of China might facilitate a different conception of power distribution on the world stage, one that could help create peace, equality and justice.

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Works of art that provide these alternative ways of understanding China might not perhaps be wanting; rather it may be a case of them not ­attracting sufficient attention, because they do not fit into the existing paradigm of understanding China; or perhaps there is a genuine dearth of such works. In any case, for criticism to critique or valorise art and literature that focus on the Anthropocene is definitely a valid form of intervention in the crisis, and this is precisely the function of criticism. The next question to ask would be this: how can such criticism become more effective in future? The current trend of interdisciplinary research is definitely a productive path. Drawing on geography, history, anthropology, energy studies and political science, as well as other disciplines, will facilitate a more multi-faceted and exacting assessment of the present state of art, and of the world. In so doing, we will achieve a more sophisticated triangulation of reality, artistic representation and critical acumen in our response to art, and to the Anthropocene crisis, to which it is imperative we pay attention.

Index1

A Aesthetics, 10, 11, 25, 33, 38, 41, 42, 46, 52, 87, 159, 185, 205, 209, 212, 213, 218, 219, 228, 229, 233, 242, 243 Animal, 11, 13, 14, 51, 53, 59, 70, 86, 93–97, 100, 102, 133, 134, 139, 154, 155, 161, 163, 164, 216, 225–244, 261 Anthropocene, 1–14, 23, 34, 53, 83–89, 96–102, 109–124, 131, 132, 136, 137, 151, 152, 168, 227, 243, 244, 249–266, 275–277 Authenticity, 12, 13, 152, 153, 158, 160–163, 165, 166, 168, 207, 210, 211, 213, 229, 260 B Belt and Road Initiative, 4, 12, 140

C China, 1–14, 22–24, 28, 30–32, 37–47, 51, 57, 72, 83–102, 110, 112, 113, 125n19, 131, 132, 136–140, 143n19, 144n27, 156, 159, 168, 182–184, 186–188, 191, 193–195, 203–219, 225–232, 234, 235, 237, 238, 240–244, 249, 250, 252, 253, 255, 257–259, 261, 262, 264, 275–277 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 11, 113, 119, 122, 182, 188 Cultural Revolution, 11, 13, 39, 97–101, 112, 115, 132, 138, 179–183, 185, 187, 192, 194, 196n2, 209, 238, 239, 261 D Dehumanization, 12, 236 Developmentalism, 11, 110, 112–113, 116, 119, 121–124, 126n24 Digital, 14, 37, 153, 159, 161, 225–244

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Documentary, 9, 10, 12, 23–27, 33, 34n6, 37–53, 158–161, 216, 225, 227–229, 251, 255, 262 Drought, 1, 13, 184, 191–195, 198n32 E Environment, 2–10, 13, 23, 30, 33, 34, 37–53, 59, 61, 67, 70, 72, 85, 89, 97, 110, 112, 115, 124, 134, 136, 139, 146n40, 151, 152, 159, 160, 162, 163, 194, 203, 210, 226, 227, 240, 241, 244n3, 251, 258, 259 Ethnic minority, 8, 10, 12–14, 43–46, 51, 112, 137, 138, 156, 157, 160, 162, 181–183, 185–189, 225–244 G Garbage, 9, 10, 21–34 H Hong Kong, 10, 11, 57–73, 83–102, 158, 217, 276 Human, 3, 5, 6, 9–14, 23, 27, 33, 41, 42, 44, 47–50, 52, 53, 58–63, 65, 67–71, 73, 83–91, 93–97, 100–102, 102n8, 104n36, 105n46, 109, 111, 112, 118, 124, 131, 133, 135, 136, 151, 153–155, 157–160, 168, 170n19, 185, 186, 188, 193–195, 204, 209, 218, 220n7, 227–229, 232–237, 239, 241–244, 244n4, 249–251, 258, 276

I Intangible cultural heritage, 13, 210, 213–218, 221n22 L Left-behind children, 12 M Magic realism, 11, 59, 109–124 Mao, Zedong, 39, 97, 98, 133, 145n39, 188, 205, 220n7 Maoist, 6, 11, 13, 83–102, 180–182, 187, 192, 194, 195 Modernization, 11, 14, 109, 112, 120–122, 139, 157, 190, 226, 230, 234–236, 238, 241, 243 Mongol, 133, 136, 138, 139, 141n9, 146n40, 239 Muqam music, 188, 195 Mythology, 11, 83–102 N Nation-building, 13, 97 Nature, 5–13, 47, 49, 50, 57–73, 83, 85–87, 89, 93, 95–98, 105n46, 113, 121, 122, 134, 139, 145n38, 145n39, 151, 168, 170n19, 179–195, 203–206, 209, 215, 225–227, 229–231, 235, 236, 238, 240, 244n3, 258 Neoliberalism, 5, 6, 12, 152, 154, 160, 166, 168 Nonhuman, 3, 10, 11, 14, 42, 44, 49, 52, 53, 87, 91, 96, 97, 100, 102, 136, 203, 227–229, 231, 232, 244n4, 276

 INDEX 

O Original ecology (yuan shengtai), 13, 203–219, 230, 240 P Pristine, 9, 14, 50, 139, 225, 249–266 Purity, 13, 101, 188, 218, 252 R Recycle, 22, 30, 31 T Tibet, 14, 43, 120–122, 124, 230, 231, 236, 249–266

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U Urbanization, 10, 73, 209 Uyghur, 12, 13, 44, 45, 180–192, 197n19, 203–219 W Waste, 3, 4, 9, 14, 21–34, 234 Water, 3, 13, 14, 28, 31, 33, 39–41, 86, 94, 95, 101, 114, 161, 184, 185, 190–195, 215, 234, 241, 242, 244, 252 Wolf Totem, 11, 12, 131–140, 229, 235, 237, 239 X Xinjiang, 12, 13, 44–46, 179–195, 206, 211, 214