Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema: Reimagining a Field 0367281082, 9780367281083

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Revisiting the field of Chinese ecocinema
Theoretical perimeters and critical genealogy
“Chinese ecocinema” reconsidered
Keyword one: Chinese
Keyword two: ecology
Keyword three: film
What is Chinese ecocinema?
What can Chinese ecocinema do?
Chinese-language ecodocumentaries
Structure of the book
Notes
References
Part I: Ecodocumentaries and eco-festivals
Chapter 1: Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape: Politics of aesthetics and environmental ethics in Taiwanese ecodocumentaries
“Ecocinema” under debate
Ecodocumentary making in Taiwan
Laying the foundation for Taiwanese ecodocumentary making: The Lukang Anti-DuPont Movement
Endangered humans versus endanger nature: National Bandits
Eco-cosmopolitanism in practice: Swing
The politics of landscape aesthetics: Nimbus
The politics of popular ecocinema: Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Filmography
References
Chapter 2: Nature in the city: A study of Hong Kong’s independent eco-film festival
Introduction
The making of environmentally aware “citizen intellectuals”
The film festival as alternative public sphere
The FFFF and the eco-cosmopolitan public sphere
Documenting everyday life and its poetic struggle
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part II: Contemporary ecologies
Chapter 3: Three ecologies of cinema, migration, and the sea: Anchorage Prohibited and Luzon
Ecologies of the virtual
Hospitality and the acoustics of the seen and the unseen
Cinematic ecologies: the foreshortened lives of short cinema
Migratory ecologies and the temporal permanence of guestworkers
Luzon, maritime conflict and aesthetico-political risk
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Tracing extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema: Tie Xi Qu and the politics of the resource image
The materiality of ecocinema
Three ecologies
Tie Xi Qu
Materialities
Representational materialities
Corporeal materialities
Tangible materialities
Processual materialities
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Chai Jing’s Under the Dome: A multimedia documentary in the digital age
The multiple documentary mode
Personal/maternal voice
Interviews
Animation
Networked circulation and communication
The official
The netizens
The international
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part III: Humans and animals
Chapter 6: Global animal capital and animal garbage: Documentary redemption and hope
Theoretical rumination: animal–capital–garbage entanglement and documentary redemption
Animal capital and documentary activism
San Hua and Cala, My Dog!: consumption and redemption
(Trans)national moon bear documentaries: zootherapy and hope
The Lost Sea: cross-strait cold war and deep-time matter
Conclusion
Notes
References
Filmography
Chapter 7: Transcendence and transgression: Reading Wolf Totem as environmental world literature/cinema?
Two types of boundary-crossing
Ethics of boundary-crossing
Hybridity, science, and love
In the name of nature
Universalizing the ecological
Representing the unrepresentable
Coda
Notes
References
Chapter 8: Fabulating animals–human affinity: Towards an ethics of care in Monster Hunt and Mermaid
Interrogating ecological correctness—eco-kitsch and/as eco-aesthetics
Beyond the pleasure principles: the cute, the cruel, and the critical kitsch
The cute Monster Hunt—animals–human affinity sans affect
The cruel Mermaid—anthropomorphic amplification of pain
Towards an ethics of care in the kitschy ecocinematic experience
Notes
References
Part IV: Landscape and nation
Chapter 9: Sinification by greening: Politics, nature, and ethnic borderlands in Maoist ecocinema
Prelude: ecocinema, Maoist China, and ethnic minority
Sinification by greening
Nomadic spring
Maoist green march toward Xinjiang
Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Notes
References
Chapter 10: No Man’s Land: Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema
The ‘west’ in crisis—the eco-hostile frontier in Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land
The Chinese ‘west’: a shifting cinematic geography
Desertification of the heart: ecological and moral crisis
Post-nationaleco-Western:Chinese Western in the global context
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema

This edited collection explores new developments in the burgeoning field of Chinese ecocinema, examining a variety of works from local productions to global market films, spanning the Maoist era to the present. The ten chapters examine films with ecological significance in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, including documentaries, feature films, blockbusters and independent productions. Covering not only well-known works, such as Under the Dome, Wolf Totem, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracts, and Mermaid, this book also provides analysis of less well-known but critically important works, such as Anchorage Prohibited, Luzon, and Three Flower/Tri-Color. The unique perspectives this book provides, along with the comprehensive engagement with existing Chinese and English scholarship, not only extend the scope of the growing field of ecocinematic studies, but also seeks to reform the means through which Chinese-language eco-films are understood in the years to come. Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema will be of huge interest to students and scholars in the fields of Chinese cinema, environmental studies, media and communication studies. Sheldon H. Lu is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis, USA. He is the author, editor and co-editor of a dozen books in English and Chinese, including Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge (2009, co-editor with Jiayan Mi). Haomin Gong is Associate Professor of Chinese at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the author of Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China (2012) and Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture (2017).

Routledge Contemporary China Series

202 Radio and Social Transformation in China Wei Lei 203 Internet Video Culture in China YouTube, Youku, and the Space in Between Marc L. Moskowitz 204 Securitization of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong The Rise of a Patriotocratic System Cora Y.T. Hui 205 Non-Governmental Orphan Relief in China Law, Policy and Practice Anna High 206 Living in the Shadows of China’s HIV/AIDS Epidemics Sex, Drugs and Bad Blood Shelley Torcetti 207 China’s Quest for Innovation Institutions and Ecosystems Shuanping Dai and Markus Taube 208 Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema Reimagining a Field Edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Haomin Gong For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/­ Routledge-Contemporary-China-Series/book-series/SE0768

Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema Reimagining a Field

Edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Haomin Gong

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Sheldon H. Lu and Haomin Gong; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sheldon H. Lu and Haomin Gong to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-28108-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31686-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



List of figuresvii Notes on contributorsix Acknowledgmentsxii



Introduction: revisiting the field of Chinese ecocinema

1

HAOMIN GONG, WITH SHELDON H. LU

PART I

Ecodocumentaries and eco-festivals

29

  1 Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape: politics of aesthetics and environmental ethics in Taiwanese ecodocumentaries

31

KUEI-FEN CHIU

  2 Nature in the city: a study of Hong Kong’s independent eco-film festival

48

WINNIE L. M. YEE

PART II

Contemporary ecologies

65

  3 Three ecologies of cinema, migration, and the sea: Anchorage Prohibited and Luzon

67

ELIZABETH WIJAYA

  4 Tracing extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema: Tie Xi Qu and the politics of the resource image PIETARI KÄÄPÄ

83

vi  Contents   5 Chai Jing’s Under the Dome: a multimedia documentary in the digital age

102

SHUQIN CUI

PART III

Humans and animals

119

  6 Global animal capital and animal garbage: documentary redemption and hope

121

CHIA-JU CHANG

  7 Transcendence and transgression: reading Wolf Totem as environmental world literature/cinema?

141

HAOMIN GONG

  8 Fabulating animals–human affinity: towards an ethics of care in Monster Hunt and Mermaid

166

FIONA YUK-WA LAW

PART IV

197

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

199

Landscape and nation

CHENG LI

10 No Man’s Land: eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema

223

KUN QIAN



Index

239

Figures

  1.1 “The Green Team” filming an anti-DuPont street demonstration in 1986 35   3.1  Man jumping over gate in Anchorage Prohibited 69   3.2  Facing the sea in Anchorage Prohibited70   3.3  Facing the screen in Anchorage Prohibited72   3.4  Two fishermen pushing a nuclear waste barrel in Luzon77   3.5  A nuclear monster in Luzon 78   6.1  A still frame from The Plastic Cow 124   6.2  A still frame from Shanhaijing 133   6.3 A still frame from Shanhaijing. On top of Ma’s image is placed a horseshoe crab with a line of Chinese subtitle: ‘peaceful environment’ 134   6.4 A still frame from Shanhaijing. Here, the director uses monochromatic, panoramic vision to signify a non-human visuality 135   8.1  The meat market 178   8.2  Puppies sold at the market 179   8.3  Flashback with Wuba and the handkerchief 179   8.4  Tianyin and Xiaolan change their minds 180   8.5 Kitschy oddities displayed in the “Museum of World Exotic Animals”: (a) the “dinosaur”; (b) the “genuine” Panthera Tigris Balica; (c) the “Batman”; (d) the “mermaid”; (e) the museum owner as a “mermaid” 182   8.6  Reclamation plan at Green Gulf 184   8.7  Drawing mermaids at the police station 186   8.8 Japanese staff take photographs with the goldfish killed by the sonar device 188   8.9 Lau watches scenes from The Cove when searching the internet for information 189 8.10 The fake mermaid takes a photo of the real-life injured mermaid190   9.1  Mao Zedong’s inscription: “Greening the Motherland” in 1956 204   9.2  The nomadic lifestyle 205

viii  Figures   9.3  People admiring the apple from Chairman Mao   9.4 Zooming-out from Mongolian Civilians shaping the hostile environment   9.5  “Transform China in the Spirit of the Old Foolish Man”   9.6  Collective efforts to plant trees in the desert   9.7 Pro-communist Narenhua clashes with anti-communist Damulin   9.8 Pro-communist Narenhua clashes with anti-communist Damulin   9.9 High-angle shot of the militarized and manufactured landscape 9.10  The harsh desert 9.11  Bird’s-eye view of Xinjiang

206 208 209 210 212 212 214 215 217

Contributors

Chia-ju Chang is Professor of Chinese at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Her scholarly and research interests include animal literary and cultural studies, ecocriticism, ecocritical (or green) cultural and film studies, and Zen eco-aesthetics. Her first book in Chinese, Global Imagination of Ecological Communities: Chinese and Western Ecocritical Praxis (2013), won the 2013 Bureau of Jiangsu Province Journalism and Publication award in China. Her many articles (in both English and Chinese) have been published in the USA, China and Taiwan. She and Scott Slovic co-edited the volume Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts (Lexington, 2016). She is also the guest editor for the Special Issue on Animal Writ­ ing: Taiwan’s Dongwu Shuxie in the journal of Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, no. 41. Her many articles (in both English and Chinese) have appeared in many peer-reviewed journals and scholarly collections in the USA, China, and Taiwan such as Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment (ISLE), Journal of Chinese Cinema, Journal of Modern Chinese Languages and Literatures (JMCLC), Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art (Wenyi lilun yanjiu), etc. Chang has served as an executive council of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). She was the Kiriyama Professor for Asia Pacific Studies in the Asia Pacific Center at the University of San Francisco in 2016. She is now editing a Chinese environmental humanities anthology, entitled Chinese Environmental Humanities: Practices of Environing at the Margins, which was published in 2019. Kuei-fen Chiu holds a PhD degree from the University of Washington, Seattle and is Distinguished Professor of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. She has written extensively on postcolonial literary historiography, contemporary Taiwan documentaries and indigenous literature in Taiwan. Her recent publications include New Chinese-Language Documentaries (co-authored with Yingjin Zhang), Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change (coedited with Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley and Gary D. Rawnsley, Routledge), and Migration to and from Taiwan (co-edited with Dafydd Fell and Ping Lin).

x  Contributors She has published in scholarly journals such as New Literary History, The Journal of Asian Studies, The China Quarterly, and Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Shuqin Cui is Professor of Asian Studies and Cinema studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema and Gendered Bodies: Toward A Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China. She has been working on a new manuscript, tentatively titled, “China’s Environmental and Ecological Catastrophe through the Lens of Ecocinema.” Haomin Gong is Associate Professor of Chinese at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature at University of ­California at Davis. He used to teach at the College of William and Mary, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Case Western Reserve University in the USA. His most recent publications include Essays on Chinese Ecocinema (co-edited with Sheldon Lu, 2017, in Chinese) and Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture (co-authored with Xin Yang, Routledge, 2017). He is also the author of Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China (2012). Pietari Kääpä is an Associate Professor in Media and Communications in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on transnational ecocinema, including Transnational Ecocinemas: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (with Tommy Gustafsson, 2013), Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinemas (2014), Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Culture in the Global Marketplace (with Tommy Gustafsson) and Environmental Management of the Media: Policy, Industry, Practice (Routledge, 2018), as well as articles on environmental themes in Sino–US blockbuster cinema. Fiona Yuk-wa Law is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include visual cultures, animal studies, Hong Kong cultural studies, Asian cinemas, digital humanities, healing, ageing, death, nostalgia and affect. Her recent writings can be found in journals such as Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Animal Studies Journal, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, as well as edited volumes such as A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema and Screening the Nonhuman: Representations of Animal Others in the Media. Cheng Li is a PhD student at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is interested in modern Chinese literature and culture, and environmental humanities. Sheldon H. Lu is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. He served as the founding Co-Director of the Film Studies Program and the Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at UC Davis. He has published a dozen books and numerous essays on Chinese

Contributors  xi literature, film, and cultural theory. He is the co-editor (with Jiayan Mi) of the anthology Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge. Kun Qian is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Film at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire (2016). Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto (Mississauga). For 2018–2019, she was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Winnie L. M. Yee is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests are contemporary Chinese literature and independent cinema, Hong Kong culture, environmental humanities, and postcolonial theories. She has published on Hong Kong independent cinema, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, and Hong Kong writers Natalia Chan and Dung Kai-cheung. Her works have appeared in Communication and the Public, Environment, Space, Place; Jump Cut, and Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, among others. She is currently working on a book project exploring the relationship between ecopoetics and Chinese independent film scene and an edited volume on Asian ecocinema.

Acknowledgments

This anthology originated from a special issue on “Chinese-language Eco­ cinema” in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11.1 (March 2017), guest-edited by Sheldon Lu. We thank the journal editor at the time, Hwee-lim Song, and we are grateful to Routledge/Taylor & Francis for allowing us to use the material from that journal in this new anthology. Haomin Gong would also like to thank the generous support from the Direct Grant (Grant No. DR19A7) that he received from Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

Introduction Revisiting the field of Chinese ecocinema1 Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu

It has been more than a decade since the first book on Chinese ecocinema, Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge (2009), edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, was published. Lu and Mi’s volume marks the emergence of the study of Chinese ecocinema as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Since its publication, an increasing number of studies have been conducted with a specific disciplinary consciousness, and this growth in turn has shaped the ecology of this burgeoning field. Over the past decade, ecologism and ecocinema in particular have evolved in response to several trends. Most noticeably (yet somehow unnoticed by some), our environment kept deteriorating. While existing environmental problems continued to plague people, new ones emerged at an accelerating rate, sometimes in a cruder and more brutal way, and at other times in a subtle and unpredictable fashion. Artists, with deepening understanding and growing vigor, responded to this changing situation in disparate forms. On the one hand, the continuous unfolding of environmental problems provided them with new subjects and themes, and, on the other, new technologies and techniques armed them with the power to create new forms of expression. Scholars engaged with these changes by making their critical tools more sophisticated and deepening theoretical crossfertilization. As a result, it is not an overstatement to say that ecocriticism is one of the most rapidly expanding critical schools today. Given this new situation, we believe it is high time to revisit the dynamic field of ­Chinese ecocinema and re-examine the ways in which people approach C ­ hinese eco-films today. This edited book is a significant expansion of the special issue on Chineselanguage ecocinema in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, published in 2017. It is also a timely supplement to and expansion of Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge. Although the field came into being only about a decade ago, Chinese ecocinema studies have played an active and perhaps leading role in this general re-orientation in global film studies in recent years. This particular volume builds on previous scholarship and further expands the geographic, temporal and generic ranges of Chinese ecocinema. The critical essays gathered here examine the Chinese-language films of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. They explore relevant films from socialist China in the Mao era all the way to the contemporary period. They cover topics pertaining to humans,

2  Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu animals, land, air, water, sea, desert, nature and the planet. In terms of genres, the films under investigation include feature films, documentaries, independent films and commercial blockbusters. The contributors examine the peculiar characteristics of ecocinema, be it landscape aesthetics, or contemplative modes of spectatorship, or activist, interventionist politics. Indeed, as we will explain further, documentary has become a quintessential genre of ecocinema and is especially suitable for probing into environmental issues. In what follows, we will provide a brief delineation of theoretical parameters and critical genealogy of ecocinema studies, reconsider the term “Chinese ecocinema” using Raymond Williams’ keywords approach, and give a short description of Chinese-language ecodocumentaries.

Theoretical perimeters and critical genealogy Before we delineate the genealogy of the contemporary environmental turn in film studies, we would like to briefly revisit a moment in the archives of nonanthropocentric humanistic studies. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, prominent semiotician Thomas Sebeok (1972) made a distinction between two kinds of semiotics: “anthroposemiotics” and “zoosemiotics.” Whereas anthroposemiotics is the study of human communication, zoosemiotics is the study of communication and signification in the animal world. Furthermore, zoosemiotics is part of the broad field of “biosemiotics.” Biosemiotics is the investigation of signs, signification and interpretation in the natural world. The biosphere encompasses verbal and non-verbal communication between humans as well as between animals. In fact, the discipline of semiotics may be dated all the way back to Greek medicine, to the physician Hippocrates (c. 460 bc–c. 375 bc), for whom medicine is a study of “vital signs” (Sebeok 1986).2 For people familiar with the practice of Chinese medicine, the interpretation of vital signs is also at the heart of the matter. The Chinese physician’s diagnosis is built on reading symptoms and non-verbal signs of illness. The doctor feels the patient’s pulse and looks at his/her tongue, and then offers prescriptions for medicine. These ideas and practices are the remote precursors to the current, belated turn to biopolitical, eco-­cosmopolitan studies. As historian Prasenjit Duara points out, the contemporary general shift in the human understanding of itself and the planet constitutes a sea-change from the paradigm of national modernization since the end of World War II to the paradigm of sustainable modernity in the current round of globalization (Duara 2014, 2015). For Duara, “sustainable modernity” implies three levels of analysis. First, the nation cannot be isolated, but should be seen as a part of a regional network, such as Asia. Second, development cannot be measured solely in terms of growth in gross domestic product at the expense of irreparable loss to the environment and nature. Third, researchers ought to study the impact of media on politics and society and investigate the emergent spaces of a trans­ regional civil society (Duara 2015). In the words of another scholar, we are at

Introduction   3 the threshold of post-humanism, a “historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technological, medical, informatic and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms” (Wolfe 2010, xv– xvi). Ecocinema can be seen as an integral component of this broad shift in the humanities and social sciences. It might be said that the modern filmmaker also reads the signs and symptoms of social and spiritual illnesses, and hopes to offer prescriptions for potential cure. We look at ecologically-oriented visual culture not just as a national phenomenon limited to mainland China, but in the broad context of transregional Chineselanguage cinema and the global network of commodity production, circulation, and consumption. We might as well regard the films under discussion as examples of what have been defined as “ecocinema.” An ecological consciousness permeates them all. Together they confront the various ecological and environmental woes besetting the Greater China area. The idea of ecocriticism appears as early as the late 1970s. Ecocriticism as a mode of literary criticism comes into full swing in the 1990s. Recently, ecocritical perspectives have been used in the study of both classical and modern East Asian literatures in the American academia (Thornber 2012). Furthermore, ecocriticism has also expanded beyond literature to encompass film and media. The probable first appearance of the term “ecocinema” is a one-page article written by a biologist and published in the journal BioScience in 1975 (Anderson 1975).3 However, film scholars trace the first use of ecocinema in film studies to Scott MacDonald’s essay “Toward an Eco-Cinema” published in 2004. MacDonald writes the following: I see the fundamental job of an ecocinema as a retraining of perception, as a way of offering an alternative to conventional media-spectatorship, … as a way of providing something like a garden—an “Edenic” respite from conventional consumerism—within the machine of modern life, as modern life is embodied by the apparatus of media. (MacDonald 2004, 109) In terms of film aesthetics, MacDonald emphasizes the long take and slow pace against the tendency of fast editing and accelerated average shot length in mainstream commercial filmmaking. Ecocinema employs “extended shots of relatively still imagery as a way of asking that viewers slow down and explore what they’re seeing” (MacDonald 2004, 115). Such films invite viewers to refresh their perception of the world and the environment and to contemplate the world in a new light different from usual mainstream commercial filmmaking. There have been insightful book-length studies of film culture from ecological and environmental perspectives since then, although they may not use the term “ecocinema” in book titles. In global film studies, the first book that does bear the title of “ecocinema” is probably the anthology Chinese Ecocinema In the Age of Environmental Challenge. The “Introduction” of the book defines

4   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu ecocriticism and ecocinema in its own way, and provides a typology of Chinese eco-films (Lu 2009).4 As pointed out by one commentator, this book “presents the first large-scale attempt to move beyond Hollywood dominance of the field by providing a comprehensive and systematic study of ecological concerns in the different cinemas that make up the wide body of ‘Chinese cinema’ (mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong)” (Kääpä 2013, 21). Some ecocritical scholars particularly emphasize the participatory, moral, activist aspect of ecocinema. Documentary, or ecodocumentary, is exemplary of this interventionist tendency in such cinema. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s passionate account of the nature of ecocinema needs to be quoted at length: Ecocinema overtly strives to inspire personal and political action on the part of viewers, stimulating our thinking so as to bring about concrete changes in the choices we make, daily and in the long run, as individuals and as societies, locally and globally. The capacity to choose consciously, with an awareness of the planetary consequences of choices, is uniquely human … Films falling within the genre of ecocinema can work on our perceptions of nature and of environmental issues through a variety of approaches. A lyrical and contemplative style can foster an appreciation for ecosystems and all of nature’s constituents—air, water, earth, and organisms. Alternatively, ecocinema can deploy an overt activist approach to inspire care, inform, educate, and motivate us to act on the knowledge they provide. (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010a, 45) Some other scholars offer a more inclusive definition of ecocinema. For them, “all films present productive ecocritical exploration and careful analysis can unearth engaging and intriguing perspectives on cinema’s various relationship with the world around us” (Rust and Monani 2013, 3). Ecocinema may appeal to the different faculties of the human mind: cognitive, intellectual, emotional, ethical and practical. The resistance to wasteful consumerism, the ability to provide new angles of perceiving the planet and the call for action are the prized qualities of ecocinema.

“Chinese ecocinema” reconsidered Keyword one: Chinese The term “China” has constantly been questioned and challenged in the field of Chinese film studies. This is mainly because the overarching concept of “Chinese cinema” consists of the cinemas of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese-speaking communities, whose respective histories overlap, penetrate each other, and are closely intertwined. Besides modern Chinese history, these cinemas are also shaped by the connected but contentious geopolitics, social conditions, and cultural influences of Greater China. As a result,

Introduction  5 these cinemas present simultaneously similar yet distinct characteristics that make Chinese cinema a dynamic enterprise. In addition, the boom of new critical paradigms in the past few decades has also cast “China” into a crisis of legitimacy. In the 1980s, when Chinese film studies first grew into a discipline in the West, the field was dominated by the discourse of “nation-state.” This discourse conformed to the dominant tendency in English-language academia at the time. Chinese cinema was then regarded as a national cinema in world cinema. Intriguingly, this term was used both to generally include films produced in the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese communities, and specifically refer to those made in the mainland. Accordingly, both singular and plural forms of Chinese cinema(s) were used in different cases. For instance, Yingjin Zhang titled his book—the Chinese volume of the Routledge National Cinemas series—Chinese National Cinema, even though the book discussed films from the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.5 Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz et al. (1994), on the other hand, used the title New Chinese Cinemas to emphasize the differences between those enterprises. The same can be said of Journal of Chinese Cinemas, perhaps the most important journal devoted exclusively to the study of Chinese cinemas. The plural form is employed to showcase that the art and industry of Chinese films combine heterogeneity with a distinct “national” identity. In the 1990s, globalization engulfed Chinese cinemas, and Chinese films illustrated the growing trend of transnational production, distribution, and consumption. The new paradigm of “transnational Chinese cinemas,” which Sheldon Lu (1997) first proposed in his edited volume, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, timely responded to this new trend and provided a new approach to studies of Chinese cinemas. This transnational approach explores Chinese films against the backdrop of the expanding flows of capital, technologies, personnel, and information among the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other parts of the world. Only through these transnational studies, proponents believe, can analysts tease out the socio-cultural dynamics of Chinese films in this strengthening network of world cinemas. “China” in this transnational paradigm becomes a more porous yet simultaneously more vigorous concept. At the beginning of the new millennium, Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh introduced the concept of “Chinese-language film” into the field of Chinese film studies in the English world, arousing another round of discussions and debates on the paradigm shift. Indeed, the term “Chinese-language film” had been around in the Chinese speaking world, used by people in academia and industry alike, since the 1980s. It had been serving as an extremely useful canopy under which films made in the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Chinese speaking communities were conveniently discussed, circumventing many political and ideological disagreements that used to make exchanges difficult. On the other hand, however, the term “Chinese-language film” also complicated discussions: the previously used “Chinese” was a concept defined mainly in geographic, political, and national terms, while “Chinese-language” was a term

6   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu determined by linguistics (and related only by extension to national/ethnic and cultural identities). To make things more complex, Shu-mei Shih proposed a new paradigm of “Sinophone studies” (Shih 2007), which is still used in Chinese film studies today (Yue and Khoo 2014). Although Shih did not include literary and filmic works made in mainland China in her setup, highlighting her postcolonial, anti-mainland-centric orientation, other critics tend to agree that the term “Sinophone” should include all communities that use Chinese as their major means of communication. Obviously, “Chinese-language film” and “Sinophone cinemas” overlap to a great extent; in many cases, particularly in Chinese academia, they are often used interchangeably. However, differences between their political connotations, though nuanced, are still remarkable. The term “Chinese-language film” is less politically oriented, partly due to its original prospect of sidestepping political barriers and, as a result, being quite popularly used by people of all walks of life across Chinese-speaking areas. The term “Sinophone cinemas,” in contrast, shows more conspicuous political consciousness, owing largely to its genealogical indebtedness to Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone discourses. Nevertheless, both terms highlight the growing asymmetry between Chinese as the definitive official language of the nation-state China, and Chinese as an amorphous language that is geopolitically, historically, and culturally shaped. On the one hand, the study of Chinese-language film and Sinophone cinemas— which extend way beyond mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and reach as far as Chinese speaking communities in Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America—is apparently much larger in scope than the study of traditional Chinese cinema(s). On the other hand, however, Chinese-language film and Sinophone cinemas exclude films made within China using languages other than Chinese, such as ethnic-language films. In this respect, Chinese-language film and Sinophone cinemas encompass a smaller range of films than Chinese cinema(s). This asymmetry, which in Lu and Yeh’s words “bespeaks continuity and unity as well as rupture and fragmentation in the body politic and cultural affiliations among ethnic Chinese in the modern world” (Lu and Yeh 2005, 2), has aroused the so-called “anxiety of subjectivity” (zhutixing jiaolü) in the field of film studies in mainland China. This anxiety comes from two beliefs about Chineselanguage film and Sinophone cinemas that some mainland scholars hold: first, that the two new approaches mark the “dilution” of the “orthodox” study of Chinese film, and second, that they pose a “danger” of disrupting the Chinese nation-state—or more blatantly, the specific polity of the People’s Republic of China.6 There has been an ongoing debate in Chinese cinema studies involving nativist scholars from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and diasporic scholars from outside China such as the United States. In other words, this is a debate between two visions of writing film history, a divide between practitioners of nativist historiography on the one hand and scholars of transnational Chinese-language cinema on the other hand. Nationalist film historiography has

Introduction  7 been central in the founding and development of film studies in the PRC since the 1960s. “Re-writing film history” has become a hot topic in the PRC in recent years as well. Some scholars maintain that Chinese film history, and along with that the Chinese nation-state and China-centered subjectivity, must occupy a central place in Chinese film studies. At the same time, overseas scholars tend to advocate a de-territorialized notion of Chinese-language cinema studies in a transnational, translocal context. This is seen as a challenge to orthodox historiography. The debate about “Chinese cinema” (Zhongguo dianying) versus “Chineselanguage cinema” (huayu dianying) erupted in 2014 and continues to today. The Chinese-language journal Contemporary Cinema (Beijing) published an interview with Sheldon Lu about the history and theory of Chinese cinema in spring 2014. Since then, Lu has become the center of this debate in Chinese film studies circles inside and outside China. Many follow-up essays and interviews have been published in flagship Chinese-language and English-language film journals. It would be useful to tease out the cultural and geographic underpinnings as well as the ideological implications behind the various positions in this debate. Paradoxically, Lu’s theory of Chinese-language film has been accused of opposite things in recent years. For instance, Lu has been accused of Sinocentrism by a film scholar based in Canada. She writes: “Indeed, the territorial construct of a nation-state representing a cohesive vision of the Chinese or Chinese-ness is concealed or replaced by the higher level of unity that Lu demarcates as ‘Chinese-­ language film’ ” (Wada-Marciano 2012, 99). “This kind of pan-Chinese ethnicity that Lu puts forth comes awfully close to supporting the ethnocentric triumphalism now commonplace in nationalistic discourse” (Wada-Marciano 2012, 100). Lu’s theory smacks of “a preoccupation of an indivisible empire, the ‘Middle Kingdom’ ” (Wada-Marciano 2012, 101). On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Li Daoxin of Beijing University and Lu Xinyu of East China Normal University in Shanghai have said the exact opposite thing about Sheldon Lu’s theory of ­Chinese-language cinema: “America-centrism” (meiguo zhongxin zhuyi) and “West-­ centrism” (xifang zhongxin zhuyi) (Sun 2016). We would argue that the idea of transnational Chinese-language film is neither “Sinocentrism” nor “West-­ centrism”. These critics use misconceived notions of national culture, globalization and Chinese cinema. We make an appeal for a broader, more tolerant and more flexible approach in the writing and re-writing of Chinese film history. More broadly, the current debate can be situated in a larger critical genealogy. There seem to be two opposite approaches in contemporary Chinese literary, cultural and film studies in a global context. One tendency is to de-centralize, de-territorialize and pluralize the object of China. This approach is seen in diasporic studies, Sinophone studies and post-colonial theory. The self-alleged counter-hegemonic, anti-Sinocentric position is usually held by scholars and critics outside the PRC. The aforementioned paradigm of “transnational Chinese-­ language film” has a certain affinity with this approach but is not exactly the same. Another approach is to re-territorialize and re-centralize China, to take China seriously as the very object and subject of critical inquiry. China studies

8   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu cannot be separated from the land of China itself, as seen in archeology, philology, ethnography and anthropology (Zhang 2015). One cannot theorize away China. Nationalist film historiography in mainland China is a representative of this approach. It may be said that the study of Chinese cinema from the PRC in the Mao era may benefit from this staunchly nationalistic paradigm. But contemporary Chinese-language films of transnational co-production and global distribution would require a more expansive critical perspective. It is important to point out the characteristics, strengths and possible weaknesses in each approach. We argue for a more balanced position in contemporary Chinese cultural, literary and film studies. The paradigm shifts from national cinema and transnational cinemas to Chineselanguage film and Sinophone cinemas and, ultimately, to Chinese subjectivity cinema, demonstrate the ways in which Chinese has been discursively imagined and constructed in film studies. This conceptualization of Chinese in turn has defined the connotations and denotations of studies of Chinese films. In this process, Chinese cinemas seem to grow into an increasingly nebulous concept. Yet it is precisely because of this amorphousness that Chinese cinemas are constantly constructed and scrutinized—and in the process disclose their dialectical dynamics. Keyword two: ecology People tend to use the terms “ecological environment” (shengtai huanjing) and “natural environment” (ziran huanjing) to refer to the same thing. In the academic discourse of ecocriticism, “ecology” is also often used interchangeably with “environment” and “nature.” However, as many critics have pointed out, these terms, if examined carefully, have quite different ideological ramifications that affect our understanding of the world. The most influential organization of ecocriticism in the West, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and the journal associated with it, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, both use “environment” in their names, a choice with which some critics may not agree. For instance, Cheryll Glotfelty notes, “in its connotations, enviro- is anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that we humans are at the center, surrounded by everything that is not us, the environment. Eco-, in contrast, implies interdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituent parts” (Glotfelty 1996, xx). Combing through theories of ecocriticism in the West, the Xiamen-based Chinese scholar Wang Nuo writes of “ecology” and “environment” as representing two divergent schools of thought: The origin of environmentalism is “weak anthropocentrism,” or “enlightened anthropocentrism” or “modern anthropocentrism.” … That of ecologism is outlooks based on the ideas of system, connection, balance, and harmony in ecology; it comes from the ecological ideas of Jean-Jacques

Introduction  9 Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Friedrich Engels, Martin Heidegger’s ecological philosophy, and contemporary holistic ecological philosophies, including Land Ethics, Deep Ecology, and Gaia hypothesis. (Wang 2013, 58) In contrast, some other critics believe that, compared with “ecology,” “environment” is a more inclusive and sophisticated term, referring not only to the natural but also the social environment, as well as the relationship between the two spheres. For instance, Lawrence Buell remarks: I believe that “environmental” approximates better than “eco” the hybridity of the subject at issue—all “environments” in practice involving fusions of “natural” and “constructed” elements—as well as the movement’s increasingly heterogeneous foci, especially its increasing engagements with metropolitan and/or toxified landscapes and with issues of environmental equity that challenge early ecocriticism’s concentration on the literatures of nature and preservationist environmentalism. (Buell 2005, 8) In his influential book, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton re-conceptualizes the idea of “environment” while questioning the idea of “nature” in ecocriticism. He writes, the very idea of “nature” which so many hold dear will have to wither away in an “ecological” state of human society. Strange as it may sound, the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art. (Morton 2007, 1) In his view, human art has always romanticized nature, so much so that it “has become a transcendental principle.” Environmental art that traverses categories and confinements, on the other hand, “plays with, reinforces, or deconstructs the idea of nature” (Morton 2007, 5). Thus, environmental aesthetics constitutes what Morton calls the “ecological culture.” Such theoretical deliberations in ecocriticism profoundly shape the ecology of studies of ecocinema. Critics view cinematic expressions of ecological themes through the prism of ecocriticism at large. As a result, different ideological connotations of nature, environment, and ecology are refracted in disparate approaches to cinematic representations of ecological subjects. One approach, for instance, takes ideas of deep ecology as its guiding principles and anti-mainstream filmic techniques as its main methods of shooting. By so doing, it aims to arouse an ecological consciousness that has been suppressed by pervasive consumerism, urge viewers to reflect on our anthropocentric social condition, and change people’s way of viewing film and the world. Perhaps the most well-known work that represents this approach is Scott MacDonald’s

10  Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu (2004) article, “Towards an Eco-Cinema,” the first important piece that uses the term “ecocinema.” MacDonald insists that only by employing techniques such as long takes and slow-paced narratives can an eco-film create a reflective edge that enters into the texture of the subject and thus revolutionizes the viewer’s perspective. In contrast, another approach does not define itself by way of non-mainstream— experimental and avant-garde—films, but instead expands its scope to mainstream commercial entertainment films so as to uncover disparate forms of ecological consciousness and examine their ways of dissemination, the effectiveness of their social functions, and their embedded ideologies. This approach, obviously, does not limit itself to the rather elitist way mentioned above, but instead opens itself up to what Morton calls a “widescreen” of ecological cultural analysis (Morton 2007, 5). An increasing number of critics take this approach today. The debates on nature, environment, and ecology in this and other relevant fields all signify uneasy processes in which people deliberate on and explore what ecocinema means under different social, historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic conditions. Examining these debates clarifies some important theoretical issues and deepens our understanding of the subject. As these conditions are constantly in a state of flux, these debates will continue and new ones will emerge, unraveling new prospects in different dimensions. Keyword three: film The idea of “film” is apparently the least debatable one among the three keywords under investigation, perhaps because the tangible physicality of the medium that gives a convenient (or false) sense of definitional clarity. However, the continuous developments in technologies and forms of film in the past hundred years reached a point of drastic change at the end of the twentieth century, when new digital technologies dramatically reshaped people’s understanding of film and the relationship between humans and this medium. What constitutes “film” is increasingly ambiguous, and this change has already yielded interesting ecological consequences and meanings that affect our understanding of the eco-film. First, in terms of its physical existence, the celluloid on which a film traditionally has been based for the past century, though still widely used today, has been replaced to a considerable extent by a variety of forms of digital media. Due to their advantages in terms of quality, price, and performance, digital film products have been increasingly accepted by filmmakers and viewers. Of course, the acceptance of digital films is not without resistance, and some detractors still argue that non-traditional forms of film cannot be categorized as film as such. However, with the accelerating growth of digital films, people’s understanding of what constitutes film is changing. Second, the traditional mechanism of production, distribution, and consumption of films, which is characterized—somewhat simplistically—by a linear process that begins with filmmaking companies and ends in theaters, is increasingly

Introduction  11 supplemented or substituted by new mechanisms. These new mechanisms, in general, have enormously diversified almost every aspect of production, distribution, and consumption of films. In terms of production, new digital technologies, particularly personal digital video, have significantly lowered the threshold of video-making, leading to a significant boom in digital film production since the beginning of the twenty-first century. New documentaries made by personal digital devices, in particular, have mushroomed, taking advantage of the mobility and accessibility that new technologies have provided. Feature films also have benefited from digital technologies. From the very beginning of their careers, young filmmakers, such as Jia Zhangke, have been vigorously exploring the new representational possibilities that these new technologies create. In some ways, new digital technologies have created a new generation of filmmakers. In terms of distribution, the internet and other information technologies have broadened the channels through which films are circulated and have challenged the monopoly of traditional distributors. People access films in increasingly convenient and diverse ways. In terms of consumption, going to the theater or renting a DVD are no longer the only means for people to see a movie. Instead, people are becoming more accustomed to “small screens” such as those of personal computers, iPads, and mobile phones. All of these new changes have reshaped the definition of the film and humanity’s relationship with it. Of course, they also affect people’s understanding of ecocinema. To better engage with these new changes, Sean Cubitt proposes the idea of “eco-media” and explores new ramifications of ecologism under this mediasaturated condition. Cubitt believes that eco-media will be able to display ecological significance beyond that of the traditional film in the following three aspects: mediality, materiality, and communicativeness of media (Cubitt 2005; Cubitt 2013; Rust, Salma, and Cubitt 2015). Turning first to mediality, the film as a powerful visual medium plays a double role with regard to ecologism. On the one hand, with its visual directness and vividness, and its popularity among the masses, the film has helped to visualize, disseminate, and promote ecological ideas across society. On the other hand, however, it is precisely because of these features that the film may also risk obscuring ideologies at play, causing what some would call “green-­ washing.” New media are much more powerful than traditional ones in terms of artistic expressiveness and communicative effectiveness, and, as a result, they interact with and influence society in more complex ways. While new media dynamically represent ecological subjects and disseminate ecological awareness, they may at the same time disguise, in a subtle fashion, many ideological problems. The mediality of new media has thus become a major issue of discussion in ecocritical studies. For the issue of materiality, both traditional film and new media have close yet largely neglected connections with ecology. For instance, the production, distribution, and consumption of traditional films involve the use of celluloid and mechanical devices and require a large investment of human and natural

12  Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu resources, all of which inevitably leave footprints, deep or shallow, in nature.7 In other words, the film’s physical impact on nature constitutes an indispensable part of its ecology. In addition, celluloid film continues to deteriorate over time despite huge investments in technologies for preservation. Ironically, the very moment at which the film, through exposure to light and chemical reactions, preserves a scene on its negative for eternity, precisely marks the beginning of the inevitable process of its gradual degradation and erosion. This process confronts us with the crude materiality of film, which is inescapably embedded in nature. The emergence of digital media has indeed changed traditional film’s reliance on nature and relationship with ecology. The use of digital media, for one thing, avoids massive investment in and consumption of natural resources. The development of Computer Generated Image (CGI) technology, for example, has turned many labor-intensive processes into clicks of a mouse, and hence has enormously reduced film’s impact on the environment. Moreover, digital technologies seem to have made an “eternal” preservation of the film possible. Digitally produced and stored films, unlike their celluloid counterparts, will almost never deteriorate with the passage of time. More and more old films made using the traditional medium are being digitally restored in order to upgrade the quality of sound and images and preserve them in the long term. Once digitized, films seem to free themselves from material restriction and exist in a form that is more “technologized” than physical. As such, their reliance on nature is further relaxed, which has as much physical as symbolic significance in terms of environmental protection. However, while new media have hugely reduced the film’s impact on nature in many aspects, they have also increased its impact in many others. Although new media films have discarded many “nature-unfriendly” materials and technologies that are part of celluloid and mechanical production, the impact of their digital existence on nature is no smaller than that of their traditional counterparts. Studies have shown that many so-called eco-friendly new technologies in fact consume an equally large amount of natural resources. For instance, cloud technologies, to which digital streaming services mainly resort, have been promoted as being in the vanguard of green technologies due to their apparently minimal impacts on nature through massive sharing of resources and coherent management on the internet. However, clouds’ consumption of energy is in fact astronomical, and the environmental contamination they cause is massive. According to one study, California’s Bay Area, where many high-tech companies (including Apple and Google) are based, has been plagued by large-scale pollution as the result of extensive use of silicon and other industrial materials. The gigantic data centers of these companies—that is, the crude physical holders of those seemingly ethereal clouds—consume a tremendous amount of energy and emit an enormous amount of carbon dioxide every day (Carruth 2014, 339–64). Similarly, YouTube, the largest site for video sharing and streaming in the world, has made a large number of video clips and films available at the tip of the finger and thus greatly reduced the impact on nature from the manufacture, packaging, and ­distribution of films. Yet it is precisely because of the ultra-convenience that

Introduction   13 YouTube provides that people have exponentially increased their video viewing. This dramatic growth in turn increases energy consumption, leaving deep marks on nature. In addition, as mentioned, a growing population is using personal and mobile devices to view videos and films. On the one hand, this change in viewing habits may have reduced the natural and financial costs of theaters and transportation, but, on the other hand, it has increased the natural and financial investment in personal viewing devices. The massive amounts of waste and contamination that these electronic devices produce every year are transferred to underdeveloped countries and regions, raising serious questions of eco-justice. In regard to the communicativeness of new media, Cubitt employs Jurgen Habermas’s “communicative rationality” to re-examine the relationship between humans and nature. In this paradigm, both humans and nature are regarded as entities endowed with subjectivity and agency; the rational relationship between the two is achieved through mutual communication instead of a one-way exertion by humans on nature. In this mutual process, new media, Cubitt hopes, play a constructive role bridging humans and nature. To achieve this communication, some filmmakers, including those using traditional means, consciously manipulate the camera lens to reconstruct a more reciprocal relationship between humans and nature, challenging the “natural” relationship between them as the viewer and the viewee, the subject and the object. In addition to this, the open, participatory, and interactive qualities of new media further reconstitute the relationships among different parties involved. Digital video technologies, for instance, have lowered the threshold for filmmaking and extended the right (and obligation) of filmmaking from professionals to common people. This shift, in terms of ecologism, helps not only to promote ecological awareness among the masses, but also to make this ecological awareness more salient for them through more interactive communication. New media films offer greater potential for disseminating and inculcating ideas through this kind of interaction compared with traditional films, although these opportunities also come with uncertainties. In all, the employment of new technologies in almost every aspect of film is gradually changing people’s understanding of what a film is. It is also readjusting the relationships among humans, film, and ecology. The emergence and rapid development of new media are increasingly reshaping the ecology of film, both as an industry and an art form. The ecological significance of film, as a result, is also in the process of changing. What is Chinese ecocinema? As we have shown in our analysis of the three key concepts in Chinese eco­ cinema above, the denotations and connotations of each are in constant flux as political, social, and cultural conditions change. This situation makes defining Chinese ecocinema a challenge, since each constituting term—“Chinese,” “eco-,” and “cinema”—contains cultural and ideological tensions that resist easy explanation. Yet it is precisely because of all these tensions and uncertainties

14   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu that the meaning of Chinese ecocinema is broadened and enriched. Chinese ecocinema defies any effort to define it as a simple, one-dimensional term, but instead welcomes multifarious unfolding. If pressed to provide a working definition of Chinese ecocinema, we would suggest an inclusive one, such as “Chinese films that have ecological significance.” Of course, this working definition—lest it suffer from reductionism— presupposes an awareness of the complexities in each component laid out above. In “Introduction” to Chinese Ecocinema In the Age of Environmental Challenge, Sheldon Lu thus defines Chinese ecocinema: In the simplest terms, ecocinema is cinema with an ecological consciousness. It articulates the relationship of human beings to the physical environment, earth, nature, and animals from a biocentric, non-anthropocentric point of view. In the final analysis, ecocinema pertains to nothing less than life itself. Last but not least, the study of Chinese ecocinema specifically should be placed squarely within the specific intellectual and socio-historical Chinese contexts that may be different from Euro-American settings in significant ways. (Lu 2009, 2) In this definition, Lu highlights three aspects of Chinese ecocinema: (1) an ecological consciousness, since “ecocinema is a description of a conscious film practice among numerous Chinese film artists” (Lu 2009, 2); (2) the link between human beings and the environment; and (3) the Chineseness of Chinese ecocinema. Lu further delineates six themes and subject matters that Chinese ecocinema usually deals with. 1 2 3 4 5 6

How the lives of ordinary people are affected by the destruction of nature and environmental degradation in the relentless processes of revolution, modernization, and industrialization … The effects of urban planning, demolition, and relocation on the lives of ordinary residents. The fate of migrants in the city … The lives and struggles of people with physical or mental disabilities … The relationship between humans and animals … Projection and description of an organic communal mode of life distinct from the daily routines of civilized city folks … A return to religious, holistic thinking and practice and the difficulty of doing so in a commercialized society … (Lu 2009, 7–8)

These types, of course, are not meant to be exhaustive, but instead provide a categorization of what were deemed eco-films at the time. These categories are, obviously, in the process of constant modification as people’s perception of Chinese ecocinema changes. It is equally important that Lu points out that “Chinese ecocinema is a critical grid, an interpretive strategy. It offers film viewers and scholars a new

Introduction  15 perspective in the examination of Chinese film culture” (Lu 2009, 2). The significance of this statement lies in how it extends the scope of Chinese ecocinema by viewing it as a critical perspective through which we examine films rather than as a group of films (no matter how fluid the boundaries of the group are). This view reminds us of the way in which Ursula K. Heise discusses “Environmental World Literature.” Instead of providing a definition of what Environmental World Literature is, Heise emphasizes what Environmental World Literature should do. In her view, Environmental World Literature should, first, disclose the literary and aesthetic merits of the works that have been known for their environmental ideas; second, trace “environmental concerns in works of world literature that for the most part do not engage with nature directly, but presuppose certain views of the natural even as they focus on issues of selfhood, sovereignty, or nationality;” and third, explore texts that “tend to address humans’ relation to nature quite explicitly, but not specifically in the environmentalist sense of human threats to landscapes and other species” (Heise 2012, 404–5).8 This agenda that Heise maps out for Environmental World Literature is instrumental to our reconsideration of Chinese ecocinema. Not unlike Environmental World Literature, Chinese ecocinema perhaps can be more constructively re-conceptualized by way of agenda in becoming. It may demonstrate a more refreshingly discursive power if taken, in Lu’s words, as “a critical grid, an interpretive strategy.” Under this re-conceptualization, we, as critics of Chinese ecocinema, should—to borrow Heise’s words—disclose the aesthetic merits of the films that have been known for their environmental ideas on the one hand, and trace environmental concerns in films that do not engage with nature directly on the other. Thus, any film has the potential to be an eco-film—or, to be more precise, any film can, and perhaps should be, examined from the perspective of ecocriticism so that its ecological significance can be duly and properly unraveled. Indeed, ecology is not so much a denominator that describes a corpus of works as an approach—a lens through which we might view and think about films, not unlike class, ethnicity, and gender. What can Chinese ecocinema do? The agenda mapped out above not only characterizes a new critical approach to Chinese ecocinema, but also highlights the nature of it—a deep engagement with the physical world and a serious attention to its own social role. As Serpil Oppermann sees it, one thing that disparate practices of ecocriticism share is their common goals of promoting ecological awareness, bringing this awareness into the analysis of literary and cultural works, and appropriately understanding the position and role of human beings in the world of non-human (Oppermann 2006, 105). Heise also remarks, Somewhat like cultural studies, ecocriticism coheres more by virtue of a common political project than on the basis of shared theoretical and

16   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu methodological assumptions, and the details of how this project should translate into the study of culture are continually subject to challenge and revision. (Heise 2006, 506) Such statements highlight the centrality of the social (and political) objectives of ecocriticism as well as the special relevance of the social functions of eco-works. The social role of Chinese ecocinema, in our view, is mainly embodied in the following two aspects: raising eco-awareness and generating eco-actions. First, like eco-films in other parts of the world, Chinese ecocinema should strive to raise people’s eco-awareness. To be more specific, Chinese ecocinema should educate people about the significance of ecology to human beings and the urgent need for them to deal with environmental crises. In this process, it can build ecoawareness into people’s everyday life and render this awareness an indispensable part of their global citizenship. C. A. Bower gives precedence to the role that education plays in promoting eco-awareness, arriving at eco-justice, and analyzing ecological ideologies. He believes that only through what he calls an “eco-justice pedagogy” can we disclose the anthropocentric ideas deeply rooted in our mind and thus view the non-human world from a different perspective. The eco-justice pedagogy must combine a responsibility for contributing to social justice (in the domains of both culture and natural ecology) while at the same time helping to conserve traditions essential to communities that retain the mutuality and moral reciprocity of the commons. … The task of conserving what contributes to the recovery of the ecological and cultural commons, in turn, requires an understanding of local interest, needs, and traditions. This understanding needs to be framed within the larger context of worldwide ecological trends such as global warming and the toxic contamination of the environment. (Bowers 2001, 25; quoted in Willoquet-Maricondi 2010b, 4) Second, generating eco-actions, in our view, is embedded in Chinese ecocinema’s social agenda. Lawrence Buell proposes what he calls “acts of environmental imagination” thus: They may connect readers vicariously with others’ experience, suffering, pain: that of nonhumans as well as humans. They may reconnect readers with places they have been and send them where they would otherwise never physically go. They may direct thought toward alternative futures. And they may affect one’s caring for the physical world: make it feel more or less precious or endangered or disposable. All this may befall a moderately attentive reader reading about a cherished, abused, or endangered place. (Buell 2001, 2)

Introduction  17 These acts of environmental imagination represent ways in which literature as an imaginary art form intervenes into the physical world. Films, in our view, can do more. Chinese ecocinema should distinguish itself as an art form that changes the world through real actions. Rather than simply taking ecology as an artistic or academic issue, Chinese ecocinema should play a proactive role by dealing with environmental problems, building ecological organizations, and informing ecological projects, among other activities. In all, it should make eco-actions a tangible and perhaps an intrinsic part of people’s lives. In recently published works, many critics emphasize the importance of action in studies of ecocinema. Besides Willoquet-Maricondi, mentioned above, Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson (2013) also attach great importance to the possibility and necessity of eco-action in producing and viewing eco-films. Actions, it can be argued, have increasingly become an integral part of ecocinema. Both eco-awareness and eco-actions, in the final analysis, lead to a cultural transformation that fundamentally affects the way in which we, as humans, live in the cosmos. In their Commentary on the special issue of “Ecocriticism in East Asia” in Comparative Literature Studies, Karen Thornber and Sheldon Lu quote Lawrence Buell’s comments on the importance of humanistic work: For technological breakthroughs, legislative reforms, and paper covenants about environmental welfare to take effect, or even to be generated in the first place, requires a climate of transformed environmental values, perception, and will. To that end the power of story, image, and artistic performance and the resources of aesthetics, ethics, and cultural theory are crucial. They write: “Ultimately, the environmental humanities work to promote the cultural transformations necessary both for reducing ecological devastation and for preparing for an increasingly uncertain and potentially traumatic future” (­Thornber and Lu 2018, 743). Indeed, Chinese ecocinema should contribute to this significant cultural turn in its own way.

Chinese-language ecodocumentaries As mentioned earlier, Chinese-language documentaries have played an important role in the development of ecocinema. Scholars speak of a ‘New Chinese Documentary Film Movement’ in mainland China as well as ‘New Chinese-­ language Documentaries’ in the Greater China area. In mainland China, this new kind of documentary practice is different from documentaries produced by official media. It cultivates ‘on-the-spot’ (xianchang 現場) realism and contributes to widening of the public sphere in post-socialist China. Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel write the following: [The] New Documentary Movement filmmakers self-consciously fashion themselves as committed to a social practice that they hope will open up

18   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu new public spaces for discussion of social problems and dilemmas in the postsocialist era. They have forged a novel space of social commentary and critique, not simply in the reception of the films by audiences but much more in the actual process of producing the documentaries. (Berry and Rofel 2010, 10) Looking beyond mainland “Chinese cinema” and encompassing the works of filmmakers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Chinese-speaking communities around the world, we may notice a broader “new Chinese-language documentary movement.” In fact, this is the subject matter of Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang’s book New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject and Place. In this book, they “take ethics as one central issue in current Chinese documentary studies,” along with questions of migration, subject, gender and power (Chiu and Zhang 2015, 1). It appears that independent documentaries and eco-films share the fundamental impulses of tackling moral issues, expanding the public sphere beyond state control, adhering to realist aesthetics and recording truth. In the post-Cold War period, urbanization, modernization and globalization have brought limited prosperity and upward mobility to sectors of the Chinese and global population. At the same time, these processes have caused environmental deterioration. Increasing attention has been given to ecology by Chinese filmmakers in recent years. A plethora of Chinese-language films take ecological and environmental issues as their central themes. Chinese-language cinema 華語 電影 includes films made not just inside mainland China, but also in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and the rest of the world. In the case of documentary films, the candid camera eye is particularly effective in revealing the brute truth of reality. There seems to be an ethical imperative for these filmmakers to participate in the creation of a functional civil society, to intervene in the national and global public sphere. The themes of their films include migration and dislocation due to large-scale public work projects, environmental destruction, pollution of soil, water and air, social injustice and the relationship between humans and animals. Overall, the filmmakers strive for an understanding of planet earth from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Here are some examples of Chinese-language documentaries, or, even broadly, diasporic Chinese documentaries, such as Up the Yangtze 沿江而上 (by ChineseCanadian director Yung Chang 張僑勇, 2008); Last Train Home 歸途列車 (by China-born Canadian director Lixin Fan 范立新, 2009); The Warriors of Qiugang 仇崗衛士 (by Hong Kong director Ruby Yang 楊紫燁, 2010) and Beijing Besieged by Waste 垃圾圍城 (by Chinese director Wang Jiuliang 王久良, 2011); My Fancy High Heels 我愛高跟鞋 (directed by Chao-ti Ho 賀照緹, Taiwan, 2010). Many of such documentary filmmakers are award-winners at international film festivals. Up the Yangtze captures the lives of ordinary people in the aftermath of the controversial construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China. The narrator of the film, or the filmmaker himself, Yung Chang, a Chinese-Canadian, visits the Three Gorges area where his grandfather lived. The China he sees is very

Introduction  19 different from the China that his grandfather told him about. He traces the lives of residents in the area before the final completion of the biggest hydraulic project in the world. Countless residents along the Yangtze River have been relocated. Cities, towns and villages have been flooded by the rising water of the dam. As shown in the film, a tourist company organizes cruise tours along the Yangtze River for international visitors as a last sight before that area is more deeply submerged under water. It should be pointed out that this film is narrated in English whereas the local interviewees speak Chinese. English subtitles are provided when Chinese is spoken. In this sense, the film is not strictly a Chinese-language film. It may be discussed as a mixed language film, a Canadian production and a diasporic ­Chinese film. It is a film made by an ethnic Chinese on the impact of man-made environmental changes on people’s lives in the land of his Chinese ancestors. Jia Zhangke’s feature Still Life (Sanxia haoren 三峽好人) also narrates how life has been changed due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Residents living in that area have no choice but migrate to other locations because their homes will literally go under water. Jia’s feature films often have a documentary­-like, realist style. He also makes documentaries directly. For example, Jia made a short film, Smog Journeys (人在霾途, 2015), for Greenpeace East Asia. This film takes on one of the most visible and most widely felt environmental problems of China: smog. Chinese cities, especially Beijing, lately are often shrouded in smog. This creates a serious health hazard for residents. The air pollution is caused by emissions from automobiles and factories as China embarks on the irreversible yet costly path of modernization, urbanization and industrialization. China has the largest migrant population in the world. Ten of millions of peasants leave the countryside and enter the cities in search of employment. They work in the cities all year long. Very often the Chinese Lunar New Year is the only time they have a chance to go home for family union. The documentary Last Train Home tells the story of this greatest migration on the planet by focusing on the life of one single family. The parents work in the city while leaving their children behind in the village. The film unfolds the emotional drama of such a migrant family, a drama that is characteristic of the fate of countless ­Chinese families. The Warriors of Qiugang by Hong Kong director Ruby Yang narrates the struggle of a village that is affected by the existence of a nearby chemical plant. The plant releases toxic waste into the river and soil of the surrounding area. Many villagers have died of cancer due to poison. However, the plant has connections with the authorities and is protected. Against the threat of retaliation, the villagers organize themselves and bring their case to the authorities. These ordinary peasants are indeed brave modern warriors against corruption, injustice and environmental destruction. They risk their lives to fight for the formation of a just, transparent civil society. Beijing Besieged by Waste by Wang Jiuliang reveals the shocking, ugly truth that the capital city is surrounded by an environmental nightmare—it is literally

20  Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu encircled by legal and illegal garbage dumping sites. The sheer magnitude of trash produced by human consumption is astonishing; indeed, beyond ordinary imagination. The endless sites of waste constitute nothing less than a sight of what might be called the “ugly sublime.” Fortunately, Wang Jiuliang’s lonely effort to document filth is noticed by the people, including Premier Wen Jiabao. The authorities have taken steps to clean up the mess and regulate garbage collection and treatment more effectively. In this instance, a documentary seems to have achieved a worthy function. It is a tool for social intervention. Wang Jiuliang’s documentary Plastic China (塑料中國, 2014) takes on the topic of China becoming a destination for global waste. China is a dumping ground in the international circulation of plastic waste. Developed countries have the habit of outsourcing waste to developing countries. In such a manner, the environment of some countries is kept clean and safe at the expense of less developed third-world countries. For instance, electronics from other countries have been dumped in China. Chinese workers and villagers scavenge and sort through toxic electronic components (computers, TVs and cell phones) and extract what might be useful for future recycling. Electronic toxic waste pollutes the soil and water of the affected areas. Another prominent case of globalized production is the case of Apple electronics (computers, iPhones and iPads). American Apple products are assembled by the Taiwanese transnational corporation Foxconn (富士康), which has set up factories inside China. Young Chinese workers manufacture the electronic products in the assembly lines of these factories, which are managed in a quasi-military style. The dreary, monotonous, repetitive work at Foxconn has caused despair in many workers. Workers suicides are often reported. The final episode of Jia Zhangke’s feature film, A Touch of Sin (天註定, 2013), which tells the frustrations and eventual suicide of a young male migrant worker from Hunan working in Guangdong, Xiaohui (小輝), is based on such reports of worker suicides in Foxconn. Zhou Hao’s (周浩) documentary Cotton (棉花, 2013) depicts the internal migration of workers inside China as well as the international circulation of China-made products. Poor rural women from other provinces go to work in the cotton fields and sweatshops of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Xinjiang is large and has plenty of land, and its agriculture is short of labor. Laborers from China’s interior provinces with limited arable land flock to Xinjiang to alleviate the labor shortage there. They make more money there than working in their home provinces. In the end, the fabric made of the cotton they pick from the field is sold in the world market. The clothes they manufacture in sweatshops turn into coveted expensive Western brands in the international division of labor. In the end, the internal national reorganization of labor forces within China is linked to a global chain of marketing, selling and consumption. At this point, we would like to review the documentary My Fancy High Heels. It is a documentary made by the Taiwanese female film director Chao-ti Ho. It examines the manufacture, circulation and use of high-heel shoes from a largely female, or, let us say, feminist, perspective. The documentary offers an

Introduction  21 intimate female look at an otherwise impersonal, global, capitalist network of production, distribution and consumption of man-made objects: high-heel leather shoes for affluent consumers. The film has also been analyzed as a “transnational documentary”, or transnational ecodocumentary. “To a great extent, transnational documentaries enable global spectators to be aware of issues of environmental injustice and exploitation faced by the underprivileged in the world” (Chu 2013, 82). While tracing the global chain of production and distribution of leather shoes and the affective aspects of labor and consumption, the documentary scrutinizes the relationship between humans as consumers on the one hand and animals (cows) as raw material (cowhide) on the other. It probes into the mechanism of globalization in which nature, animals, factory workers, poor migrants and middle- and upper-class consumers in the metropolitan centers of highly industrialized nations are locked in an uneasy relationship. The shoes are made in China but are sold in such metropolises as New York and Taipei. The retail price of a pair of shoes is about US$600 or €400–500 at the time of writing. These shoes are made for such brands as Bally, Prada, Gucci and Fendi. The shoemakers cannot afford the very shoes they themselves make. Young females come to such shoe factories in the coastal province of Guangdong from the less-developed interior of China, such as Hunan Province. They sleep in factory dormitories and eat at factory canteens. Strict discipline is maintained. Their living environment is like an army camp. Factory management is done in a quasi-military style. The manager or owner of a factory is usually a male, who is picky, harsh and rude, and routinely scolds and disciplines these young female workers. One section of the film is called “Let’s Continue to Work after 20 Years” (20 年以後, 我們繼續打工吧). The main character of this section is a young female worker with the nickname of Xiaobudian (小不點, literally ‘Little One’) in a shoe factory in Guangdong Province. She is originally from Hunan Province. She has been away from home and has been working there for three years. Her monthly salary is 1300 yuan. It would take several months’ salary for her and her co-workers to buy one pair of the kind of shoes they make. There is a scene in which she and her fellow workers go to a shoe store to buy shoes for themselves. After intense haggling with the saleswoman at the store, Xiaobudian is able to buy a pair of shoes at the price of 28 yuan. The next section of the film is a scene where these female workers chat about their lives, dreams and families in their dormitory. As they say, if they buy and wear the shoes they make, they would tarnish the famous brand-names. These industrial workers themselves could never afford to buy what they manufacture. This conversation among the female workers seems to be a modern-day classic example of what Karl Marx calls “alienation,” or what Georg Lukács regards as “reification” in a capitalist economy. The workers are alienated from the very objects they make. These young women do not have a better choice than working in a shoe factory being paid a meager salary. They say they will work until they are

22  Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu 60 years old. At that time, they might be laid off by the factory due to age. Does the country, they wonder, have a “Labor Law” to protect them? How can they be protected in old age? They still might have to work even after 60 years old. Tearful Xiaobudian says she is homesick and misses her mother the most. She hopes to go home to see her again. Early on, she failed the national college entrance exam and could not attend college. But she did not want to disappoint her mother, and therefore left home to make a living for herself. She says she is a filial daughter (xiaoshun nü). At this moment in the film, there is a short, dream-like animation sequence. It depicts the union of a mother and a daughter. The daughter returns home. This is a fantasy for a female worker trapped in a far-away factory. The last part of the film is about extracting cowhide from baby calves. This is perhaps the cruelest and most horrifying part of the film. The intertitles on the screen read: the texture of the skin of infant calves is soft. It is the top-quality hide for making famous brand high-heel shoes. Within 12 hours after birth, serum, meat and skin are taken from a calf. Before death, a calf cannot drink water and be fed with milk from the mother. The film shows part of these procedures, although sometimes with hazy, long-distance shots. Again, an animation sequence appears at this point. It describes the intimate, loving relationship between a cow and her infant calf. This section about the mother–child relationship among cows is parallel to the section where Xiaobudian talks about bonding with her own mother. Such magical animation sequences belong to the realm of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, and form a sharp contrast to the dehumanizing, cold relationship among human beings as well as between humans and animals in the real world. The film’s female focus on the relationship between mothers and children is particularly striking, whether they are humans or animals. There is no difference between humans and animals in this regard. The film effectively delivers its message about the anthropocentric, selfish, cruel treatment of other species by humans. Calves are slaughtered in order to satisfy the desire of rich consumers. The cows are raised by peasants in a village near the Russian-Chinese border in Northeast China (Dongbei). Once the cows are big enough, the farmers sell them to a cowhide factory. There is a shot of a pair of cloth shoes (buxie 布鞋) of a peasant in the village. The words on the screen say that the shoes cost 2 yuan. The film sometimes cuts to scenes of New York City and Taipei, which are cities of conspicuous consumption. Skyscrapers such as 101 dot the skyline of Taipei. Glamorous models strut on the stage with designer high-heel shoes. The film cannot but remind the viewer of the fact that such human beauty is built on brutality toward other species. Despite my admiration for My Fancy High Heels, it should be said that the critical examination of the human–animal relationship is not the exclusive domain of documentaries. Varieties of commercial films such as drama, science

Introduction   23 fiction and romantic comedy can also engage ecological issues in their unique ways. Documentary, documentary-style feature film, art-house film and commercial film make up a wide spectrum of eco-films. They utilize different film aesthetics and all deserve our attention. The rarefied aesthetic of an art film, austere cinéma-vérité, a documentary reel or a popular melodrama, each penetrates the mysteries of the planet and the ecosystem in its own manner. Eco-films from the Mao era (1949–1976), if the use of this term is appropriate, such as Army’s Reclamation Battle Song (軍墾戰歌, documentary, 1965), Old Soldiers New Story (老兵新傳, 1959), The Pioneers (創業, 1974) and Spring in the Desert (沙漠的春天, 1975), should be understood in the context of national cinema and against the background of political nation-building. These films describe the efforts of the socialist republic in land reclamation, oil production and the cultivation of arable land. They depict the human conquest of the environment and eulogize humanity’s battle with and victory over nature. Cut to contemporary big-budget, high-profile commercial Chinese-language films such as Wolf Totem (狼圖騰, Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2015) and The Mermaid (美人魚, Stephen Chow, 2016) in the age of globalization. These films also focus on the tension and relationship between humanity and animals. Wolf Totem deals with the fraught coexistence of humanity and wolves in the grassland of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, whereas The Mermaid is science fantasy about the destruction of an ecosystem set in an affluent pan-Chinese community. These films are transnational co-productions and cater to the taste of global audiences. Therefore, they ought to be viewed with a transnational critical lens. Contemporary pan-Chinese cinema calls for a new set of critical tools. Here we arrive in the realm of transnational Chinese-language film studies. Films from the Chinese-speaking world, whether feature films or independent documentaries, ask the audience to rethink the kind of world that human beings wish to live in, and ponder their relationship to nature, the environment and animals. It is high time for filmmakers, critics and researchers to re-examine existing models of modernization and modernity in the Anthropocene so that humanity can embark on a sustainable path of development on the planet.

Structure of the book The ten chapters included in this volume address a wide range of ecological issues, questioning the relationship between human beings and nature from disparate perspectives. For the sake of clarity, we group these chapters into four parts: (I) ecodocumentaries and eco-festivals; (II) different ecologies; (III) humans and animals; and (IV) landscape and nation. Part I consists of two chapters. Kuei-Fen Chiu’s chapter maps the vibrant ecodocumentary-making landscape in Taiwan. Through discussion of six renowned documentaries, Chiu demonstrates the spectrum and trajectory of Taiwanese ecodocumentary-making from its initial appearance in the mid1980s until today. These documentaries also exemplify filmmakers’ disparate approaches to ecological issues, such as social activism, adventurous

24   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu experimentation with the documentary form, non-anthropocentric environmental discourse, and commercial appeal. Chiu’s investigation challenges the reader to think more critically about what it means to make, view, and study ecocinema. Winnie L. M. Yee’s chapter examines three independent eco-film festivals organized by the members of the local Sangwoodgoon organic communities from 2014 to 2017. These festivals, Yee believes, reveal the politics of land, nature, urbanism, localism, and globality, and they are thus symptomatic of post-handover Hong Kong plagued by the imbalance of powers that shape the landscape of the city and its future. Part II focuses on the issue of “different ecologies” in Chinese ecocinema. Both Elizabeth Wijaya and Pietari Kääpä draw on Félix Guattari’s “Three Ecologies” in examining how different ecologies inform the production and reception of ecofilms. Wijaya’s chapter studies the two short films Anchorage Prohibited (2016) and Luzon (2017), both created by the Singapore-born and Taiwan-based director Chiang Wei Liang. Wijaya shows how these two films exemplify the intertwining of environmental ecologies and lived ecologies of migration in Taiwan, a connection that should be further examined in the context of shifting ecologies of ­cinematic production and exhibition. Pietari Kääpä’s chapter identifies “four materialities”: representational, corporeal, interfacial, and processual. Reading Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s monumental documentary, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003), Kääpä brings to our attention the material dimension, a significant yet usually ignored one, in the study of ecocinema. Shuqin Cui addresses an equally important ecology—mediality—in ecocinema. Using Chinese journalist Chai Jing’s ecodocumentary Under the Dome (2015) as an example, Cui explores the way in which a new multimedia documentary—characterized by an extensive resort to digital network and information technologies—can turn an environmental crisis into a dynamic media event that achieves mass virality. Part III taps into the relationship between humans and animals. Chia-ju Chang’s chapter discusses animal films from multiple localities: China, Taiwan, India, Vietnam, and Australia. Chang demonstrates how film as a medium acts as an “agent of redemption” in dealing with the slow violence human beings afflict on nonhuman animals. Haomin Gong’s chapter examines the transnational blockbuster Wolf Totem (2015), adapted from Chinese writer Jiang Rong’s bestseller novel of the same title and directed by the world-renowned French director Jean-Jacques Annaud. Gong explores how this film’s spectacular depiction of wolves under a cross-cultural context illustrates the border-crossing politics of recent world ecocriticism. Fiona Yuk-wa Law’s chapter moves beyond the investigations of animals in these two chapters to analyze films featuring imaginary animals; her discussion focuses on depictions of fictitious monsters and mermaids in commercial blockbusters Monster Hunt (2015) and Mermaid (2016), respectively. Law asks how the ethics of care between different species are represented and what the limit of care in these inter-species entanglements is. The final part addresses the issue of landscape and nation. Cheng Li’s chapter looks back to the Maoist era in China. In examining two films about ethnic minorities—Spring in the Desert (1975) and Army’s Reclamation and Battle

Introduction  25 Song (1965)—Li proposes a theoretical framework that he calls “sinification by greening,” through which he studies the complex politics of greening an ethnic landscape to build a socialist revolutionary nation. In the final chapter, Kun Qian asks whether China has a cinematic genre equivalent to the American “western,” and if so, how a Chinese “western” may inform ecocinema. Taking Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land (2013) as an example, Qian explores how the landscape of western China must be de-culturalized and the national boundary must be deterritorialized in order to make a Chinese western possible. Overall, these ten chapters provide new and unique perspectives to the studies of Chinese ecocinema today. These perspectives not only extend the scope of this burgeoning field, but also complicate the means through which people analyze Chinese eco-films. We are confident that our contributions will inform the studies in the years to come.

Notes 1 This Introduction consists of a re-writing of passages from “Introduction: Chinese-language Ecocinema” for a special issue on “Chinese-language Ecocinema” in Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11.1, written by Sheldon Lu (2017), and new material composed by Haomin Gong. See also Haomin Gong’s (2017) Introduction, “Theoretical Issues in Contemporary Chinese Ecocinema” in the anthology Essays on Chinese Ecocinema [中國生態電影論集], co-edited by Haomin Gong 龔浩敏 and Sheldon Lu 魯曉鵬 (2017). 2 See also Lu (2008). 3 The journal editor’s note on the same page reads: “This proposal was originally published in the Arboretum News of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wildlife Refuge in 1966.” 4 There is an abridged Chinese translation of the essay. See Lu (2010). 5 Intriguingly, Zhang uses singular cinema but plural “Chinas” in his discussion, which particularly engages in the dialectics of nation-state. 6 For a summary and discussion of the debate, see Gong (2015). 7 A good example is the controversy over the destruction of a natural scene caused by Chen Kaige’s production of The Promise (Wuji) in 2005. Part of Chen’s magical fantasy film was shot onsite at Bigu Lake in Shangri-la, Yunnan Province, a tourist site known for its well-preserved waters, virgin forest and pastures, and lakeside azaleas. On April 18, 2016, an article titled “Who Should Come to Dissolve the Ecological Disaster Caused by Promise” was published in People’s Daily (Li 2016), the most important mouthpiece of the Party-state, accusing Chen for irresponsibly handling his production in the Bigu area and causing destruction of the environment there. Many other major news media followed People’s Daily and turned this exposé a public event. Under this pressure, Chen made a public apology, fixed the destruction that his cast had made, and restored the environment to the original state. 8 Obviously, Heise draws inspiration from David Damrosch’s definition of World Literature: “world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading …” (Damrosch 2003, 5).

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26   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu Berry, Chris, and Lisa Rofel. 2010. “Introduction.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, edited by Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel, 3–13. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Bowers, C. A. 2001. Educating for Eco-Justice and Community. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Browne, Nick, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, eds. 1994. New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2001. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. And Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Carruth, Allison. 2014. “The Digital Cloud and the Micropolitics of Energy.” Public Culture 26 (2): 339–64. Chu, Kiu-wai. 2013. “From My Fancy High Heels to Useless Clothing: ‘Interconnectedness’ and Ecocritical Issues in Transnational Documentaries.” In Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation, edited by Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä, 65–84. Bristol: Intellect. Cubitt, Sean. 2005. EcoMedia. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Cubitt, Sean. 2013. “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere: Data Visualization and Ecocriticism.” In Ecocinema: Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt. 279–96. New York and London: Routledge. Chiu, Kuei-fen, and Yingjin Zhang. 2015. New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject and Place. London: Routledge. Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Duara, Prasenjit. 2014. The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duara, Prasenjit. 2015. “The Agenda of Asian Studies and Digital Media in the Anthropocene.” Asiascape: Digital Asia 2 (1–2): 11–19. Glotfelty, Cheryll. 1996. “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, xv–xxxvii. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press. Gong, Haomin. 2015. “民族性、“去政治化”的政治與國家主義： 對 “華語電影” 與 “中國電影主體性” 之爭的一個回應” [Nationalism, Politics of Depoliticization, and Statism: A Response to the Debate on Chinese-Language Films and the Subjectivity of Chinese Cinema]. 電影新作 [New Films] 5: 4–12. Gong, Haomin. 2017. “當代中國生態電影的理論問題” [Theoretical Issues in Contemporary Chinese Ecocinema]. In 中國生態電影論集 [Essays on Chinese Eco­ cinema], co-edited by Haomin Gong 龔浩敏 and Sheldon Lu 魯曉鵬, 1–17. Wuhan: Wuhan University Press. Gong, Haomin, and Sheldon H. Lu, eds. 2017. 中國生態電影論集 [Essays on Chinese Ecocinema]. Wuhan, China: Wuhan University Press. Gustafsson, Tommy, and Pietari Kääpä, eds. 2013. Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation. Bristol: Intellect. Heise, Ursula K. 2006. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism.” PMLA 121 (2): 503–16.

Introduction  27 Heise, Ursula K. 2012. “World Literature and the Environment.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir, 404–12. London: Routledge. Kääpä, Pietari. 2013. “Transnational Approaches to Ecocinema: Charting an Expansive Field.” In Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation, edited by Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä, 21–43. Bristol: Intellect. Li Changhong 李長虹. 2016. “誰來消除《無極》生態之災” [Who Should Come to Dissolve the Ecological Disaster Caused by Promise]. 人民日報 [People’s Daily], April 18. Lu, Sheldon H., ed. 1997. Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lu, Sheldon H., and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, eds. 2005. Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lu, Sheldon H. 2008. “I Ching and the Origin of the Chinese Semiotic Tradition.” Semiotica 170 (1/4): 169–85. Lu, Sheldon H. 2009. “Introduction: Cinema, Ecology, Modernity.” In Chinese Eco­ cinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, 1–14. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lu, Sheldon H. 2010. “中國生態電影批評之可能” [The Possibilities of Chinese Ecoc­ inema Criticism]. Translated by Tang Hongfeng 唐宏峰. 文藝研究 [Literature and Art Studies] 221 (7): 92–8. Lu, Sheldon H. 2017. “Introduction: Chinese-language Ecocinema.” Special issue on “Chinese-language Ecocinema” in Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11 (1) (March): 1–12. Lu, Sheldon H., and Jiayan Mi, eds. 2009. Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. MacDonald, Scott. 2004. “Toward an Eco-Cinema.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11 (Summer): 107–32. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oppermann, Serpil. 2006. “Theorizing Ecocriticism: Toward a Postmodern Ecocritical Practice.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 13 (2): 103–28. Rust, Stephen, and Salma Monani. 2013. “Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves–Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 1–13. New York: Routledge. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds. 2015. Ecomedia: Key Issues in Environment and Sustainability. London and New York: Routledge. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1972. Perspectives in Zoosemiotics. Hague: Mouton. Sebeok, Thomas A. 1986. I Think I am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs. New York: Plenum Press. Shih, Shu-mei. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sun, Shaoyi. 2016. “Chinese-Language Film or Chinese Cinema? Review of an Ongoing Debate in the Chinese Mainland.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10 (March): 61–6. Thornber, Karen Laura. 2012. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Thornber, Karen Laura, and Sheldon Lu. 2018. “Commentary.” Comparative Literature Studies 55 (4): 741–8. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. 2012. Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

28   Haomin Gong, with Sheldon H. Lu Wang, Nuo 王諾. 2013. 生態思想與生態批評 [Ecological Thoughts and Ecocriticism]. Beijing: Renmin chubanshe. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula. 2010a. “Shifting Paradigms: From Environmentalist Films to Ecocinema.” In Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, 43–61. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, ed. 2010b. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yue, Audrey, and Olivia Khoo, eds. 2014. Sinophone Cinemas. London: Macmillan. Zhang, Longxi. 2015. “Re-conceptualizing China in Our Time: From a Chinese Perspective.” European Review 23 (May): 193–209.

Part I

Ecodocumentaries and eco-festivals

1 Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape Politics of aesthetics and environmental ethics in Taiwanese ecodocumentaries Kuei-fen Chiu “Ecocinema” under debate In 2013, the documentary Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above 看見台灣 (2013, d.  Chi Po-lin 齊柏林, hereinafter referred to as Beyond Beauty), took Taiwan by storm with its astounding aerial photography and strong environmental message. It garnered the “Best Documentary Award” at the Fiftieth Golden Horse Film Festival and became the highest grossing documentary since Taiwanese documentaries began to be screened in theaters in 1997. In spite of its record-breaking box office gross and popularity, Beyond Beauty was regarded by some critics as a disappointing eco-film for its emphasis on emotive effect rather than in-depth analysis of the devastating environmental problems presented in the film (Lin 2013; Kuo 2014, 117–24). The debate on this popular documentary raises important questions about the definition of “ecocinema” and eco-film criticism. At the heart of this debate is the popular mode adopted by Beyond Beauty in its attempt to reach a wider audience. Furthermore, the criticism of Beyond Beauty implies that rational analysis, rather than affect or emotion, is essential to an eco-film. The case of Beyond Beauty draws attention to critical issues under debate in ecodocumentary studies. What form should ecocinema assume? What constitutes the so-called “ecocinema experience”? Should ecocinema try to offer a film experience alternative to the kind of media spectatorship found in most popular films (MacDonald 2013, 19–20)? Or, should there be room for a pluralistic eco-aesthetic, to borrow the term from David Ingram, that recognizes the value of commercial films for promoting environmental awareness (Ingram 2013, 58–9)? The debate generated by Beyond Beauty invites us to think more critically about what it means to make, view and study ecodocumentaries. Paying special attention to the politics of aesthetics and environmental ethics, this chapter investigates how Taiwanese documentary makers and critics engage critical issues of ecocinema and contribute to ecocinema studies in general.

Ecodocumentary making in Taiwan “Taiwan had discovered ‘nature’ sometime in the mid-1980s,” so says Robert P. Weller in his Discovering Nature: Globalization and Environmental Culture

32   Kuei-fen Chiu in China and Taiwan (Weller 2006, 2). Although the 1970s witnessed environmental deterioration in Taiwan due to rapid economic growth, there was little visible environmental activity from the government during that time (Weller 2006, 1). Taiwanese ecodocumentaries that addressed environmental issues and promoted environmental consciousness began to appear in the mid-1980s. They can be regarded as a sub-category of oppositional social documentaries that sought to empower the emergent civil society in Taiwan at that time. In its early stages, ecodocumentary-making in Taiwan was marked by a strong activist agenda and, generally speaking, was anthropocentric in its approach. Arguably, documentary makers engaged the issue of environmental protection mainly to defend the interests of economically underprivileged local people. Activist ecodocumentary making has remained vibrant in Taiwan since then. The Lukang Anti-DuPont Movement 鹿港反杜邦運動 (1987, d. the Green Team 綠色小組, hereinafter referred to as Anti-DuPont Movement), and National Bandits: A Beautiful Mistake 國家共匪: 美麗的錯誤 (2000, d. Mayaw Biho 馬躍·比吼, hereinafter National Bandits) serve as illustrative examples for our analysis here. The former was produced by the “Green Team”—allegedly “the father of the New Taiwan Documentary.” The latter was made by Mayaw Biho, an indigenous documentary maker of the Ami tribe who has used the documentary as the main medium for championing the rights of the indigenous people in Taiwan. Both documentaries are concerned with land rights. AntiDuPont Movement documents the movement against the proposal by the transnational DuPont company to build a titanium dioxide plant in Lukang—a coastal town in western central Taiwan. National Bandits highlights the indigenous perspective to intervene in the national park debate and throws into relief the thorny issue of “rival environmental ethics”—i.e. the interests of endangered humans and their culture vs. the protection of endangered species (Buell 2001, 230). These two activist documentaries address the following issues that also find resonance in ecocinema worldwide: What is the relationship between humans and the land? Who owns the land? How should the land be used by humans? Who has the right to make these decisions? As the two activist documentaries put these questions in the spotlight, they implicitly define Taiwanese ecodocumentary making as a filming practice intersected with geopolitics, race and ethnicity. The factor of gender, however, has not come into the picture yet. Although these two documentaries focus on land rights in their intervention in environmental debates, they are quite different in the choice of documentary style. Anti-DuPont Movement employs the expository mode, whereas National Bandits eschews voiceover or captions. The indigenous filmmaker’s position is revealed through his careful selection of juxtaposed interviews, shots and songs, instead. We shall show how the documentary makers experiment with documentary aesthetics and form to convey their messages. With their focus on the impact on underprivileged people in the transformation of the environmental landscape, Anti-DuPont Movement and National Bandits are anthropocentric in the sense that they are concerned more with the interests of humans than with those of nonhumans. The turn of the twenty-first

Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape   33 century witnessed the increasing prevalence of non-anthropocentric environmental discourse in Taiwanese ecodocumentaries. Three ecodocumentaries are chosen for discussion to illustrate this new direction of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature on the Taiwanese documentary scene. In all three documentaries, nonhumans are placed in the limelight. The main characters in Swing 擺盪 (2010, d. Ke Jinyuan 柯金源) are orangutans imported to Taiwan from Southeast Asia through transnational animal trafficking. The interests of animals, rather than human interests, are the main concerns of this ­non-anthropocentric ecodocumentary. The highly stylized documentary Nimbus 帶水雲 (2009, d. Huang Hsin-yao 黃信堯) celebrates landscape aesthetics with a strong focus on nature images. Human actions and voices are minimized in this film. The filmmaker Huang Hsin-yao actually defines this work as a biocentric ecodocumentary. Beyond Beauty, a theater-released popular film, also foregrounds ‘nature’ as the main subject in its attempt to spread the message of environmental protection. The notion of environmental ethics surfaces in these three ecodocumentaries. The celebration of aesthetics, particularly in the cases of Nimbus and Beyond Beauty, throws into relief the politics of aesthetics, inviting us to examine critically the intertwining of aesthetics and ethics in the making, viewing and study of ecocinema. If ecocinema is defined as “ecocinema with an ecological consciousness” that “articulates the relationship of human beings to the physical environment, earth, nature, and animals from a biocentric, non-anthropocentric point of view” (Lu 2009, 2), does the art film aesthetics of Nimbus promote ecological consciousness more effectively than the popular film aesthetics of Beyond Beauty? If the deployment of aesthetic devices in both films is meant to generate a specific “ecocinema experience,” arguably that aesthetic experience would lead to ethical engagement with environmental problems. If so, the question as to how aesthetics intersect with ethics certainly should be placed squarely on the table of ecocinema studies.

Laying the foundation for Taiwanese ecodocumentary making: The Lukang Anti-DuPont Movement As has been noted, the environmental movement in Taiwan began to gain momentum in the mid-1980s (Hsiao 1999, 33; Grano 2015, 42–6). It was about the same time that independent documentary filmmaking appeared on the Taiwanese scene. Working in close alignment with social protesters, a group of independent documentary filmmakers who identified themselves as “The Green Team” made documentaries that vividly captured a growing Taiwanese civil society at that specific historical juncture (Chiu and Zhang 2015, 42–3). A significant category of these documentaries is environmental documentaries—broadly defined as documentaries concerned with environmental issues. Anti-DuPont Movement is representative of this corpus of environmental documentaries produced in late-1980s Taiwan. Just as its title suggests, this documentary depicts the anti-DuPont movement that was launched in 1986 and ended in 1987. This movement is often taken to

34   Kuei-fen Chiu be a watershed in the history of Taiwan’s social movements because, in the words of the sociologist Ming-sho Ho (2013, 701), “the unexpected victory of a small town over an American chemical giant enhanced the morale of Taiwan’s nascent environmentalism.” The documentary in itself is also a landmark in the history of Taiwanese ecodocumentary making in that it laid the foundation for activist Taiwanese ecodocumentaries. The structure of the documentary consists of two parts. The first part builds up an environment discourse with interviews with local people and experts who support the environment movement. Local people provide a micro-view of the potential threats of the DuPont plan to the livelihoods of local farmers and fishermen and stress their responsibility to future generations. Experts, on the other hand, uphold the notion of “environmental rights” and situate the transnational investment plan in Taiwan within a broader context of the neo-colonial international division of labor in the Cold War structure. The second part is dominated by actions: on-the-spot documentation of street protest vis-à-vis riot police, a press announcement of DuPont’s decision to withdraw the plan and finally a religious ritual with strong local color held in Lukang in celebration of the victory of the movement. It is noteworthy that this foundational Taiwanese ecodocumentary strikes a rudimentary note of environmental justice—an environmentalism that recognizes the uneven distribution of environmental burdens and the need for social justice (Hartley 2003, 478–9; Yu 2010, 100), even though the term “environmental justice” was not known to the documentary maker or the protesters in the film. Anti-DuPont Movement, in a sense, defines Taiwanese ecodocumentary making as a geopolitical filming practice that addresses environmental problems in Taiwan in terms of the interplay between the global and the local. In addition to the introduction of basic environmental justice issues, a significant contribution of this documentary is its innovative use of formal audio-visual devices to highlight “the voice of the people.” For example, the main language used in the documentary, including the female voiceover, is local Taiwanese rather than Mandarin—the official language in Taiwan after the end of World War II. The use of the camera in the street demonstration scenes also identifies the cameraholder as one among the protesters, suggesting that the documentary is telling the story from the perspective of “the people.” “The Green Team” is widely considered as the forerunner of ecodocumentary making in Taiwan. Anti-DuPont Movement embodies the legacy of Taiwanese ecodocumentary that the Green Team has passed down to the later generations. The documentary’s strong interventional, activist character continues to define a very strong strand of Taiwanese ecodocumentary making. It also throws into relief the relevance of ecodocumentary making, viewing and study as geopolitical practices in a dynamic planetary context. Figure 1.1 captures vividly the vitality of activist documentary making in the late 1980s. Anti-DuPont Movement shows the close tie between a particularly strong strand of Taiwanese documentary making and environmental movements in Taiwan. The documentary is concerned with the rights of local residents and

Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape   35

Figure 1.1  “The Green Team” filming anti-DuPont street demonstration in 1986.

their struggles to protect their own interests by warding off environmental pollution and contamination. Human characters dominate the pictures. The rights of nonhumans are hardly mentioned, nor is there any reflection on the intrinsic value of nonhumans independent of the interests of the human characters.

Endangered humans versus endanger nature: National Bandits Lest we underestimate the complexity of activist ecodocumentary making in Taiwan and misunderstand it in simplistic terms of “civil society vs. the state/ corporate,” we shall take a look at the indigenous documentary National Bandits by the indigenous documentary maker Mayaw Biho. Just like the 1960s in many Western countries, the 1980s was an era of social movements in Taiwan. The environmental movement and independent documentary making were taking shape. So was the indigenous movement. While literary magazines and indigenous writers played a significant role in the indigenous movement in the 1980s, indigenous documentary makers—e.g., Mayaw Biho of the Ami tribe and Pilin Yapu of the Atayal tribe—began to appear on the scene in the late 1990s. The intersection of indigenous movement with the environmental movement provides a very interesting case for testing the boundaries of “ecocinema.” Like Anti-DuPont Movement, National Bandits tackles the problem of land rights. But while the former frames the debate in terms of “environmental protection vs. development,” the indigenous documentary problematizes the environmental protection discourse by calling attention to the factors of ethnicity and class in green dispossession. The main issue is the establishment of national

36   Kuei-fen Chiu parks for environmental preservation. From the perspective of indigenous people, national parks exemplify another form of colonization that denies indigenous people’s rights to their land (Bayet-Charlton 2003, 176). The documentary opens with the scene of a small group of indigenous people hunting in a national park against the law. From the perspective of these indigenous hunter-interviewees, they are practicing a traditional indigenous mode of existence to safeguard their own culture. The implementation of laws against hunting in national parks, in their view, violates indigenous rights. As Fabienne Bayet-Charlton (2003, 171) points out in his discussion of the case of Australian aboriginal dispossession, “wilderness” conceived as wild, uninhabited or inhabited by nonhumans only, actually signifies a type of “paternalism and dispossession” if it demands the removal of aboriginal people from the so-called “wilderness” landscape. In National Bandits, government officers are nicknamed ‘national bandits’ by the indigenous interviewees, for they rob indigenous people of their traditional hunting territories and ancestral homes. The documentary deliberately stages interviews with indigenous people from different tribes in Taiwan to reveal pervasive indigenous dispossession and loss of their rights to land. Indigenous people are forced to give up their ancestral homelands, forbidden to hunt or cut down trees for house building, and they are not allowed to expand their own houses in national parks to accommodate newborn children or grandchildren. The personal accounts of these indigenous interviewees paint a picture of what Rachel Stein (2010, 101) calls “disposable bodies” in the natural preservation discourse of national parks. While Stein focuses on the incidents of biocolonialism—i.e., the biotechnological consumption of the vulnerable bodies of Third World people or refugees, Mayaw Biho’s portrayal of the predicament of the indigenous people points to a similar conception of indigenous bodies that can be disposed of in the plan of national parks. As in Anti-DuPont Movement, National Bandits interweaves the interviews with scholars of indigenous studies with those with indigenous people to provide both macro and micro views on the issue at stake. In the view of a scholarinterviewee in the documentary, the national park plan is a form of what he calls “environmental colonization,” a forced usurpation of indigenous people’s land and natural resources. Another scholar-interviewee proposes an alternative conceptualization of national park as a form of environmental protection, which would leave room for the interaction between indigenous people and their traditional habitats. The documentary ends with the victory of the indigenous protesters as government officials announce the abolition of their plan to set up a new national park. Unlike Anti-DuPont Movement, National Bandits does not use the voice-over as its guiding structural principle. The filmmaker’s perspective is conveyed mainly through editing and the skillful arrangement of selected interviews. For example, the pervasive phenomenon of environmental colonization and the disposability of indigenous bodies are suggested, as indigenous land controversies

Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape   37 are shown to appear in different places and in different forms. These controversies concern the indigenous tribes of mountain- as well as ocean-culture in Taiwan. A particularly noteworthy device is the intricate interplay between images and song-singing. Song, as Lawrence Kramer argues, can be understood as “a deformation of speech” (Kramer 2015, 578). Singing does not simply enunciate words, it also enacts “unspeaking,” “an undoing of speech” (Kramer 2015, 577). This tricky power of song-singing comes to the fore in National Bandits when the documentary couples an indigenous female voice singing a popular Taiwanese love song from the 1970s, “Wishing You Happiness,” with the image of a big truck carrying nuclear waste to a storage site on an indigenous island. Here, singing reconfigures the text of words, giving it an ironic twist: Sending you a gift of love I wish you happiness Regardless of when and where Always remember my blessings This “gift of love” turns out to be a “gift of death” in disguise; the “blessings” a curse. Indigenous signing “mimics,” turning the love promise in the pop song upside down. It points to the long history of treacherous betrayal suffered by indigenous people. The song becomes a form of political “paraphrase,” to borrow a term from Kramer (2015, 576). The documentary implies that situated in this context of pervasive indigenous dispossession, the establishment of national parks for the preservation of nature at the expense of indigenous rights is a further violation of social justice. As Jean Ma and Mathew Johnson remark, “soundtracks are not only meaningful or pleasurable ‘add-ons’, but also function as a political script, narrative and counter-narrative” (Ma and Johnson 2013, 182). In the hands of the indigenous documentary maker Mayaw Biho, the popular song in the mainstream commercial market is transformed into a strong political commentary on the persistent exploitation of indigenous people and land in Taiwan. Thus, National Bandits throws into relief the clash between endangered humans and endangered nature. It foregrounds rival environmental ethics—i.e., “the misery of beasts and humans” as phrased by Lawrence Buell (2001, 224–42). Given the fast disappearance of tree and animal species in Taiwan’s mountain area due to pervasive illegal logging and trafficking of endangered animals, this “endangered humans vs. endangered nature” dilemma is surely a thorny problem. Discussing a similar conflict between indigenous people and environmentalists in the case of the famous Makah whale hunt controversy, Caskey Russell (2010, 170) argues that both parties “have to be willing to re-envision and, perhaps, redefine themselves” in order to bring a form of “green postcolonialism” into being. This recommendation, of course, is more easily said than done. The Postscript section of Russell’s essay, entitled “A Wound Reopened,” describes the rise of tensions between Makah tribal members and anti-whaling environmentalists when illegal hunting of a grey whale by five remorseless

38   Kuei-fen Chiu Makah tribal men occurred in 2007. Similar negotiations between the activists of environmental protection and the defenders of indigenous rights also take place in Taiwan. Voicing indigenous perspectives, National Bandits takes the side of indigenous rights in its intervention in this environmental debate. Contextualization is, as Michael R. Dove (1998, 56) remarks, “the subject of the debate.” Situated in the context of ecocinema studies, National Bandits deserves special attention. It challenges the legitimacy of the environmental discourse of national parks, calling attention to the intricate connection between “environmental colonization” and “environmental protection.” In a sense, the story told in the documentary is a story of “ecoambiguity,” to borrow a term coined by Karen Laura Thornber to encapsulate the ambiguity of human’s relationship with nonhumans (Thornber 2012, 1–12). It provides a very interesting case of the “epistemological uncertainty” of ecoambiguity (Thornton 2012, 6). For the purpose of this chapter, this indigenous documentary invites its viewers to reflect critically on the definition of “ecocinema.” Does “ecocinema” refer only to works promoting environmental awareness? Or, does it also encompass those films that, like National Bandits, challenge the viewers to confront the dilemma of rival environmental ethics? No matter how we answer these questions, it is clear that this interventional indigenous documentary asks disturbing questions about the boundary of ecocinema.

Eco-cosmopolitanism in practice: Swing Both Anti-DuPont Movement and National Bandits approach environmental issues with human interests as their main concern. In the following, we examine three non-anthropocentric documentaries to travel further into the space of Taiwanese ecodocumentary making. Swing focuses on the predicament of orangutans in transnational pet trafficking and conservation. Opening with juxtaposed shots of an orangutan swinging freely in a rainforest and those of an imprisoned orangutan swinging restlessly in a cage, this documentary traces the history of the Taiwanese fashion of adopting big apes as pets in the 1960s and the consequent problems of managing abandoned or aging pet-apes. A documentary tackling the issue of animal rights, Swing does not work within the simple framework of “humans vs. animals” in its portrayal of the encounter between the apes and humans. Juxtaposing the stories of different pet-orangutans in Taiwan, the documentary shows how human compassion for pet-animals creates unexpected disasters for the animals they purport to love. Loss of family members, ordeals during travel across seas, constant relocation to unfamiliar places and living in a cage without freedom are the common fates of the ape characters in this film. The traumatized experiences of forced separation from their dear ones and constant relocation leave unerasable imprints on these apes. As an expert from a government-sponsored center of wildlife in Southern Taiwan explains in the film, the swinging of these big apes in their narrow cages is a sign of obsessive-compulsive mental disorder rather than a

Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape   39 natural behavior as it was in their rainforest home. Even though the animal-pets are shown to be treated with great compassion by their foster families, their suffering certainly invites more critical reflection on the existence and operation of pet markets in the service of human interests. The film highlights the despair of these caged apes. In a word, rather than setting up antinomy between humans and animals, the documentary shows that “anti-cruelty” is not enough when thinking about the relationship between humans and animals (Regan 2003, 66). Although the moving stories about the empathy between humans and the pet-apes suggest what Jennifer Ladino calls “interspecies connectivity” (Ladino 2013, 133), they nevertheless underscore the importance of recognizing the difference between humans and the pet-animals these humans try to adopt as family members. Carefully building a non-anthropocentric environmental discourse, Swing urges its viewers to defend the interests of animals, which includes stopping having animals as pets and leaving them in their natural habitats (Chiu 2016, 147). This message is driven home most forcefully through the juxtaposition of shots that show the orangutans swinging freely in their natural habitats and those that show them swinging nervously in the cages. The latter half of the documentary engages the issue of “home-coming” for the dislocated apes so as to explore the ways of redressing the wrongs that have been done to them. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible for these apeimmigrants to return to their homes in Southeast Asian rainforests because of the fast shrinkage of the rainforest areas due to economic development. On the other hand, the pet-orangutans often find it difficult to be “at home” again in the rainforests since they have lost the necessary survival skills. Toward the end of the film, we see a man-made home for orangutans in England as a restoration plan. This “home-searching” suggests the filmmaker’s endorsement of both wilderness preservation and ecological restoration. The strength of Swing does not rest in its stylistic innovations but rather in its in-depth engagement with environmental ethics issues. Tackling the issue of animal liberation, Swing endorses an environmental ethics that underscores moral responsibility toward nonhumans, including animals and their natural habitats (Chiu 2016, 147). While the shots of touching interaction between humans and orangutans stress the empathy between humans and nonhumans, the documentary shows how human’s undue compassion for animals generates a disastrous impact on the nonhumans (Chiu 2016, 45). Like many animal rights films, Swing employs the rhetoric of animal liberation, suggesting that “sentient animals are equal to humans because they too feel pain” (Murray and Heumann 2014, 122). The interests of nonhumans, rather than the interests of humans, are the major concern here. However, rather than staying with the “individualistic approach” with individual animals as the focus, Swing presents a holistic environmental vision that places the issue within the global context of the wholesale destruction of wildlife habitat. The pet-animal problem is no longer understood as simply a local problem in the Taiwanese context. A broader scope of thinking is needed in

40   Kuei-fen Chiu order to grasp the complex situation of the animal migrants in their transnational trajectories. The orangutans are transported to Taiwan through transnational animal trafficking. The hope of saving this endangered species also hinges on transnational joint efforts. Swing contextualizes the problem it tackles “within the transnational economic and geopolitical systems that structure the world” and urges its viewers to think about “global solutions” to the environmental problems at stake (Kääpä 2013, 26). It exhibits a strong “eco-cosmopolitan” outlook. Defined by Ursula Heise, eco-cosmopolitanism is “an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds” (Heise 2008, 61). Swing examines the problem of pet-apes and its possible remedies in terms of the dynamism between the global and the local. It therefore departs from what can be called an “ethic of proximity” that has characterized the Taiwanese ecodocumentary tradition. It brings to light “a network of ecological links that span a region, a continent, or the world” (Heise 2008, 56). The planetary scope of thinking about local environmental problems is a distinctive trademark of the filmmaker J. Ke Jinyuan, and it has earned him the respected title of “Master K” in Taiwanese documentary and environmental circles.

The politics of landscape aesthetics: Nimbus Of all the ecodocumentaries studied here, Nimbus has received the highest praise from film critics because of its unique art-film style (Zheng 2011). The winner of many prestigious awards at film festivals in Taiwan, Nimbus maps the landscape of a rural town with poetry and music. It foregrounds nature images to deliver a non-anthropocentric environmental message. The documentary opens with the reading of a Taiwanese classical poem and ends with the picturesque shot of a coastal town. It underscores the beauty of the landscape in seasonal cycles. Instead of polemics, Nimbus offers the viewers an experience. It tries to move, rather than to persuade via an argument. David Ingram makes a distinction between ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ in his discussion of ecocinema experience. In his words, ‘affect’ is defined as “a viewer’s automatic, visceral response to a film,” whereas emotion “includes a cognitive element in addition to this bodily feeling” (Ingram 2014, 23). Ingram argues that affect and emotion are important in ecocinema experience, for “the process of valuing things in the world is inseparable from the emotions and feelings they induce in us; without these emotions and feelings there would be no value” (Ingram 2014, 31). In the place of rational discourse, we have mood-cues in Nimbus that induce the viewers to value the landscape of the rural town unfolding in the film. Many critics have remarked on the visual artistry of the film (Zheng 2011; Chiu 2015, 54). The rural town, commonly known for its subsidence problem, is shown through aesthetically composed shots highlighting nature images such as trees, beaches, birds, rain, water, and cloud. The aesthetic emphasis on nature images

Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape   41 evokes first a sensory, affective response to the so-called ‘beauty of nature’. An emotional response that recognizes the good of this state of being for the township, particularly for nonhumans, is then aroused. However, this exclusive focus on the visual aspect of Nimbus fails to register the fact that the soundtrack plays no less an important role in shaping the particular “ecocinema experience” of this film. As Song Hwee Lim remarks in his discussion of Sinophone films and various critics point out in film studies in general (Lim 2014, 65; Morris 1997, 2–5; Sterne 2003, 4; Ma and Johnson 2013, 179–82), little attention has been paid to sound and voice in films (Lim 2014, 65). Films are usually discussed mainly in visual terms even though they are sound-saturated. In Nimbus, sound and voices work in various ways as moodcues to induce the viewers’ emotional engagement with the landscape. For example, the documentary film opens with the reading of a poem in Taiwanese, inviting the viewers to appreciate the seaside bathed in a sunset glow. As Michel Chion points out, sound helps shape the meaning of the image, making us “see in image what we would not otherwise see, or would see differently” (Chion 2012, 53). The poetry reading at the very beginning of the film guides the viewers to appreciate the image from a specific angle and sets the poetic mood for the film. It is then followed by a deep-toned, male, voiceover. Accompanied by leisurely paced background piano playing, the narrator’s personal mode of address reinforces the mood. Obviously, the soundscape does not simply function to provide information. The soft tone, low pitch, leisurely pace and gentle address of the voice and music go beyond the communication of words to induce a particular mood—i.e. the mood of a pleasant excursion to an idyllic place. The soundscape is performative, generating emotions and feelings for the rural landscape on screen. Arguably, the combination of visual and audio devices in this film shapes a landscape aesthetics that aims to promote ecological consciousness. As the director remarks in an interview: the image of the water implies rebirth, and, in a sense, the film celebrates “the rejuvenating cycle of nature” (Hu 2009). However, what makes Nimbus particularly interesting as a case study of ecocinema is the ambiguous meaning of this film’s environmental discourse once it is situated in the real-life, social context of the land subsidence problem of the rural town. Environmental critics would point out that the images of ‘nature’ presented in this documentary are in fact images of ‘culture’—a culture of inappropriate water resources management and policy supporting industrial development at the expense of the interests of the rural town. The ambiguity of the film’s non-anthropological environmental message comes to the fore if the viewers take into consideration the fact that the idyllic township in the film is widely known in Taiwan as a materially impoverished place suffering the worst land subsidence problem on the island (Chiu 2015, 61–2). Thus, a closer look at Nimbus reminds us of the importance of historicized, situated interpretation when doing ecocinema studies. This documentary provides another interesting case of ecoambiguity. It throws into relief the complexity of the politics of landscape aesthetics in ecocinema studies.

42   Kuei-fen Chiu

The politics of popular ecocinema: Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above Our exploration of the Taiwanese ecodocumentary making landscape has covered activist documentaries and art films so far. We now turn to the relationship between commercial cinema and ecocinema. Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, a popular film that claimed the highest gross for a locally produced documentary in Taiwan (Lee 2014), is our case study here. In his insightful essay “The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-film Criticism,” David Ingram points out that art films and activist documentaries are often regarded as more likely to be eco-films than commercial cinema (Ingram 2013, 44). Against this prevalent penchant in ecocinema studies, Ingram argues for a “pluralistic eco-aesthetic” which finds value in popular, blockbuster cinema (Ingram 2013, 58). He contends that the so-called “impact aesthetic” of commercial cinema, which celebrates the primacy of affect over cognition and emotion in the cinematic experience, often generates entertainment values that are instrumental in the pedagogical purpose of eco-films (Ingram 2013, 49–54). It is within this context of the debate on ecocinema aesthetics that we will situate our discussion of Beyond Beauty. This documentary uses juxtaposition as its main device. The first part of the documentary presents scene after scene of the astounding beauty of Taiwan as “Formosa”—the name endowed on the island when Portuguese sailors first sighted the forested island in the sixteenth century. Staging the spectacular natural landscape of Taiwan from an aerial perspective for nearly 25 minutes with scarcely any voiceover or dialogue, the documentary underscores the primacy of affect in the cinematic experience. A theater-released documentary, it unfolds images of majestic mountains and seas panoramically on the big screen of the theater. The indigenous singing in a mature male and then a female voice works as another emotional cue, in effect performing an “ode” to the natural landscape to create an “impact aesthetic.” This singing is conducted in an indigenous language. Even though the viewers may not understand a word in the song, affect is in play. Singing performs a kind of, what Peter Middleton calls, “un-writable saying,” instantiating through corporal voices what is not and cannot be found in speeches or written words (Middleton 1998, 288). The combination of visual and audio effects creates what Lee Rozelle calls “ecosublime”—transporting the viewers “from an apprehension of the natural world to a fear of its greatness and finally a newly acquired identification with that ‘world’ ” (Rozelle 2006, 3). This power of ecosublime continues to operate in full display in the second half of the film, but with an ironic twist. The film revisits the spectacular sites of Taiwan’s natural environment only to reveal the deep scars on the landscape as a result of environmental damage (Chiu 2016, 139). This is where the human voice­ over appears to guide the viewers through the rest of the film with informative clues about those wounds: landslides caused by undue development plans, countless rivers polluted with toxic factory waste, oceans swarming with garbage, beautiful mountain areas destroyed owing to the impact of the cement industry, and factory chimneys spewing toxic smoke. The massive scale of this devastating

Mapping Taiwanese ecodocumentary landscape   43 environmental catastrophe generates another form of ecosublime—i.e., as ­Christopher Hitt argues, “Human beings still experience a humbling sense of fear and awe before nature, but in this case—in contradistinction to conventional accounts of the sublime—the threat is of their own making. And worse, the danger is all too real” (Hitt 1999, 619). It is noteworthy that the voiceover identifies its viewers as inhabitants of Taiwan. It speaks to them. For the Taiwanese viewers, the cinematic experience is supposed to evoke a sense of the “uncanny” as they are urged to see Taiwan, their “home,” as a place both familiar and strange. In a very interesting essay on water as a site of environmental imagination in new Chinese cinema, Jiayan Mi proposes Freud’s concept of “uncanny” as a theoretical kernel for understanding Chinese ecocinema (Mi 2009, 20). Mi argues that many Chinese films show how environmental damage creates a condition of “ambient unheimlich,” in which “displacement, estrangement, dysfunctionality, and homelessness” impact the formation of Chinese identity. In Freud’s words, “the ‘uncanny’ is that species of the frightening which goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Freud 2003, 124). Freud elucidates the ambivalence of the word heimlich in German. Heimlich, which means “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home,” turns out to be identical with its opposite—unheimlich (Freud 2003, 132). In Mi’s view, the “uncanny” can be used as a theoretical concept to explore the ecological imagination in new Chinese cinema, for “the sense of being estranged from the home and becomes unhomely” is a prevalent theme in contemporary Chinese films. This understanding of Freud’s “uncanny” certainly is also applicable to Beyond Beauty. The viewers are invited to look at Taiwan afresh twice. This theatrical release documentary has been criticized by some film critics for trying to elicit what they call a “sentimental identification” with Taiwan without going into an in-depth investigation of the environmental problems presented in the film (Kuo 2014, 122; Lin 2013). Nevertheless, it turns out that the film “moves” the viewers so much that the government was forced to set up a task-force of “National Land Use” in response to its great impact. Several serious environmental pollutions captured in the film also came under legal investigation. It appears that the success of this popular ecodocumentary cannot be defined in exclusively commercial terms. Its repercussion in the real world suggests that the “impact aesthetic” of popular, blockbuster cinema deserves more attention from ecocinema critics.

Conclusion Paula Willoquet-Maricondi defines ‘ecocinema’ as “films that overtly engage with environmental concerns either by exploring specific environmental justice issues or more broadly, by making ‘nature’, from landscapes to wildlife, a primary focus” (Willoquet-Maricondi 2010, 9). By this definition, ecocinema is a specific type of cinema that seeks to intervene in our conceptualization of the “value” of nonhumans and explore the implications of ethics in the conceptualization. All eco-films try, as Alexa Weik von Mossner says, to “move their

44   Kuei-fen Chiu viewers to a new intellectual conviction, to a new emotional attitude, or to action” (von Mossner 2014, 45). More than eco-fiction films, ecodocumentaries emphasize the consequential nature of what their viewers see on the screen (von Mossner 2014, 42). They urge the viewers to translate their new conviction into action. Ecodocumentary-making and studies are, in this sense, driven by the impulse of “world-making,” trying to shape or herald a new world in which environmental ethics is a paramount concern. How an ecodocumentary-maker constructs an ethical environmental discourse in a proper aesthetic form in the pursuit of this goal is a pivotal issue in ecocinema studies. Ethics and aesthetics are intertwined in the realm of ecocinema. This chapter discusses five Taiwanese ecodocumentaries to show how the issues of the ethics and aesthetics of ecocinema are addressed and debated in the Taiwanese context. It also analyzes how a variety of formal devices—e.g., structural framing, audio-visual devices—are strategically employed by the documentary makers to convey their specific environmental visions. From the activist ecodocumentary Anti-DuPont Movement in 1987 to the popular Beyond Beauty in 2013, Taiwanese ecodocumentary has constituted a tradition of its own. The variety of topics, the diversity of documentary styles, and the intensity of the debates on environmental issues indicate a vibrant realm of film production and circulation, as well as a rich field for ecocinema studies.

Acknowledgements This chapter is a revised version of a paper originally published in The Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11(1) (2017): 13–29. I thank the Journal of Chinese Cinemas for permitting me to publish a rewritten version of it as a chapter in this edited volume. Thanks should also go to Gong Haomin and Sheldon Lu for kindly inviting me to contribute a chapter to their publishing project. I am also grateful to the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan for its continuous support of my research. The image included in this chapter is used with the permission of the Public Television in Taiwan and the photographer Ms. Cai Ming-de.

Filmography Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above 看見台灣, d. Chi Po-lin 齊柏林, 2013. National Bandits: A Beautiful Mistake 國家共匪:美麗的錯誤, d. Mayaw Biho 馬耀 比吼, 2000. Nimbus 帶水雲, d. Huang Hsin-yao 黃信堯, 2009. Swing 擺盪, d. Ke Jinyuan 柯金源, 2010 The Lukang Anti-DuPont Movement 鹿港反杜邦運動, d. Green Team 綠色小組, 1987.

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46   Kuei-fen Chiu Kuo, Li-hsin. 2014. Zhenshi de kowen: jilupian de zhengzhi yu quzhengzhi/Interrogating Truth: The Politics and Depoliticization of Documentary Films. Taipei: Rye Field Publications. Ladino, Jennifer. 2013. “Working with Animals: Regarding Companion Species in Documentary Film.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 129–48. New York: Routledge. Lee, Maggie. 2014. “Film Review: Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above.” Variety. http:// variety.com/2014/film/global/film-review-beyond-beauty-taiwan-from-above1201050029/ (accessed January 28, 2016). Lim, Song Hwee. 2014. “The Voice of the Sinophone.” In Sinophone Cinemas, edited by Audrey Yue and Olivia Khoo, 62–76. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lin, Mucai 林木材. 2013. “Kanjian Taiwan: Jian yu bujian/Beyond Beauty: Insights and Blindness.” [看見台灣:見與不見]. www.ettoday.net/news/20131204/303594.htm (accessed May 6, 2016). Lu, Sheldon. 2009. “Introduction: Cinema Ecology, Modernity.” In Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi, 1–14. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Ma, Jean, and Matthew Johnson. 2013. “Introduction.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7 (3): 179–87. MacDonald, Scott. 2013. “The Ecocinema Experience.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 17–42. New York and London: Routledge. Mi, Jiayan. 2009. “Framing Ambient Unheimlich: Ecoggedon, Ecological Unconsciousness, and Water Pathology in New Chinese Cinema.” In Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, 17–38. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Middleton, Peter. 1998. “The Contemporary Poetry Reading.” In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, edited by Charles Bernstein, 262–99. New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, Adalaide. 1997. “Introduction: Sound States.” In Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, edited by Adalaide Morris, 1–14. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Murray, L. Robin, and Joseph, K. Heumann. 2014. Film and Everyday Eco-disasters. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Regan, Tom. 2003. “Animal Rights: What’s in a Name?” In Environmental Ethics, edited by Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III, 65–73. Oxford: Blackwell. Rozelle, Lee. 2006. Ecosublime: Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Russell, Caskey. 2010. “Wild Madness: The Makah Whale Hunt and Its Aftermath.” In Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives, edited by Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt, 157–76. Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press. Stein, Rachel. 2010. “Disposable Bodies: Biocolonialism in the Constant Gardener and Dirty Pretty Things.” In Framing the World: Exploration in Ecocriticism and Film, edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, 101–15. Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thornber, Karen Laura. 2012. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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2 Nature in the city A study of Hong Kong’s independent eco-film festival Winnie L. M. Yee

Introduction The ecocritical approaches that emerged in the West in the 1980s have evolved into a highly developed discipline. Ecocriticism’s popularity continues to grow in response to the destruction wrought in the name of development and the prevalence of anthropocentric points of view. While ecocritical paths lead in several directions, one fruitful line of inquiry has focused on the ways literature and other art forms help to record, capture, and reflect on the recent exponential damage to the environment in the form of climate change, natural and anthropogenic disasters, and unequal relations between humans and non-humans. As the magnitude of the destruction continues to expand and penetrate all levels of life worldwide, ecocritical discussions of art must cross-reference different cultural contexts and different forms of art production. This chapter intends to bridge the gap between Western and the non-Western scholarship by providing an example of Hong Kong. The ecocritical approach taken in this chapter challenges the urban imaginary that informs the inhabitants’ views of Hong Kong. It explores an alternative mode of imagination, symbolized by the emergence of organic communities and green activism in the post-handover period. I will argue, first, that the rise in ecocritical awareness in the post-handover period marks a turning point in which the dominant developmental discourse that has shaped Hong Kong has been challenged by the philosophy represented by organic communities. Second, the rise of “green” scholarship and the introduction of eco-film festivals provide opportunities to disseminate knowledge of alternative ways of living among readers and participants. Third, by examining and reviewing the festival programs of the Food and Farming Film Festival (2014–2017) and related events (e.g., post-screening discussion, food sharing, etc.), I will show that film festival curators have encouraged sustainability by stressing the interconnectedness of the non-human and human, of different groups within the community, and of the local and global. The chapter examines the two-pronged approach adopted by eco-film festivals—“case studies and the theorization of their broader relevance to our understanding of the festival as circuit” (Monani 259)—to promote environmental discourse and action. In conclusion, I argue that the ecocritical

Nature in the city   49 turn provides the space for Hong Kong people to reflect on the dominant ideology of capitalism and to recover a more sustainable vision of Hong Kong’s political, economic, and cultural future. The belief in the economic “miracle” of Hong Kong, which has been prevalent since the 1960s and has shaped the construction of Hong Kong’s identity, suggests the successful integration of Hong Kong culture into a capitalist narrative where Euro-American values are globally dominant. Even though capitalist modernization was initiated and introduced from the outside, the people of Hong Kong embraced it, as is evident in their adoption of Central (the central business district of the city) as the visual symbol of Hong Kong to encourage tourism and foreign investment. In his discussion of the globalization of capitalism, Harry Harootunian observes, capitalism was “born of colonization and the world market” and has subsequently “universalized” history, inasmuch as it has established systematic relations of social interdependence on a global scale that have eventually encompassed noncapitalist societies. In this regard, capitalism has managed to fix a standard of measurement – world time – produced by a “single global space of co-existence,” within which action and events are subject to a single, quantifiable chronology. But because different social practices remain outside this abstract measure, capitalism has not “unified” history. (Harootunian 2000, 49) Hong Kong is under the sway of the capitalistic discourse and its adherence to the model of economic success has become, according to theorist Ackbar Abbas, a compensation for its lack of political power (Abbas 1992, 45). However, there is also the persistence of the established social practices that Harootunian has noted, a persistence that characterizes the Hong Kong activists who will be the subject of my discussion. From the 1960s onwards, Hong Kong has experienced extraordinary economic development and rapid urbanization under the British colonial authority, and has emerged as a world center (Lo 2010, 166). This economic success continues to shape and dominate the self-image of Hong Kong: the success of the city has been taken for granted and its adherence to capitalism has continued beyond the official end of the colonial period. In both literature and cinema, the discourse of British colonizers and Hong Kong postwar boomers has focused on the rise of the “city” and the “urban” lifestyle. Authors and filmmakers of New Wave cinema have pointed to the rapid changes in urban Hong Kong as a mark of its superiority to the motherland. As Hong Kong cinema has gained momentum from the 1980s onwards, the city itself dominated the narratives and became the representative trope of glamour and cosmopolitanism. This fascination with the urban, however, was challenged after the 1997 handover, when the city found it increasingly difficult to keep its competitive edge when compared with major Chinese cities such as Shanghai or Shenzhen. Mirroring the political struggle between the citizens of Hong Kong and the Special Administrative Region government in the post-2008 period is the

50  Winnie L. M. Yee c­ onflict between a commitment to an environmentally sustainable lifestyle and an adherence to the capitalistic logic of urban development. There have been many signs of active engagement founded on the belief that justice and a fair society must be based on a mutual respect between nature and culture, the human and non-human. The emergence of organic communities, including ­community farms such as PEACE (Partnership for Eco-Agriculture and the Conservation of Earth—活耕建養地協會), Mapopo community farm (馬寶寶社區 農場), and Sangwoodgoon (literally “House of Living” 生活館), heralds an integration of art appreciation (scholarly and aesthetic experience) and active engagement in farming activities (physical and material experience). Sangwoodgoon, the focus of this discussion, is also the subject of several recent documentaries. It belongs to the category of “alternative communities,” so called because they are not built on a foundation of familial lineage or cultural history. They began as an alternative to the urban lifestyle that is symbolized by capitalistic logic, developmental discourse, and a neglect of environmental awareness; they are also a direct result of the anti-government movement. Flexible in operation and small in scale, these communities challenge the massive production promoted by capitalism and directly resist dependence on the importation of food. The emergence of the alternative communities in Hong Kong was precipitated by political measures that used patriotism and economic growth as justifications for taking away inhabitants’ homes and farmland. The sacrifice of individual benefits and natural resources was demanded in the name governmental efficiency. North American ecocritics provided crucial perspectives on this plight. In Going Away to Think, Scott Slovic proposes the notion of “ecocritical responsibility,” by which he means “various forms of engagement and retreat, in all pursuits of ‘responsibility,’ in quest of meaningful response to the world as I experience it and gather information about it” (Slovic 2008, 3). Ecocritical responsibility should characterize the relationship between humans and nature. Treating nature as an instrument under the capitalistic model has led to dire consequences: climate change, pollution, and the extinction of species, among others. Failure to learn from these consequences and a blind acceptance of the prolongation of Hong Kong’s “economic miracle” would lead to Hong Kong’s double marginalization: Hong Kong is already in the process of being marginalized by mainland China at the political level because of its citizens’ adherence to the “one country, two systems” principle, and it will become marginalized by other countries if it does not share the global responsibility to save the planet. Reenvisioning our relationship with land offers a new way of developing Hong Kong’s identity. This ecocritical turn embraces sustainable living, activism, knowledge dissemination, and art: it upholds the necessity of shouldering the ecocritical responsibility that will determine the future of Hong Kong. Two examples of ecocritical responsibility will be examined in this chapter: alternative communities, with a focus on Sangwoodgoon, and the eco-film festival (Food and Farming Film Festival), organized by Sangwoodgoon, in Hong Kong. Sangwoodgoon combines farming activities with films, art, and performance, creating a platform that connects the aesthetic portrayal of the land

Nature in the city  51 with the physical working of the land. Land is perceived as both a physical site and a rich terrain of imagination. The combination of art appreciation and farmrelated activities encourages members of the communities and attendees of the film festivals to reflect on life and the environment, nature and development, the local and the global. Patrick Murphy draws attention to the Bakhitinian “dialogical concepts of answerability and anotherness,” and argues that the concepts “provide a way of talking about how various movements within nature-oriented literatures ground their action and ground their readers in ethically referential situations aware of difference and responsibility” (Murphy 2009, 33). A similar effect is created by nature-oriented film festivals. The Food and Farming Film Festival (hereafter FFFF), by appealing to ethics and empathy, aims to situate its attendees so that they recognize the injustice suffered by farmers around the world and are motivated to take action. Members of the organic community of Sangwoodgoon exemplify—through their manner of living, dwelling, and education—a new form of living that stresses one’s responsibility to the community, to nature, and to the world as a whole. The emphasis on connectedness challenges the institutionalization of knowledge within the academia: the proliferation of knowledge should occur in everyday life among the general public.

The making of environmentally aware “citizen intellectuals” In Hong Kong, the links between ecocriticism and activism have become evident in recent years. Since the return of sovereignty to the motherland, activism in Hong Kong has been ignited by many issues, the most controversial being the construction of the Guangzhou–Hong Kong high-speed rail line, which was the source of civil resistance in 2009 and 2010. This express runs from a terminus in West Kowloon and heads north to the Shenzhen/Hong Kong border, where it connects with the mainland. The Express Rail Link is predicted to connect Hong Kong with the 16,000 km PRC National High-Speed Rail Network, the largest such network in the world.1 In November 2008, Choi Yuen villagers received notice that they were required to vacate their village by November 2010. There were no meetings, discussions, or negotiations between the villagers and the government beforehand. The villagers’ demands to stay in their homes went unheeded by the government. The project affected approximately 150 households, representing a population of around 500 and three million square feet of agricultural land. Opposition to the rail line was initiated by a range of people, including academics and media activists who had been involved in similar campaigns, such as the preservation of the Star Ferry Pier in Edinburgh Place in 2006 and the Queen’s Pier in 2007. At the outset, the campaign against the Guangzhou–Hong Kong line focused on saving Choi Yuen village, which had been painstakingly built by its residents over four decades. This was widely regarded as an example of the sacrifice of the interests of the common people to those of a small coterie of wealthy property developers. The subject of many independent films and

52  Winnie L. M. Yee d­ ocumentaries, the Saving Choi Yuen Village movement became the catalyst of Hong Kong’s ecocritical turn. William A. Callahan’s idea of “citizen intellectuals” is useful when contemplating the environmental activists’ complex relationships with the governments of the PRC and of Hong Kong. Callahan formed the idea after reading Vaclav Havel’s (1978) essay “The Power of the Powerless,” a complex analysis of power in the late-socialist era in Eastern Europe. Havel suggests that “being a dissident can be counter-productive because it isolates intellectuals as an ‘exclusive group’ from the rest of society.” Rather than arguing for the creation of an elite group to lead a grand revolution, Havel suggest that everyone can make their own revolution by “living in truth”: “living in truth starts with rejecting the ‘lies’ that the regime produces and distributes to buttress its legitimacy” (Havel quoted in Callahan 2012, 253). The organic community of Sangwoodgoon and its film festival were chosen as the focus of this discussion because one of the main goals of the founders is to reject the “lies,” be they myths of traditions, accusations of political incorrectness, or simply the mainstream narratives. To Callahan, citizen intellectuals in China are “independent voices” not because they are in opposition to state power, but because they take advantage of China’s new social and economic freedoms to choose when to work with the state, and when to work outside state institutions. Popular resistance thus can emerge in a decentred way, in different social spaces, including the activities of everyday life. (Callahan 2012, 253) While Callahan’s discussion focuses primarily on activism in mainland China, I would like to expand its scope to include Hong Kong’s organic communities. The FFFF provides an important venue for young activists to voice their concerns about political and ecological issues by focusing on the micropolitics of people’s everyday experiences with nature, history, and traditions. The organizers’ efforts show how the general public can build alternative cultures and public spheres by promoting a renewed relationship with nature and history. Through the moving stories of individual lives, we are able to see the hopes of people pursuing a more just and green society. Sangwoodgoon was founded during the years of the anti-Guangzhou–Hong Kong high-speed railway line and the Save Choi Yuen Village movements. The founders maintained that democracy depends on whether citizens have the freedom to choose and create their own way of living. The alternative lifestyle it offers is a direct response to the government’s lack of social and ecological responsibility. Sangwoodgoon practices organic farming and has adopted permaculture design principles. The farm is devoted to food production, and, building on this foundation, the members initiated the FFFF to raise awareness of foodand agriculture-related topics both locally and globally, and to explore the most basic components of sustainable living. In their manifesto, the members2 state,

Nature in the city   53 in the modernized, industrialized age, big corporations and governments are intertwined, taking away from each and every one of us the chance to grow our own food and distancing us further away from the producers. We end up consuming what Alice Water sees as fast, cheap and easy food. Farmers who originally have the power to live sustainably and independently have become the ones being exploited. Their aims are to promote sustainable farming as an alternative way of life and, through active engagement with farming, to encourage awareness of local and global environmental concerns.

The film festival as alternative public sphere In order to understand the aims of the FFFF more fully, it is useful to provide some background on the history of film festivals. While film festivals have had a very long history, the study of film festivals is relatively recent. Many prominent scholars have turned their attention to these festivals and have variously focused on the following aspects: conceptualization (Loist and de Valck 2010), cultural power (Iordanova 2011), relation to history (Stringer 2001), connection to nation-building (Lee 2005; Wu 2007; Davis and Yeh 2008; Ma 2009; Berry and Robinson 2017), and specialization according to subject matter, genres, and types (Olson 2002; Barlow 2003; Kim 2007; Snyder and Mitchell 2008). In her essay “East Asian Film Festivals: Transnational Clusters for Creativity and Commerce,” Dina Iordanova notes a trend toward “new localism.” Quoting from Davis and Yeh, she observes that [a] specific feature of the “new localism” is that it “revives interest in servicing local and regional audiences by area, and targeting specialised markets by genre or demographic”. Its products are films rising out of local genres and sensibilities that emerge as an alternative to the blockbuster benchmark. (Iordanova 2011, 15) Iordanova argues that although Asia has been unable to resist the pressures of globalization, it should be strategic in the way it offers its image for global consumption. Film festivals can “re-center” the channels of distribution to the mutual benefit of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and mainland China: “This ‘re-entering’ strategy allows Asian players to take advantage of new market frontiers by entering a variety of intra-Asian cultural exchanges and targeting Asian consumers across national borders” (Iordanova 2011, 16; emphasis in original). While FFFF does not promote pan-Asian cinema or encourage pan-Asian collaborations, it does show that the film festival can be instrumental in forging new networks and alliances. The “re-centering” in this case is not the focus of markets but the focus of ecological awareness. Through the film festival, there is a possibility of building new connections that can contribute to the green communities around the world.

54   Winnie L. M. Yee Iordanova identifies six functions of film festivals: they act as a bridge between industry and politics; as a cultural node within transnational infrastructures; as a multifaceted creative cluster; as an ideological space of inherent transnationalism in defiance of nationalist agendas; as a site of cultural exchanges; and as an alternative to creative migratory trajectories (Iordanova 2011, 17). The FFFF highlights two of these functions—that of a cultural node and that of an ideological space of inherent transnationalism. By examining the documentaries selected for the film festivals, we can see that the organizers’ intention is to create a multifaceted perspective on the world of food and farming. While there is a general consensus that film festivals are often concerned with issues of national identity building, Julian Stringer uses historical examples to show that the exhibition sites of film festivals act as a “new kind of counter public sphere”: While the establishment of events like Berlin, Cannes, and Venice in the postwar period signaled that the balance of power was shifting in the new world order, the rise of film festivals on a global scale since the 1980s is implicated, too, in the restructuring of an alternative social object, namely the modern city. (Stringer 2001, 136) He observes that the international film festival circuit suggests “the existence of a socially produced space unto itself, a unique cultural arena that acts as a contact zone for the working-through of unevenly differentiated power relationships” (Stringer 2001, 138). Monani notes that the “counter public sphere” theory of film festivals propounded by Julian Stringer and Soyoung Kim, among others, is reinforced by that fact that film festivals often present themselves as meeting spaces for expanding the boundaries of democratic and public engagement: “in considering their function as public spheres, thematic film festivals often take on a dual role, evoking both the notion of the official public sphere as well as the alternative public sphere” (Monani 2013, 257; emphasis in original). Given that the FFFF is not a corporate- or government-sponsored film festival, it falls more readily into the category of the alternative public sphere. Stringer notes that the etymology of the word “festival” links it to “celebration,” which is the “key aspiration behind every individual event” (Stringer 2008, 53). He stresses the focus of film festival research should include the experience of the participants. A film festival is “the celebration of its participants within a new cultural space. It is these participants whom film festivals are meant to be ‘for’ ” (Stringer 2008, 53). For Stringer, the main function of this cultural space is the formation of minority group identities. The space is structured by the ideas shaping the film selection process, the intended audience of the film festival, and the events that are designed to provoke a more intellectual response to the films. While Stringer cautions that “there is a distinction to be drawn between an audience responding to an event and an audience being created or designed for the festival” (Stringer 2008, 59; emphasis in original), the FFFF has established a

Nature in the city  55 strong connection between the two: it successfully attracts and creates an audience that responds positively to the core values of the festival, which is reflected in its impressive turnout for three consecutive years. The festival also encourages participants to reflect on land, food production, and the future of Hong Kong and the world as a whole.3 The creation of an audience that shares the ideas and insights of the organizers creates what Marxist theorist Jurgen Habermas calls an “alternative public space,” which is entirely different from the mainstream film market that focuses on distribution and profit. The founding of a film festival can be understood as a means of bringing together people of similar minds and concerns to connect and establish further collaboration. An examination of the program, the screening venues, and the post-screening activities of the FFFF shows how this particular sense of community is constructed and maintained.

The FFFF and the eco-cosmopolitan public sphere Since December 2014, three Sangwoodgoon FFFFs have been held. They have been jointly organized by the local farm initiative Sangwoodgoon and the veteran independent movie organization Ying E Chi. Each film shown has only one or two screenings: the audience is usually small but focused. According to data supplied by the organizers, each screening attracts over 50 people, which is considered an excellent turnout. While the scale of the film festival is relatively small, it is able to attract a very dedicated audience. During the first festival (from December 20, 2014 to January 18, 2015), six independent films from Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, the USA, and Hong Kong were screened in a range of venues in Hong Kong (see Appendix I). In the second (from January 2 to January 30, 2016), “soil” was chosen as the theme. Five long and two short documentary films from Japan, Taiwan, the USA, and Hong Kong were presented (see Appendix II). The films featured at the festival explore issues ranging from agriculture and genetically modified food to community struggles. The third festival (from December 17, 2016 to January 15, 2017) also featured seven independent films from Taiwan, the USA, Hong Kong, and Japan, focusing mainly on the food system of Hong Kong (see Appendix III). A quick look at the titles shows that the aim has been to increase what Ursula Heise (2008) calls “eco-cosmopolitanism.” The films are not confined to issues that affect Hong Kong; they are committed to raising global awareness. In the introduction to the program for the first FFFF, the organizers pointed out that the film festival was prepared while the Umbrella Movement was at its height. They noted that the issues raised in the film festival (e.g., the problems of urban populations elsewhere, the exploitation of Third World farmers by the US government and transnational corporations) may seem too distant from the pressing concerns of the Hong Kong audience at the time. Yet, the organizers believed that Hong Kong’s close connection with the world regarding food supply should not be minimized, and that discussions of the USA and China were inevitably linked to the future of the city (Ying 2015, 22). They maintain that the green movement has a key role to play in buttressing the city’s

56   Winnie L. M. Yee d­ emocracy. The movement stresses the importance of sustainability and selfsufficiency. Creating a sustainable food supply locally would be an essential step in achieving self-reliance and democracy. By juxtaposing two films—The Song of Rice from Thailand, which is a visual record of rice culture and its influence on people in different parts of Thailand, and Bitter Seeds (India), which documents the farmers at the center of the suicide region in India—the festival drew attention to the need to develop an ethical relationship with nature, with exploitation, and with irresponsible urban development. The theme of the second FFFF in 2015 was inspired by the UN International Year of Soils. Its aim was to convey the importance of soil in cultivating lives (Ying 2016, 21). The films chosen present and explore the infinite possibilities of agriculture and food as an organizational vehicle for concepts, tastes, and human relationships (Ying 2016, 21). An analysis of cooking and food production (in Food Fascist), a critique of genetically modified food (in GMO OMG), and an account of the urban farming movement in Los Angeles (in The Garden) all encouraged the audience to reflect on the modern city, social movements, and the collusion between business and government. By showing how a group of Japanese farmers experimented with farming methods and the effects on their rice fields, Magino Village: A Tale reveals the hard lives of farmers and the importance of the soil in nourishing lives. The third FFFF concentrated on food system. The Harvest deals with labor problems; Fly Kite Fly investigates the relationship between food security and the high number of deaths of black kites in Taiwan; and Agroway portrays the ambitions of young farmers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. Pressure Cooker and The Farmer and the Chef both explore culinary culture, though they come at it from different angles, thus highlighting the differences made by ethnicity, class, and attitudes towards entrepreneurship. The festival organizers clearly hoped to broaden the discussion of food and agriculture by choosing films that address global concerns. With settings ranging from Asia to Europe and subjects ranging from the personal to the political, the third FFFF demonstrated a much stronger determination to initiate cross-cultural, cross-sector, and cross-ideological dialogues. The introductory note to the program for the third FFFF notes, “As a medium between the subjects being filmed and the audience, these [documentary] filmmakers connect the two parties by creating a communication beyond conventional visual consumption. We also believe that screening events are attempts to creating new communities” (Ying 2017, 21). The three FFFFs have helped construct an alternative public sphere and also an eco-cosmopolitan community by bringing together the common problems of different cultural contexts. In her seminal work Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Heise stresses the importance of realizing “how different cultural frameworks … condition quite divergent perceptions of what the local ecology consists of, what it requires from humans, or what an appropriate way of responding to it may be” (Heise 2008, 44; quoted. in Oppermann 2010, 768). We need to understand local concerns when we think about ecology, and Heise’s notion of eco-cosmopolitanism, which argues for “a more nuanced understanding of how both local cultural and

Nature in the city  57 ecological systems are imbricated in global ones” (Heise 2008, 59) is particularly instrumental. Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism should be viewed not as a call to minimize local considerations but as a means of seeing these considerations as elements in a Latourian network that includes culture, country, language, class, and ecology, among other categories. This positioning of Hong Kong’s issues—of food safety, sustainability, and social justice for farmers, among others—as part of global structural issues, is crucial as it encourages the citizens of Hong Kong to realize that their concerns are a reflection of structures, processes, and products that we actively engage with and consume in our day-today lives. Through film festivals, alternative communities are invited to see themselves as part of a planetary community.

Documenting everyday life and its poetic struggle Other environmental film festivals have also aimed to show the interrelationship of environmental awareness, social justice and practice, and the cinema. In their analysis of the 2010 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (hereafter FLEFF), Chiu and Arreglo observe that the emergence of a very motivated alternative community was facilitated by “a variety of films, readings, art installations and multi-media performances … FLEFF allowed participants to personally engage and grapple with the topic from a number of different standpoints, from survival to aesthetic well-being to economic trade” (Chiu and Arreglo 2011, 224). The notion of environmental sustainability often raises more general questions regarding justice and equality. As Patricia Zimmerman states, “sustainability can only be considered as the fluid and mobile nexus between the social, the political, the aesthetic, and the ecological, a moving construct of interrelated parts within a transnational sensibility” (quoted. in Chiu and Arreglo 2011, 224). The FFFF post-screening events and other activities similarly encouraged participants to engage in everyday political actions in response to social injustice in Hong Kong and around the world. Like the FLEFF, the FFFF advocates exploring “a broader matrix of interconnecting issues that help us to map sustainability from an international ­perspective” (Monani 2013, 272). It provides a series of unconventional opportunities for audiences, farmers, artists, and organizers to share their views. In the foreword of the first Sangwoodgoon FFFF brochure, the organizers observe,4 Documentary is not only a way for agriculture and farmers to express themselves; it is even a form of movement, of engagement and of organization for agriculture, farmers and food, for it is simultaneously analytical, intellectual, tasteful, sensual, passionate and revolutionary. In addition to airing the documentaries, the organizers contact groups to participate in a variety of activities such as discussion panels, food and recipe sharing, farmers’ markets, and guided tours. Bringing together these different perspectives on food suggests a dynamic process of material expression, evident in

58   Winnie L. M. Yee exchanges, bodies, and phenomena. It is a space where material ecocriticism successfully integrates with its theoretical dimension—ecocritical activism. A quick look at these events and at the choice of screening venues reveals the organizers’ efforts to make their message applicable to everyday life. Indoor screenings are held in schools and nonprofit organizations (e.g., the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity), or in cultural centers such as ACO Books that attract a young educated audience. The outdoor screenings took place at Mapopo Community Farm and Sangwoodgoon—settings that highlight the everyday issues that farmers are struggling within today’s Hong Kong. The advertisements for the first FFFF—”Come! Come to watch films, to ponder, to exchange, to sow the seed and to let the fruitful outcome surprise us” (Ying 2015, 13)— make it clear that the festival’s goal is to bring together educated young people who care about the environment in order to create an alternative public sphere and initiate environmental action. In her analysis of Hong Kong’s small film festivals (the nonprofit Hong Kong Social Movement Film Festival and Chinese Documentary Festival), Esther Yau comments that these festivals are participatory opportunities to exercise creativity, critical thinking, and the capacity to empathize; and they support ethical perspectives unrestricted by national politics. These events outside the classroom take a bottom-up approach to building a civic culture that buttresses activism in the broadest sense. (Yau 2017, 146) While the festivals that Yau discusses are larger than the FFFF and have received funding support from outside organizations, her insights also apply to the FFFF. She notes that the festivals pursue “distinct goals of self-education and communitarian participation” (Yau 2107, 146). In the case of the FFFF, communitarian participation is closely associated with the everyday aspects of farmers’ work and lifestyle. At the second FFFF, the strong connection between the screening venues and the screening itself was even more evident. The venues were selected because they were associated with the issues presented in the films. In the Japanese documentary The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories, the director, Shinsuke Ogawa, interviews the Narita airport protesters 40 years after the movement. It is a testament to human persistence. The screening place took place in the new Choi Yuen village, which was built by the villagers with their supporters after the demolition of their original homes, when the Anti-High Speed Rail Movement was celebrating its fifth anniversary. The screening of Food Fascist took place at the School of Everyday Life—a hub of activity in Tai Po, which has launched a number of initiatives relating to education, everyday life, and nature in recent years. ToHome, a community organization in To Kwan Wan, which is concerned with urban planning and grassroots rights, was another screening venue. The selection of venues is a strong indication of the organizers’ hopes to bring together passionate souls who are eager to engage with community politics and

Nature in the city  59 to adopt a more sustainable and responsible way of living: “The events created a knowledge exchange venue for people of different ages, social backgrounds, and people with different values. The events also brought music, storytelling, cooking, film and local agriculture together” (Ying 2016, 21). The screening venues for the third FFFF also encouraged activism and selfreflection. Two screening were held at Mapopo Community Farm, which has been threatened by the incursions of property developers. Henderson Land Development Company Limited repossessed a portion of the farm in the summer of 2016, and the farmers were compelled to defend their land. Two of the films shown—The Harvest (2011) and Kaze non Hamon (2015)—deal with the fate of farm workers and old buildings. Post-screening discussions hosted by local food groups and guided tours of Mapopo community encouraged the audience “to build reciprocity and learn more about the site of Mapopo and its current context” (Ying 2017, 21). The film-watching experience widened to encompass personal reflection, witness testimonies, gestures of community affirmation, and collective strategizing.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined the eco-turn of Hong Kong politics in the posthandover years. As a result of the frustration arising from irresponsible and devastating urban renewal policies, the imbalance of power between Hong Kong and the PRC, and accumulated anxiety about the future of Hong Kong, the Saving Choi Yuen Village movement became the catalyst of an effort to redirect Hong Kong’s course. The movement and the subsequent creation of Sangwoodgoon and other organic communities allow Hong Kong people a vision of an alternative imaginary and an alternative future. Focusing on the three eco-film festivals organized by members of Sangwoodgoon from 2014–2017, this discussion shows how such festivals can draw attention to the interconnectedness of local and global concerns, encourage a collective effort to highlight environmental awareness, and create an alternative eco-cosmopolitan public sphere that encourages critical reflection on cross-­ cultural and cross-generational problems. The events and venues associated with the film festival further highlight the unique feature of the FFFF. By choosing sites that have strong historical implications (e.g., New Choi Yuen village), reflect social struggles (e.g., Mapopo Community Farm), and are tied to literary and cinematic enterprises (e.g., ACO, HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity), and by sponsoring events such as discussion forums, art appreciation, storytelling, food tasting, and guided tours, the FFFF has created an alternative public sphere to discuss issues that transcend the local context and usual anthropocentric concerns. Knowledge about nature is brought to the city, reminding city dwellers that nature is never separate from, or opposed to, the metropolis. Only through productive engagement with nature will Hong Kong be free from its absorption in urbanism and be able to imagine a more harmonious relationship with land, nature, and the non-human.

74 mins 111 mins

61 mins

75 mins 88 mins

2013 2003

1998

2014 2011 1980

台灣 Taiwan (客家語 Hokkien、國語 Mandarin)

菲律賓 Philippines (英 語、菲律賓語 Ilocano, Kankanaey, Tagalog and English)

印度 India (印度語 Indian、日語 Japanese)

泰國 Thailand (泰語 Thai)

印度 India (印度語 Indian)

香港 Hong Kong (粵語 Cantonese)

行健村的有機夢 The Organic Dream

小小的家 Abong/Small Home

只因我們生活在地球： 福岡 正信印度之旅 For Living on the Planet Earth: Fukuoka Masanobu Goes to India

稻米之歌 The Songs of Rice

苦澀的種子 Bitter Seeds

歲月河山—鄉曲 The Song of a Village

45 mins

106 mins

2014

香港 Hong Kong (粵語 Cantonese)

巨輪下的新界: 東北 Struggles for Land: New Territories Developing Stories

片長 Duration

年份 Year

地區(語言) Region (language)

電影 Film

Appendix I  第一屆有種電影節The First Food and Farming Film Festival

黃敬強 Wong King-keung

Micha 、Peled

Uruphong Raksasad

今泉光司 Koji Imaizumi

今泉光司 Koji Imaizumi

許文烽 Col Boom-Fong

原銘翹 Kelvin Yuen 麥嘉熙 Marco Mak

導演 Director

生活館 (元朗八鄉錦上路謝屋 村) Sangwoodgoon, Tse Uk Tsuen, Kam Sheung Road, Yuen Long

香港兆基創意書院 HKICC LSK School of Creativity

香港兆基創意書院 HKICC LSK School of Creativity

馬寶寶社區農場 (粉嶺馬適路) Mapopo Community Farm, Ma Shi Po Village (Ma Sik Road, Fanling)

艺鵠 (灣仔軒尼詩道365–7號富 德樓14樓) ACO, 14/F, Foo Tak Building, 365–7 Hennessy Road, Wanchai

油街實現 (北角油街 12 號) Oi! (12 Oil Street, North Point, Hong Kong)

艺鵠 (灣仔軒尼詩道 365–367 號富德樓14樓) ACO, 14/F, Foo Tak Building, 365–367 Hennessy Road, Wanchai

放映地方 Screening venue

27 mins

90 mins

30 mins 222 mins

2015

2013

2013 1987 2014

台灣 Taiwan (國語 Mandarin)

美國 USA (英語 English)

香港 Hong Kong (粵語 Cantonese)

日本 Japan (日語 Japanese)

日本 Japan (日語 Japanese)

友米真好 Pure Land

GMO OMG

飲食法西斯 Food Fascist

牧野村千年物語 Magino Village: A Tale

活在三里塚 The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories

140 mins

80 mins

2008

美國 USA (英語 English)

The Garden

103 mins

美國 USA (英語 English)

Symphony of the Soil

2012

代島治彥 Haruhiko Daishima 大津幸 四郎 Koshiro Otsu

小川紳介 Shinsuke Ogawa

葉文希Yip Man-Hay

Jeremy Seifert

陳祥豪 Xiang-Hao Chen 林婉婷 WanTing Lin 徐冠軒 Kuan-Xuan Shiu

Scott Hamilton Kennedy

Deborah Koons Garcia

Appendix II  第二屆有種電影節The Second Food and Farming Film Festival

元朗八鄉錦上路 菜園新村 New Choi Yuen Village, Kam Sheung Road, Pat Heung, Yuen Long

上水鄉土學社 (梧桐河畔華山村旁) SoIL (Society for Indigenous Learning), Sheung Shui (Beside Ng Tung River, near Wa Shan Village)

生活書院 (新界大埔錦山 178 號生活書院 – 前佛 教大光中學) School of Everyday Life (178 Kam Shan, Tai Po, New Territories)

風車草劇團排練室 (香港九龍觀塘大業街 11 號華 凱發展大廈 8 樓) Windmill Grass Theatre (8/F, Kevin Wong Development Building, 11, Tai Yip Street, Kwun Tong, Kwoloon, Hong Kong)

土家 (土瓜灣鴻福街16號地下) To Home, 16 Hung Fook Street, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon

艺鵠 (灣仔軒尼詩道 365–7 號富德樓14樓 ) ACO, 14/F, Foo Tak Building, 365–7 Hennessy Road, Wanchai

99 mins 221 mins

99 mins 81 mins

2015 2016

2008 2016

2014

日本 Japan (日語 Japanese)

香港 Hong Kong (粵語 Cantonese)

美國 USA (英語 English)

移步廣碧 Agroway

Pressure Cooker 美國 USA (英語 English)

美國USA (英語 English)

風之波紋 Kaze no Hamon

NaturePlay

The Farmer and The Chef

65 mins

80 mins

2011

美國 USA (英語 English)

The Harvest

75 mins

台灣 Taiwan (國語 Mandarin)

老鷹想飛 Fly, Kite Fly

2015

Mike Whalen

Daniel Stilling

Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman

陳彥楷 Benny Chan

小林茂 Jobayashi Shigeru

U Roberto Romano

生活館 (元朗錦上路謝屋村) Sangwoodgoon (Tse Uk Tsuen, Kum Sheung Road, Yuen Long, New Territories)

香港兆基創意書院地下放映室(九龍聯合道135號) Screening Room, HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity (135 Junction Road, Kowloon City, Kowloon)

壹樓共同社 (太子砵蘭街372號壹樓) Portland Commons, 1/F, 372 Portland St., Prince Edward, Kowloon

艺鵠 (灣仔軒尼詩道 365–7 號富德樓14樓) ACO, 14/F, Foo Tak Building, 365–7 Hennessy Road, Wanchai

馬寶真社區農場(粉嶺馬適路) Mapopo Community Farm, Ma Sik Road, Fanling, New Territories

梁皆得 Liang-Chieh-te 生活書院 (新界大埔錦山 178 號生活書院 – 前佛教 大光中學 ) School of Everyday Life (178 Kam Shan, Tai Po, New Territories)

Appendix III  第三屆有種電影節 The Third Food and Farming Film Festival

Nature in the city   63

Notes 1 For some detailed discussions, please consult: Yung and Leung (2014), Lam (2015), Lam (2013). 2 Further information can be found on their website: https://sangwoodgoon.wordpress. com/filmfestival/ (accessed December 8, 2017). 3 https://sangwoodgoon.wordpress.com/filmfestival/ (accessed December 13, 2017). 4 http://sangwoodgoon.wordpress.com/filmfestival/ (accessed December 13, 2017).

References Abbas, Ackbar. 1992. “The Last Emporium: Verse and Cultural Space.” City at the End of Time, edited by Ping-Kwan Leung, Twilight Books in association with Department of Comparative Literature, 43–59. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong. Barlow, Melinda. 2003. “Feminism 101: The New York Women’s Video Festival, 1972– 1980.” Camera Obscura 18 (3): 3–38. Berry, Chris and Robinson, Luke, eds. 2017. Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Callahan, William A. 2012. “Shanghai’s Alternative Futures: The World Expo, Citizen Intellectuals, and China’s New Civil Society.” China Information 26 (2): 251–73. Chiu, Belinda and Carlo Arreglo. 2011. “The Intersection of Theory and Practice: Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).” Environmental Communication 5 (2): 221–227. Davis, Darrell William and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. 2008. East Asian Screen Industries. London: BFI. Harootunian, Harry. 2000. History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Havel, Vaclav. 1979 [1978]. “The Power of the Powerless.” International Journal of Politics 1–80. Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Iordanova, Dina. 2011. “East Asian Film Festivals: Transnational Clusters for Creativity and Commerce.” Film Festival Yearbook 3: Film Festivals and East Asia, edited by Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung, 1–33. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies, University of St Andrews. Kim, Jeongmin. 2007. “Queer Cultural Movements and Local Counterpublics of Sexuality: A Case of Seoul Queer Films and Videos Festival.” Translated by Sunghee Hong. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8 (4): 617–33. Lam Sau-yin. 2013. Social Movement, Net Activism and Urban Governance: A Case of Choi Yuen Village Incident. (Thesis). University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.5353/th_b5131657. Lam, Yu-ching. 2015. Choi Yuen Village Land Resumption and Anti-express Rail Link Movement in Hong Kong: A Study of New Social Movements. Thesis (MPhil): Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Lee, Nikki J. Y. 2005. Travelling Films: Western Criticism, Labelling Practice and SelfOrientalized East Asian Films. PhD Dissertation. London: Goldsmiths College, University of London. Lo, Kwai-Cheung. 2010. “Liu Yichang and the Temporalities of Capitalist Modernity.” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 10 (1): 162–76.

64   Winnie L. M. Yee Loist, S., and de Valck, M. 2010. Film festivals/Film festival research: thematic, annotated bibliography, 2nd edn. Medienwissenschaft/Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere; No. 91. Hamburg, Germany: Universität Hamburg, Institut für Germanistik II. Ma, Ran. 2009. “Rethinking Festival Film: Urban Generation Chinese Cinema on the Film Festival Circuit.” Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova and Raga Rhyne, 116–36. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies. Monani, Salma. 2013. “Environmental Film Festivals: Beginning Explorations at the Intersections of Film Festival Studies and Ecocritical Studies.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 253–78. London and New York: Routledge. Murphy, Patrick. 2009. Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies. ­Plymouth: Lexington Books. Olson, Jenni. 2002. “Film Festivals.” glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. www.glbtqarchive.com/artsindex.html (accessed December 13, 2017). Oppermann, Serpil. 2010. “Ecocriticism’s Phobic Relations with Theory.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17 (4): 768–70. Slovic, Scott. 2008. Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Stringer, Julian. 2008. “Genre Films and Festival Communities: Lessons from Nottingham, 1991–2000.” Film International 34: 53–60. Stringer, Julian. 2001. “Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy.” Cinema and the City, edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 134–44. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. 2008. “How Do We Get All These Disabilities in Here? Disability Film Festival and the Politics of Atypicality.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 17 (1): 11–29. Wu, Chia-chi. 2007. “Festivals, Criticism and International Reputation of Taiwan New Cinema.” Cinema Taiwan: Politics, Popularity, and State of the Arts, edited by Darrell William Davis and Chen, Ru-shou Robert, 75–91. London and New York: Routledge. Yau, Esther C M. 2017. “What Can Small Festivals Do? Toward Film Festivals as Testimony to Expanded Civic Engagement in Post-Handover Hong Kong.” Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation, edited by Chris Berry and Luke Robinson, 141–67. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ying E. Chi. 2017. Hong Kong Independent Film Festival (Program). January 8–22, 2017. Ying E. Chi. 2016. Hong Kong Independent Film Festival (Program). January  24–​ ­February 5, 2016. Ying E. Chi. 2015. Hong Kong Independent Film Festival (Program). January 3–28, 2015. Yung, Betty and Yuk-ming Lisa Leung. 2014. “Diverse Roles of Alternative Media in Hong Kong Civil Society: From Public Discourse Initiation to Social Activism.” Journal of Asian Public Policy 7 (1): 83–101.

Part II

Contemporary ecologies

3 Three ecologies of cinema, migration, and the sea Anchorage Prohibited and Luzon Elizabeth Wijaya

Ecologies of the virtual Félix Guattari first published Three Ecologies in 1989 as Les trois écologies. Guattari argues that since it was created globally, the ecological crisis has to be responded to on a global scale.1 He lists Taiwan as an example of the “hyperexploitative New Industrial Powers” that depend on “immense zones of misery, hunger and death” as part of a “monstrous system of stimulation that is Integrated World Capitalism” (Guattari 2000, 31). Guattari’s titular ecologies are: social ecology, mental ecology and environmental/machinic ecology. These ecologies are relational, transversal and in their mutating movements, they impact upon forms of subjectivity and power structures within global capitalism. Guattari reminds us not to forget the force of the immaterial in the search for “new social and aesthetic practices” (Guattari 2000, 68). In the decades since, the need for inventive responses to the socio-ecological-migratory crisis has only intensified. In the face of cascading and cumulative environmental and migratory perils, how could cinema be more than a frivolity or a further waste of resources? In his final book, Chaosmosis, Guattari includes cinema within deterritorialized incorporeal species, where the incorporeal is on the side of value systems and virtuality. He asks: How do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the Cosmos? (Guattari 1995, 119–120) Cinema, being so reliant on economics of production and exhibition, maintains no innocence within the transactions and exchanges of late-stage global capitalism and its asymmetrical structures of power. The familiar refrain that cinema could, for example, “raise awareness” of the problems it shines a light on, does not account for how, in this hyper-saturated, hyper-stimulated media environment,

68   Elizabeth Wijaya cinema could hold open a hope for futurity. Through an analysis of the aestheticpolitical strategies of two Taiwan-shot short films, Anchorage Prohibited (禁止下喵) (2015) and Luzon (2017) (海中網) by Chiang Wei Liang and by situating the works within the cinematic-material-sociological ecologies that the films and filmmaker are part of, this chapter argues that the virtual and the material are inextricably linked and the ecocinematic transverses the human/ nature/culture divides.

Hospitality and the acoustics of the seen and the unseen Anchorage Prohibited (2015) begins with the sound of the wind blowing through leaves layered with a rhythmic, machinic drone that leads into a formally composed daytime shot of a woman and a man, and the man is counting a stack of crisp banknotes. The woman runs off-screen and the audience is presented with the first conflict: the woman and man have been promised NT300,000 by an older man but have been given only NT180,000. Refusing to increase the amount, the older man grabs the money back and retreats into an industrial space, and the shutter is lowered behind him. The dialogue between the young woman and the older man is in differently-accented Mandarin. The young man says a line in Vietnamese, “Chuyện gì vậy?” (What’s happened?), but in the film the director only provides subtitles for the Mandarin dialogue and not the Vietnamese.2 The mechanical lowering of the shutter is accompanied by a machinic sound and the creaking of chains. The woman’s banging on the shutter and her repeated questioning as to the disparity between the promised and presented sum are met with no answer. Throughout the film, there are 11 fleeting lines in Vietnamese but only the Mandarin dialogue is given subtitles. This choice to leave the Vietnamese dialogue without subtitles or translation has an affective dimension that amplifies the politics of the couple’s world where there are invisible barriers between the heard and the unheard that determine whose voices are symbolically translatable. Since, in the festival travels of Anchorage Prohibited, only a minority of the audience is expected to be able to understand Vietnamese, the directorial refusal of linguistic translation becomes an experiential translation of the couple’s alienation. If both the Vietnamese and the ­Mandarin had been translated through the subtitles to another language, such as English, as is commonly the case in film festivals, the significance of the linguistic switch in the woman’s conversation with the older man (in Mandarin) and her partner (in Vietnamese), would be less noticeable. The demand for the translatable foreigner extends beyond language to the heart of the difficulty of hospitality: should the figure at the threshold of entry fulfill certain conditions before being welcomed or is the demand on the host to welcome unconditionally whomever or whatever arrives at the door? For Jacques Derrida, the question of language and translation speaks to the violent imbrication of hospitality and hostility, and the first question of hospitality is: “must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our

Three ecologies   69 country?” (Derrida 2000, 15). The aporia of hospitality lies in the unconditional demand for hospitality as a higher law and the conditionality of hospitality as enacted through social, legal, national, and international institutions. What we see and hear in Anchorage Prohibited are two drifters and a baby who have the appearance of mobility, since they wander around Taoyuan, but find no welcome anywhere. In the next scene, we see the woman holding a red bundle of a baby whose face is obscured while the man squats and smokes near a stream of water. The ambient sound consists of a mix of birds, running water, and static. They speak, barely audibly, in Vietnamese and the director sticks with the choice to leave their dialogue without subtitles, translation, or clear sound mixing. Later, we see this young couple on a bus and, through the window by their seats, an industrial-looking landscape punctuated by fields of green can be seen rolling past. There is no non-diegetic soundtrack and only a paucity of dialogue throughout the film. We do not know where they are going or what they intend to do. We are given no background as to who the young man and woman are. Even though the editing of the film is not non-linear, through its strategies of exclusion and reticence of narrative, we are made to ponder the negations and absences of this couple’s world. In a seminal introduction, Sheldon Lu draws attention to “the active reimagination of locale, place, and space” in Chinese ecocinema (Lu 2009, 1).3 At

Figure 3.1  Man jumping over gate in Anchorage Prohibited. Source: Chiang Wei Liang, 2015.

70  Elizabeth Wijaya their first destination, the depth of foreground and background contrasts with the flattening of humans and the built environment. The view is limited to a lockeddown medium-wide shot showing the young man jumping over a rusty blue gate, sealed off by 台灣桃園地方法院 (Taiwan Taoyuan District Court) and with a warning tape 危險 請勿靠近 (Danger, do not approach) encircling it (Figure 3.1). The colors of his white T-shirt and blue jeans blend into the gate and the corrugated metal of the building; the official seals that seal off their entry also seal off their future. We hear the metallic sound of off-screen banging on a gate or door, brief cries of the baby and the young woman calling after him “Quoc Huy.” When he returns moments later, he looks at her and the crying baby. Though they do not exchange words, in their silence there is a resounding sense of defeat as both the humans and built environment have been abandoned. In the next two scenes, it again seems as if there is nothing going on, which is the mood and central conceit of the film: the most urgent crisis can take place on a quotidian, even lackadaisical basis. They each inhabit their own successive medium-wide shot, he sits around in a field holding the baby, and then she defecates in a field while ships are visible in the distant background. There is neither dialogue nor music to guide us or externalize the characters’ thoughts or emotions, just the sound of the wind blowing. Then, in the third wide shot of this

Figure 3.2  Facing the sea in Anchorage Prohibited. Source: Chiang Wei Liang, 2015.

Three ecologies  71 series, its sublation in a balanced composition, his back is to the camera as he walks steadily towards the sea, carrying the red bundle. She runs towards him and grabs the bundle before shouting his name and walking away with the bundle (Figure 3.2). As she exits the frame, she shouts another line, “Không còn gì để nói nữa” (“nothing to say anymore”), and he remains on the edge of the horizon, facing the sea, silent and still. With the action placed far from the camera’s focus and the actors facing away from us, the shock of the shift from the mundane scene to the foiling of an infanticidal movement hits belatedly—or could even be missed. There is no emotional catharsis provided by the musical tools of melodrama, close ups of their expressions, or revelation of their inner thoughts through voiceover, just a return to the mundane, with a shot of stray dogs playing by the beach, the couple sitting together beneath a sign, 禁止下錨, which provides the basis for the film’s title, Anchorage Prohibited. Even though the scene of them sitting in front of the sign lasts for just 45 seconds, in the experience of cinematic time, the effect is drawn out and interminable. We could ponder their thoughts or, along with them, the rhythm of the sea. Scott MacDonald argues for a broader frame of “ecocinema” beyond proenvironmental narratives, suggesting that ecocinema should have an effect on the experience of temporality and suggest alternate rhythms of life (MacDonald 2013, 19). Slowness in Anchorage Prohibited betrays a quiet desperation. So far, 11 minutes into Anchorage Prohibited, we seem to have experienced two dramatic moments of three precarious lives, and yet the effect is neither intimacy nor voyeurism. We barely know what they are thinking, who they are, where they come from, or what they plan to do. Yet, with every still and windy shot, the film becomes an affective frame for the narrowing of their lives’ frames. Although the film is not presented in the genre of a mystery, its central mystery could be: at which moment in the day did they decide to accept the lower amount to sell their baby? The only interior shot of the film takes place at the cashier counter of a convenience shop where the young couple stand side-byside and across the counter—yet another visual barrier that echoes the sealed-off gate—the cashier asks for NT820 in Mandarin. There is yet another agonizing wait as the young man counts out coins and the young woman leaves the scene early. While he carries the bags of baby supplies when they reunite later in an alley, as with the opening scene, we do not see the completion of the transaction. Within this cinematic world, no transaction takes place smoothly. Recalling Guattari’s words on cinema and desire as incorporeal species, the question on aesthetic strategies remains: how much may a film simultaneously withhold and reveal? What access can a film provide to the immaterial world of decisions and desires? As they take another bus ride, lightly fussing with the sleeping baby, we see glimpses of the city at night through the windows. There is no dialogue and nothing of interest seems to be happening. This could be the most intense or quotidian scene, depending on how invested the audience is at this point. Through a J-cut, the sound of banging on a shuttered gate—a sound we first heard in the opening scene—intrudes into this quiet bus ride and leads us to the final shot of the film. In this final scene, we see the young woman ­holding

72  Elizabeth Wijaya

Figure 3.3  Facing the screen in Anchorage Prohibited. Source: Chiang Wei Liang, 2015.

a baby, placed to the right of an austere, rigorous composition. Her expression is impenetrable, and the scene is accompanied by the continuation of the loud banging. The young man enters the scene and they exchange looks before staring ahead into the camera (Figure 3.3). For the last five seconds of the film, with the center-framed composition, they stare into the camera so we look straight back at them before the sharp cut to black, followed by the credits. In this final tableau of the familial unit, the cinematic world looks out to the world with an accusing gaze—now, whose subjectivity isn’t at stake? Borders are both visible and invisible: a sealed off gate for a sealed off life; the edge of the sea, which could be the location for an idyllic break, becomes the line separating life and infanticide; and the reverberating sound of the shutter closing that continues into the credits, amplifies the sacrifice of the child into processes unknown. At the end of the credits, we hear the resounding metallic clang of the shutter falling back in place. With that note of finality, the brief black at the end of the credits suggests a flash of the bleakness of the world that was already submerged beneath the sunny day of the exterior shots. Anchorage Prohibited confronts us with this recurrence of the thresholds of hospitality and hostility, without ever separating one from the other. As Étienne Balibar hypothesized, the borders of politico-economic entities “are no longer at the outer limits of territories: they are dispersed a little everywhere” (Balibar and Williams 2002, 71). Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s (2013) Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor shows that beyond cartographic, geopolitical, and

Three ecologies   73 state-territorial lines, borders inform material and psychical spaces of sociality with different forms of inclusions and exclusions.

Cinematic ecologies: the foreshortened lives of short cinema The credit sequence of a film leads us into its cinematic ecology, sometimes referred to as the “real” world, but not any less governed by the virtualities of desire and its own visible/invisible temporal and spatial borders. In the credits of Anchorage Prohibited, we see the actors’ names: Nguyen Thi Thuy Lanh and Tran Quoc Huy. Chiang lists his course advisors as two figures associated with the Taiwan New Wave: director Wang Tong and director/editor Liao ChingSong. In small font beneath the end title credit, we see “Completed as part of the coursework for the module Film Production II at the National Taipei University of the Arts (Film Directing MFA).” In Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, Adrian J. Ivakhiv (2013) develops Guattari’s three ecologies of the material, social and the perceptual/mental into cinematic ecologies of the anthropomorphic (social, subject-world), geomorphic (material, object-world), and biomorphic (apparent, life-like world). Ivakhiv considers the sites of film exhibitions including film festivals and cineplexes as part of the social ecologies of cinema. The eco-nomy and eco-logy of cinema share the root of “oikos,” concerning the basic unit of society—the home/house/world of what cinema shows are embedded in the infrastructures of cinematic production, exhibition and distribution. In the following, I give an account of the production and exhibition route of Anchorage Prohibited in order to show this collision of the short film, the short-film maker, and the subjects of the cinema, with asymmetries of mobility and power. Remember that for Guattari, the study of the three ecologies is intended to show the regimes through which subjectivities are produced and, consequently, can be changed. In this case, the infrastructural ecology of cinema reveals how a short film on migration is itself a migratory work that is also subject to the conditions and economies of national categories. Anchorage Prohibited premiered at the 52nd Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival in 2015 and, in 2016, the 66th Berlin International Film Festival (­Berlinale) awarded Anchorage Prohibited with the Audi Short Film Award, which carries a prize of €20,000. Chiang Wei Liang, who is a citizen of Singapore, has been living in Taiwan since 2013 when he started a MFA at the Taiwan University of the Arts. Anchorage Prohibited was produced as part of coursework for Chiang’s MFA, which he began in 2013 and received in August 2018. In 2014, he participated in the Sixth Golden Horse Film Academy, led in 2014 by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Taiwanese-American director Arvin Chen, who started out as a protégé of Edward Yang, served as a tutor during the Golden Horse Film Academy and continues to be an important mentor for Chiang. The Ministry of Culture, Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development divides international film festivals into four tiers, with the first tier consisting of the Cannes International Film Festival, the Venice International Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival and the Academy Awards. In accordance with the

74   Elizabeth Wijaya guidelines, for being in competition at a top-tier festival, Anchorage Prohibited was awarded with an International Film Festival Grant of NT250,000.4 Anchorage Prohibited was shot in one and a half days in Taoyuan on a budget of NT23,000. In an unlikely scenario with a short film, which in general has limited commercial opportunities beyond the film festival screening fees or sales to online platforms, the director did not incur a financial loss. Apart from the Berlinale in February 2016, that same year Anchorage Prohibited was in competition at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in March, the Taipei Film Festival in July where it won Best Short Film, and the Singapore International Film Festival in November where it won Best Singapore Short Film. Apart from the competitions, Anchorage Prohibited also screened at regional, thematic and international film festivals such as the Chicago International Film Festival, the Reel Asian Toronto Film Festival, and the ­Guanajuato International Film Festival. This non-exhaustive list of the festival travels of Anchorage Prohibited reveals the travels of an award-winning short film with its international premiere at a prestigious film festival, as well as how insular and time-restricted these travel circuits can still be, since, after about a year at film festivals, few short films manage to find afterlives in terms of sales or distribution avenues. Festival-oriented short cinema can be opportunities for exploring artistic form and socio-political commentary (in part, due to a lack of commercial viability) but as part of the ecology of film festivals, the form is also not abstracted from socio-economic-political considerations. The limited travels, time and location-sensitive exhibition and lack of publicity given to short cinema also mean that the lives of shorts are foreshortened even within academic writing. Within Asian cinema and Chinese cinema studies, though by no means exclusive to these fields, it is no exaggeration to say that much more work is devoted to the long form.5 Imagine if literary studies only read the novels and neglected the poetry or short stories of an area. Even the most successful short films on the festival circuit could burn bright for a year, shown mainly to film festival goers, but then be quickly forgotten. The festival travels of Anchorage Prohibited further reveal how national identity, reproduced and performed in the film festival eligibility categories, can also be bound up in economic considerations, thus acting as a film’s passport and capital in its travels. As a migratory subject, the film takes on “dual nationality” across the East and Southeast Asian regional formations: in its international premiere, Anchorage Prohibited represents Taiwan, while at its Singapore premiere, it competed in the Southeast Asian Short Films Competition and won Best Singapore Short Film due to the Singaporean nationality of the filmmaker. The double inhabitation of Anchorage Prohibited speaks to the openness of the Taiwan film industry and its hospitality to foreign-born filmmakers, with perhaps the most well-known hyphenated examples being the Malaysian-Taiwanese director, Tsai Ming-liang and the Burmese-Taiwanese director, Midi Z. However, the cultural capital that the filmmakers trade in is not accessible to the foreign laborers portrayed in Midi Z’s migratory films as well as Anchorage Prohibited.

Three ecologies  75

Migratory ecologies and the temporal permanence of guestworkers Not all forms of migration are equal, but even the filmmaker and the film, with their own precarity due to the instability of reliance on film festivals for visibility, have more mobility than the subjects of the film. For Anchorage Prohibited, Chiang cast non-professional actors who are low-wage workers in a plastics factory without permanent residency, otherwise known as “guestworkers.” Historically, the term is from the German word Gastarbeiter. Cindy Hahamovitch identifies common features between the early temporary worker programs and indentured servitude and traces the first phase of the guestworker programs to Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century, with “growing intolerance toward immigrant workers” while nation-states were under construction (Hahamovitch 2010, 74). It is perhaps no coincidence that the publication dates of Guattari’s late works before his death in 1992 are nearly contemporaneous with Taiwan’s official implementation of the guestworker policy in 1992. Guattari was concerned with capitalist exploitations and the forms of subjectivity that made these exploitative systems endure and, in the early 1990s, Taiwan needed external labor power for economic growth. The guestworker policy in Taiwan was modelled after Singapore’s restrictive policy, which enables a high influx of migrant labor, along with a high turnover, and allows the nation-state to be both dependent on immigration and be anti-immigration in practice (Tseng and Wang 2013, 7). The “guestworker” scheme takes the hostility of limited hospitality to an extreme, where migrants become labor power to be utilized, controlled, and surveilled. Much has been written and debated about the poor working conditions under the guestworker scheme, with workers paying exorbitant fees, working long hours, receiving low wages, enduring harsh treatment and having little recourse for injustices faced (Tierney 2007, 205–28; Hoang 2016, 690–707). Tseng and Wang argue that apart from class distinctions between guest workers who are considered low-skilled and white collar workers, “the exclusionary migration regimes” of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan “reflect their ideologies of ethnic homogenization” (Tseng and Wang 2013, 4). The system is one of class exploitation and also racism. The entry of the “guest” in this case is utterly conditional on what can be extracted from the “guest” whose exit is planned through policy so as to avoid having a permanent “guest” who overstays the very limited, conditional welcome of the host. In July 2018, Taiwan’s Ministry of Labor lists 692,868 foreign workers, with 216,900 from Vietnam, just behind Indonesia’s numbers of 261,543.6 The number of workers classified as foreign has more than doubled since the end of 2003, with 300,150 listed. In 2017, after a Vietnamese migrant was shot nine times by police, the National Immigration Agency announced that they will no longer refer to a foreign worker whose whereabouts are unknown as “illegal runaway foreign workers” (非法逃跑外勞) and will instead use the term “unaccounted for foreign workers” (失聯外勞). It is the workers’ legal foreignness that remains unchanged, like the obdurate barriers in the landscape of Anchorage

76   Elizabeth Wijaya Prohibited. The situation in Taiwan is far from unique within the global economy sustained by the flows and frictions of migrant labor. The palpable ghostliness of guest workers is only one face of a deep haunting of late-stage global capitalism.7 What shifts in Taiwan’s internal and external borders, and what do we learn of the scaffolds of global capitalism, when we consider the affective structures of precarity and displacement? In Anchorage Prohibited, the virtuality of cinematic conjuring hint at the virtuality of the nation’s financial ecology propped up by laboring bodies whose presences are ubiquitously invisibilized, as if they were already immaterial, with only ghostly desires. The term “Ghostpitality,” David Coughlan’s adaptation of Derrida’s neologism ‘hostpitality,” foregrounds this inseparable haunting of the ghost and host for guestworkers (Coughlan 2016, 169). The line between the ghosts of the living and ghosts of the dead is perhaps thinner for the runaways, unaccounted for, illegals. More than a metaphor for the contradictory conditions built upon being everywhere and yet nowhere, necessary and present, yet foreign and displaced, with invisible yet impenetrable boundaries keeping them from being “local” on the ground upon which they sit or the sea upon which they float, the ghostliness of guestworkers also names the lingering precarity and unresolved deaths of migrant workers who labor under unjust conditions. Anchorage Prohibited is not a film about ghosts but the daylight ghostliness of being unaccounted for guest-ghost-workers.

Luzon, maritime conflict and aesthetico-political risk If there is no consequential question to which “the East” is the answer, it is because the toxic drift of industrial modernity either knows no such borders or is caught up in one of the swirling gyres of our anthropogenic epoch’s oceans. (Christine Marran 2017, 23) Christine Marran cautions against a narrow understanding of ecological cinema that is overly humanistic and neglects to interrogate the mutual constitution of self and world (Marran 2017, 56). Marran’s work builds on Adrian J. Ivakhiv’s (2013) Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, which is in turn inspired by Guattari’s (2000) Three Ecologies. The three works share a refusal to rest on a flattened understanding of film form, rhythm, and image and warn against foregrounding the figure of the individual human at the solipsistic, and ultimately capitalistic, expense of a shared, intertwined ecological vision. Within Anchorage Prohibited, this constitution and implication of self and world occur when the characters in their wandering have nowhere to go due to the economic limitations that determine their spatial mobility. While Anchorage Prohibited takes us to the edge of the sea, Chiang’s next work, Luzon, leaves us adrift in the Luzon Straits where the figure of the individual human becomes even more threatened and untenable. The official synopsis of Luzon is: “Somewhere in the South China Sea, a Chinese nuclear waste barrel draws a Taiwanese fisherman and his Filipino counter­ part into a maritime conflict.” The 13-minute Luzon was shot in four days with a

Three ecologies  77 budget of NT140,000. The shooting location for Luzon was about 15–20 km away from the shores of Keelung (East China Sea) and Kaohsiung (South China Sea). Even though the film was shot from two ends of Taiwan, as the shoot took place far from the shores, there are no identifying markers of the location and the title Luzon is meant to suggest that the film takes place in the Luzon Straits. Unlike the narrative realism of Anchorage Prohibited, Luzon begins in a more informative or didactic manner, with bilingual Chinese and English title cards that declare: “The Luzon Strait separates Taiwan and the Philippines/… and connects the Philippines sea to the South China Sea …/… the site of recent Chinese nuclear development.” We soon see a close-up of a yellow nuclear barrel with the words 中國核電科技 (China Nuclear Power Technology). For the next ten  minutes, two fishermen, one on a boat with a Taiwan flag and one with a Philippines flag, push the barrel to each other (Figure 3.4). In the midst of it, an off-screen audio warning plays first in Mandarin and then English: Attention/The South China Sea Islands/… and their surrounding waters …/… are the inherent territory of the People’s Republic of China …/ in all historical, geographical and legal terms/Your ship has violated the sovereign rights/… of the People’s Republic of China and …/… disrupted the peace, security …/… and order of the relevant waters/Please evacuate immediately.

Figure 3.4  Two fishermen pushing a nuclear waste barrel in Luzon. Source: Chiang Wei Liang, 2018.

78   Elizabeth Wijaya

Figure 3.5  A nuclear monster in Luzon. Source: Chiang Wei Liang, 2018.

Ignoring the repeated warning that seems to emanate from the sky, the fishermen continue this Beckettian pushing of the barrel towards each other even while the titular Taiwanese song, 海中網 “haizhong wang” (a net in the sea), starts crackling with disrupted signals. In Chiang’s first use of costly computer-generated imagery (CGI), a red sea monster jumps out of the sea and swallows the Taiwanese fisherman while the fate of the Filipino fisherman is unknown (Figure 3.5). The continued strains of “haizhong wang,” a song on love betrayed that was popular in the 1990s, links the diegesis of the film to the credit sequence, which ends with the repetition in English of the recorded warning, this time accompanied by the whirring sound of helicopters. Luzon’s stylistic departure from the familial focus and Taiwan New Waveinspired austere realism of Anchorage Prohibited can also be contrasted with Arnie, a 24-minute Taiwanese short film by the Filipino-Taiwanese director, Rina Tsou. Premiering at Cannes Critics’ Week in 2016, Arnie was released a year after the death of Supriyanto, a physically-abused Indonesian migrant fishermen employed on a Taiwanese distant-sea fishing vessel.8 Near the end of Arnie, a deceased Filipino seaman dances with a Taiwanese labor agency worker. This scene of the human/ghost dance in medium close up is accompanied by a tearful rendition of a love song sung in Tagalog with the lines “When the sun rises/I will forget you.” The ghostliness of erasure in Anchorage Prohibited and the fantasy of the ghostdance in Arnie extend the inhospitable

Three ecologies  79 borders of migration to the border between human life and death. That is to say, while they reveal how some lives matter more than others, the conflicts within Anchorage Prohibited and Arnie remain staged on the human scale. Although Chiang casts a Filipino fisherman working in Taiwan as a lead actor, Luzon shifts its focus away from the workers’ lives to the environmental scales of nuclear disaster. The lives of guest workers and the nuclear threat might, in some categorization, appear as distinct issues, but if we heed Guattari’s call to think transversally between the ecologies of nature, society, and the subject, we could ask if there is still hope for fundamental, existential changes in the framing of hospitality, subjectivity and responsibility that could allow us to resist and refuse the overlapping scales of exploitation from the human to the planetary. Or, is the monstrous future already here? Where Anchorage Prohibited shows the internally alienated navigating invisible borders in Taoyuan, Luzon, confronts the fear of the future and the contestation over sovereign boundaries disrupted by the almost-comical appearance of the red sea monster. The editors of The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene argue that monstrous figures show the entanglement between multispecies life and landscape, revealing that “in the indeterminate conditions of environmental damage, nature is suddenly unfamiliar again” (Swanson et al. 2017, M2). The monster that emerges from the contested waters between China/Taiwan/the Philippines turns the geopolitical conflict into an ecopolitical crisis that cannot be contained by the sovereign claims of nations. In a personal interview, Chiang cites Ishiguro Honda’s Godzilla (1954), the nuclear plants along the East coast of China, and protests against the proposed construction of a Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District, Taiwan as inspirations for Luzon.9 The futile pushing of the nuclear barrel back and forth between the fishermen portends that the evasion of responsibility in an attempt to enact territorial borders in the sea cannot contain the consequences of a nuclear disaster. As a monstrosity, the CGI creature that arises from the sea transverses the virtual and actual (existing nuclear threat today) as part of an ecology of the virtual, incorporeal, and material. What comes after the apocalyptic end? Jennifer Fay’s provocative thesis in Inhospitable World is that cinema creates artificial worlds that decenter the human being’s claim to being natural. The question of hospitality is not only a matter between humans but necessarily extendable to that of the earth, even in a future without human creatures: “for the future life forms who excavate or penetrate the earth and encounter our traces (including our media culture in some form), we will be the nature upon which they create their worlds and rituals of hospitality (Fay 2018, 206).” The nuclear event is a reminder that the thresholds between the natural and the artificial have long been contaminated. While Luzon challenges territorial and conceptual boundaries, its festival travel has been circumscribed within Asia, showing that dependence upon film festivals for recognition has its own unpredictability. Premiering at the Kaohsiung Film Festival in 2017, Luzon then screened in competition at the Taipei Film Festival in 2018. Its first screening outside of Taiwan was at the Singapore

80   Elizabeth Wijaya International Film Festival in December 2018, where it was awarded Best Singapore Short Film. In 2019, Luzon was awarded a Special Mention under the Asian New Force Category of the 24th ifva Awards, organized by the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The limited travels of Luzon can be understood through its aesthetic as well as political risks. It is perhaps out of awareness of this risk that within the credits of Luzon, the proper names of individuals are conspicuously absent. In white font against a black background, the film’s credit sequence lists the roles involved in production and post-production such as “Starring,” “Cinematography by,” “Sound Mixing Studios” while omitting the names of individuals and companies other than acknowledging the contribution of ­Kaohsiung Film Fund, Kaohsiung Film Archive and Bureau of Cultural Affairs Kaohsiung City Government. Politically, blacking out the names is reminiscent of the caution indicated by the conspicuous use of “Anonymous” in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012). Symbolically, this gesture is also consistent with the apocalyptic ending of Luzon where the threat of the radioactive sea stretches beyond the human scale. How, within this entangled ecology of cinema, migration, and the sea—of lives, both human and nonhuman—could the cinematic be hospitable to those who are most in need of hospitality? Could cinema as a haunted and virtual media that is actualized through material and social routes, call into being, or at least make palpable, the virtuality of another possible future and be more than its material substrate within the ecological cycle of production and waste? In crucial ways, despite their foreshortened lives and often precarious dependence on national categories manifested through film festivals and funding, the polyphonic voices and visions that make up festival-oriented short cinema harbor within them alternative landscapes and seascapes, more numerous than featurelength cinema since the latter has higher barriers of entry and, frequently, more commercial or distribution considerations. It is not so much that short cinema will save us from “ourselves” (and these recurring categories of inclusion/​ exclusion) but in the search for new subjectivities, if we could still believe in resistance, we urgently need to hear the submerged voices. Cinema cannot absolve human creatures of responsibility for their actions but it can shift and elongate in time the frames of reference beyond that of the individual standpoint or human lifespan. By the end of Luzon, it is the monster and nuclear barrel that remain at sea. Between Anchorage Prohibited and Luzon, if there are no guarantees of hospitality that the human world can give to its human and nonhuman counterparts, then there are also no guarantees that the world will be hospitable towards the human creatures that the world neither begins nor ends with.

Notes 1 This chapter was first presented at the Taiwan Studies Workshop on “Ecologizing Taiwan: Nature, Society, Culture” in October, 2018 at the University of California Davis and I thank the organizers (Michelle Yeh and David Wang), my session chair (Sheldon Lu), as well as the participants for their comments. I also thank Christine Marran for her comments. The writing of this work was supported by the President’s

Three ecologies   81 Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). 2 I thank Thao Dong Thi Phuong for providing the translations from the Vietnamese. 3 See also the 2017 special issue on Chinese-language ecocinema in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, edited by Sheldon Lu (2017). 4 The list of the festival tiers is available on the website of the Ministry of Culture Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development, July 6, 2018. www.bamid.gov.tw/ information_211_64486.html. Updated. 5 For an example of recent work focused on Asian short cinema and film ecologies, see Jasmine Nadua Trice’s (2019) article “Gendering National Histories and Regional Imaginaries.” Trice investigates three Southeast Asian women filmmakers and their negotiation of imaginaries and industry practices at varying scales, from the local to the national and transnational. 6 For detailed tables, see “Table 12–5 Foreign Workers in Productive Industries and Social Welfare by Various Type and Nationality,” Ministry of Labor Republic of China (Taiwan). August 20, 2018, statdb.mol.gov.tw/html/mon/c12060.pdf. 7 Compare Brian Bernards’ (2019) “Mockumenting Migrant Wokers” for a reading of how inter-Asian labor migration in the Singapore context creates a conceptual and cinematic hinterland space with implications for rethinking Asian regionality. 8 For investigations of the Supriyanto case, see Li et al. (2017), Xuelei yuchang and Setri Yasra et al. (2017), “Slavery at Sea.” 9 For an analysis of documentary cinema and the anti-nuclear social movement around the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, see Christopher Lupke’s (2012) “Documenting environmental protest.” See also Ming-Sho Ho’s (2014) “The Fukushima Effect” on the development of nuclear energy in Taiwan and the post-Fukushima resurgence of Taiwan’s anti-nuclear movement.

References Balibar, Etienne and Erin M. Williams. 2002. “World Borders, Political Borders.” PMLA 117 (1): 71–8. Bernards, Brian. 2019. “Mockumenting Migrant Workers: The Inter-Asian Hinterland of Eric Khoo’s No Day Off and My Magic.” Positions 27 (2): 297–332. Chiang, Wei Liang, director. 2016. Anchorage Prohibited. Chiang, Wei Liang, director. 2017. Luzon. Chiang, Wei Liang. Personal interview. September 10, 2018. Coughlan, David. 2016. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Fay, Jennifer. 2018. Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: The Athlone Press. Hahamovitch, Cindy. 2010. “Creating Perfect Immigrants: Guestworkers of the World in Historical Perspective.” Labor History 44 (1): 69–94. Ho, Ming-sho. 2014. “The Fukushima Effect: Explaining the Resurgence of the AntiNuclear Movement in Taiwan.” Environmental Politics 23 (6): 965–83.

82   Elizabeth Wijaya Hoang, Lan Anh. 2016. “Vietnamese Migrant Networks in Taiwan: The Curse and Boon of Social Capital.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (4): 690–707. “International Film Festival Grant.” 2018. Ministry of Culture Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development, July 6, 2018, www.bamid.gov.tw/information-​21164486.html (accessed November 2, 2018). Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2013. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Li, Xueli, et al. 2017. Xuelei yuchang: kuaguo zhiji taiwan yuanyang yuye zhenxiang. Taipei: Flaneur Culture Lab. Lu, Sheldon. 2009. “Introduction: Cinema, Ecology, Modernity.” Chinese Ecocinema: in the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi, 1–14. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lu, Sheldon. 2017. “Introduction: Chinese-language Ecocinema.” Chinese-language ecocinema, special issue August of Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11 (1): 1–12. Lupke, Christopher. 2012. “Documenting Environmental Protest: Taiwan’s Gongliao Fourth Nuclear Power Plant and the Cultural Politics of Dialogic Artifice.” Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Method, edited by Sylvia Li-chun lin and Tze-lan D. Song, 155–82. New York: Routledge. MacDonald, Scott. 2013. “The Ecocinema Experience.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 17–42. New York: Routledge. Marran, Christine. 2017. Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World. ­Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mezzadra, Sandro and Brett Neilson, 2013. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oppenheimer, Joshua, director. 2012. The Act of Killing. Final Cut for Real. Swanson, Heather et al. 2017. “Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies.” The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, M1–M12. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. “Table 12–5 Foreign Workers in Productive Industries and Social Welfare by Various Type and Nationality.” Ministry of Labor, 20 August 2018, statdb.mol.gov.tw/html/ mon/c12060.pdf (accessed November 2, 2018). Tierney, Robert. 2007. “The Guest Labor System in Taiwan.” Critical Asian Studies 39 (2): 205–28. Trice, Jasmine Nadua. 2019. “Gendering National Histories and Regional Imaginaries: Three Southeast Asian Women Filmmakers.” Feminist Media Histories 5 (1): 11–38. Tseng, Yen-fen and Hong-zen Wang. 2013. “Governing Migrant Workers at a Distance: Bridging the Temporary Status of Guestworkers in Taiwan.” International Migration 51 (4): 1–19. Yasra, Setri et al. 2017. “Slavery at Sea: Undocumented Indonesian Seamen are Victims of Abuse Aboard Foreign Fishing Boats.” Tempo English January 15, 2017: 11–24.

4 Tracing extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema Tie Xi Qu and the politics of the resource image Pietari Kääpä The materiality of ecocinema Contemporary work on ecocinema has become increasingly focused on the material conditions underlying the production of media content. Janet Walker and Nicole Starosielski’s (2016) Sustainable Media, for example, emphasizes the complex ways environmental messages and the infrastructure of media production intertwine. This approach draws from Jennifer Gabrys’ (2011) and Lisa Parks’ (2007) work on the technological and material infrastructure of media communications, including underwater cable lines and data servers. In comparison with the dominant tendency of ecomedia studies to analyze ideological preoccupations in environmental content, the concerns here explore the emissions generated by production practices or the share of renewables in the energy mix enabling digital communications. For example, Jussi Parikka’s (2015) work on the geology of media takes this materialist approach to a much wider level to consider the “premediatic” materialities of the media, while the work of Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (2012) focuses on the afterlives of media devices, amongst other considerations to do with the political ecology of media. The point here is that the lifecycle of the media—and, thus, the scope of analysis required to evaluate it—extends far outside the text on which academic critiques often focus. Indeed, it is necessary to shift critical attention beyond the more obviously anthropocentric concerns in the textual frame (including representations of environmental concerns) to thinking how films reveal and critique the extraction and subsequent manipulation of materials (including metals, minerals, coal, hydro, etc.) that enable the production infrastructure of contemporary media. This material turn insists that academic critique must rethink its approach to the relationship between media and the environment. Nadia Bozak’s (2012) work on what she calls the resource image provides a conducive start for exploring how content and infrastructure can merge. She identifies the resource image as a means to trace cinematic representations back to the energy infrastructure that facilitates their production. Both analogue and digital film rely on extensive material resources, and it is the task of the critic to address how these material traces are deposited into and revealed by the text. Echoing the work of Rust, Monani and Cubitt (2012), a focus on these traces

84   Pietari Kääpä reveals that all films have an environmental footprint that needs to be accounted for. Recent studies by Kääpä (2018) and Vaughan (2019) have focused considerable attention on environmental policies and production practices, which provide industrial benchmarks for a sustainable film industry. Simultaneously, film organizations in the UK and Europe have started to conceptualize equivalent benchmarks for textual content, with the aim that these would generate audience awareness of not only wider environmental concerns, but also the footprint of the media they consume. As Kääpä has pointed out, industry standards such as Albert (the UK’s certificate for carbon awareness) only work for a captive industry audience, as the logo appears at the end of programs and means little for consumers not versed in the implications of the concept. Thus, shows such as the soap opera Coronation Street have started to prioritize (thus ‘normalize) the presence of recycling bins in the mise-en-scène, while Eastenders has included narratives about environmental sustainability. The film and television industry, at least in the UK, is only starting out on its sustainability “journey” (to use a term frequently evoked to visualize the incorporation of these ideas to daily production practice). As we await the industry to catch up with the field of environmental communications, where such practices have been studied extensively, we can turn to consider alternative ways in which visual cultures can signify their environmental presence. Bozak’s work is especially useful here as it addresses cinema’s roots as part of the culture of a global reliance on oil and coal and covers texts from a wide variety of cultural contexts, including brief evaluations of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (2005) and Li Yang’s Blind Shaft (2003), both films of key significance to this collection. Yet, an even more penetrating focus on what Walker and Starosielski call the “entanglement” of environmental and technological concerns—that is, of an integral and existential relationship between the production of art and the environment—is necessary. Here, a focus on the material circumstances of the production environment—that is, the choices made on set in terms of technology, transport, location, objects such as the cameras used, as well as the role of the human as an organic being— translate into the film text. Such aspects, often ignored, can reveal to us as much about the film’s ecological relationship with the lived environment and how its production history contributes to its textual content. By generating such a perspective focusing on a variety of material traces in the filmic text, we also seek to expand Bozak’s arguments concerning productive means to synergize textual and infrastructural analysis. As suggested, any assumption about audience reading strategies should be supported by evidence and claims are invariably limited by a presumption that audiences would be capable and willing to read all these material traces into the resource image. Audience readings invariably depend on a range of demographic qualifiers and levels of media literacy—would audiences be able to distinguish the analogue and digital footprints of Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992) and the documentary War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006), to note a few films mentioned by Bozak? Whether these readings would take place or not is a matter that can only be sufficiently addressed by audience studies, but as such work

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema   85 remains elusive, a theoretical evaluation of audience positioning will have to suffice, for now. As such, this chapter will formulate an approach to how documentary films generate awareness of the complex environmental and material infrastructures of the resource image. In doing so, it will suggest an analytical framework for evaluating how the material roots of media production—and not only the materiality of the media itself—make themselves felt on the textual level. This has considerable potential as a template to be used for a more nuanced perspective on how audience attention may be drawn to the material roots of media production and consumption.

Three ecologies Acknowledging producer and audience complicity in the politics of the resource image starts from challenging the immersive identificatory practices evoked by environmental films. To put it another way, asserting that environmental documentaries, for example, facilitate more awareness about environmental concerns is not particularly insightful. Such interpretations of films largely regurgitate readings already explicit on a textual level and echoed through the popular reception of these films. Instead, addressing how certain representational methods can help to uncover the inherent materiality of production practices can be more invigorating in their ecologicalist implications. The key to constructing such an ecological perspective lies in undoing the dualistic separation of cultural and natural—or anthropocentric and ecocentric—constituents of film production practices. To achieve this undoing, I focus on Felix Guattari’s (2000) arguments concerning the necessity to generate cognitive, political and environmental challenges to facilitate more effective environmental understanding. For Guattari, these three areas consist of distinct ecologies, of ways of comprehending one’s relationships with the external world, where cognitive, political and environmental challenges translate to mental, social and environmental ecologies, respectively. While the practicalities of these three modes are invariably cross-­connected, the purpose of Guattari’s framework focuses on overcoming the obstacles that block concrete action on problems such as climate change. Guattari argues that adopting environmentalism is not enough as “ecology must stop being associated with a small nature loving community. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalist power formations” (Guattari 2000, 35). For this transformation in perception to happen, environmental awareness must be generated on all three ecological levels so that human beings’ awareness of their own role in the ecosystem, the political organization of society as pertains to environmental issues, and, finally, environmental activism would come together holistically to generate a shift in the ways human entanglement in environmental issues is acknowledged. Such a holistic perspective has considerable implications for the politics of the resource image as it facilitates a pathway to refocus critical attention to the environmental infrastructure of film production whilst keeping ideological and political matters relevant for the analysis. To do so, Guattari suggests that we

86   Pietari Kääpä must work “transversally” to consider factors from mental, social and environmental perspectives to construct conditions most conducive for environmental awareness. To explain, human subjectivity does not automatically identify with, or agree to, the most productive social or sustainable behavior. Guattari suggests that this is often the opposite, as political concerns override mental awareness of issues such as environmental sustainability, which, in his work, is a particular result of capitalist hegemony on the construction and constitution of normative mental and social ecologies. Instead, it is the “job” of an ecophilosophical argument to bind the three ecologies together in ways that lead to productive outcomes while accounting for the diverse requirements embedded in each of the perspectives. (A big ask by all accounts!) In practice, this would take place by ensuring that these transversal connections utilize the particular qualities of each ecology. For cognitive challenges, the focus would be on new ways of thinking and perception. Societal ones would involve a radical politics that challenges the patterns of normalization that hegemonic orders use to maintain dominance. And, for an environmental perspective, the emphasis is on highlighting connections that question the normalizing power of capitalist subjectivity. How do these three ecologies translate to the politics of the resource image? Adapting the three ecologies to analyzing the material foundations of cinematic representation would, first of all, require challenging conventional means of representation that maintain hegemonic structures, including both narrative conventions and semiotic symbolism. Second, they would need to rethink political norms in ways that pose powerful and transformative alternatives to the ways societal hegemony is constructed and maintained. One of the ways of achieving this would be to refocus attention to the ways environmental films, both on a semiotic and a thematic level, open to different subjectivities, including ones outside of the control of human intentions. While cinema is an anthropogenic undertaking by its nature, this does not exclude other material elements from playing a considerable role in the construction of narrative significance. Shifting the gaze away from human subjectivity gestures to a more profound non-­dichotomized version of reality than is available by, for example, focusing only on the sociopolitics of the films. These different subjectivities can be considered as ‘agentic materialities’, that is, as elements that exist outside of the strict abilities of anthropocentric interests to manipulate them for representational purposes. This description provides a new materialist view of narrative agency, where non-­human material has an equal level of narrative significance as the human participants: the new narrative agents are things, nonhuman organisms, places, and forces, as well as human actors and their words. Together, they anticipate an alternative vision of a future where narratives and discourses have the power to change, re-­enchant, and create the world that comes to our attention only in participatory perceptions. (Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 88)

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema   87 By shifting focus to material elements as reflected in the texts, such as the choice of location or the ways environmental conditions shape production practice, a new materialist ecocritical analysis of cinema can provide a more efficient template for future audience studies to evaluate the ways spectator perspectives are entangled with environmental content that has to be considered multidimensional and consisting of diverse material agencies. To do so, an evaluation of the complex influences of non-­human materials on anthropogenic cultural production is necessary.

Tie Xi Qu This chapter now explores the case of Chinese cinema to outline how the three ecologies can be used to generate a more comprehensive ecological perspective on cinema’s material entanglement. From documentaries such as Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003) and Behemoth (2015) to fictional features such as Still Life or Blind Shaft, cinema captures the transformations of China’s post-­socialist resource and communal infrastructure. The focus is inevitably on representing the cataclysmic implications these transformations have for communities and the environment. The ecological content of these films is certainly powerful (as well as thoroughly analyzed—see Wang 2010; Zhang 2009), but what role do the material traces of production play as part of these representations? Do these material concerns make themselves felt on the level of the text? The focus of this chapter is on Wang Bing’s monumental Tie Xi Qu, a three-­part documentary chronicling the end of the industrial lifecycle of the Tie Xi factory complex in North Western Shandong. The film provides an appropriate case study not only for its multifaceted exploration of different parts of the extractive landscapes of China but for its narrative and formative complexity. The chapter assesses the ways the material realities this film captures reflect the physicality of the media through which these ideas are communicated. In many ways, the resource politics involved in the transition from analogue to the digital image presents an evolving history of China’s economic and societal fabric, translated now into a form of media archaeology that allows us to refocus our attention on the politics of the resource image and the material conditions underlying filmic imagery. A particularly significant concern for us is the ways external material conditions— the agentic materialities—infiltrate anthropogenic forms of representation and, theoretically, audience responses to them. A focus on the materialist qualities of Chinese ecocinema in the Anthropocene can open new avenues for rethinking the relationship between film form and its material foundations. Tie Xi Qu was shot over two years with Wang Bing capturing the transformation of the industrial estate and its associated communities on a Mini DV camera. The process led to hundreds of hours of footage, which were subsequently edited together into the final nine-­hour presentation. The film has generated extensive interest in both Chinese and documentary film scholarship (see Wang 2010 and Smith 2015) for its complex and penetrating exploration of China’s post-­socialist privatization. The discussion of the transition of not only

88   Pietari Kääpä of means of capital and modes of production but also of communal and cultural mores has led to the film being covered in ways that synergizes its thematic range with its formative mode. Thus, the focus of the film on work practices and the precarious lives of the people coping with the restructuring of society is a topic that has been explored in relation to both Tie Xi Qu’s formative structure and its environmental connotations. This is not surprising as focusing on the relationship between industry and environment through its low intensive production methods would make the film, as Bozak (2012, 9) would argue, “ecological by default,” especially as it contains all the hallmarks of ecocinema (as identified by authors such as Brereton 2005). It deals with anthropogenic transformations of landscapes, explores the contamination of natural resources, considers the role of humans as part of the environment, presents critical perspectives on land ethics, and, finally, importantly, foregrounds the material presence of the cinematic apparatus by making it visible in the mise-­en-­scène. The film is divided into distinct chapters all with a material theme—rust, remnants, and rails. The first part focuses on the operations of the vast factory complex at Tie Xi. We follow an assorted group of laborers in their daily tasks at the smelting factory floor and witness the often-­dangerous working conditions. We also get insight into the break room as the workers banter and wash themselves. The second part focuses on a community facing relocation from their hutong into newly constructed flats. The relocation tears apart communities and poses considerable obstacles for families who rely on their homes to house multiple generations. The new flats are often much smaller and there’s confusion over when they are available, highlighting the precarious roles of the laborers as part of an economy in transition. Finally, we focus on the rail workers who play an essential part in the infrastructure of the factory complex, transporting the materials needed for operations as well as connecting the factory to the external world. Together, these three parts provide a penetrating look at the environmental and human costs of societal restructuring. Tie Xi Qu’s thematic scope more than qualifies it as a significant piece of ecocinema. However, instead of highlighting these thematic features (covered extensively by Li 2008), it is more important to design a systematic means of analysis of how its formative challenges build towards the materialist template for audience studies, as premised on Guattari’s three ecologies. This is where the context of Tie Xi Qu’s production becomes significant. At the time of its production, advancements in the use of digital technology in film production allowed an individual filmmaker such as Wang Bing to produce such an epic film on a very small budget. Tie Xi Qu’s form and content rely on emergent forms of digital technology as both its length and ability to access these constrained industrial and communal spaces was facilitated by the mobility of the camera. At the same time, we have to remember, as Gabrys et al. remind us, that digital production and infrastructure are implicated in a range of problematic political and economic processes and a reliance on natural resources that make it far from a sustainable “immaterial” form of production. Thus, the reliance of a film such as Tie Xi Qu on digital production

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema   89 processes inadvertently complicates the benefits to be gained from the content of the film. Taken from this perspective, the use of the long take and the length of the film can be seen to exemplify excess in terms of the resources used for its production and distribution. Thus, two key question emerge for us. How does the form of a digital film connect with the resource politics it otherwise seeks to critique? What role can the cinematic apparatus play in foregrounding these material concerns, especially in a film that veers as far as possible from a romanticized depiction of these transformations? One of the key arguments to address is that the monumental transformations of post-­socialist China require a range of innovative techniques to capture them. It is not surprising that many of the films attempting to do this are key texts of slow cinema (see De Luca and Jorge 2015), a movement that evaluates how cinematic narratives mobilize time in alternative ways. Here, the sense of transformation and unstoppable movement are captured appropriately by a slow reflective pace. The style of a film such as Tie Xi Qu facilitates a clear challenge to the mental ecology as spectators are required to navigate a complex audiovisual style that is more than observational—it is a straightforward confrontation with the normative comfort of mainstream cinematic norms, often still based on the principles of Classical Hollywood narrative techniques. Meanwhile, the challenge to social ecology emerges from the ways the film provides a distinctly grassroots view of Chinese society. The refusal to celebrate progress or even to show clear narrative resolutions to the restructuring of the socialist economy are made clear in the ways the film fragments narrative cohesion and leaves ambiguity as its lingering theme. The Mini DV used for the shooting exhumes a grainy yet detailed quality that complements the long takes. There is no escaping the gaze of the camera that both seeks to embed us in the image but also distract from it by foregrounding the presence of the filmmaker and the cinematic apparatus. In total, these perspectives emphasize the film’s ecocentric worldview where it is both the humans and the environment that are the victims of exploitation. Yet, this sort of reading does not really provide any new material on Wang Bing’s filmmaking as this is very explicitly a film about the comprehensive problems of the Anthropocene. One way to start moving towards a material understanding of the film is to further consider the director’s role in the film. Tie Xi Qu has frequently been read as a particularly insightful and formatively innovative form of observational documentary. This approach makes sense especially considering its duration and the impartial silence Wang Bing maintains throughout the film. Yet, Bozak (2012) suggests that framing the documentarist as a distanced observer can also be problematic. Impartiality comes with its own caveats, as it can be seen as a refusal to commit to the questions addressed, especially when one is dealing with a topic as fraught with emotion and ideology as the breakdown of the industrial and communal structures of nations. For her, the makers of observational documentaries are not disinterested observers as, instead, they act like silent soldiers in the trenches, that is, they participate in the processes that the films ostensibly critique. A film such as War Tapes may

90  Pietari Kääpä critique the devastation caused by resource wars such as the Gulf conflicts. But as the film is comprised of vignettes of captured footage from platforms such as YouTube or from the mobiles of soldiers, it uses the proliferation and overwhelming omnipresence of digital technologies in everyday life to capture its messages. Yet, the messages put forth by the film do not directly connect with its material roots based on the proliferation of digital technologies and the huge resource consumption that these technologies generate, including their role in precisely the types of resource wars that encapsulate the Gulf conflicts. In short, the media is never impartial or unbiased as the role of the creatives and the infrastructure that enables them invariably feeds into the images they capture. In a somewhat similar mode, Ramos-­Martinez (2015) suggests that the film captures a sense of “not knowing,” in terms of how to deal with the vastness of Tie Xi from the perspective of an unbiased observer who will never be able to capture its comprehensive totality. This approach makes some sense as the factory is an organic compendium of diverse elements from the undergrowth to the trees, from the human habitation and the various factories that comprise the estate. Yet, Ramos-­Martinez also suggests a need to understand the film in more material terms where the film captures what he calls a process of oxidation as rust pervades all parts of the represented world, from the dilapidated factory floors to the crumbling houses. But crucially, this applies to Wang’s “long long” takes as well as they “oxidize” conventional modes of representation of the observational documentary. They let the scenes “breathe” and challenge taken-­for-­granted perceptions of the rhythm of documentary films and, by extension, the active roles to be played by audiences and the filmmakers. Through this, the factory and individuals become the objects of knowledge and the filmmaker and spectators the subjects of knowledge as we are directed to challenge our consensual notions of cinematic representations of societal progress as well as the labor expected of audiences. As we are frequently challenged by our awareness of time and space and the ways this awareness confronts conventional norms of representation, the role of the documentarist, regardless of how impartial and distanced, is thematized as a key issue for the film. Yet, the suggestion that these representational techniques are used to challenge the conventions of documentary cinema can be misleading in that this sort of focus only sees value in art for art’s sake. Certainly, the formative mode provides a significant contribution to the film but seeing the challenge as only about documentary film in its own right is too isolated and anthropocentric in orientation. Instead, a much more productive take would be to think of the film’s foregrounding of its producer as an encapsulation of the resource image, of emphasizing the material qualities of documentary practice as a means to reorient our understanding of the complex embeddedness of documentary production and consumption in a material infrastructure. This, then is not a film about film, but one about us, the producers and the spectators, as the enablers and facilitators of its central theme of an environmentally hostile act. In the end, the process of viewing the film is not so much about what we see but how we see it.

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema  91

Materialities As I have suggested, it would not be too difficult to suggest that Tie Xi Qu is an environmental film as it clearly uncovers the problematic intersections of humanity and nature from a range of complex perspectives. Yet, this is not enough, as noting that the environment and environmentalism play a role here is not particularly insightful. What I have in mind involves a more complex way for the environment to speak or make its voice heard. Instead of only acting as the backdrop to human narrative events (or as an embodiment of the sublime as a means to consider existential anthropocentric questions), the material conditions of Tie Xi Qu’s production inflect the text in more complex ways. This can be explained through four stages of agentic materiality in the film, or of material elements that can be seen to evade anthropocentric mastery. The first is to do with the role of a range of representational materials in the mise-­en-­scène that exceed the confines of the representational tableau unfolding in front of the apparatus, from the dust that emanates from the labor processes to the concrete that holds the factory together, all comprising elements that exceed semiotic denotation, existing as they do outside of anthropocentric control. The next stage involves the corporeal presence of the filmmaker, which can be seen in both shadows on screen and his influence on camera movement by, for example, his body responding to the cold climate during the shoot, all of which provides traces of a human-organic presence that exceeds simplistic understandings of creative agency. The third is to do with elements such as steam and light that refuse to be contained within the representational frame. These can be called interfacial elements as they attach to or penetrate the translucent qualities of the lens. By exceeding the boundary between the world captured and the mechanisms used to capture it, they reveal both the artificial qualities of this ‘slice of life’ and the ways any capture of reality is predicated on the conditions it aims to capture. The final role is those of processual elements—the technology—that facilitates the production and communication of the content, where, for example, the physical qualities of the camera, or of the data management infrastructure for digital photography, make themselves felt in the text. In collaboration, these elements—the representational, corporeal, interfacial and processual—facilitate an environmental ecological understanding of how the environment communicates with humanity through the material role of digital film.

Representational materialities The first step to achieve this critical perspective and analytical template is to explore the film in terms of the agentic role it affords representational material elements. Representational materialities are the types of elements that we see as remnants of China’s infrastructural transition. The footage of industrial processes, of train journeys to transport materials, of the sweat of laboring bodies, of hutongs in a state of demolition, all gesture to the materiality of societal ­transition. They are part of the politics of the resource image, gesturing to the

92  Pietari Kääpä f­ ragility of the digital image and the impermanence on which it is built. Similarly, the affordability of the digital device is based on an infrastructure that has to move with the markets, even if this means the destruction of natural habitats and people’s livelihoods. Thus, as the film brings us closer to the rust and remnants of these dead industrial and communal sites, we are provided with an opportunity to integrate the film’s critical thematic scope with its means of production. An example of this sort of material challenge takes place with an unusual zoom to a close-­up of concrete being drilled as part of the restoration operations in the factory. The dust and shrapnel thrown up by the drill is captured in minute detail, enabled by the sharpness of the digital image. The digital close-­up allows us to explore the materiality of the factory and labor processes first hand. In one of the longest takes of the film, workers unload a train’s cargo of suppliers for zinc processing. The scene is different from the mechanized capturing of industrial process in many other scenes in the film. The work is arduous and physically demanding, but in contrast to the majority of the film, our vision of the scene is challenged when the dust from the cargo threatens to obscure the vision for us. The sharpness of the digital camera, so revealing in other moments, is not able to penetrate the dust as it proves no match for real life obstructions. The length of the shot emphasizes this potentially frustrating tone as the static shot structure allows the dust to fly and settle at random, to set a scene where control of the visibility is not up to the apparatus. For a spectator now accustomed to immediate sharp access to the events, this prolonged scene premised on obscuring vision may be, at first, jarring. At the same time, however, a shot that would most likely be labeled avant-­garde in other contexts, now zooms in on what, arguably, matters—the physicality of the materials that held this community together—instead of the grand political narratives with their ephemeral substances that have been seen as the lifeblood of such industrial communities. Yet, at the same time, it can only raise questions about the tenacity of material substances as they are invariably morphed by political and societal processes. Foregrounding material in this way forces us to not only acknowledge the material of industrial labor and the political processes that often override them, but also the filmmaking and viewing process. These haptic forms confront the spectator to show them the minutiae of industrial labor and the organic emissions it emanates. Instead of a distanced perspective on industrial processes, these immersive shots make the process tangible and felt in a way that can be uncomfortable, especially as the length of the scene fits well with some of the ways complex representational practices challenge established worldviews, as described by Laura Marks (2000). In emphasizing the immediacy of such haptic perspectives, the film provides a challenge to the mental ecology. The ways the film emphasizes the materiality of factory work and its integral role in the socialist economy contributes a challenge to the social ecology, as we know this labor will not mean much in the long run. Through this, it undercuts the idea of socialist progress and welfare by emphasizing its physical costs. But this is not only a challenge to mental and social ecologies but also to the environmental

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema   93 ecology. As material processes make visible the entanglement of natural resources and anthropocentric organization of the material world, the distanced perspective of an observational documentary is shattered. The camera is at the mercy of the elements, as it has to constantly refocus its resolution to capture the particularities of industrial work. While one could suggest these instances are only examples of production practice struggling to attune to mainstream representational conventions, the fact that Wang decided to include this shot out of the hundreds of hours of digital footage shot suggests otherwise. As these material elements refuse human coordination, they gesture to a more ecocentric worldview. By extension, we are drawn to pay attention to the materiality of film production. The industrial processes captured here are part of the same ecosystem that facilitates the existence of Mini DV cameras as well as the energy that powers such cameras, and, by emphasizing this, the film suggests that representational materialities are not only something to be captured by a camera but they also emit a level of agency of their own.

Corporeal materialities So far, the discussion has closely aligned with a more orthodox understanding of the resource image as a means to emphasize the material roots of media production through representational elements. These roots provide one level of challenge to the idea of the immaterial objective form of the documentary. Corporeal materialities provide the next step to a more ecological sense of understanding the film’s environmental connectivity. The two instances of representational materiality addressed above feature the physical corporeal reactions of Wang Bing to external stimulations, such as the cold or the movement of a train. Yet, these provide additional material challenges to conventional expectations of how films are meant to appear, and thus facilitate a challenge of the mental ecology. To explain, when cutting to a closer view of activities such as drilling or unloading the train, the high level of resolution provided by the digital focus makes the image seem jittery and unclear in tone. The high resolution amplifies even the tiniest movements made by Wang Bing and causes the shaking of the equipment to become visible. Thus, the corporeality of the director as the maker of the film brings another level of materiality to this representation. By revealing the physical reactions of the filmmaker, a fact also emphasized by frequent impressions of the boom mike on the wall or the director in the shot, we are taken to a subsequent level of materiality where it is clear that this capture of Tie Xi is also a process mediated through human materiality. Yet, this human materiality is not immune from the ecological conditions pertaining to the production environment. In contrast to the challenges of the representational materialities on the constitution of the visual image, corporeal materialities are largely based on invisible influences that shape the constitution of the film. These are key indicators for understanding how an ecological consciousness emerges, as anthropocentric control is shown to be only one aspect influencing the outcome.

94   Pietari Kääpä

Tangible materialities The representational and corporeal materialities have emphasized how agentic materialities come to challenge anthropocentric perspectives. Yet these are based on capturing material elements and influences external to the camera apparatus. The next level is to focus on the technology enabling this capture, namely the Mini DV used by Wang Bing, as this facilitates a closer connection with the agentic materialities enabling film production. In the process, these materialities also move us closer to an analytical position where the human maker of the film is divested of control over its final form, enabling that sense of environmental ecologicalism, one that seeks to prioritize more democratic and open agentic participation, discussed by Guattari, where we come face to face with the material realities of our cultural production and consumption practices. To take this line of analysis further, I am suggesting that we should not so much focus on the world of the diegesis but the immediate ‘skin of the film’ (to draw from Laura Marks’ assessment of hapticity and cinema). The skin is a repository of meanings in the experimental intercultural cinema Marks discusses. For us, the digital capture takes on this role as it mediates between the existent reality in front of the camera, human decisions in what to capture, elements refusing those decisions, and technological processes translating these into digital data. Particularly relevant for us are elements that behave in unexpected ways or veer control away from the human agents organizing the captures, elements such as light and steam, which challenge the complex boundary between the world in front of the camera and the reorganized anthropomorphized recapture that will be edited into the final shape that we see projected for us. While there is no self-­ evident organic process present with the materiality of the film itself, such as the fusion of light and the nitrates that comprise analogue film, the production of digital images also comprises a material process that we need to consider when evaluating the environmental presence of film. The choice to use this digital video camera for the production gestures to the combination of pragmatic realities and material necessities of a production like Tie Xi Qu: I tried to use a DV video camera to make the film “West of Tracks.” I found out it’s handy to film and easy to use to enter the space of the character. In the meantime, the digital video camera is easy to capture a huge amount of video material. It is superior compared to the film camera and so I made the film “West of Tracks” on my own. I began to understand the beauty of the digital image during filming. (Wang Bing in Forrest 2017) The technology facilitates a connection with the subjects—whether human or object—due to its mobility and ability to fit into contained spaces. Furthermore, it facilitates both extensive coverage as well as provides sufficient quality. The advances addressed here echo those identified by Ramos-­Martinez on the role of digital technology in facilitating a new relationship with the environment:

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema  95 Portable cameras, film sensitive to natural light and a minimal recording unit reduce the technical burden of the filming process and maximize its capacities to follow and record the always unpredictable course of action. The observational camera intervenes in a manner analogous to a military surveillance operation: it is mobile, more or less undetectable, and yet ever-­present. (Ramos-­Martinez 2015, 8) Yet, this does not address digital as part of a physical lineage that participates in precisely the problems it seems to critique, as Bozak has suggested. How can we overcome the fundamental fact that materiality is a part of any film production, especially as the use of digital technologies has arguably increased the production footprint of the media, as explored in Kääpä (2018)? While the representational aspects of ecocinema are understandably prioritized in contemporary scholarship, the four mechanisms through which Wang integrates materiality into the cinematic image gesture to a much more profound way of understanding the environmental costs that even seemingly ephemeral digital production has. Is there a way to incorporate this shift to the materiality of production into a viable means of expanding contemporary ecocinema scholarship? As we have already suggested, a material turn does not have to equate to a zero-­sum game where advances in environmental content cancel out material impacts. Making materiality a clear aspect of the content communicated can provide a more emphatic sense of connectivity with the environment. To make this connection stronger, a focus on the collision point between the external environment and the means of representation needs to be considered. This can be the surface of a camera where the material impact of the external environment predominantly stops (of course, variations in temperature and moisture can influence the operations of the camera mechanisms). Or it can be the moment when the visual stimuli are translated into binary code and imprinted on the DV tape that carries the content to the audiences. One example of such an interfacial element is sunlight on the camera lens. Several scenes capturing the abandoned factories practically white-­out as the sun, streaming through the windows, floods the image. This comprises a frequent technique of the film as the often-­improvised nature of the shoot means that the camera is pointed directly at sources of light that then reflect on the image in various ways. In addition, as the film is based on extensive tracking shots through the factories or the housings of the community, the camera is not able to adjust at the right speed to the lighting changes in the environment. The restrictions of the equipment become especially obvious once electricity is turned off in the Shandong community in anticipation of the final relocation of its people and all the camera can capture at night are distant lights or a group of individuals huddled around a table where candles and gas lamps do not provide enough light for us to see through the murkiness. The camera works hard to compensate but the available light leaves even more extensive lens flares on the screen. These reminders

96   Pietari Kääpä of a material reality highlight the limits constraining the representational ability of anthropogenic film as human control has to surrender to the agentic material that demands more from the technologies than they can handle. Interfacial materialities provide the third step for the template in moving from the distanced observational role of human agency on representational materialities to a more involved perspective with corporeal elements that now physically either reflect or affect the filmmaker. Yet, on the level of interfacial materialities, the agentic role of the filmmaker is further reduced as the material qualities of the external world take control of the reality represented. To illustrate, one of the most pervasive elements in the film is steam. While it is not a pure CO2 pollutant, steam acts as a particularly interesting agentic material as it seems to dissipate much like the real footprint of a production, such as Tie Xi Qu. At the same time, the particularities of each emission also remain in the atmosphere, much like the pre-­ and after-­lives of digital technology do not disappear from the ecosystem. Taken metaphorically, it leaves similar traces of residue to film production and consumption and can be seen as an intriguing reflection of its material realities. To make this connection more pertinent, steam is also something that attaches itself to the interface between the world and the recording equipment, especially in scenes taking place in the factory bathroom or at the communal shop, where steam condenses on the edges of the frame. It is intriguing that Wang Bing decided to use these scenes as they are arguably compromised by agentic materialities, at least in terms of conventional representational tendencies, as there are many instances where steam cuts off the view of the railtracks or of the human protagonists in the room, all which could have been replaced by similar footage out of the vast quantity shot for the film. Yet, there is an artistic quality to many of these shots as the sunlight and the steam provide the film with an almost translucent quality. This emphasizes the material qualities of the production process even as it fulfils the general mandates for a socially and artistically relevant documentary aspiring to a sense of realism. In this sense, again, Tie Xi Qu expands outside of the remits of observational documentary into something more profound through a haptic perspective that reveals the skin of the film, or in this case, its seemingly immaterial digital interface, where the human and the natural are entangled, as suggested by Walker and Starosielski, on a reciprocal level. The use of materials impacting on the interface between ‘reality’ and representation are not, of course, anything new. Lens flares and other similar gimmicks have become popular simulacra in the wake of trend-­setting films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Children of Men (2005), where they function as postmodernist techniques hiding the fabricated reality of the world. In Tie Xi Qu, their role is markedly different. They are not predicated on coordinated impressions of realism but take place randomly, based on the integration of movements and contact with unpredictable materials in a much more accidental, or perhaps more appropriately organic, way. While the included scenes have certainly been selected consciously for the final edit of the film, indicating a level of anthropocentric organization of agentic material elements, the amount of time dedicated

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema  97 to, for example, train shots with snow falling on the lens or on dimly lit scenes at the factories or housing, suggests a more consciously ecocentric influence on the representation. This constructs an unpolished view of materialities clashing with the world of the representation—they are not mere representations but actualizations of a complex interconnection where a range of tactile elements penetrate a normative understanding of how to communicate with and about the world.

Processual materialities What is at stake here involves an interpolation of a thoroughly anthropocentric worldview (often favored even by “ecocritical” cinema) with a more ecocentric one that enables other agencies—especially of material elements that refuse human control—to influence the final product. Such a perspective is inherently concerned with minimizing human influence from being the source of all decisions in a film. Obviously, this can be difficult as ultimately the film has been shot and edited by humans. Yet, agentic materialities allow us to take into account the spectatorial challenges that take place on the digital interface of the film and which urge us to go deeper into the processual machinations of what happens to the representational, corporeal, and interfacial materialities as they become transformed by the device that captures them. There are a range of materials involved in this process that are largely unacknowledged when talking about film production. These are to do with a more complex ecology than simply translating audiovisual signals into binary code. The pixels at the end of the lens cylinder capture data that are then transferred onto a metal evaporated tape that is coated with two magnetic layers, a protective layer of carbon coating and another layer of black coating. These would be first viewed by the filmmaker when shooting on location and subsequently by audiences on LED screens consisting of a translucent plastic cover and light emitting diodes composed of semiconductor chips (which in themselves are composed of a range of metals and minerals). Images are made of signals comprising electrons mobilized with voltage, which combine with bespoke electron holes within the device, releasing energy in the form of photons which spark up a range of high brightness diodes. All of this material activity consumes resources and contributes to the environmental footprint of a film such as Tie Xi Qu. How does this processual perspective come through in the film’s cinematic techniques? These material processes are, of course, made invisible on purpose but by tracing the influence of representational, corporeal and interfacial materialities, we can come to a better understanding of its environmental ecology, that is, of the ways it entangles producers and spectators into material processes. As we have established already, the form of the film raises considerable challenges to mental and social ecologies that reorient our perspective. For example, the long shots in themselves gesture to the type of ecologicalism that Scott MacDonald (2004) identifies in films such as Riverglass (Zdravic, 1997), composed entirely of a static shot from a camera immersed in a river. The method of filming minimizes human intervention in the final product and creates optimal

98   Pietari Kääpä ­conditions for ecocentric cinema. In Tie Xi Qu, the human body combines with technology to concretely mediate an experience of the world. The lightness of the equipment enables Wang Bing to achieve shots with minimal involvement from the technical limitations of the shooting process. The iconic shots of the camera capturing railtracks from the front of the train combine all three categories of agentic materialities in ways that steer our attention to the organic roots of these digital processes. First, we see representational materialities through an emphasis on capturing the immensity of the factory complex and the chronicling of the human infrastructure facilitating labor (whilst later also showcasing the precarity of these spaces as the factories close down). Second, Wang Bing often physically reacts to external stimulations, such as movement or the cold, causing images to shake with his corporeal reactions. Third, most of the images have a haptic quality, as snow falls and stays on the lens despite frequent edits. The representational, corporeal and interfacial materialities combine to focus attention on processual materialities and the transition between the world represented and the technical infrastructure enabling it. Accordingly, we can navigate a path through the challenges to mental and social ecologies leading to an environmental ecology, predicated on the analytical template highlighting the increased role of the agentic materialities involved in the production of Tie Xi Qu, that leads us to consider our own involvement as contributors to both the socio-­political and environmental degradation the film addresses.

Conclusion Evaluating the environmental impact of a film is always a problematic propo­ sition. Certainly, there are a few cases that can claim to provide evidence of significant impact on general awareness of environmental issues. These include documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Blackfish (2010) that have resulted in demonstrable behavioral transformations. Yet, a range of important films with significant environmental messages can be obfuscated by their relative marginality or focus on other elements of the text. This does not even begin to account for the diversity of reading positions audiences will adopt when accessing the environmental content of these films. While it is perhaps clear that environmental awareness may be reached by a combination of powerful cinematic forms and the complex content of the film, all of these ideas still only act as hypothetical speculations on audience responses to them. Can we ever prove that audiences will respond to audiovisual and narrative challenges in the way we speculate they will? What can we actually say concerning the audiences of a film such as Tie Xi Qu and the potential of the resource image to draw attention to the material infrastructure of media production? While such data would have to be sourced through audience studies, this chapter has focused on navigating Guattari’s three ecologies to facilitate a better understanding of how a film like Tie Xi Qu may reinvigorate a more materialist perspective on the relationship between Chinese cinema and the environment. This applies especially to academic work on the topic. The tendency of scholars

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema  99 to only focus on areas of particular interest related to their research fields can obfuscate some of the complexity of a film such as Tie Xi Qu. Certainly, this film is a particularly important example of political cinema that uses techniques that connect it to several academic paradigms such as slow cinema. And yes, the film is about work as well as effectively positioning spectatorship as work. The work/slow angle challenges mental ecologies through reorganizing the conventional cognitive and intellectual properties of spectators. At the same time, the content of the film challenges us to think politically and consider the longue duree influences of administrative and political decisions on communities and the land, confronting us on the level of the social ecology. Yet, a focus on the resource image permeates all aspects of the film in a way that insists on the inevitable materiality of screen production, a perspective that can be approached through the camera’s ability to entangle with the physical world. This chapter has identified four materialities that provide a template for addressing the inherent materiality of film production—that is, elements that function as agentic materials that complicate or refuse to be incorporated into anthropocentric representations. These comprise the representational, corporeal, interfacial and processual materialities, which connote a set of challenges to spectatorial positioning, or which can be used as categories for evaluating audience responses to the multiple materialities of the text. While cinema traditionally makes a range of emotional and ethical appeals to viewers, I argue that by foregrounding their own complicity in the transformations depicted on screen, a film such as Tie Xi Qu confronts spectatorial complacency, a process that can be traced through the four types of materialities. Yet, to make these assertions verifiable, they must be complemented by empirical data from audience studies that make use of the material template established here but focus on questions of cultural complexity and reading capacity. Several pertinent questions are raised by acknowledging this complexity. For example, the length of the film provides an obvious limitation to any claims made in regard to general audience demographics as the film would have only circulated through specialist or festival distribution. A long long shot is only a distraction depending on one’s expectations for the film, as are shots with inadequate lighting or massive lens flares. If the audience group is familiar with such devices from previous encounters with art house or documentary cinema, these elements would not provide much of a challenge to mental ecologies. Similarly, challenges to the social ecology of audiences would also be predicated on their perspectives on developmental politics and advance knowledge of post-­socialist China. The context of viewing would also be relevant as would any additional materials provided alongside a festival screening (for example). Finally, the film and media literacy of these audiences would provide variations on how they respond to both challenges. ‘Entanglement’, as understood by Walker and Starosielski (2016) as an indicator of complex relationality between humanity and the environment, is here constrained by cultural and societal factors. Thus, any real understanding of an environmental ecology—conceptualized here as an ecocentric acknowledgement of the environmental materiality of film production

100  Pietari Kääpä and its ability to not only provide access to a world but a sense of being in that world—is complicated by the diverse ways that audiences respond to a provocative film such as Tie Xi Qu.

References Bozak, Nadia. 2012. The Cinematic Footprint. Piscataway: The Rudgers University Press. Brereton, Pat. 2005. Hollywood Utopia. Bristol: Intellect. De Luca, Tiago and Nuno Baraddas Jorge, eds. 2015. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: ­Edinburgh University Press. Forrest, Nicholas. 2017. “Q & A Wang Bing: Winner of EYE 2017 Art and Film Prize,” at www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/2080382/​q-­and-­a-­wang-­bing-­winner-­of-­2017-­ eye-­art-­and-­film-­prize (accessed 5 January 2018). Gabrys, Jennifer. 2011. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Guattari, Feliz. 2000. The Three Ecologies. London: The Athlone Press. Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. 2012. “Material Ecocriticism: Material, Agency and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon 12: 71–91. Kääpä, Pietari. 2018. Environmental Management of the Media: Industry, Policy, Practice. New York: Routledge. Li, Jie. 2008. “Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks—Salvaging the Rubble of Utopia.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 50, spring. MacDonald, Scott. 2004. “Toward an Eco-­cinema.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 11 (2): 107–32. Marks, Laura. 2002. The Skin of the Film. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Maxwell, Richard and Toby Miller. 2012. Greening the Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press. Parks, Lisa. 2007. “Falling Apart: Electronics Salvaging and the Global Media Economy,” edited by Charles Acland, Residual Media, 32–47. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ramos-­Martinez, Manuel. 2015. “The Oxidation of the Documentary – The Politics of Rust in Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks.” Third Text. Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, eds. 2012. Ecocinema: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Smith, Patrick Brian. 2015. “Working/Slow: Cinematic Style as Labour in Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West Of The Tracks,” edited by Tiago De Luca and Nuno Baraddas Jorge, Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vaughan, Hunter. 2019. Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Costs of Our Screen Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Walker, Janet and Nicole Starosielski, eds. 2016. Sustainable Media. New York: ­Routledge. Wang, Ban. 2010. “Of Humans and Nature in Documentary: The Logic of Capital in West of the Tracks and Blind Shaft,” edited by Sheldon Lu and Mi Jiayan, Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, 157–70. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Zhang, Hongbing. 2009. “Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontents in the Age of Globalization,” edited by Sheldon Lu and Mi Jiayan, Chinese Ecocinema:

Extraction in contemporary Chinese cinema  101 In the Age of Environmental Challenge, 129–54. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Zhang, Zhen. 2007. “Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of Transformation,” in Zhen Zhang, ed., The Urban Generation, Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-­first Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

5 Chai Jing’s Under the Dome A multimedia documentary in the digital age Shuqin Cui

After Chai Jing’s multimedia documentary Under the Dome was released online on February 28, 2015, it received 117 million views and 280 million posts within 24 hours until the imposition of official censorship.1 Why did the film have such an astonishing reception? In other words, why did it go viral? This chapter attempts to answer these questions through the lens of a multimedia documentary and its internet circulation. Chai Jing’s Under the Dome is not a documentary film in a conventional form, such as direct cinema or cinéma-­vérité. It is a multimedia work that employs documentary modes, infographic designs, photographic images, audio/video tracks, textual citations, animated illustrations, and a TED Talk format. Under the Dome is also not simply “a personal war against environmental catastrophe,” as the filmmaker declares, because the film relies on digital channels and internet users as co-­agencies of communication and distribution. The combined media forms of the documentary and the role of the internet challenge as well as change the conception of film production, perception, and distribution. What has been newly generated is the notion of an interactive multimedia documentary able to flow across different fields of communication through digital channels. Recent scholarship on cinema and media studies proposes that “any project that starts with an intention to document the ‘real’ and that uses digital interactive technology to realize this intention can be considered an interactive [multimedia] documentary” (Aston and Gaudenzi 2012, 125–6). In the case of Under the Dome, combining the documentary with the digital stimulates public response to and viewer participation in discussion of environmental issues. The dialectical interplay operates first on a rhetorical ontology, where investigation into air pollution reveals evidence and offers explanation through a multimedia documentary mode. In response, a worldwide network via the internet accelerates distribution of the film through digital devices and engages viewers on-­and off-­line in a paradoxical public sphere subject to constant negotiation and contestation. This chapter examines how Chai Jing’s multimedia documentary turns environmental reality into digital articulation with multifaceted database/­ artifacts as rhetorical components, and how the film’s internet circulation generates unprecedented interactivities between the institutional and the ordinary as well as the local and global.

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome   103

The multiple documentary mode Chai Jing’s Under the Dome exemplifies a type of new media that features a multiple documentary mode. The innovative mode extends beyond a linear narrative or filmmaker/camera-­framed reality. Instead, the multimedia assets— interviews, infographics, film footages, illustrated animations, numerical data—generate a multi-­perspective presentation and unconventional documentary experience. Under the Dome begins with specific questions critical to the director as well as the audience: What is the smog? Where does it come from? What can we do about it? In response to these questions, Chai Jing curates her multimedia assets and interacts with her audience to make a compelling rhetorical appeal. The modes of persuasion make the work appealing to the audience (pathos) through the producer’s credibility (ethos) and the work’s logical reasoning (logos). Personal/maternal voice Narrative credibility and emotional response begins with a personal and maternal voice, creating a conversational mode between the filmmaker and her audience in order to bring attention to the catastrophe of smog. The story shared with the audience is that of Chai Jing’s newborn baby and the medical operation to remove a benign tumor right after birth. The image of the ultrasonic picture of the unborn baby and the mother’s description of the operation instill an anxious awareness that transfers to the problem of air pollution. This maternal position is further asserted via the director’s interview footage with a six-­year-­old girl in Shanxi, who has never in her life seen a blue sky, or stars at night. With the maternal narrating voice, and children presented as vulnerable victims, the audience onsite and online responds to the story with emotion and realizes that environmental pollution is the target of criticism. The maternal voice that urges protection of the environment and children echoes an ecofeminist claim that associates women with nature. Ecofeminism takes the “women–nature connection” as a point of departure and views the domination of women and the exploitation of nature jointly, linking sociocultural oppression and ecological degradation (Warren 1993; Cuomo 2002; Wang 1999; Ruether 1993). The proposed connections present a theoretical and metaphorical framework, against which feminist concerns of women and ecological considerations of nature become reflexive partners in a shared rhetoric. Ecofeminism claims that “we cannot end the exploitation of nature without ending human oppression, and vice versa” (Birkeland 2010, 19). As appealing as this stance sounds, however, ecofeminism faces challenges from other theoretical schools or individual scholars. Critiques of ecofeminism cite its essentialist claim of a woman–nature connection, its ethnocentric exclusion of race, class, and ethnicity, and its worship of women as a caring source of nature. While I will not attempt a historical review of ecofeminism, I will argue that Chai Jing’s Under the Dome presents a valid

104   Shuqin Cui case for reconsidering ecofeminism against China’s gender as well as environmental conditions. The story of pollution harming children, told in the voice of maternal explanation, underscores the connection between the abused environment and victimized children. From an eco-­feminist point of view, the damage to child and nature results from economic exploitation and the projection of social-­political power. Thus, the mother–children–environment triad constructed in Chai Jing’s film addresses the issue of the women–nature connection through rhetorical persuasion, a mode of discourse legitimized by maternal credibility (ethos), an appeal to the audience’s emotional sympathy (pathos), and the logic of cause– effect reasoning (logos). The film refuses to render mother/nature as silenced victims but instead provides documentary evidence of an environmental catastrophe and offers critical rhetoric in an investigative mode. The film’s discourse establishes Chai Jing’s credibility as a concerned mother and a responsible citizen committed to environmental issues. Moreover, the identity shared with the public audience, especially with mothers and mothers-­to-­be, joined in the pronouns “we” and “I”, situates Chai Jing with ordinary people in a non-­ hierarchical manner. The rhetoric of maternal persuasion and the proffering of an eco-­feminist perspective has encountered unsympathetic criticism, however. Challenges to the maternal position and its reliability claim that Chai Jing’s use of her child to engage viewers is sentimental and that the possible link between her daughter’s tumor and air pollution is unscientific. One internet user calls the mother– daughter narrative “corny chicken soup,” for instance.2 The artist Ai Weiwei further asserts that “her daughter’s tumor may not be associated with smog, but the brain-­damaged mother finds clear scientific data support,” and “those who comprehend the notion of smog only through Chai’s womb must be brain-­ damaged, too.”3 The charges against the film and pointedly against the film director speak for a sexually oriented dichotomy, where reason and nature as well as body and mind remain a split power structure. The primary conception of a  women–nature connection, and especially the mother–daughter narrative, reveals the soft spot easily challenged by both discursive rhetoric and the virtual internet. In an authoritarian and economically driven society, it is difficult to grant women and children a privileged association with nature, as both remain subject to exploitation. Furthermore, the victimization of women and children in regard to the environmental crisis cannot be viewed as a single relation. Differences in social class, economic conditions, and even geographical locations come into play. Two child figures in Chai Jing’s film, one her baby daughter in Beijing and the other a six-­year old in Shanxi, are portrayed as victims of air pollution. Familial and geographical differences generate distinctive rhetorical evidence and documentary effects. Chai Jing’s baby is the victim needing protection, whereas the six-­year old steps forward as a witness. In doing so, the camera always frames the former from behind to conceal her identity, but moves to an extreme close-­up of the latter to capture her testimony. The back

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome  105 image of the toddler confined inside the house and the frontal shot of the girl facing the audience make a sharp contrast, not only visually but also discursively. The manner of exposure to the audience through the camera lens suggests differences in social class, family orientation, and material relations with the environment. The rhetoric carried through the maternal voice and personal perspective is further empowered by the film director’s other credentials as an investigative journalist and environmental advocate. A former anchorwoman for CCTV well known for her investigative reporting, Chai Jing has been a household name and public figure in China.4 As a journalist-­turned-­ environmentalist, Chai Jing can approach issues with her investigative skills and environmental knowledge. In other words, as an erstwhile journalist, taking on a self-­funded research project, Chai Jing can credential herself as a citizen concerned about air pollution as well as an experienced and knowledgeable speaker opposing the apologists for industrial production. Chai thus has the privilege of having access to a media network on the one hand and to scientific evidence on the other. The practice of investigative journalism in contemporary China, nonetheless, entails daunting challenges and risks. The shared principles of exposing social problems, serving the public interest, and holding the powerful accountable remain professional ethics among those dedicated to investigative journalism. These principles are difficult to uphold in reality, however, as authoritative power manipulates events to escape culpability. To survive as effective journalists, Chai Jing and others have to test boundaries and negotiate possibilities. Under these conditions, Chai Jing’s continued commitment to investigative journalism led to her shift in status from official employee to independent journalist, a move facilitated by the unprecedented development of social media and the online network. The incorporation of investigative journalism into the medium of ecodocumentary supports the ethos of narrative credibility and the pathos of audience perception, primarily through interviews and the social–visual evidence provided in documentary film. Interviews The incorporation of documentary modes and investigative journalism reinforces the persuasiveness of Under the Dome. The mode of expository documentary establishes a point of view for the audience through an authoritative voice and the rhetoric of reason. The narrating voice, often with corresponding visual footage, attests the truth of the reporting. In a similar milieu, investigative journalism probes and describes issues of social (in)justice in critical depth and with extensive evidence. The ultimate mission is to “seek above all to tell the documented truth” and “to provide a voice for those without one and to hold the powerful to account.” Under the Dome thus investigates the causes of air pollution through critical interviews as primary narrative components of the film. The interviewees, including institutional representatives, government officials,

106   Shuqin Cui science specialists, and western experts, respond to Chai Jing’s questions about the nature of smog and its causes with scientific explanations and self-­reflexive satire. Accelerated by the soundtrack and film footage, interview sequences dramatize confrontations between the film director and the film subject, between discursive contest and environmental reality. A pre-­recorded video interview, for instance, shows Professor Avol at the University of Southern California on a large screen. The expert is asked whether it is true that exposure to pollution helps children adapt to the environment. With the image of the foreign academic and scientific publications superimposed as evidence, the interview presents authoritative explanations backed by academic credentials. The voice and the data are not necessarily synchronistic, as the interview intends to adduce the authoritative voice to explain environmental effects on children’s lung function and cite scholarly publications to justify the claim. As a medical specialist on the faculty of a US university, the invited guest confers legitimacy on the logos of knowledge. If the interview with the foreign specialist codifies the investigation, interviews with Chinese officials, especially from the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), reveal the complicated social-­economic conditions under which economic development, people’s livelihoods, and environmental protection come into conflict. Chai asks the official administrator of the MEP why nothing was done about environmental problems, given the ample film footage and other evidence of illegal activities. The official returns the question in a rhetorical tone: “Would you make the decision to shut down production and eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, essentially destroying the economy of the entire province?” Chai strategically unveils the dilemma of environmental protection and economic development, as officials and ordinary citizens face complicated social-­economic conditions. The investigative interviews and expository mode challenge the powerful, holding them accountable in a self-­reflexive and self-­contradictory irony. In a double interview, Chai first questions the deputy of CRAES (Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences), asking why the fuel standard is not set higher. The interviewee says that the majority of the fuel-­standard committee members come from the petrochemical industry. Chai then interviews the opposing party, the head of the National Oil Fuel Standard Committee, with questions about why the oil industry fails to regulate fuel standards and whether it should take social responsibility. The interview exposes with satirical mockery the irony in the role of the MEP in environmental protection, as the oil industry manipulates the regulatory process. When subjects on opposite sides of the issue provide information and reveal problems side by side, Chai’s interviews generate a self-­reflexive rhetoric which catches the official system in contradiction. In this depiction of regulatory capture, investigative journalism works together with expository documentary to reinforce the mode of persuasion.

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome  107 The most dramatic or satirical moment in a person-­to-­person interview with documentary footage comes from a scene where Chai Jing requires the vice general manager of a pharmaceutical company in Zhejiang province to explain a chemical odor. In a split screen, the audience is invited to witness the polluted water and landscape while hearing the film subject claim that his sense of smell is not as sensitive as Chai Jing’s. The juxtaposition of verbal denial and visual evidence makes the official look not only at fault but also ridiculous. The interview ends effectively with a diagram that shows the network of corruption in the energy industry. The blend of documentary and journalism generates trans-­ media rhetoric in environmental discourse. As the lines blur between the two mediums, we witness differences as well as dynamics: journalistic sensibility and documentary consciousness, timely investigation and depth-­driven exploration, person-­to-­person interviews and camera documentation. It is precisely the multimedia mode that allows the filmmaker as well as the audience to engage in the subject of air pollution with critical depth. In addition to the documentary mode reinforcing investigation, a multimedia presentation style further asserts rhetorical persuasion. To help establish herself as a knowledgeable environmentalist and media specialist, Chai employs visual graphs for illustration and brings in science professionals for justification. In this 104-­minute film, for instance, Chai Jing effectively interweaves into her presentation numerous graphs, tables, charts, numbers, and documents. In order to explain how PM2.5 critically affects the human respiratory system, when its level is elevated to 305.91 micrograms per cubic meter of air, Chai Jing presents a colored chart on the large screen. The chart shows the limits for PM2.5 set by the World Health Organization, the USA, Europe, and China as 25, 37.5, 50, 75, respectively. Therefore, 305.91 is more than four times higher than the high Chinese standard. To further address how the PM2.5 level affects human health, Chai asks the scientist from Beijing University to analyze the particle elements, and among the 15 that can cause cancer, benzo[a] pyrene reached 176, fourteen times higher than the national standard. The example demonstrates how the juxtaposition of journalist and environmentalist creates a rhetorical appeal, presenting a reliable and trustworthy figure. In the position of environmentalist, for instance, Chai is able to bridge expert knowledge and scientific reasoning. As a journalist, Chai can cover the news through visual rhetoric. She offers the public audience an ethos of credibility, pathos of inspiration, and logos of reasoning, all on the subject of smog. The style of Chai’s presentation suggests inspiration from the TED talk model. The TED talk package contains multiple components unfolding through juxtapositions of narrative and narration, digital and textual, technological and pedagogical. Most important, the purpose and philosophy of TED aims to generate an authentic experience with an engaged audience through simplified storytelling and information sharing (Watson 2014). By applying TED rhetoric in her presentation, Chai Jing connects the Chinese audience with concurrent media discourse and references. Its immediate impact is on audience engagement, both

108   Shuqin Cui onsite and offline. We notice while viewing Under the Dome that the camera cross-­cuts frequently between the presenter on the platform and the audience in the auditorium to create an interflow between presentation and reaction. The film, for instance, cuts to female viewers when Chai Jing describes her daughter’s surgery, inserts a close-­up of the audience with masks when screening polluted days, and captures the audience reaction when revealing a cancer patient on his deathbed. The onsite audience, selected and rehearsed, reflects not a spontaneous presence but a rhetorical device forming a sense of community and creating identification with offsite viewers. We understand that in a TED-­talk-­type presentation, audiences are as important as the presenter, because they are part of the onsite community. Their interest in the topic and engagement with the presentation contribute significantly to the mission of rhetorical persuasion and identification. “Traditionally, rhetoric has been understood as synonymous with persuasion; however, it has been characterized more broadly as identification” (Burke 1974, 19). Identification means establishing a common ground with others, whether conscious or not, in efforts to transcend various divisions of society (Burke 1974, 10). Thus, the mode of persuasion and identification generates a community space, where viewers concerned about environmental issues share and spread the message. Animation Counter to documentary conventions, Under the Dome inserts sequences of animation to convey scientific knowledge and to inspire citizen engagement in environmental protection. Alternative and experimental, the flash animation navigates between harsh reality and animated illustration, and between documentary-­making and audience perception. The first animation sequence, inserted to illustrate how PM2.5 particles affect and destroy human health, makes medical science and environmental damage comprehensible for ordinary viewers. In other words, animation bridges the gap between “the apparently unknowable and seemingly unimaginable” (Wells 1998, 51), between human physiology and environmental processes. Through the animation, the CGI personifies PM2.5 as warriors and the human respiratory system as a battlefield. As computer-­designed cartoon figures invade the human body, the dubbed human voiceover explains the procedure. The animated image and embedded voice, accelerated by a music soundtrack, deftly visualize how PM2.5 particles travel through the nostril, throat, and lower respiratory system. The creative animation builds on the voiceover and visual illustration to foster public engagement in scientific education and environmental awareness. The teaming of documentary and animation, human narrator and cartoon images facilitates an understanding of scientific knowledge while challenging our conventional perception of documentary film as a transparent medium of realism.

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome  109 We may view the inserted animation as hyperrealism, a representation of the real via digital technology and computer programs. The concept of the hyperreal has increasingly blurred the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the actual and the virtual, reality and illusion. When viewed from conventional conceptions, animation may appear to be in conflict with the documentary mode, but the incorporated mediums function complementarily, as the increasing use of animation in documentary “provides visual interpretations and imagery when live-­action footage is missing, censored, or unavailable” (Ehrilich 2012, 73). Animation’s potential contribution to the documentary comes from its “indexical connection between the physical world and the animated illusion and mimetic qualities” that facilitates the audience’s comprehension of reality through animated reference (Ehrilich 2011). Hyperrealist visualization, in other words, complements and incorporates different media for multifaceted communication, where the documentary mode presents original materials and animation provides illustration. “Consequently, although these animated images may not be visually realistic and/or physically indexical, they are undoubtedly informative and possess a truth value that legitimises them and should prevent viewers from automatically disregarding them as fictional” (Ehrilich 2011). The indexical bridging between the animated sequence of PM2.5 particles invading the human respiratory system and film footage of an operation on a lung cancer patient self-­reflexively provides a cause/effect explanation of the health consequences of smog. Even an audience without much knowledge of medical science will grasp the connection between air quality and human health. The significance of animation lies not only in bringing knowledge to the audience but also in creating a participative mode, inspiring citizen engagement in environmental protection. In her response to the question of what we can do to fight smog, Chai Jing calls on environmental activists to act through individual participation. Again, animation is used to deliver the public message. With hand-­drawn visual images and a voiceover, the film invites viewers and citizens to participate in specific environmental protection activities: from taking public transportation to reducing energy consumption; from exposing illegal industrial sites to reporting commercial malfeasance. The hotline phone number managed by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, 12369, looms large on the screen and becomes the most appealing spectacle to the audience. The flash animation looks simple but its effect is significant when empowered by the social media of a hotline phone system and online web network. Chai Jing knows well how essential it is to have her message spread through social media, a primary component of China’s green public sphere. In fact, phone calls to the hotline number 12369 increased 240 percent after the film was released online, a measure of the public response to the film’s call for individual action against environmental problems. While connecting citizens and the government, phone lines cannot promise fundamental change over environmental conditions, however, as the green public sphere inevitably collides with the administrative sphere. This is especially true when the green

110  Shuqin Cui public voice speaks of environmental protection in a way that threatens administrative and enterprise interests in economic profitability and social stability. Meaningful public participation in policy changes and systemic reform is required.

Networked circulation and communication When uploaded to websites and circulated through the internet, the multimedia-­ generated documentary work creates unprecedented interactivity in a digital fashion between film production and reception. The interactive mechanism and digital network make possible the popularity of the internet and widespread social media in contemporary China that has facilitated the rise of a “green public sphere,” supposed to foster political debate and affect policy-­making about environmental issues (Yang and Calhoun 2007). The formation of a green public sphere requires a green/public space where citizen participation involves discussion and vigorous debate over environmental issues. The question of just how green the public sphere can be, however, complicates the promising picture, as we consider the state censorship apparatus on the one hand and virtual online media on the other. Institutions and individuals with valid arguments who enter the public space to express ideas and perspectives are the primary participants. But the institutional side can take the role of a monitor and manipulate the discussion of public issues for its political interests and authoritarian purposes. China’s current political regime has declared that “the internet has become the main battlefield for public opinion struggle.”5 Tightened regulations and empowered censorship have showcased a sophisticated censorship apparatus capable of controlling the real and the virtual in the name of cyberspace sovereignty. Can the green space remain “green” for internet users when real-­name registration laws require them to submit personal information into the hands of government agencies, when the Great Firewall software blocks and filters anything undesirable to government ideology, when (in)visible regulatory bodies patrol virtual space like prison guards, and when persecution or imprisonment could befall anyone caught violating administrative enforcement? In addition, the public space generated through the internet and social media rather than conventional news or mass media opens up a virtual forum, where both the powerful and the ordinary exercise their agency over public issues. The networked online community, because of the virtual space, transforms the public sphere from singular to multiple and from exclusive to intersectional. The transformed media operating under the dominance and manipulation of an official appa­ratus can hardly promise a green public sphere, however. “The transformative effect of online activism in China is undeniable,” as Freedom on the Net reports, “yet the final outcomes of high-­ pressure encounters between netizens and officials typically fall short of systemic reform or democratic decision-­making. Consequently, they fail to ensure meaningful accountability.”6 In other words, the supposedly shared or

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome  111 interactive online space/platform of public discussion actually exists as contested zones, where institutions and citizens negotiate and compete. Under the Dome, with its wide circulation and proliferating viewer discussion via the internet, survived for only 48 hours, and presents salient evidence. The gap between the uses of social media and the needs of ordinary citizens regarding air pollution and environmental protection remains very wide indeed. The example of Chai Jing’s Under the Dome forcefully demonstrates how various internet users in and outside government, domestic and international, confront each other in an effort to establish or control a voice in virtual cyberspace. The official Different parties, officials or netizens, look to social media and the green space as a contested platform to express opinions or exercise power. The interactivity between the film’s online distribution and the official response to it sparked an unprecedented dispute in China’s contemporary media realm. Upon its release via major websites in China, Under the Dome surprisingly received official support. The government website, People’s Daily Online (www.people.com. cn), provided the media platform where the filmmaker first uploaded the documentary and followed with an editorial interview. Chen Jining, Minister of Environmental Protection, sent a text message to the filmmaker to express gratitude. Four days after the release, however, after millions of views, the film was censored and taken down from social media by the official propaganda bureau. Initial official support followed by sanctions indicated the continuing friction between individuals and the government, between netizens and authorities, over virtual online space. Censors and censored engaged in negotiations that featured a dynamic of intervention from participating parties. The upload and abrupt removal of the film from websites caused a stir in China’s social media. “It is precisely the event’s temporality—its distinct relation to time,” as Fan Yang (2016) rightly points out, “that provides a valuable opportunity to rethink how we discuss Chinese pollution in the context of neoliberal globalization.” The filmmaker played carefully with the schedule and online sites for the release of the film. Although challenging environmental policies, Chai Jing was an insider of the official media system, a former CCTV anchorwoman and investigative journalist, and had access to official web-­channels and the online network. To that end, Under the Dome could be aired via people.com.cn, the flagship newspaper and website of the Communist Party. The official platform as well as the response sent a signal that the film may have been facilitating government environmental policy or speaking for official interests. Ironically, when faced with the pressure of public perception and collective reaction, the same media hierarchy removed the film offline. The contradiction indicates that social media and censorship under China’s current conditions appear paradoxical and competitive in a political fashion.

112  Shuqin Cui The online/internet space thus becomes a terrain where officials and netizens negotiate and dispute, with the former manipulating the media content and potential flow of information. Chai Jing’s case presents strong evidence that virtual online space and social media channels are open to voices of opinion but are closed down at the prospect of potential action. “The purpose of the censorship program is not to suppress criticism of the state or the Communist Party,” but rather “to reduce the probability of collective action by clipping social ties whenever any collective movements are in evidence or expected” (King, Pan and Roberts 2013). The netizens The widespread reception of the film was due to the large number of internet viewers, their critical response, and expansive digital channels. The manifold interactions on social media suggest how its users create a green public sphere for environmental concerns. The response to Chai Jing’s film can be measured in data collected by ZDC.7 We learn from its charts that over 80 percent of viewers were deeply concerned about air pollution in China. About 70 percent of viewers watched the film in full and said that the film changed their view of haze and gave them a better comprehension of the problem. Over 75 percent expressed a willingness to restrict car/air conditioner usage and take public transportation. Moreover, viewers believed that official bureaus, emission companies, and legislatures should be accountable for environmental disasters. According to online interviews and data collection, positive responses included enthusiastic engagement with viewing the film, acknowledgement of its implications, and willingness to take actions to protect the environment. At the same time, there was no lack of criticism from netizens, as evident in the heated online debate about the film. The public green space propagates a highly opinionated public sphere and defies simple analysis. The following comments indicate the range of opinions: The director and the film speak for the interests of those well-­off middle class elites through her celebrity social status. Unreliable data collection and forged information. Incredibility of maternal position that relates the air pollution with her baby’s medical operation. Real source of pollution results from a government that entitles absolute power. Air pollution is human-­made catastrophe and the problematic political institutions should be accountable for the course.

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome   113 A new media model with the components of female elite, independent production, public concerned topic, potential audience perception and official resource support, and intention.8 Circulation of the film along with viewer responses to it creates an open, online space for discussions about environmental issues. The new green space comes with contradictions, however, as opinions are diverse and frequently clashing. The cited comments show that internet users in China are not a homogeneous entity, nor do they enjoy complete freedom of expression. In a place where the authoritarian hegemony restricts access to public or political discourse in physical settings as well as virtual spaces, an individual who addresses environmental issues and calls for mass reactions becomes a public target in both positive and negative ways. As a result, the consequences of participation in and engagement with green public space might vary widely. Public-­minded netizens, for instance, would acknowledge Chai’s effort and follow the issue even further to the irresponsible governmental system. Conspiracy theory believers, by contrast, might question Chai’s credibility and her ties to the official system. The international As the media flow travels between domestic and international sites, one can take a global perspective on the exposure of China’s environmental crisis. The flow of information and the online viewing of the film create a two-­way traffic, a transnational integration between local production and global perception. Due to the internet and social media, the environmental sphere has blurred the border lines between the local and global, thereby between production and perception. The title of the film, Under the Dome, for instance, originated from an American television series adapted from Stephen King’s novel of that name and aired in 2013 by CBS. The story is about how a small town, Chester’s Mill in Maine, becomes suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible and impenetrable dome. The dome, a symbol in an allegory, suggests the mysterious alien world beyond the earth and the ecological problems that humans face; it suits Chai Jing’s thesis well: the lethal hazards of microscopic airborne particles, like the overpowering dome, suffocate one’s breath and promise no escape. The dome metaphor could also be read in terms of social and environmental politics, namely, the harmful effects of government censorship, corporate corruption, and destructive economic development. In taking the title of a foreign television series, the film producers adopt a rhetorical device with metaphorical intention. In the west, social media responded to Chai Jing’s film by comparing it with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring. Titles such as “China’s Inconvenient Truth” or “China’s Answer to An Inconvenient Truth” circled within the Google network.9 It is true that both

114   Shuqin Cui Under the Dome and An Inconvenient Truth deal with environmental subjects in the style of a TED talk. Nonetheless, the similar approach did not carry the same consequences and implications. An Inconvenient Truth, an Academy Award-­winning film, brought Al Gore, the presidential nominee-­turned environmentalist, the honor of a Nobel Peace Prize, renown as a leading climate change advocate, and a worldwide audience. In contrast, Chai Jing’s film remained online for only four days, even though its message of catastrophic air pollution and the urgent need for environmental protection are professionally delivered through a TEDx format. In other words, Chai Jing’s Under the Dome, although adapting the TEDx style and claiming an independent production, could not share the platform and engage its audience like Gore had, largely because of official censorship in China. The similar TED rhetoric could not forestall a divergent outcome, as Chinese authorities monitored the news flow between the local and the global. For the Chinese producer, the TED-­talk presentation struck local audiences as a profound new style while global viewers found a familiar format. Comparing the reception of Chai Jing’s Under the Dome with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth highlights the different media contexts in which the film narratives appeared. For the purpose of establishing shared experience, local–global interplay extends the western reference to historical documentation. In Under the Dome, the film director takes the audience on a journey to London and Los Angeles, two cities that have had a history of devastating pollution. The Great Smog of 1952 in London serves as historical evidence for Chai’s Under the Dome. The film cross-­cuts between flashbacks to film footage of the London smog and Chai Jing’s onsite explanations or interviews. The juxtaposition of different times and places deepens the environmental discourse by investing contemporary reality with apposite historical references. The historical citation and film footage mean to educate a Chinese audience to the fact that the unfolding environmental catastrophe can be controlled should China choose to enforce regulations on fuel use and emissions. The comparison between London fog and China smog, in terms of lethal effect, does show similarities. But the kind of legal regulation and policy implementation that occurred after the 1952 catastrophe in London is unlikely under Chinese conditions.10 Historical footage and other documentary evidence cannot claim to be the complete truth when used to support a specific environmental problem in a different social-­political context. Without English subtitles, the audience outside China might not have had access to Chai Jing’s film. The translingual process between Chinese and English generates another transnational link between China and the world. Of course, global warming as well as the news flow is not simply a national issue. But few viewers would have guessed that two high school students in China had initiated the “mission” of English translation which brought the film to the world’s attention (Berman 2015; Tyson 2015; Fox-­Lerner 2015). With help from hundreds of volunteers worldwide, crowdsourcing subtitle translations into English, the two teens re-­uploaded the film to YouTube, where it has remained online after the film was taken down by government-­controlled media in China. The film has

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome  115 since been translated into French and Japanese, and a German version is on the way. The sensibility of a rising young generation about environmental issues and youth’s immersion in the digital world has extended the green public sphere from local to global. In circumventing the cyber-­wall, the work of these teens demonstrates the significance of digital media and the networked international community.

Conclusion Chai Jing’s Under the Dome presents an unprecedented model of how a multimedia documentary can turn an environmental crisis into a dynamic media event that achieves mass virality. The “going viral” came about because of the interplay between unconventional multimedia documentary modes and an extensive digital network characterized by a large number of users resorting to various technologies. While the rhetorical persuasion built upon multimedia assets encouraged viewers to interact with or navigate through the story of an environmentally alarming reality, the digital media enabled citizens alerted to deadly environmental conditions to tap into a channel of green discussion and diverse voices. The irony of the film’s initial virality provoking its short-­lived circulation reveals once again the brute fact of media censorship and social-­political constraints. In a polluted landscape and manipulated virtual space, open discussions and investigative exposures of environmental problems remain political and controversial. Yet, Under the Dome not only presented Chai Jing’s personal war against an environmental outrage, it also inspired public conscio­usness of grim environmental realities. For those who are ecologically concerned, it is good news that after its erasure online in China, the film remains available via the international network. Despite the filmmaker’s punishment with “soft” house arrest, narratives of an impending environmental apocalypse continue to unfold. Discursive negotiations between the government and the netizens will never cease so long as China has widespread social media, an informed public, and dedicated professionals.

Notes   1 The film is still available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?vDT6•2uwlQGQ.   2 See her twitter post at https://twitter.com/WilderMohn/status/572916785508458497 (accessed March 3, 2015).   3 See Ai Weiwei’s post on twitter at https://twitter.com/aiww/status/​572913514341269506 (accessed March 3, 2015) and https://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/letscorp_ archive/archives/85583.   4 Chai Jing, former investigative journalist and CCTV reporter, is known for important and popular television programs she hosted in China, including Horizon Connection, One on One, 24 Hours, and Seeing. She earned her professional credentials and investigative reputation by confronting and handling tough events or crises, such as the SARS outbreak, the Wenchuan earthquake, and coal mine accidents.

116   Shuqin Cui   5 See Freedom on the Net: China. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-­net/2015/ china.   6 Freedom on the Net: China. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-­net/2015/china.   7 ZDC refers to an online center for consumer research and analysis: zdc.zol.com.cn.   8 Examples are selected from www.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2015/03/201503012302. shtml#.VqpUAFJgmXs, www.momscleanairforce.org/chai-­jing-­air-­pollution.   9 Titles and postings on Google can be found at http://docsinprogress.org/2015/04/ underthedome/, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/08/china-­s-­inconvenient-​ truth-­documentary-­about-­the-­airpocalypse.html. 10 Parliament passed the Clean Air Act in 1956, restricting the burning of coal in urban areas, and helped households to use alternative heating materials.

References Aston, Judith and Sandra Gaudenzi. 2012. “Interactive Documentary: Setting the Field.” Studies in Documentary Film 6 (2): 125–39. Berman, Sarah. 2015. “Interpreting China’s Banned Pollution Documentary.” TheTyee, March 16. http://thetyee.ca/Culture/2015/03/16/China-­Pollution-­Documentary/. Birkeland, Janis. 2010. “Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice.” In Ecofeminism, edited by Greta Gaard, 13–59. Philadelphia: Temple University. Burke, Kenneth. 1974. A Philosophy of Literary Form. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Cuomo, Chris. 2002. “On Ecofeminist Philosophy.” Ethics & the Environment 7 (2): 1–11. Ehrilich, Nea. 2011. “Animated Documentaries as Masking.” Animation Studies Online Journal 7. https://journal.animationstudies.org/nea-­ehrlich-­animated-­documentaries-­as-­ masking/. Ehrilich, Nea. 2012. “Animations: D.W. Winnicott and the Contemporary Animated Documentary.” In Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, edited by James Elkins, Kristi McGuire, Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuennen, 73–6. New York: Routledge. Fox-­Lerner, Aaron. 2015. “Breaking the Barrier: Translating Under the Dome: How two Beijing Students Brought the Film to the World’s Attention.” Time Out Beijing, April 8. www.timeoutbeijing.com/features/BooksFilm-­Film_Features/37710/Breaking-­the-­ barrier-­translating-­Under-­the-­Dome.html. Freedom on the Net: China. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-­net/2015/china. King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2013. “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression.” American Political Science Review 2: 1–18. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1993. “Ecofeminism: Symbolic & Social Connections.” In Ecofeminism and the Sacred, edited by Carol J. Adams, 13–23. New York: Continuum. Tyson, Elizabeth. 2015. “China and Crowdsourcing: The Rise of a New Green Generation?” News Security Beat. The blog of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, May 4. www.newsecuritybeat.org/2015/05/china-­crowdsourcing-​ rise-­green-­generation/. Wang, Alvin Y. 1999. “Gender and Nature: A Psychological Analysis of Ecofeminist Theory.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29 (11): 2410–24. Warren, Karen J. 1993. “Introduction to Ecofeminism.” In Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 253–67. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Chai Jing’s Under the Dome  117 Watson, Joseph A. 2014. “Screening TED: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Intersections of Rhetoric, Digital Media, and Pedagogy.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University. Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. New York: Routledge. Yang, Guobing and Craig Calhoun. 2007. “Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China.” China Information 21 (2): 211–36. Yang, Fan. 2016. “Under the Dome: Chinese Smog as a Viral Media Event.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 33 (3): 232–44.

Part III

Humans and animals

6 Global animal capital and animal garbage Documentary redemption and hope Chia-­ju Chang

Whether today’s modern societies are capitalist or socialist with Chinese characteristics, non-­human animals in these societies are victims of the current unbridled process of global modernization. Animals become caught up in the capitalist loop of production, consumption, and post-­consumption—a journey of eternal return in the system of a market economy. The CNN headline news, “Unfit for human consumption: How nearly 9 million pounds of bad meat escaped into the food supply,” illustrates just how animal capital (good meat to be consumed) and animal garbage (bad meat to be tossed away or destroyed) are two sides of the same coin. The totality of animals reduced to a piece of meat and “garbage” is measured solely upon their economic value. The ubiquitous and invisible presence or elements of animals (in slaughterhouses, landfills, and even in the air we breathe) articulated as raw material, capital, and detritus can be found at all levels of economic institutions, irrespective of whether they be institutionalized, semi-­institutionalized, un-­institutionalized, or illegal, such as the biomedical pharmaceutical industry, large-­scale transnational agribusiness trade, or illegal animal trafficking. In other words, it is not just human tissues, but the entire human civilization that feasts on the flesh and bones of non-­human animals. Current crises such as global climate change, which result from the wonton plundering of the elements of the natural world, have prompted scholars of environmental humanities to incorporate alternative perspectives and methodologies and to engage questions regarding planetary justice, survival, and representational strategy. One of the most pressing issues is rapid mass extinction and the suffering of animals. Granted, in pre-­modern societies, animals have always been utilized as food, tools, ritual objects, and medicine (Holland 1994), but the unprecedented scale and speed of planetary deterioration are leading to its own demise. Many activist ecodocumentaries have thus far emerged, such as Earthlings (2005), My Fancy High Heels (2010), The Cove (2009), and The Ivory Game (2016) to name a few, with international ecocinema criticism scholarship subsequently addressing the issue of animal justice locally, globally, and glocally. In generating a new perspective within the current framework of global and transnational ecocinema criticism to talk about the plight of the animal, cosmopolitan

122  Chia-­ju Chang interspecies ethics, and documentary aesthetic strategies, I first place the trope of animal—namely, “animal-­as-­capital” and “animal-­as-­garbage”—in the vein of post-­Marxist and new materialist theorists’ discourses such as Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidotti, Nicole Shukin, and Jane Bennett. Against this theoretical valance there is the question concerning the role, function, and aesthetics of documentary film as a means of intervention and mediation. If it is an outright animal activist film, then what aesthetic strategies do the filmmakers use to raise animal protection consciousness that prompt post-­cinematic change or action? How do we as viewers engage a critical and participatory reading to help bring forth a more-­than-­human interpretation, if an animal advocacy voice is absent? What affects are appropriate for an animal advocacy film? In recognizing the potential negatives of documentaries to energize, traumatize, terrorize, and numb the audience by simply exposing and cataloging animal suffering, or by employing sadistic spectacles, I submit that film is best when it is conceived as an affective apparatus of hope and redemption, rather than one that evokes blaming, guilt, and despair. In rejecting viewing films about animal cruelty and suffering as a vehicle for spectacle production without offering hope or redemption, we should also resist the temptation of immersing ourselves in the melancholic mood vis-­à-­vis the current dire ecological situation, even if a melancholic mode is “ethically more appropriate” (Morton 2007, 75). While it is more appropriate and inevitable as a personal matter, from the activist point of view, the rhetoric of hope and redemption is more suited to jolt the audience out of a sense of despair and inspire them to change. How to transform that personal melancholic pathos into a meaningful documentary activism to change the audience is what an advocacy documentary film should be targeting. Even though it is undeniable that the word “redemption” immediately evokes either Judeo-­Christian theology or Buddhist doctrines, here I will discuss the idea of redemption (to “buy back” or to “ransom”) in the secular contexts of critical animal and cinema studies. To place this in an animal advocacy or ecocritical context, it can mean to buy back/ransom, to “release” the animals and to make amends for the injustice done to animals. How does a film or film media help ransom, release, and make amends for humanity’s wrongdoing? For Siegfried Kracauer, if the cinema is a medium that redeems physical reality by way of “render[ing] visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent” (Kracauer 1997, 300), then we can readily extend this idea of cinematic redemption of physical reality to render animal activist hermeneutics. In other words, rendering visible what we do not or could not see before its advent—say, making visible the treatment of animals at large-­scale slaughterhouses—­ provides an opportunity to make amends for a broken human–animal relationship. The redemption of reality has to be further fueled with activist aspiration, rather than stopping at its indexical capacity. As we move toward a transdisciplinary field called environmental humanities that transcends geopolitical boundaries, this chapter endeavors to draw films (both feature and documentary) from multiple localities to examine the cinematic medium as an apparatus of redemption and hope. The films include The Plastic Cow (India), Three Flower (China), four

Global animal capital and animal garbage   123 Asian Black Bear rescue documentaries from Australia, China, and Vietnam, and, finally, The Lost Sea (Taiwan).

Theoretical rumination: animal–capital–garbage entanglement and documentary redemption The opening scene of Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste (Laji weicheng, 2013) jolts viewers into a state of moral shock: on the outskirts of Beijing, at landfills unbeknownst to his audience, goats are herded to feed on garbage, their “shepherds” assisting them by poking open plastic bags and Styrofoam boxes. Hastily chewing on everything they can find, these hungry goats munch raw vegetable scraps, eggshells, leftover food, and, even more shockingly, plastic bags. Through the use of hand-­held digital camera, the horrific sight of garbage-­binging goats immediately creates a moral shock through what Dirk Eitzen calls “consequential authenticity” (Eitzen 2005). These images evoke those of the garbage-­filled necro-­bodies of the albatrosses on Midway Atoll and more aptly the plastic-­grazing cows in India’s urbanscape. Kunal Vohra’s The Plastic Cow (India, 2012), a 37-­minute documentary film on plastic pollution and its impact on India’s cows, finds its final climax in an operation sequence where a medium-­sized, one-­horned cow’s rumen is sliced open to reveal the evidence of an undeniable yet obscured crime: 53 kilograms of indigestible, entangled matter such as plastic bags, balloons, leather, etc., all of which cause the animals to perish slowly and painfully (Figure 6.1). After watching this film, viewers will never view India’s cows (and, by extension, all garbage-­binging animals) the same way ever again. Be it Midway Atoll’s albatrosses, Beijing’s laji yang (garbage goats), Rongcheng’s Swan Lake garbage swans in Shandong, India’s plastic cows, and so on, they are a synecdoche of animals’ corporeal entanglements in the age of “plastic-­o-­cene.” This omnipresence of “garbage animals” acts as a counterstatement to John Berger’s observation on the disappearance of non-­ human animals in modernity and instead fulfills Rimbaud’s prophecy that “[t]he [hu]man of the future will be filled with animals” (Philo and Wilbert 2000, 3). In the context of the early twenty-­first century, the monstrous scale and invisibility and degree of suffering portend to every single cow eating plastic waste and possibly every single cow carrying waste products inside its rumen equivalent to the weight of an adult human female. What should be noted is that the documentary medium, in addition to its direct, indexical relationship to reality, also allows us to see what is not immediately accessible to us or is hidden away from us, either inside the animal body, in the landfill, or in the deep abyss of the ocean. If the demand that “ecological art is duty-­bound to hold slimy in view” (Morton 2007, 159), the close-­up sequence of the operation in the case of The Plastic Cow fulfills its duty as ecodocumentary art. At the same time, as it brings the unwanted matter into view and holds humans accountable—via the documentary voiceover narration—for the way they treat animals it begins to possess a redeeming quality. Here, the cinematic apparatus plays an intervening role in redeeming non-­human animals from the

124   Chia-­ju Chang

Figure 6.1 A still frame from The Plastic Cow. Here, the veterinarian operates on a cow and pulls out 53 kg of garbage in her rumen. Source: Courtesy of the director.

day-­to-­day hidden cruelties resulting from neoliberal capitalism. In this closed “production–consumption–recycling” chain of material exchange between these two worlds (natural world and world of animals as raw materials), animals are endlessly returned back to the industrial loop to be regenerated as capital. Such a practice threatens the viability of the social and natural environments as a means of life and life itself (Shukin 2009, 80). The only way to get out of the loop of capitalist productivity, as in the case of Shukin’s analysis of the rendering industry, is through a disease outbreak or some form of environmental catastrophe— only then can animals be released from the cycle of productivity for capital. As the counterpart to animals’ productivity, the conjugal term “animal garbage” is useful to describe the post-­capitalist condition. Etymologically speaking, “animal garbage” or “garbage animal” is a tautological one, as the word “garbage” in the sixteenth century refers to unwanted parts of butchered fowl (e.g. giblets and feet). In a broader context of capitalism, it now pertains to the negative surplus value of animals that are no longer of any use or may prove harmful when ‘recycled’ back to the system for reuse, and therefore they need to be removed.1 Both animal capital and “garbage animal” address contemporary existential-­material conditions of global animals. They unveil a story of how non-­human animals in global market societies not only become enmeshed in a global capitalist loop, but also get lost in a post-­capitalist waste system. The 53 kg of garbage inside the cow in Vohra’s The Plastic Cow or the plastic grazing sheep in a landfill of Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Trash are visual evidence of the claim that “contemporary capitalism is ‘bio-­political’ in that it aims at controlling all that lives” (Braidotti 2013, 95). Here, the “garbage animal” phenomenon manifests a larger, or more fundamental, problem relating

Global animal capital and animal garbage  125 to the current economic system in which animals have become carnally entangled through different forms of controls. Documentaries such as The Plastic Cow and Earthlings hold humans accountable for such a horrendous crime against other earthlings, by exposing or indexing animal cruelty to create moral shock. While the use of shock value can be a powerful tactic, other side effects, such as misanthropy and negative psychological effects, may also accompany it. As in the case of Earthlings, the reminder of humans as earthlings toward the end of the film does not redeem the animals, nor does it render hope. Audiences are left with total disgust. We thus need to ask: how can we articulate hope for humanity on such a subject matter? In Animal Capital, Shukin offers what she calls “hope of resistance” as an answer. The idea that nature has an agential capacity is a proposition similar to Jane Bennett’s disruptive “vibrant matter” in material ecocriticism (Bennett 2010). In Vibrant Matter, Bennett cites “antagonistic life” (i.e. “mad cow disease”) as an exemplar of what Martin O’Connor calls “nature’s resistance”, which, as mentioned above, erupts in a supposedly controlled and static loop (Shukin 2009, 86). Such theorization of “hope of resistance” helps articulate the generative power of animal’s agential capacity. The question though is that these subversive forms of hope—hope of resistance, antagonistic life, and “nature’s resistance”—come with a heavy price for humanity, as one can just think of all the devastating eco-­catastrophes, such as climate change, that we have encountered thus far. How then can the film medium help articulate hope without the dark, dystopian rhetoric and vision of “the empire strikes back”? To answer this requires first an acknowledgement of the film industry’s complicit role in animal and human labor exploitation (e.g. Edison’s electrocution of an elephant and later the streamlining of handling animal butchering at the slaughterhouse; see Shukin 2009). First, at the onset, the “time–motion” technology served as capitalism’s henchman: it was used to study animals’ streamlined physiology to help build an efficient industrial infrastructure, which in return was able to butcher animals more efficiently. The shooting of animal or human motions aimed to produce a series of temporal stills to perceive micromotion; and the editing process of cutting off wasteful or extraneous movements was employed to a molecularly streamlined labor force to increase capitalist productivity and efficiency (Shukin 2009, 73). Here, the concept of editing is analogous to removing animal viscera and preserving wanted parts. The slicing off of excessive motion evoked the sixteenth-­century culinary practice in Europe mentioned above. Following this, we can see the material and symbolic entanglement of animal matter and film technique being traced back to the pre-­modern era. Second, traditional celluloid film feeds on animal flesh: the film stock material derives from gelatin, which is the protein obtained from boiling animal (mostly cow or pig) skin, bones, cartilage, and hides. In this sense, the very materiality of film is born out of animals. Against this bloody background, now I want to return to the question of filmic redemption and hope. As I turn away from the dystopian

126   Chia-­ju Chang nature’s resistance, where animals or nature fight back as agential monsters and revengers, I regard the film medium—especially the digital, activist-­investigative mode of documentaries—as a powerful medium that is capable of breaking the circuits of biocapitalism. The “activist mode” of documentaries not only investigates the hidden practice of animal exploitation, but is also a medium of resistance. Rather than simplistically indexing animal suffering or cruelty, the documentary medium has the capacity to investigate or address various routes of deviation and provides opportunities to end the closed loop. One way to break the capitalist loop is to create a political intervention through the digital documentary medium. Film plays a co-­agential role in resisting capitalist biopolitics, more than just simply as an instrument of revelation or spectacle. However, in theorizing film’s redemptive capacity, we should first place such redemption within the context of its complicit role (as part of the capitalist assemblage) in exercising capitalist biopower. The new digital medium, as opposed to the traditional celluloid film stock, can be conceptualized as a medium that redeems its predecessor. There is a redeeming quality in digital film, as traditional film is made with animal parts. Bozak (2012, 11) believes that digital technology has the potential to be configured into a more self-­sufficient and ecological mode of communication. What follows is a discussion of several documentaries on a group of animals that can be classified as economic animals, horseshoe crabs, bears, cows, and dogs/cats in their given cultural contexts.

Animal capital and documentary activism San Hua and Cala, My Dog!: consumption and redemption While the consumption of dogs and cats in China can be traced back to as early as the Han Dynasty, subsequently going through different phases of disfavor and popularity, it was not until very recently that it became celebrated at festivals. As economic growth has increasingly created urban bourgeois elites with high levels of disposable income, the pet industry has emerged as one of the latest sectors to see a boom in China. According to Euromonitor International, China is the third-­largest pet market in the world with 27 million dogs and 11  million cats (Larson 2014).2 However, in this burgeoning pet culture, the growing animal population has probably given rise to the commercialization of dog meat consumption in the name of festivals celebrating tradition and local customs. During the 10-­day annual Yulin Dog Meat Festival, for example, which began in 2009, about 10,000–15,000 dogs are killed and consumed, and most of them are stolen household/companion dogs or strays from xiaoqu (small local neighborhoods) and rural villages, rather than, as often claimed, having come from dog farms, since raising dogs for consumption is not cost-­effective (Animals Asia 2015). The subtexts of dog-­theft and dog meat trade are evident in the feature film Cala, My Dog! (Kala shi tiao gou; dir. Lu Xuechang, 2003), which addresses the question of the changing human–animal relationship and the vulnerability of dog safety in an urban environment such as Beijing.

Global animal capital and animal garbage  127 Stolen strays and companion animals are a by-­product phenomenon of the pet industry and culture, and they are the cheapest source of supply to dog and cat markets and restaurants. What we see here is an example of a recycling process in which stray (as capitalist “negative surplus animals” in the sense that these animals, either lost, abandoned, or feral, are “deviated” from the urban capitalist biopolitical track) and companion animals (supposedly human family members in post-­industrial/capitalist society) are recycled back as animal capital into the capitalist meat market economy, turning them into a table dish, rendering their hide to the fur trade, etc. In this closed loop, every part of the animal is fully used and any type of waste is scrupulously avoided. In many ways, Three Flower/Tri-­Color (dir. Guo Ke) differs from Cala, My Dog!. This full-­length journalist-­style documentary raises many serious political and cultural issues surrounding the ethics, cruelty, and safety of cat meat consumption. It also poses questions regarding the documentary medium, representation, and redemption. First, the documentary redeems the animal by exposing the chain of production. Compared with dog-­eating, cat consumption in China is relatively lesser known, both domestically and internationally, even though it also has a long history. Underground cat-­theft and trafficking have more than 20 years of history, with the network spread over as many as 15 provinces in China, covering all aspects of the consumption industry: cat-­ napping, transportation, sale, and consumption—a closed chain, in other words. In an interview, Ai Weiwei talks about this cat-­trading chain, paraphrased as follows: We hope to film all aspects of this illegal cat-­trade, ranging from topics as to why the cats need to be protected, how to protect them, the cat-­kidnappers, how cats are tortured, what the chain production is like (i.e.  transportation routes), how these people handle the pelts, what the cat-­eating restaurant is like, what the attitudes of cat sellers are, as well as the difficulties of animal protection law. (Ai 2010) Three Flower investigates such a domestic cat-­trafficking chain. After receiving a call from an animal activist to accompany her to an ambush and hijack of two trucks, with 400 cats confined in small cages, at a highway tollbooth en route to Guangdong to be sold to cat restaurants, Guo Ke began to investigate this underground production chain and the activism element. In the film, the director shows different aspects of this “event” to gain a more holistic view: the tension between the cat activists and the police, interviews with “cat aunties” (mao ayi) to show their heartwarming dedication and focus, restaurant workers’ and consumers’ confessions and attitudes toward cat-­killing, cooking and consumption, etc. Second, in addition to redeeming animals through its activist, journalist investigation, the documentary redeems the theme of animal torture by counterbalancing it with images of animal grace, beauty, and dignity. Here, I agree with Martha Nussbaum (2006, 383) that “there is no respectable way to deny the

128   Chia-­ju Chang equal dignity of creatures across species.” To grant animals dignity is to discover their beauty and elegance as an individualistic species. The director is careful not to overexpose scenes of violence. Sharply contrasting with the remaining part that deals with the indignity and brutality of the cat-­eating and trading chain, the opening scene (of a cat in Ai Weiwei’s studio, called San Hua—literally, “Three Flower”) foretells a theme of redemption: animal individuality, beauty, and dignity. The term “Three Flower” has a threefold meaning: first, it is the name of the cat we see on the screen; second, “three flower,” or tricolor, refers to a color pattern on the fur; lastly, it also refers to the name of the pelt sold in the fur trade. The opening image of an outdoor cat prompts the audience to appreciate the beauty of animal dignity and elegance, through the cinematic intervention of slow motion and close-­up shots. Such an editing sequence redeems our relationship with animals, as seen in a later part of the film. What he intends to redeem is not only animals’ lives, but also their dignity as living beings. Like Cala, My Dog!, Three Flower examines just the tip of the iceberg of the cat and dog trade and the animal theft business, exposing the problems of cultural tradition and spectacle, subaltern rights/livelihood, the ethics of dog/cat meat consumption, transnational animal ethics, etc. One of the ways in which Three Flower redeems the animals is through restoring their dignity from their journey of utter inhumane suffering to calling for respect towards all sentient beings. Such interspecies care and respect is what needs to be developed at this particular historical juncture in China.

(Trans)national moon bear documentaries: zootherapy3 and hope Owing to a totemic belief, which is common in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), bears (i.e. their bile, paws, etc.) have had their bile harvested for more than 2000 years.4 Bears, including brown bears and the Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus, also known as the moon bear), have historically been captured or reared for their bile in East Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Laos. As animal capital, their gallbladder, paws, and cubs are of great economic value. The bile is said to cure “tapeworm, childhood nutritional impairment, hangovers, colds, and even cancer” (Kavoussi 2011). As a result of over-­farming and overproduction, bear bile is now even to be found in Chinese throat lozenges, shampoo, toothpaste, wine, and tea. The practice of farming bears for their entire lives to extract their bile while alive originated from North Korea in the 1980s, and the Chinese government adopted this practice to prevent the killing of bears for their gallbladders in the wild. This legal, institutionalized practice did not stop wild bears from being hunted for their gallbladders, but instead led to the proliferation of commercial demand for more bear bile (Animals Asia 2016) and the organ trade. Demand also has to do with the globalization of TCM, with such remedies now being sold in Asian pharmacies throughout the world. In this light, the consumption of the

Global animal capital and animal garbage  129 animals is different from the case of cat-­or dog-­eating, as both consumption and activism are transnational. In an interview, the directors divulge that bear-­ farming is an extremely lucrative industry and has a very mature production chain. Some of the farms own and breed female bears raised specifically for mating and bearing cubs. The farmers begin to milk bile from the young cubs when they reach the age 3 or 4. Every single part of the bear is fully used. The bear bile products are then exported overseas, especially to Vietnam. In the past four years, we see an even more worrisome issue, that is the bear farm is disguised in a legal outfit to engage in organ trade, not just bear bile, but also bear fur, paws, pelts and fats. Bear meat is 60 RMB per kilogram (roughly 4 USD per pound). A bear paw will cost more than 10 thousand RMB, the rest of the body parts such as fats and bones will be used for cooking. (Huang 2015) The most prominent activist committed to protecting bears is a British woman, Jill Robinson, the founder and CEO of Animal Asia. The organization is devoted to rescuing bears from bear farms, to eradicating the practice of bear-­bile farming, and to improving the welfare of animals in China and Vietnam. In 2000, Jill Robinson signed an agreement with the Chinese authorities to set up a bear sanctuary designed to rescue bears from the bile industry. This was the first such agreement to be signed between the Chinese government and an international NGO. Part of Moon Bears: Journey to Freedom (2014) centers on Robinson’s touching rite-­of-­passage story of how she became involved in the bear-­rescue project in China. In this sequence, she speaks of the direct contact between a caged female bear and herself that marked the transformative moment which triggered her life-­changing decision. As the production of bear documentaries is not limited to China, it therefore challenges the nation-­bound concept of cinema. Here, I propose to situate this group of documentary films that deal with the issue of bear-­farming and activism in China and Vietnam into a more hybrid category of transnational documentaries. These films prompt us to take a more cosmopolitan look at animal or environmental issues and animal cruelty as a global concern, rather than one locally confined and to be dealt with only by local activists or filmmakers. Thus far, there have been several documentary films, mostly produced or sponsored by Animals Asia, devoted to the issue of bear-­farming and animal rescue activism: The Moon Bear (China, 2012), Moon Bears: Journey to Freedom (2014), Cages of Shame (Australia, 2012), and Moon Bears on Planet Earth (Italy, 2016), to name just a few; as well as numerous videos circulating on social media. The Moon Bear has been referred to as the Chinese version of the US documentary, The Cove. Created by three Chinese journalists, The Moon Bear is a documentary investigating and exposing the bear-­bile farming industry and organ trade in China. They are called moon bears, or “white-­crested bears,” because they have crescent-­shaped hair on their chest. The moon bear is classified as vulnerable by

130   Chia-­ju Chang the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) and is regarded as a second-­class animal under protection according to China’s Wildlife Protection Law. Cages of Shame is a simple, straightforward story documenting a journey in which ten bears are escorted from a bear farm in Shandong. Directed by Martin Guinness, an Australian, the film follows the rescue team to a bear farm in Shandong to bring ten bears back to the sanctuary in Chengdu, Sichuan. Moon Bears on Planet Earth is a volunteer project directed by two Italian independent filmmakers in collaboration with the Animals Asia Foundation. This short film documents the Tam Tao Bear Sanctuary (or the ­Vietnam bear rescue center) outside of Hanoi and the bear rehabilitation process. The strategies employed by the activists who produce the bear-­ rescue videos do not dwell on images of torture, unlike most animal activist groups or documentaries, which tend to mobilize action through the augmentation of animal death and suffering as part of industrial animal fetishism. Jonathan Burt once criticizes the exploitation of animal misery, as reflected in an editing process that tends to select the most bloody and horrific scenes so as to attract attention and gain political currency. He argues that this is no different from commercial films. Visual imagery of mistreatment is one way of binding them together. This reduces the complexity of these various practices to a basic question of impact on the animal body whilst, at the same time, presenting a montage effect of similarly striking images. (Burt 2002, 172) Burt agrees with Jane Giles (1999, 174), who contends that material documentation of the torture and murder of animals “provide[s] a stop-­gap for the hungry sadistic eye.” Here, Burt raises the question of slaughterhouse aesthetics and distance, writing that, “[f]ew films, however, actually explore the relationship between this revelatory imagery and other aspects of culture, preferring instead to reinforce its sense of separateness” (Burt 2002, 175). I agree with him in the sense that the hidden, distanced viewing of brutality, one that fails to provide the full context, tends to aestheticize violence. The sense of separateness or distance might, in my viewing experience, also have to do with an instinctual avoidance as a mechanism to protect oneself from being traumatized. Homo sapiens are, after all, highly social beings and therefore extremely empathetic to another creature’s suffering. The point made by Burt regarding cinematic exploration of the relationship between this revelatory imagery and other aspects of culture is an important one. Placing the violent scene in an appropriate cultural context avoids the sadistic consumption of what he called “slaughterhouse aesthetics” (Burt 2002, 174). Also deserving a mention are the non-­sentimentalized images: the autopsy sequence in The Plastic Cow and the emergency surgery scene in Cages of Shame both betray Burt’s critique of the animal welfare/rights genre and nature film, since the images provided there are different from the conventional trope

Global animal capital and animal garbage   131 of animal mistreatment (i.e. the use of montage to catalog and condense all the most horrific shots of animal cruelty to produce strong effects). Unlike PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) videos, images of animal mistreatment are not spectacular in a manner designed to incite instant moral outrage; nor are formal devices (i.e. slow motion, close-­ups, time-­lapse, camera angles, etc.) used to reduce reality to a sequence of images by removing animals from their original context. Taking the autopsy or surgery scenes as examples, the veterinarians present the “evidence of crime” (i.e. plastic bags, leather of unknown origin, and balloon in The Plastic Cow, and the metal devices in Cages of Shame) to the camera as testimony to human brutality. Both The Plastic Cow and The Moon Bear provide a different way to think about documentary redemption: they function as important visual evidence that shows the inside of the industry or the capitalist system. The case of The Moon Bear debunks the myth often found in the bear-­bile farming propaganda of humane treatment of bears. One of the effective strategies in this group of bear-­rescue documentaries produced by Animals Asia, is the shift from the rhetoric of violence (i.e. scenes of butchering) to that of hope. The shots of uplifting scenes and language (e.g. rescue, healing, recovery, and animal health and well-­being) turn the narratives of animal cruelty into those of “restoration or redemption.” Particularly in a cross-­cultural context, where the main protagonist (i.e. Jill Robinson as the CEO of Animal Asia in China) or the filmmakers are outsiders of the culture, such a strategy most importantly avoids the explicit cultural and food bias in The Cove and also serves to repair and to bring the audience closer to the formerly tormented animals and redeem humanity from the brutality. It moves the discourse of redemption, that is, to redeem our relationship with animals through exposure to hidden crime, to the next level, which is hope, and to affect real change in the culture itself. In Cages of Shame, a context of violence and concern is established through the use of frame-­within-­the-­frame or audience-­within-­audience. While traveling back to the bear rescue center, one bear suddenly gets very ill and is in need of immediate surgery. The rescuers stop off in a town and receive help from a local hospital. Surgery is performed on the bear inside the truck, surrounded by curious local residents. What the villagers see is, presumably, what we see and learn outside the frame as the audience of this documentary, thanks to the detailed explanation provided by Jill Robinson, who keeps both the villagers and the camera updated on how the surgery is progressing, which speaks to the cruel consequences of bile consumption. It is here that documentaries, which act as a filmic record of rescue efforts and progress, provide an alternative way of thinking about hope. One way to conceptualize hope is by bringing to light the hidden crimes. Many documentaries discussed herein play a crucial role in exposing the cruelties of industry, whether it be animal theft and the trading chain or the bile-­farming industry. Moon Bears: Journey to Freedom even stirs in audiences the hope that a complete shutdown of bear farms in China is not as unlikely as one might think—there having been

132   Chia-­ju Chang many success stories in which bears were liberated. We are witness, in fact, to changing attitudes toward bear-­farming, even among practitioners of Chinese medicine and bear farmers themselves.

The Lost Sea: cross-­strait cold war and deep-­time matter Most of the discussion thus far has centered on the redemption of animal capital—the idea of animals’ bodies being plundered and capitalized on for their visceral substance or fluids—and film’s participatory role in activist rescue operations. In this section, I turn to the final example of animal capital—the horseshoe crab—to examine a different strategy of redemption. Ever since around the 1970s in the western world, horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) have become a “celebrity” species. Scientists have discovered a powerful substance contained in their blue-­colored blood (the protein hemocyanin carries copper that turns blood blue when binding with oxygen), which is a protective agent capable of detecting mini-­levels of bacteria (Madrigal 2014). As “animal capital” in the form of a “primitive antibiotic” used in the biomedical industry, their blood is harvested on a scale that has made it a multibillion-­dollar business. Horseshoe crabs are thus now caught in this endless loop of being captured and brought back to the lab to have one-­third of their blood extracted and then released back to where they belong. Many of the horseshoe crabs fail to survive after their blood has been extracted. The number of horseshoe crabs is decreasing as a result of such practices, consequentially endangering the costal ecosystem (Olson 2014; Niles et al. 2009; Berkson and Shuster 1999). The situation in Kinmen, Taiwan is different. Tachypleus tridentatus, or tri-­ spine horseshoe crab and a species of horseshoe crab in Asia, was once abundant along the coastal zone of the Taiwan Strait, but has become scarce due to overfishing, land reclamation, and water pollution. It is no longer found on the eastern side of the Taiwan Strait and is now just a rare species on the mudflats of Kinmen (Chen et al. 2004, 1890). In the case of Kinmen (or Quemoy), which forms a group of islands off the southeastern coast of mainland China and 2 kilometers east of Xiamen, the conservation of T. tridentatus is not just a biological program, but a socioeconomic and political issue (Chen et al. 2004).5 Hung Chun-­hsiu’s The Lost Sea is a documentary film about the construction of Shuitou Harbor in Houfeng, Kinmen. Owing to a political miscalculation, the conservation of T. tridentatus and everyday fishermen’s lives are caught up in the changing political relationship between mainland China and Taiwan (Xie and Wu 2014). This documentary focuses on the fishing community in Houfeng, especially the Hung clan. It is said that the Hung clan is the offspring of the Ming Dynasty Koxinga’s subordinate Hung Xu-­fan’s scions. The Chinese title of the documentary, Shanhaijing (刪 海 經), immediately evokes the name of the classic text Shanhaijing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas). Using a clever punning device, the director here replaces the word “shan” (mountain) with “shan” (removal) to skillfully suggest the central idea of the documentary as a tale of the “Classic of Removing the Seas” (i.e. the seashore habitat, fishing communities,

Global animal capital and animal garbage   133 and species) vis-­à-­vis the impending construction of the commercial harbor, which destroys the local community and coastal ecosystem. Given the recent military history of Kinmen, it is not difficult to see the irony that history plays on T. tridentatus. As in the case of the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that has been transformed into a wildlife haven, this species thrived during 38 years of Taiwan martial law, starting in 1949 and ending in 1987. After almost four decades of human inactivity, T. tridentatus has prospered. However, due to the resumption of communications between the two countries, such as the Mini-­Three Links (xiao-­santong) effective in 2001 that has facilitated direct travel between the mainland and Kinmen, the horseshoe crab habitat, as well as the fishermen’s village, has become, in the eyes of Taiwan’s central government, a hindrance to economic development (i.e. the construction of the Shuitou commercial harbor). As poignantly pointed out by Lin Cheng-­ sheng, a Taiwanese director, the irony is that this ancient species has outlived dinosaurs, yet it cannot survive political decisions made by humans. This vision of the documentary is undoubtedly that of ‘shallow ecology’ or humanist ecology, which concerns the survival of Kinmen’s local fishing community and coastal ecology in the face of cross-­strait economic development. In such a vision, horseshoe crabs are deemed solely as economic animals or animal capital (i.e. a food and tourist attraction), no different from their western

Figure 6.2 A still frame from Shanhaijing. Here, former president Ma was giving a speech at the inauguration for the construction of the Houfeng Harbor. The line that appears on the screen reads: “People from both sides of the Taiwan Strait will benefit [from the construction].” Source: Courtesy of the director.

134   Chia-­ju Chang

Figure 6.3 A still frame from Shanhaijing. Here, three visual and textual elements are assembled to create a sense of the absurdity of history: an old TV set airing former president Ma waving his fist giving a passionate speech. On top of Ma’s image is placed a horseshoe crab with a line of Chinese subtitle: “peaceful environment.” Source: Courtesy of the director.

counterpart (i.e. bio-­medicine). However, given such a grand narrative, we can nonetheless detect documentary redemption that renders space as a reflection upon the species, like what Jane Bennett (2010) calls “vibrant matter.” The “documentary of hope” hence does not reside in its activist promise, as discussed in the case of the Moon Bear film; rather, it resides in the visual (non-­ verbal) discourse of the species as a deep-­time creature. Undeniably, the horseshoe crabs embody a thickness of “material imagination” (to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s term, cited in Iovino and Oppermann 2012, 81) and hence enable agentic capacity as a “site of narrativity,” “material textuality,” or “storied matter.” The term “storied matter” is defined as a “material mesh” of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and non-­human players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 1–2). T. tridentatus as an essential part of Kinmen and Taiwanese lives serves as a thick description of such storied matter: [I]n former times, the horseshoe crab was already part of the daily life in Kinmen and Taiwan, so it is easy to advocate this commonly remembered event. For example, some places are named after the horseshoe crabs, such as horseshoe crab hill or village, and its shell was commonly used as a utensil to dip water. This utensil was named after the horseshoe crab, and even though

Global animal capital and animal garbage   135 the shell itself is no longer in use, the utensil still bears the name of the horseshoe crab. Shells were hung at the tops of doors and walls to protect the house from evil, or they were painted as a tiger, with the faces of Chinese opera characters, etc. … So there are intimate connections of this organism with the lives of the people of Kinmen and Taiwan. (Chen et al. 2004) From this description, we can see that T. tridentatus was part of human culture from early times, producing “configurations of meanings and discourses that we can interpret as stories” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014, 7). As a deep-­time, 450 million-­year-­old creature from the late Ordovician period, the living fossil T. tridentatus, like stones or other matter, has its own life record, and thanks to its rich textuality in the more-­than-­human-­world has its own more-­than-­human stories and trajectories. Fascinated by this creature and the contrast between its own “history” versus that of humans, the director reveals moments of this creature’s deep-­timeness. In one beach scene, Hung placed a horseshoe crab on an old TV set broadcasting news about former president Ma at the harbor’s inauguration ceremony (Figure 6.2). In this shot, the archaic living fossil slowly moves about on the TV screen. The surreal juxtaposition of the ancient living fossil and framed images of politicians forms a sharp, jarring contrast, as if creating a dialogue

Figure 6.4 A still frame from Shanhaijing. Here, the director uses monochromatic, panoramic vision to signify a non-­human visuality. Source: Courtesy of the director.

136   Chia-­ju Chang between two geographic periods (Figure 6.3). Through adopting a zoomorphic approach, the director’s camera renders a vision that confers on this ancient species an agentic capacity, rather than presenting it as mere animal capital to be manipulated by politicians. To capture horseshoe crabs as living beings, Hung adopts a form of camerawork that is in parallel with the creatures themselves, mimicking their vision (close to the ground and panoramic lens) and speed (Figure 6.4). The visual strategy tells another story designed to confront such an anthropocentric vision—the disparity between narrative and visual/ spatial effects, creating a double vision and freeing up a space for thinking about “documentary hope.” Turning away from the treatment of the animal as an economically valuable species, as the dominant mode of discourse and perception within the biomedical community in the west, this documentary provides an alternative narrative—one that problematizes negative surplus. The Lost Sea powerfully illustrates the way in which horseshoe crabs are implicated in both deep-­time and our current ecological age, which has now come to be recognized as the Anthropocene. The fate of this species is contingent upon historical conditions, its irony, and material co-­agential capacity.

Conclusion In this chapter, I take a vanguard excursion into sophisticated material ecocriticism situated at the intersections of Chinese and transnational ecocinema studies, critical animal studies, and the so-­called trash or discard studies. If ecocinema is “cinema with ecological consciousness”—voicing “the relationship of human beings to the physical environment, earth, nature, and animals from a biocentric, non-­ anthropocentric point of view” (Lu and Mi 2009, 2)—then within the context of Chinese as well as Asian and African modernities, that biocentric, non-­anthropocentric point of view should foreground environmental and animal justice ethics and confront anthropocentric and capitalist practices and viewpoints aesthetically. What, then, can an activist documentary film do when confronting anthropocentric practices? In an interview in which the comedian Jon Stewart talked about the function of art (i.e. satire), Stewart said that it is the activism that brings forth change, not the artist. What artists do is to give it a little push. While this comment can be applied to the activist documentary film genre, I am convinced that these films do more than give just a ‘nudge’. Watching these documentaries while writing this chapter dispelled my doubts with regard to some non-­ activist scholars’ criticism of activist documentaries as being too didactic, boring, and misanthropic/arrogant. What is moving about these documentaries is not simply the revelatory aspect: exposing cruelty to arouse a sense of disgust and justice. I was also particularly moved by the documentary activists’ long-­term commitment and their hopefulness evoked in terms of an ultimate outcome. This is the first time, as both a viewer and critical animal studies scholar, that I have felt hopeful that an animal industry in China as cruel as bear-­farming can potentially be eradicated in the near future through persistent activist intervention.

Global animal capital and animal garbage   137 If the strategy is to use hope as a documentary device, then it is a particularly effective and affective one, as it liberates the audience from a depressive, melancholic mode. All these films provide an alternative way to regard animal documentaries as models of inspiration. They demonstrate that the redemptive power of film media resides, in keeping with the thoughts of Dirk Eitzen, in the fact that the documentary film has a special appeal (i.e. consequential authenticity) for activist intervention through its temporal form, as well as the technology that helps to craft a unique activist documentary aesthetics to render powerful affects and hope. As with Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Trash or in Kunal Vohra’s The Plastic Cow, the media asserts an agency via this visual technology that has the potential to change the way we look at plastic waste, the seemingly unrelated connection between omnipresent plastic products and global animals, or the relationship between plastic production and consumption; Guo Ke’s Three Flower accentuates animal dignity and reveals the brutal violation of animal bodies; the cluster of Chinese and transnational bear-­rescue documentary films shows the brutal industry of bear-­ farming and the bear rehabilitation progress; finally, Hung Chun-­hsiu’s The Lost Sea enables us to see the irony of history and human follies and greed from the perspective of the deep-­time creature. All these documentaries, as a form of redemption, offer redemption not only for these “capital animals” and “surplus garbage animals,” but also for the medium itself. Redemption means to rescue, to buy back and to make amends. The documentary film genre serves as a medium of redemption through its investigative intervention, which brings to the fore what is left behind in the disguised harmonious system/loop that is techno-­capitalism.

Notes 1 I have used the term “garbage animal” elsewhere as a way to conceptualize the inter-­ and intra-­ connections between animal and unwanted matter and discussed Kunal Vohra’s The Plastic Cow (see Chang 2016). This is different from “trash animal,” which evokes the images of dry discards and is closer to the Chinese concept of laji. One of the best examples of “garbage animal” is the ocean “by-­catch” that occurs during trawling as practiced in the industrial fishing industry, where “living creatures [are] cast back as lifeless garbage” (Alaimo 2014). Sharks are another example, as they become a “garbage animal” after being thrown back into the ocean to die slowly after their fins are harvested. 2 The consumption of dogs and cats is a pan-­Asian phenomenon, as practiced in South Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand (see Podberscek 2009, 616; Serpell 1996, 18). Records of dog-­eating are also found in North and Central America, parts of Africa, and islands in the Pacific. 3 Zootherapy is the healing of human diseases by the use of therapeutics obtained or ultimately derived from animals (see Costa-­Neto 1999). 4 Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica (1986) by Dan Bensky, Andrew Gamble, and Ted Kaptchuk lists bear bile as a remedy for trauma, sprains, fractures, hemorrhoids, conjunctivitis, severe hepatitis, high fever, convulsions, and delirium. 5 A detailed account of Kinmen’s history can be found on the Moviegoer: Anthropology, Activism and Art website (see Hsieh 2014).

138   Chia-­ju Chang

References Ai, Weiwei. 2010. “Caifang Ai Weiwei zhi san’ ” [Ai Weiwei Interview III]. Yangguan weishi jilupian. [In Chinese.], August 7, 2012. http://loveaiww.blogspot.tw/2011/09/ blog-­post_7340.html (accessed March 15, 2016). Alaimo, Stacy. 2014. “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by S. Oppermann and S. Iovino, 186–203. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Animals Asia Official Website. 2015. “China’s Meat Dog Farms are a Myth – Most are Poisoned and Stolen from Rural Homes.” June 10, 2015. www.animalsasia.org/us/media/ news/news-­archive/chinese-­dog-­meat-­trade-­uncovered.html (accessed June 22, 2016). Animals Asia Official Website. 2016. “What is Bear Bile Farming?” https://www.animalsasia. org/us/our-­work/end-­bear-­bile-­farming/what-­is-­bear-­bile-­farming/the-­history.html (accessed June 18, 2016). Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bensky, Dan., Andrew Gamble, and Ted Kaptchuk. 1986. The Chinese Herbal Medicine: Materia Medica. Seattle, WA: Eastland Press. Berkson, Joseph and Carl N. Shuster Jr. 1999. “The Horseshoe Crab: The Battle for a True Multiple-­Use Resource.” Fisheries 24 (11): 6–10. Bozak, Nadia, 2012. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burt, Jonathan. 2002. Animals in Film. London: Reaktion Books. Chang, Chia-­ju. 2016. “Wasted Humans and Garbage Animals: Deadly Transcorporeality and Documentary Activism.” In Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays, edited by Rayson Alex and Susan Deborah, 119–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chen, Chang-­po, Hsin-­yi Yeh, and Po-­fen Lin. 2004, “Conservation of the Horseshoe Crab at Kinmen, Taiwan: Strategies and Practices.” Biodiversity and Conservation 13 (10): 1889–904. Costa-­Neto, E.M. 1999. “Healing with Animals in Feira de Sanatana City, Bahia, Brazil.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 65: 225–30. Eitzen, Dirk. 2005. “Documentary’s Peculiar Appeals.” In Moving Image Theory, edited by J. Anderson and B. Anderson, 183–99. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Giles, J. 1999. “The White Horse, Seul Contre Tous and Notes on Meat as Metaphor in Film.” Vertigo 1 (1). www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-­1-­issue-­9-­ summer-­1 999/the-­w hite-­h orse-­s eul-­c ontre-­t ous-­a nd-­n otes-­o n-­m eat-­a s-­m etaphor/ (accessed June 20, 2016). Holland, K. 1994. “Medicine from Animals: From Mysticism to Science.” Pharmaceutical Historian 24 (3): 9–12. Hsieh, I. 2014. “Kinmen hou yu xiandai ren de yuyan” [Modern Parable of Kinmen Horseshoe Crab and People]. [In Chinese.] MovieGoer: Anthropology Arts Activism. http://cinematic-­note.blogspot.tw/2014/04/blog-­post.html (accessed June 23, 2016). Huang, Xiaohe. 2015. “Yueliang xiong.” Di’er rensheng [The Second Life]. [In Chinese.] www.rensheng2.com/220000/218800.shtml (accessed July 15, 2015). Iovino, Serenella and S. Oppermann. 2012. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3 (1): 75–91.

Global animal capital and animal garbage   139 Iovino, Serenella and S. Oppermann. 2014. “Stories Come to Matter.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by S. Oppermann and S. Iovino, 1–17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kavoussi, Ben. 2011. “Asian Bear Bile Remedies: Traditional Medicine or Barbarism?” Science-­Based Medicine. www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/asian-­bear-­bile-­remedies-­ barbarism-­or-­medicine/ (accessed June 28, 2016). Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Larson, Christina. 2014. “China’s Skyrocketing (Pet) Population.” Bloomberg.com, August 22. www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-­08-­21/chinas-­skyrocketing-­pet-­ population (accessed June 27, 2016). Lu, Sheldon H. and Jiayan Mi, eds. 2009. Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenges. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Madrigal, Alexis C. 2014. “The Blood Harvest.” The Atlantic, February 26. www. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-­blood-­harvest/284078/ (accessed June 27, 2016). Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature. New York: Harvard University Press. Niles, Lawrence J., Jonathan Bart, Humphrey P. Sitters, Amanda D. Dey, Kathleen E. Clark, Phillip W. Atkinson, Nigel A. Clark, Jacquie Clark, Simon Gillings, Allan J. Baker, et al. 2009. “Effects of Horseshoe Crab Harvest in Delaware Bay on Red Knots: Are Harvest Restrictions Working?” BioScience 59 (2): 153–64. http://bioscience. oxfordjournals.org/content/59/2/153.full (accessed June 27, 2016). Nussbaum, Martha, C. 2006. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. London: Belknap/Harvard University Press. Olson, Samantha. 2014. “As Horseshoe Crab Populations Steadily Decrease, Their Indispensable Medical Use is Threatened.” Medical Daily. www.medicaldaily.com/ horseshoe-­c rab-­p opulations-­s teadily-­d ecrease-­t heir-­i ndespensable-­m edical-­u se-­ threatened-­280728 (accessed June 25, 2016). Philo, Chris and Chris Wilbert. 2000. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographics of Human – Animal Relations. New York: Routledge. Podberscek, Anthony L. 2009. “Good to Pet and Eat: The Keeping and Consuming of Dogs and Cats in South Korea.” Journal of Social Issues 65 (3): 615–32. Serpell, James A. 1996. In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human–Animal Relationships. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capitals: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Xie, Wen-­hua and Wu Zheng-­ting. 2014. “Shanghaijing jilupian kongsu Jinmen tianhai hui houtu.” [The Lost Sea accuses Jinmen of Land Reclamation and Destroying the Land of the Horseshoe Crabs]. [In Chinese.] Liberty Times Net. http://news.ltn.com. tw/news/life/paper/791502 (accessed December 21, 2016).

Filmography Animals Asia 2014. Moon Bears: Journey to Freedom. Hong Kong: Animals Asia. Chun-­hsiu, Hung. 2014. Shanhaijing [The Lost Sea]. Tai-­chung: Fushihui Studio. Davidson, Kief and Richard Ladkani. 2016. The Ivory Game. Wien: Terra Mater Factual Studios. Guinness, Martin. 2012. Cages of Shame. Moore Park: Guinness Entertainment. Jiuliang, Wang. 2011. Laji Weicheng [Beijing Besieged by Waste]. Bejing: Wang Jiuliang Studio.

140   Chia-­ju Chang Junhui, Xiong. 2012. Yueliang Xiong [The Moon Bear]. China: Tu Qiao and Chen Yuanzhong. Ke, Guo. 2010. San hua [Three Flower]. Beijing: Ai Weiwei Studio. Vohra, Kunal. 2012. The Plastic Cow. New Delhi: Altair Films. Xuechang, Lu. 2003. Cala shi tiao gou [Cala, My Dog!]. Beijing: Huayi Brothers Media. Zanellato, Nadia and Andrea Daddi. 2016. Moonbears on the Planet. Italy: Volunteer Project for Animals Asia.

7 Transcendence and transgression Reading Wolf Totem as environmental world literature/cinema? Haomin Gong

In her article, “World Literature and the Environment,” Ursula K. Heise (2012, 404–5) proposes to construct an “environmental world literature,” whose task is: tracing the outlines of an environmental world literature canon that has begun to take shape over the last three decades with works that are currently being translated and circulated through a variety of languages and cultures as texts whose principal—if not always exclusive—focus is on the ecological crises of the last half-­century.1 This task not only echoes David Damrosch’s (2003) definition of world literature as literature of transcultural translation and circulation, and detached engagement, but also corresponds to what Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic (2009, 6) describe as the “third wave of ecocriticism,” which “recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries.” Heise takes Chinese writer Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem, along with three other globally circulated and translated novels, as an example of such environmental world literature.2 Heise (2012, 405) believes that these works, although disparate in subject matters, thematic concerns, and writing styles, share one thing, that is, they: all build a consciousness of cultural boundaries, encounters, and misunderstandings into the very texture of their plots, thereby exploring in fictional form how basic concepts such as “nature,” “ecology,” “pollution,” or “the animal” mean quite different things in different cultural contexts and lead to divergent environmentalisms and anti-­environmentalisms. These “cultural boundaries, encounters, and misunderstandings,” and people’s endeavors to cross cultural boundaries, even in a way of misreading, in Heise’s (2012, 407, 408, and 410) view, are constructive in building an “Environmental World Literature” because, as these novels exhibit, in the face of ecological crises and existential dilemmas that are becoming increasingly transregional and global, human beings of different cultures may and should transcend their cultural boundaries and work collaboratively. In addition, Heise (2012, 411–12)

142   Haomin Gong suggests, “cultural differences, often signaled by linguistic misunderstandings or mistranslations, might be the point of departure for a new kind of ‘eco-­ cosmopolitanism’ that mobilizes a wide range of cultural resources for engagement with environmental problems.” Heise hopes that such transcultural encounters will lead to the effect of what Hans Georg Gadamer (1997) calls the “fusion of horizons,” that is, going beyond the limitations of one’s particular horizon and achieving the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked, in this case, by the encounter with a declining nature.3 Yet, no matter whether such a “fusion of horizons” has been arrived at in these novels (it has been in some but not in the others), the very fact that these novels are widely circulated and read in the world testifies to the growing awareness of ecological problems among a large population and to the encouraging trend that “world literature is beginning to include more and more texts with an explicitly ecological or environmentalist dimension” (Heise 2012, 412). Heise’s ideas indeed are seminal in this age of increasing transnational flux and globalization, yet we should nevertheless at the same time remain cautious and critical about the risks that this promise of transcendence may bring to us in regard to nature. To be more specific, although transcultural acts may lead us to a fusion of horizons, the realization of this ideal may come with the danger of transgression. In other words, trans-­border acts, be they taxonomical, geographical, national, cultural, or religious, do not always necessarily point to the ideal of arriving at a transcending horizon and building an environmentally ethical relationship with the other; on the contrary, crossing boundaries may often mean an act of transgression, and thus wreak more disastrous destruction and lead to more unfortunate consequences than non-­boundary-­crossing forces do. This, unfortunately, is exactly what happens in Wolf Totem, both the novel and the film.4 The final extinction of the Mongolian wolf on the Olonbulag grassland and the desertification of the grassland are precisely the result of some forces that possess the power of boundary-­crossing. These transgressive forces, as I would call them, are quite ubiquitous in the work, and have very complicated relationships with transcending powers. The two concepts “transcendence” and “transgression,” in many ways, are intertwined and may be interchangeable under certain conditions. What is the nature of these trans-­border forces? What impacts do they have both on the environment and on the characters portrayed? In what way do they play a transcending or transgressive role? Further still, what cultural, political, ethic, and aesthetic implications do these forces have in regard to environmental protection and ecological sustainability? To answer these questions, I explore the following three aspects in Wolf Totem: (1) the ethics of practices of boundary-­crossing; (2) cultural-­political symbolizations of nature; and (3) paradoxes of cinematic representation. By examining the ambiguous trans-­ border moves in this novel and its film adaptation, as well as in their production and consumption, I argue, in the transcultural flux that features Wolf Totem as a work of world ecoliterature and ecocinema (which is also symptomatic of many other eco-­productions), transcendence and transgression usually

Transcendence and transgression   143 form a dialectical relationship, which constitutes the cultural-­political complexity in configuring environmental world literature and cinema.

Two types of boundary-­crossing Boundary-­crossing in Wolf Totem both empowers and endangers the characters and the environment, yet with different ethical underpinnings. As Heise sees it, the encounters of the characters of different ethnic, cultural, and political backgrounds will produce a fusion of horizons, a premise of a real ecocritical understanding. But while some characters do gain a more productive vision, others do not, and the story of Wolf Totem eventually ends in an ecological and cultural collapse. How come some of such encounters succeed in achieving an ethically ecological understanding whereas others fail? An exploration of the nature of these encounters will give us a clue. Arguably, the most prominent success, if it is so called, in attaining a transcending horizon lies in the protagonist Chen Zhen’s tragic-­heroic efforts to save Mongolian wolves from extinction. These efforts are best exemplified in his bittersweet experience of raising a wolf cub, which provides him, in a time of political unforgivingness and environmental unawareness, with a rare opportunity to communicate with people of different ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, and political views, and even with different species. As it is commonly agreed, Chen Zhen is an alter ego of the author Jiang Rong (pen name for Lü Jiamin呂嘉民), a scholar of political science and a persecuted political dissenter. The novel is based on Lü’s personal experience in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. Chen Zhen is an “educated youth” from Beijing. At the beginning of the movement of “going and working in the countryside of mountain areas” (上山下鄉), he is sent down to the Olonbulag grassland located in the northeast of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and works as a herder with local people. In the Olonbulag he lives with Bilgee, an elderly experienced herder, and his family. In his apprenticeship with Bilgee, Chen Zhen develops a deep interest in, or even an infatuation with, Mongolian wolves. This infatuation develops from his growing understanding of the critical role that wolves play in keeping the fragile ecological balance of the grassland on the one hand, and, perhaps more importantly, from his belief in the shrewd, aggressive, and unyielding spirit that he sees Mongolian wolves represent. This wolf spirit, Chen Zhen believes, is precisely what the Chinese (read: Han) nation lacks, and is the very cause of the spiritual lapses and national weakness of Han ethnicity. In terms of ecological sensitivity, Chen Zhen’s understanding of the wolf, which is deeply shaped by his Mongol tutor and friends, indeed has a transcending nature. From the very beginning of his “re-­educated” life, Chen Zhen tries very hard to view and understand the grassland and all the living creatures from the perspective of what the Mongols call the “grassland logic,” an alien logic that is marked, among other things, by the conviction of an ecological sustainability. This sense of ecological sustainability is a product of Mongolian wisdom

144   Haomin Gong developed over the generations of their life experience on the grassland. Its fundamental idea is an ultimate respect for the “larger life of the grassland” (草原的大命). This idea, arguably, resonates Aldo Leopold’s (1949) “land ethic.” The grassland perspective that Chen Zhen gains from his Mongol tutors is further reified in the form of the Wolf Totem, which is in sharp contrast with the Dragon Totem that the Han Chinese had long been worshipping (though it was a target of the political radicalism at the time). Chen Zhen wholeheartedly embraces this “other” Mongolian myth and is drastically critical of his own Han culture. He becomes increasingly close to his Mongol spiritual guides: he calls the Old Man Bilgee “Papa,” and comes to regard the Bilgees as his own family. He learns from them how to herd sheep, catch marmots, kill wolves, etc., and, most importantly, develops from this experience what he calls a “wolfology” (狼學), a body of ideas centering on the wolf. Although it is indeed a fetishization, Chen Zhen’s wolfology is nevertheless a holistic view of cosmological order and ecological balance that over-­ambitiously encompasses the entire biological and cultural spheres. Viewed from an ecological sense, wolfology echoes the spirit of the grassland logic, and is a product of a fusion of horizons, with its deep rootedness in an organic understanding of the grassland that the Mongols have developed in their age-­long nomadic experience on the one hand, and a transcultural acuteness and poignancy on the other. However, intriguingly, Wolf Totem also depicts another group of people, who apparently resemble Chen Zhen in that they also have attained—or better still, they are born with—Mongolian-­Han transcultural knowledge, but who turn out to be the very antagonists of Chen Zhen and Bilgee. These sinicized Mongolians have come, or fled, to the Olonbulag from the agrarian Northeast plain. They include Bao Shungui, the Party representative assigned by higher revolutionary institutions to take charge of the Olonbulag communal work unit, and his fellow migrant workers/farmers. They are of Mongolian ethnicity, and thus have inherited nomadic experience from their ancestors; but they have been living in the Han-­dominant Northeast for so long that they are more accustomed to the agrarian than the nomadic lifestyle. Most of them have discarded their Mongol names and use Han names instead; they speak both Mandarin and Mongolian fluently, and, most importantly, they have good knowledge of both nomadic and agrarian cultures. Once they have returned to the Olonbulag, either for the sake of survival or for personal gain, they take full advantage of their knowledge of the geographic and ecological features of the grassland and the habits of animals on the one hand, and the more “advanced” techniques and tricks that they have learned in their agrarian experience on the other. They virtually reshape the grassland—their long-­deserted “home”—in their own “transcultural” way. Arguably, it is precisely because of these people’s “boundary-­ crossing” knowledge and experience that they become the most destructive force to the grassland and wolves. For example, Lao Wang, a representative of the stereotypical migrant workers/farmers, for all his knowledge of Mongolian wolves’ habits, which he

Transcendence and transgression   145 has gained from his Mongolian family, and skills in throwing together weapons and tools and using unfamiliar tactics, which he has obtained from his Han neighbors, usually wreaks the most deadly destruction on the Mongolian wolves. He knows how to outwit the suspicious wolves with his tricks in setting traps, placing poisons, etc. And Dorji, a Mongolian returnee to the Olonbulag who has been living on the grassland for a long time, becomes a “Hero of Wolf Hunting” given credit by the Revolutionary Unit, for having made “good” use of his insider’s knowledge.

Ethics of boundary-­crossing Obviously, the transcultural knowledge that the migrant workers/farmers have only produces transgressive consequences rather than achieving transcending results. How come this shared knowledge brings about two antagonistic outcomes respectively in Chen Zhen and the migrant workers/farmers? Obviously, these migrant workers/farmers have not crossed the boundaries and entered into the realm of the “other” for the sake of understanding the latter. On the contrary, they have entered as invaders, taking advantage of their knowledge of them, only for the sake of exploiting and conquering them. Thus, while Chen Zhen, humble and open-­minded, is able to develop a more sympathetic and all-­ embracing view of the Mongols, the animals, and the grassland, those workers/ farmers are, unfortunately, not. Beneath their contrasting views, however, are two clashing mindsets regarding nature. What those migrant workers/farmers represent, arguably, is an instrumentalist mindset that sees nature in a sheerly pragmatic way. What nature means to them is simply a resource that they can make use of; the value of nature rests exclusively on its utility. In contrast, Chen Zhen and his Mongol tutors view nature with highly complex feelings, a mixture of religious piety, pristine mysticism, universalist compassion, and sometimes macho heroism. If the migrant workers/farmers’ instrumentalist view is characterized by a Darwinian linearity combined with a survivalist nowism, Chen Zhen’s view, it can be argued, is basically cyclical, nurtured by the land-­ rooted and time-­ honored wisdom he has learned from the Mongols. The Mongols have developed this wisdom in their long, lived experience on the grassland. They pass it down from generation to generation, not according to short-­term interests, and attaching themselves intimately to the specificity of the grassland. Chen Zhen, as an outsider granted a transcultural acuteness, is more keenly aware of, after being initially shocked by, this wisdom. He then subjects himself wholeheartedly to it. Those migrant workers/farmers, conversely, are largely immune to this wisdom, though ironically armed with a transcultural knowledge of it. They are what the Mongols call “vags” (盲流), who have fled to the Olonbulag after their destructive farming and hunting had desertified their grasslands-­turned-­farmlands in the Northeast plain. Homeless, they come to other grasslands to “cultivate”—that is, to exploit and destroy—them. Arguably, the devastation they bring about is due mainly to their migration, physical and

146   Haomin Gong spiritual. As they have not shown any cherishing impulses towards their own homeland, how could one expect them to develop any respect for a new land? Not surprisingly, these migrant workers/farmers do not have the slightest concern for the long-­term welfare of the Olonbulag. Instead, what they are only interested in is short-­term gains, even if they have to, and actually do, exploit the grassland to the utmost. As Lao Wang shamelessly, yet not without a sense of poignancy, says to Chen Zhen when found, to the astonishment of Chen Zhen and Bilgee, annihilating an entire population of marmots from their settlement for generations, Didn’t you people call us migrants? Migrants, migrants, mindless immigrants. What do we care about next year? We go where there’s food and never worry about the year after that. You have plenty of concern for marmots, but who cares about us migrants? (Jiang Rong 2008, 480) Here, we may find, place-­wise, these migrant workers/farmers dislodge themselves from the attachment to any specific land, chasing profits wherever available; while, time-­wise, they limit their view to the immediate now, caring only about instantaneous gains. Their sense of uprooted spatiality, it can be argued, inevitably leads to the sense of fragmented temporality. This explains their destructive “cultivation” of the grassland, and, more unfortunately, foreshadows Mongols’ equally devastating fenced and contracted herding years later. Just as what the migrant workers/farmers do during the Cultural Revolution is shaped by the political fanaticism in those days, what the Mongols are up to 30 years later is as much driven by the equally frenetic marketization of the post-­New Era. Hence, Wolf Totem demonstrates at least two levels of socio-­cultural interventions: first, in terms of ecological engagement, we see two contrasting views contesting for the dominant power to shape the ecological scene of the Olonbulag. Intriguingly, both views are transcultural, but they have antithetical ethical ramifications and cause very different physical consequences. Therefore, transcultural horizons, if both can be thus called, can be ethical—blessed with sympathy, understanding, compassion, etc.—and thus be transcending; but they can also be simply technical—that is, instrumentalist, short-­sighted, profit-­ oriented, etc.—and inevitably lead to transgressive and thus devastating consequences. Second, the work, particularly the novel form, also exhibits a manifest institutional concern. The migrant workers’/farmers’ groan “who cares about us migrants?” is not so much to exonerate the violence that they have exerted on the grassland, as to implicitly make the current social condition and political system accountable for their deeds. This institutional criticism makes a part of, or grows into, an overall social, cultural, and political criticism of China, symbolically epitomized in the imaginary dragon, as the very opposite of the equally sanctified wolf. And this overall criticism, controversially, constitutes the chunk of the

Transcendence and transgression   147 book’s meaning. That is to say, the work’s social-­political-­cultural concern, to a large extent, overshadows its ecological concern; yet on the other hand, the former is also grounded in the latter. Without ecological validity woven into its nationalist narrative, the work’s social-­political-­cultural criticism arguably could hardly be justified. This paradoxical relationship between the two levels constitutes another dimension of the tension between the transcending and the transgressive. This will be addressed in what follows.

Hybridity, science, and love Chen Zhen is not entirely innocent. Not entirely unlike his opponents, he is also subject to transgressive moves. Chen Zhen’s transcultural horizon owes much to a trans-­species experiment, that is, raising a wolf cub. This experiment constitutes the main story of both the novel and the film, from which much of the tragedy emerges. With loaded implications, this experiment is as thought-­provoking as it is controversial and, arguably, is as transcending as it is transgressive. The tension lying beneath it points to the central inquiry of this section: how does one’s love of nature and, with this transcending love, his attempt to sincerely scientifically understand nature, end up with a transgressive result? A careful scrutiny of Chen Zhen’s experiment provides some ideas. Chen Zhen has been wanting to raise a cub since very early in the story when his curiosity about the Mongolian wolf is excited by Bilgee’s introduction. With his interest in the wolf increasing every day, his eagerness to own a wolf cub in order to study it grows accordingly. His dream is finally realized when he and his friend Yang Ke, under Bilgee’s instruction and with the help of Dorji, succeed in stealing a brood of cubs from a she-­wolf one spring. He keeps the strongest one to raise. From the time when he first obtains the cub in early spring, to the time when he has to separate from him later that fall—he kills him in the novel and releases him to the wild grassland in the film—Chen Zhen experiences almost all the beauty and hardship that the grassland can provide for the better part of a year, as well as almost all the important things that can take place in a wolf’s lifespan. Admittedly, Chen Zhen’s trans-­species experience/experiment has invigorated his development of transcultural horizons. Just as his communication with the Mongols has brought him the insights that he could not have otherwise obtained by staying within his own Han community, his interactions with the wolves—ideally, more intimate than those of the Mongols’—will provide him with the understanding that no other, including the Mongols, has ever achieved, he hopes. Chen Zhen’s dream with the wolf is projected onto, or reified in, two other images, both playing intriguing roles: wolf children and the wolf-­dog Erlang. Wolf children are legendary creatures, who are hybridized by wolves and humans or who, born human beings, are raised by wolf mothers and thus grow into half-­human, half-­wolf beings. Owing largely to their trans-­species features,

148   Haomin Gong wolf children are physically able and are said to have thus accomplished many extraordinary feats—at least it is thus inscribed in many mythical-­historical records, such as Records of the Grand Historian (史記) and History of Zhou (周書), from which Jiang Rong cites quite amply and highlights in the epigraphs of chapters.5 Moreover, these wolf children also signify a trans-­species bond— though perhaps only an imaginary one—that is rapidly losing its ground in modern days. Not seeing a mother wolf raising a wolf child, Chen Zhen, to everyone’s surprise, attempts to make up for it by doing the very opposite—to become a human father of a wolf cub. In this process, however, instead of modeling his cub wolf into the image of a human being, Chen Zhen tries everything possible to maintain the cub’s nature as a wild wolf and virtually turns himself into a “wolf father.” He envisions his cub growing into a real Mongolian wolf warrior, one that will one day bring his own family in the wilderness back to visit his human father. Too idealistic to be realized though, this dream nevertheless bespeaks Chen Zhen’s innocent intention to re-­establish the animal-­human, or the nature-­culture, bond. If the above-­mentioned records of wolf children are more mythical than historical, and wolf children remain as imaginary as they are legendary, the real hybrid creature, Erlang, gives the reader something of the hang of the trans-­species power that Chen Zhen admires.6 Mysterious in its origin, this wolf-­dog comes into Chen Zhen’s life out of coincidence. It wanders around in the grassland without a stable human host and runs into Chen Zhen, who, out of curiosity, takes it as one of his guard dogs. What intrigues Chen Zhen is this wolf-­dog’s mysteriously unique nature: it is widely known as the most ferocious dog on the grassland; but beneath its ferocity, more importantly, there is a sense of unbending independence that distinguishes it from other dogs. Unlike any other dog, it never begs favor from its human host—it never seems to want to have a human host, in fact. It takes Chen Zhen as its human host— perhaps only a nominal and expedient one—simply because any dog living on the grassland needs to have one; an independent dog is never an option. Its relationship with Chen Zhen, arguably, is more like self-­reliant yet collaborating friends than that of a human host and a wolf guard. Further, Erlang fights wolves most ferociously, but he does this not so much out of hatred as out of respect for his opponents, which reminds Chen Zhen of the Mongol’s seemingly self-­contradictory attitudes towards wolves. Chen Zhen thus suspects, and it is quite explicitly hinted in the book, that Erlang is perhaps a hybrid wolf-­hound or a hound-­wolf. It possesses the natures of both a dog and a wolf: while it demonstrates a superior ability to both protect herds and kill wolves, it also shows an insuppressible desire to eat sheep and an innate longing for the free lifestyle that Mongolian wolves much cherish. To a great degree, Erlang is, in effect, a wolf contained, or constrained, in a dog’s body. And it is precisely this quality of hybridity and sense of unfulfilled desire, it can be argued, that grant Erlang an undomesticated savagery, an unrivaled fighting ability, and, more importantly, an admirably independent personality. It is perhaps also because of this unique nature that Erlang becomes the one who

Transcendence and transgression   149 is the most intimate with the wolf cub, who, though in a different situation, is similarly growing on the border of two species and harboring an insuppressible power that is to be enacted. However, neither the cub nor Erlang seems to end up well. Erlang, though proving to be the most ferocious of all the guard dogs in numerous battles against wolves, is at the same time the least desirable one on the grassland, due precisely to its non-­doggishness. Throughout its life it has always been marginalized, which, however, it does not seem to care about. It is also implied that Erlang is infertile because of its hybrid birth. Its death (it perhaps dies at the gunpoint of a Han migrant when it becomes a stray dog again at the end of the story), just like its birth, remains a mystery and becomes a haunting myth on the grassland. The cub in the novel also dies, although tragic-­heroically. Chen Zhen kills it in the end when the cub is on the brink of losing both its life and dignity. Both act like real Mongolian warriors in this highly heightened moment of killing— Chen Zhen offering the utmost respect to the cub and the cub retaining its most respected dignity. The film has a different ending—Chen Zhen releases the grown-­up cub to its natural home, the wild grassland, apparently a more positive ending with his dream fulfilled. However, Chen Zhen letting the cub go is not so much a willing choice as it is out of despair—should he not have done so, the cub would most possibly end up being another unworthy victim of the notorious tricks and cold technologies of humans. The slim hopefulness of this end is much overshadowed by a sense of helplessness. Although both endings, happy or sad, are prominently sublimated in their own stylized narratives, they are nevertheless equally symbolic of the ecological degradation and cultural degeneration that are the shared themes of both versions. How come these two creatures, who are so intriguingly empowered by their own hybrid natures, come to such tragic ends? What role does Chen Zhen, the human who is most intimate to them, who most appreciates their uniqueness, and who is most closely involved in their entangled lives, play in their lamentable lives? More importantly, how does Chen Zhen’s projection of his ideal onto and perceived identification with the two creatures constitute their paradoxical fates? Admittedly, Chen Zhen raising the wolf cub, whimsical as it appears in the eyes of the Mongols, grows out of his sincere affection for wolves. This love is further buttressed and yet complicated by the “scientific” spirit imbued in his “study” of wolves. His “experiment” of raising a cub is meant to observe a Mongolian wolf under his nose, a deed, according to him, that no one else has ever accomplished before.7 This experiment, in his view, is critical in saving the endangered species; for the extinction of wolves inevitably leads to the perceivable consequence of the desertification of the grassland and the destruction of the entire ecosystem of the area. All of the “studies” that he has done to the cub, and all of his lived experiences with the cub, are for the sake of gaining first-­ hand scientific knowledge and trans-­species understanding of wolves; and this knowledge and understanding, unlike that obtained by his migrant opponents,

150  Haomin Gong grows out of a deep affection both for the animal and the grassland, and are for the purpose of maintaining the harmonious way of life that he treasures the most from being eliminated. It is precisely his love and earnestness that earn him a bare consent from the furious Bilgee to his experiment. It is can thus be argued that his love triggers and also ethically justifies his scientific exploration; in return, his scientific exploration justifies his affection by providing it with a rational validity. Together, this ethical justification and scientific validity seem to have legitimized, at least Chen Zhen believes, his crossing of the boundaries and intervening in the world of wolves, as well as all the consequences that follow. It indeed has consequences. The tragic end of the cub, the most traumatic of them, questions, if not de-­legitimizes, Chen Zhen’s good intentions. Karen Laura Thornber in her voluminous book, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures, discusses this paradox between good intentions and sad consequences in human interaction with nature. In Wolf Totem, in particular, she finds this paradox especially poignant.8 In what she calls the “green paradox,” Thornber (2012, 380) finds that “[o]ne of the oddities of people’s interactions with their surroundings is that individuals who love, respect, or show fascination with nature often contribute, deliberately or inadvertently, to damaging or destroying it.” More direly, she continues to write, “damage to landscapes is even harder to prevent and remediate because people’s basic sympathy towards the nonhuman regularly accompanies behaviors that unleash (un)expected harm” (Thornber 2012, 380). She feels rather pessimistic, noting “many literary works argue that little prevents well-­meaning individuals and proclaimed environmentalists from acting in ways that harm ecosystems” (Thornber 2012, 381). Thornber sees that one thing that most significantly constitutes this paradox is the conflict between admiring and respectful attitudes towards nature on the one hand, and behaviors harmful to the nonhuman world on the other. In Chen Zhen’s case, he loves the cub wholeheartedly, but it is precisely this loving attitude, Thornber argues, that generates the behaviors that unexpectedly (though naturally) cause damage to the very object of his love. What lies behind this conflict, I would further add, are some more significant and innate contradictions embedded in Chen Zhen’s apparently transcending attitudes to the wolf and the grassland. First of all, Chen Zhen’s transcultural and trans-­species attitude, which underpins his experiment, is inherently at odds with the socially (as well as biologically) conservative grassland life, which, paradoxically, constitutes the very ideal that his experiment aims to arrive at. This experiment of raising a wild wolf cub in a domesticated herd not only causes numerous practical problems to the everyday life and production of the entire community, but, more importantly, contradicts the very fundamental way of life of the grassland, a way of life that is markedly characterized by a stability in which things are clearly positioned and classified. This organic way of life is a product of the Mongols’ traditional and mythical wisdom accumulated over the generations; any act of repositioning or border-­crossing will be transgressive and cause disorder.

Transcendence and transgression  151 Therefore, once Chen Zhen puts the cub in his herd, the relationships between all parties, including the natural environment, animals, and human beings, begin to degenerate in an undesirable way. In all, what Chen Zhen does here— attempting to grasp the self-­sustained and change-­resistant way of life on the grassland through a rather intrusive and transformative deed in the name of love and science—is self-­contradictory and paradoxical, if not ironic. Second, Chen Zhen’s attitude towards the Mongolian wolf is problematic in itself, and particularly so when confronted with the Mongols’ view of the wolf. Admittedly, no one ever doubts Chen Zhen’s deep and sincere affection for the wolf; he “literally loves an animal to death,” as Thornber (2012, 386) puts it. However, his love is always so intense that it oftentimes turns into overindulgence. But the Mongols do not see the wolf that way. Their attachment to the wolf is no less tight, but it is never one of emotional intimacy, nor does it ever lapse into one of sentimentality. They revere the wolf for its role as the ultimate arbitrator of the ecological balance of the grassland, and deify it thereof as the primary intermediary between humans and Tengger, their heaven. These two roles of the wolf are interwoven, both leading back to the Mongols’ belief in the spirituality and sanctity of the ecological balance as a part of the heaven’s all-­ encompassing decree over the entire universe. In other words, in the Mongols’ view the ecological and physical sphere that they live in is an integral part of the larger cosmological and spiritual sphere that governs all. Thus, the ritualistic sky burial to be conducted by the Mongolian wolf is regarded simultaneously—in an ecological sense—as returning human flesh back to nature, and—in a spiritual sense—as bringing the souls of the deceased up to the heaven. However, at the same time, Mongols also kill wolves, and this is also done based on their belief in the aforementioned dual roles that the wolf plays— maintaining ecological balance and connecting humans and the heavens. When Chen Zhen asks why they kill wolves while revering them, Bilgee explains thus: if there are too many wolves, then they become demons, not deities any more, and they should be killed (Jiang Rong 2008, 123). Here, in Mongols’ view, the wolf’s divine character depends on its part in maintaining the ecological balance of a system, and, by extension, the social and spiritual. In addition, the Mongols simultaneously fighting against wolves and worshipping them, which Thornber (2012, 386) views as owing simply to the “disparities in wolf behavior,” also can be seen as exemplifying a primitive dialectic of the Mongols, one that derives somatically from their understanding of ecological balance. This dialectic further translates into a dialectical relationship between the Mongols and wolves, a relationship that is characterized by a tragic-­heroic respect between perennial friends and opponents simultaneously. This tragic-­heroic respect constitutes an important part of the Mongols’ markedly masculine wolf totemism. Compared with the Mongols’ view, however, Chen Zhen’s is full of contradictions. To begin with, raising a deified, wild wolf cub in custody, chaining it along with “feces-­eating” dogs, no matter how justifiable or noble his intention is, is nothing but blasphemous, as Bilgee furiously tells him. Although Chen Zhen weepingly defends his acts as one of respect and reverence—he treats the

152  Haomin Gong little cub as if he were tending a Mongol king or prince—and his words make the old man almost at a loss to judge whether Chen Zhen’s attitude is also a respect for the wolf as a Mongolian deity. Yet, his respect, if it is thus called, is in no way similar to that of the Mongols’. If the Mongols’ respect for the wolf is marked by an assertion of the dignity of both parties, Chen Zhen’s is, on the other hand, simply self-­denying and self-­degrading. As he says, “I’m not treating this wolf cub like a slave. If anything, I’ve become its slave” (Jiang Rong 2008, 271). As it is, Chen Zhen’s wolf totemism, from the very beginning, is plagued by a moral dilemma, which inevitably results in things going awry one after another. Even when Chen Zhen agrees to make up for the situation that is falling apart by sending the cub back to the wild, his implementation is constantly deferred by his excessive attachment. Thus, Chen Zhen’s respect for the wolf, a respect that grows out of an excessive affection, can be as devastating as indifference to, or hatred of, nature. It is in this sense that we can better understand Thornber’s (2012, 548 n66) remark that Wolf Totem demonstrates “just how easy it is to be seduced by narratives of human respect for the nonhuman. The novel reveals how such narratives can camouflage destruction far greater than the actual destruction being condemned.” This largely explains why Chen Zhen’s transcending ideal unfortunately leads to transgressive aftermaths. Or, perhaps, his ideal is not as transcending as it seems to be, at least in his relationship with the wolf. Chen Zhen’s trans-­ species move is more “wolfish,” as I would put it, than transcending because, rather than achieving a really border-­crossing understanding and communication (the Mongols have not done so), Chen Zhen subjects himself almost entirely to the wolf, so much as that the wolf has virtually eclipsed all the others in Chen Zhen’s increasingly obsessive world. In effect, along the course of the story, Chen Zhen has been painstakingly protecting the wolfishness of the cub (as well as the grassland). His fleeting whim of breeding wolfhounds, as a pretended excuse for raising the cub, never materializes. Contrarily, he quite paradoxically takes pains to manually train the cub to maintain its wild nature in a custodial environment. In addition, Erlang’s rather detached intimacy with the cub is “wolfish” too—Erlang shows interest in the cub because it is—unlike others around them or his hybrid self—simply a wolf. (Erlang’s hybridity is rather ambivalent here, as while he is empowered by it, he also seems freakish and demonish because of it.) In all, there seems to be an invisible divide between cultural liberalism and biological conservatism in Chen Zhen’s border-­crossing efforts. He transcends different views and perspectives in order to achieve a fusion of horizons, only to result in the transgressive consequences of messing up ecological borders. Hybrid visions with the support of scientificism, paradoxically, only discover the significance of the protection of the purity of nature. In other words, while the longing for a cultural hybridity is confronted by a demand for preserving biological purity, the synthesis of visions inevitably comes with an ethical dilemma. This dilemma alerts us to some crucial questions that Wolf Totem raises: perhaps the ecosystem as an object of human visions that value a fusion, has a different

Transcendence and transgression   153 urge for keeping the borders of its constituents stable and intact, and resisting such a fusion? Perhaps the idea of trans-­border hybridity that a constructive understanding of the ecosystem entails does not readily apply to the ecosystem, whose institution is decidedly cautious of radical hybridization? Or perhaps it is people’s overconfidence in “transcending” ideals, whose concern for nature is so justifiably earnest that it in effect overlooks nature’s real nature, that ironically it causes transgressive consequences? If this is so, does such transcendence risk falling into just that anthropocentrism that it has taken such pains to overcome and dispel?

In the name of nature Wolf Totem is a work that shows a strong sense of assertion of its distinctive narrative of the transcending idea of “wolf totemism.” This idea that the author’s alter-­ego Chen Zhen so proudly develops is, on the one hand, laudably rooted in his lived experience with wolves, but, on the other, more prominently abstracts this lived experience, so much so that the work’s ecological dimension is largely overshadowed, and the work appears more like a political and nationalist tract than an ecological engagement. As the Shanghai-­based scholar Chen Hong (2016, 767) concludes her observation, “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.’ ” While many people share this view, it is at the same time hard to dismiss the work’s ecological underpinning, because its political valence, if it is so called, is precisely based on and justified by its ecological concern, from which, however, it also gradually yet irretrievably departs. This paradox signals a central problem of Wolf Totem, as well as a growing number of many other ecological works (“ecological” in quotation marks or not)—that is, what Marshall Sahlins (1976, 105) calls “the naturalization of culture and the culturalization of nature.” In many such works, nature is either “naturally” privileged so that it is used as a legitimizer of other “relevant” issues, or co-­opted into some “grander” issues, be they political, social, cultural, economic, regarding class, gender, ethnicity, ethics, etc. As such, real ecological concerns are sidestepped and nature is hollowed out, and much of the cultural power that it is meant to transcend is taken advantage of in the name of nature and, thus, turns inevitably transgressive. This culturalization happens in the hands of both destroyers and lovers of nature. In Wolf Totem, the naturalization of culture and the culturalization of nature take place mainly in the forms of politicization, romanticization, mystification, and moralization of nature. First and most conspicuous in the work is the ubiquitous politicization of nature, not surprisingly most zealously conducted by the Party representative, Bao Shungui. Bao’s view concerning nature stereotypically exemplifies that of the Socialist orthodoxy during the time, that is, in short, “Man Must Conquer Nature” (人定胜天). For Bao, everything is primarily and essentially political, and it is this political mandate that guides his treatment of

154   Haomin Gong things and people on the grassland. He takes as his foremost political responsibility changing the existing environment of the grassland, rendering it more productive so that it meets the increasing demand of the growing population in China. This political responsibility is critical for him as well as the entire revolutionary commune because, in his opinion, the success of its implementation is all about the survival and prosperity of the newly established Socialist Regime, and thus it ultimately signals a political struggle between the two political routes of socialism and capitalism. Therefore, wolves who are seen to threaten and harm the laboring on the grassland (which is essentially socialist) are labeled as class enemies, and Bilgee and other elder herders who defend wolves on an ecological base are deemed politically incorrect. When Chen Zhen first takes the wolf cub, one of his major concerns is the possible accusation of him raising a “political enemy.” Bao, partly out of curiosity and partly craving for personal gain, relieves Chen Zhen by justifying his deed as (quoting Mao) one of “study[ing] the enemy in order to defeat the enemy” (Jiang Rong 2008, 276). In politicizing nature, one of the most vehement confrontations occurs when Bao Shungui hunts swans for food. In this instance, the commune goes to explore a new grassland under the pressure of increasing outputs. As they step into the grassland, Bao finds a flock of swans swimming unalerted in a lake and, against all opposition, he kills one and cooks it, partly to satiate his appetite and partly to displace his frustration with wolves. The Mongols disapprove of what he has done, as they take the swan as their sacred bird; yet the fiercest protest comes from another educated youth, Yang Ke. In Yang’s eyes, the swan is one of the most elegant and noblest creatures, and Bao killing it like a “common chicken,” giving it a most unheroic and worthless death, is simply an insult to civilization. Yang had tried to dissuade Bao from killing, most notably with the example of Tchaikovsky’s classical ballet Swan Lake, but Bao responds unashamedly that he cares nothing about Yang’s “capitalist hogwash,” and says “we can’t stage The Red Detachment of Women till we drive Swan Lake off the stage” (Jiang Rong 2008, 281). While this typically political remark of Bao’s is dismissible, Yang’s romantic attachment to the swan is equally debatable. Yang Ke is a fervent lover of the arts. He is almost immediately mesmerized by the breathholding beauty of the new grassland with a virgin swan lake, although this grassland, not unlike any other, has many unfavorable conditions to be overcome, and killing and bloodshed also take place on it every day. Romantic that he is, Yang chooses to overlook the unromantic side of the reality and stay in his imagined world of the dreamland. While Bao the pragmatist only sees the physical value of the animal, Yang on the other hand only has its aesthetic value on his mind. While Bao unsurprisingly politicizes the animal, following Yang’s romantic reasoning, as a product of Soviet Revisionism, Yang aestheticizes it for its universal beauty, totally disregarding political lines. No wonder when Yang hears the heartbreaking cries of the swan and the wolf lamenting the loss of their murdered mates, he is so saddened and compares the cries, again, to another Tchaikovsky’s work, Pathétique (Jiang Rong 2004, 187).9

Transcendence and transgression  155 It should be noted that Yang’s excessive affection for the swan is very similar to Chen Zhen’s for the wolf. In Yang’s romantic imagination of the swan, he naturally links the doomed swan with the wolf, and further thinks the wolf’s “imminent defeat would be the first sign of the grassland’s defeat.” Ecologically extensive this thought seems to be, it nevertheless finally comes down to the cultural and aesthetic ground of “man’s concept of beauty” that is to be defeated as the result (Jiang Rong 2008, 291). Further, whereas the wolf’s ecological significance, on which the culturalization of it is based, is self-­explanatory, that of the swan is much less clearly stated. Other than its much hyped nobility, the reader is not sufficiently informed of its function on the grassland, although we share with the work the idea that everything has its due position in an ecosystem. This invisibility results in hollowing out the ecological dimension and evading real ecological issues at stake. Similarly, the mystification of nature may equally debilitate an authentically ecological engagement. For instance, the sage-­like figure Bilgee, portrayed as the ultimate guardian of the grassland, represents a philosophy that is as ecological as it is mystical. His understanding of the ecological salience of the grassland ecosystem as well as its fragility is largely based on his mystical wisdom regarding the wolf. Inspirational though this wisdom is, it is essentially at odds with a truly ecological view that would emphasize positionality, balance, and equality—every creature on the grassland as an indispensable part of the ecosystem; and each one bearing with it its own intrinsic value (as against the exchange value that is based on its usefulness to humans). Mystification of the wolf not only exhibits an excessive and undue respect, but also comes with a disparagement of other animals—for instance, the Mongols view the sheep as the lowest and silliest creature, although, ironically, they rely on it for their living. This exchange value-­oriented hierarchy is in fact a product of an anthropocentrism that a true ecocriticism means to overcome. Finally, moralization of nature, which is most exquisitely exemplified in Chen Zhen’s construction and praxis of his theory of wolfology, constitutes a large chunk of Wolf Totem’s narrative and its socio-­cultural significance. What Chen Zhen does in the story is mostly to test his ideas and, more importantly, abstract his concrete experiment into an overarching theory that is more about the grand Chinese culture than about his starting point of ecology. The wolf here is likewise more an abstract and allegorized concept than a specific species. Chen Zhen’s obsession with his wolflogy and the ideological partiality of this theory have invited a great many criticisms. It is worth quoting two of them at some length. First, Howard Y. Choy (2009) in his review of Wolf Totem: [The] Chinese critic Li Jianjun has pointed out that Wolf Totem is a product of an age of evacuated values and cultural crisis, with humanism in retreat and science at the forefront, and in which the law of the market has become a new ideology, or rather, a new form of the Marxist-­Maoist philosophy of struggle. Indeed, Jiang Rong’s extremism echoes Stalin’s social Darwinist

156   Haomin Gong 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.” In the wolf’s worldview, one either hunts or is hunted. Eulogizing European imperialism and Japanese militarism, Jiang Rong’s radicalism reveals ironically his misunderstanding of democracy as mobocracy. His cruel fantasy of territorialization through terrorization has been labeled by Chinese and Western critics alike as “fascism.” If “crypto-­fascist” still sounds too harsh, it is at least fair to contextualize Wolf Totem in the dominant discourse of new nationalism that searches for national pride and power.10 The piece of Li Jianjun’s that Choy refers to, Criticisms of Wolf Totem, is one of the most vehement criticisms of the novel in Chinese. Although it may have fallen into the same radicalism it denounces, Li’s work nevertheless alerts the reader to some of the important ideological controversies embedded in the novel. Besides the socio-­political problems emphasized here, Choy continues in his review to point out how nature is used, or displaced, by other issues—most notably, gender and ethnicity. Choy’s insight is further supported by Haiyan Lee (2014, 103), who, resorting to the influential studies of Marshall Sahlins and Claude Lévi-­Strauss, thus traces the ideological underpinnings of Chen Zhen’s wolfology: The expurgated parts expound a theory of “wolfology” that combines a behavioral study of wolves with ideas derived from Victorian ethnology and the Hegelian philosophy of history. Above all, it proceeds from the “folk dialectic” of culture and nature famously skewered by Marshall Sahlins in the 1970s debate on sociobiology, a discipline dedicated to the search for the prototypes of human behaviors in the innate repertoire of other animal species. In Sahlins’s view, Western societies have long been in the habit of projecting the categories and values of a historically specific culture onto nature (especially animals) and then using the culturally inscribed nature to naturalize and legitimate culture. Wolf Totem, Lee adds, inscribes onto the wolves and the Mongols, Social Darwinism—a typical product of the culturalization of nature. More interestingly, Lee further compares Wolf Totem with River Elerge (河殇), a highly popular and controversial TV documentary series broadcast in 1988. Both works, although 16 years apart, take on the traditional Chinese culture symbolized by the Dragon Totem, and propose to infuse into its moribund vein the rejuvenating blood of exotic cultures. This similarity between the two works generates a sense of déjà vu. In a way, the huge popularity that Wolf Totem garnered immediately after its publication in 2004 harkens back to the 1980s, when fervent discussions of ideals of enlightenment, such as freedom, democracy, nationalism, and many other things, marked this

Transcendence and transgression  157 decade of “high culture fever.” It seems anachronistic that those discussions, products of an age of idealism, could still reverberate so strongly in the hearts of so many readers more than a decade later. Perhaps, besides the “evacuated values and cultural crisis” (Li Jianjun in Choy 2009) that resonated with contemporary intellectuals, and the “bold reinvention” of an developmental discourse that continued to structure Chinese historiography (Lee 2014, 101), the ecological discourse, in which the narrative of Wolf Totem is so ingeniously repackaged, also contributes to the work’s popularity. By the 2000s, the ecological discourse has already gained much authorial endorsement and become a mainstream expression. Writing/veiling a nationalist story in the form of ecological elegy catches the attention of an enormously broad readership. It would not be an overstatement to claim that it is largely in the name of nature that the author has intriguingly popularized and legitimized his socio-­political messages—a trick that is apparently transcending, yet ultimately transgressive indeed.

Universalizing the ecological Arguably, the film (2015) differs from the original novel most prominently in its singular focus on the ecological theme, discarding almost entirely the notoriously cultural–political subtext. This is not simply a matter of personal choice on the part of the filmmaker, but instead it owes much to the complex mechanisms of film adaptation, transnational production, global distribution, etc. With the nationalist cultural–political moralizing gone and the “universal” ecological engagement in the limelight, the film seems to be exempt from the controversial transgressions laid out above, and thus empowered by a transcending vision obtained in the process of international communication, collaboration, and exchanges. Is this true? Indeed, the film is a typical product of transnational filmmaking, which is becoming increasingly notable in contemporary Chinese cinema. It is a co-­ production of China Film Corporation Limited, Beijing Forbidden City Film Corporation, and Reperage in France. The director Jean-­Jacques Annaud, an internationally renowned figure, is a French national. Other French crew members include the cinematographer Jean-­Marie Dreujour and the editor Reynard Bertrand. The music score was composed by James Horner, an acclaimed American composer. The wolves used in performance were trained by the Canada-­based training team led by the Scottish animal trainer Andrew Simpson. In addition, upon the author Jiang Rong’s request and insistence, all ethnic roles were played by ethnic actors, including the female lead, the Mongolian actress Ankhnyam Ragchaa, who played Gasma. This international team, it seems, has collaborated quite harmoniously and warmly towards the final success of the film. Their collaboration was a process of exchanges, and sometimes confrontations, of ideas. In their interviews, many talked about how they managed to cooperate with their colleagues from different cultural backgrounds (Wang 2015). For instance, the

158   Haomin Gong male lead Feng Shaofeng (who plays Chen Zhen) mentioned how he was at first embarrassed by Annaud’s ways of expressing friendship and intimacy— embraces and cheek-­kissings, but he later accepted Annaud’s Western ways and adopted them himself. Moreover, as they were aware, it was through such cross-­cultural exchanges that they gained a better understanding both of themselves and others. Ankhnyam said that for her, others’ (Chinese and French) views of the Mongolian culture would provide the Mongols with something that the latter would normally take for granted. When explaining why he had accepted the task of directing Wolf Totem, Annaud noted the importance of encountering a different civilization, telling his own life-­ changing experience of teaching cinema in Cameroon approximately in the same years when the story of Wolf Totem was taking place. All of these, in a way, serve as extra-­diegetic exemplifications of the “fusion of horizons” that the film, as well as the novel, is said to promote. Or, it can be argued that, with its international production, the film has added an additional trans-­ cultural dimension to the original story, which, hopefully, enhances the transcending power of the diegesis. This transnational character of the film, I would argue, does not simply bring about (ideally) a fusion of horizons, but, more intriguingly, has shaped the film’s portrayal of the ecological theme. It is interesting to note that all of the interviewees almost univocally emphasized how the ideas of protecting the environment and revering nature, which they believed so marked the film, had in one way or another captivated them and changed their outlooks;11 yet, at the same time, everyone seemed to, consciously or not, shy away from the political messages, which had decidedly characterized the original novel. It seems that ecological engagement bears such a universal character that it is capable of summoning people of different cultural backgrounds under its banner. The wolf trainer Simpson’s words speak loud about this view—in his opinion, the way that the Mongols think about the wolf and, by extension, their culture and religion, are similar to those of North Americans. Debatable as this opinion may be, it nonetheless describes the mentality of this international team. For a team that is as culturally heterogeneous as Wolf Totem’s crew, perhaps only a “universal” idea—environmental protection in this case—can serve as a common denominator to be shared by all. Political assertion, particularly a controversial one such as the theory of wolfology, on the other hand, can be ideologically problematic and transgressive, and practically too troublesome for a project that is specifically oriented to the global market. Here, the ecological is in effect taken as a universal currency—politically correct, ideologically safe, fashionable, and marketable, whereas the political, for the same reason as why the ecological is so featured in the film, has to be so watered down as to an almost entirely disappear.12 However, the supposedly universal language of environmental protection does not, in fact, seem entirely universal, whereas the specter of the supposedly discarded, “non-­universal” political narrative somehow still haunts the filmmaking. While everyone in the crew talks about environmental protection and

Transcendence and transgression  159 ecological balance, what he or she in effect does is no much more than reiterate Jiang Rong’s view of how important the wolf is to the grassland, and how the Mongolian lifestyle and beliefs are shaped by the wolf, etc. For instance, Annaud specifically interprets Chen Zhen as a person who sees that the “Mongol culture is duplicated from the society of the wolf;” and Simpson more bluntly remarks that Mongolian “cultural and spiritual life is associated with the wolf.” These statements simply repeat the debatable argument that Chen Zhen/Jiang Rong’s controversial cultural–political preaching is well-­grounded, which renders the “transcending” power doubtful. More intriguingly, the production of the film per se further complicates the politics of the film. Choosing Annaud as the director is indeed a tricky issue. Although Annaud had been on the producers’ radar owing to his well-­known success in working with animals, he was actually not their first choice, mainly due to his 1997 film Seven Years in Tibet. This film gives a sympathetic portrayal of the Dalai Lama, casts the sister of the Dalai Lama in it, and depicts the People’s Liberation Army in their invasion of Tibet in 1950, all of which the Chinese authorities took issue with. The film was thus banned in China, and Annaud himself was also banned from entering China at the time. Annaud remained ambiguous about his apology, although he managed to have his personal ban lifted later. Given this history, picking Annaud surprised many people. It is also surprising that the Chinese authorities gave the full green light to his production, without cutting any part. Added to this, one should also be reminded of the fact that the authorities once also raised an eyebrow over Jiang Rong’s novel, even though they later turned a blind eye to it. Perhaps under these conditions it would only have been wise for Annaud and his team to shift their focus to the safety of the innocuous theme of environmental protection, and carefully avoid the political dimension. This intriguing politics of depoliticization, however, only calls to mind the facts that the apparently innocent process of universalization of the ecological is achieved through a tactical circumvention of the political, and the ideal of a fusion of horizons regarding understanding ecological balance via exchanges of views glosses over political ambivalences that can be as transgressive as the ideal is transcending.

Representing the unrepresentable One factor by which this “film of spectacle”—which I believe it can rightfully be called—attracts an audience is the stunning representation of wild wolves on screen, a formidable task for sure. This ability to represent the unrepresentable is arguably one of the most prominent features that characterize animal films. This is especially so with Wolf Totem, in that the film, in effect, is capturing—in both physical and metaphorical senses—wolves, yet ironically, in a story that is fundamentally about the impossibility of capturing/domesticating them. As such, it can be argued that the production of this film, in a way, duplicates Chen Zhen’s moral dilemma in raising the wolf cub, and thus reveals an ambivalent ethics in the human representation of nature.

160   Haomin Gong This ambivalent ethics comes inevitably with the active production of the film. To have a most authentic representation of wolves, an admirable ideal as well as a good selling point, the producers decided to use real Mongolian wolves for shooting. They acquired, from different zoos in China, a pack consisting of 17 wolves, and hired Simpson to raise and train them. This preparatory work took three years to accomplish. Simpson’s work proves to be successful, as the shooting of the wolf scenes went quite smoothly, and the film has been unanimously praised for its spectacular visual effects. However, Simpson’s success ethically symptomizes human relations with nature. In a way, what the film succeeds in doing is precisely what Chen Zhen fails to do in the novel. In other words, while Chen Zhen’s experiment in the novel fails to bring the wolf cub up to be what he expected it to be, the film succeeds in modeling the wolves into answerable actors, a feat unimaginable by Chen Zhen. Yet, if Chen Zhen’s failure signifies a human acknowledgement— be it a humble or a reluctant one—of the difficulty and inappropriateness of such an intervention, the film’s success, on the other hand, showcases, in its visual concreteness, human power over nature, an achievement which—ironically enough—directly contradicts what the film professes itself to be about. Similarly, although choosing Annaud to be the director is first and foremost a pragmatic compromise—the Chinese directors the producers had first approached having found the prospect of filming humans with real wolves too challenging, this choice, as it were, turns out to have more serious ethical ramifications regarding human and nature than a merely technical decision. For one thing, Annaud’s skills and experience with filming animals, together with other crew members’ expertise, make the representation of the unrepresentable not only possible but also desirable. Yet, behind this spectacular representation of wild wolves lies a similar moral dilemma: the successful representation or visualization of wolves, creatures deemed symbols of the spirit of freedom and unyieldingness, is ironically premised on their effective domestication and manipulation.13 In other words, the more skilled the filmmaker is in this regard, and the more ravishing the visual effects, the more ambivalent the relationship between the human and nature can be. This is because any development in techniques of visual representation of animals means an advance in the human grasp of—and intervention into—nature, which can be a risky move. Annaud, not surprisingly, is much inclined to take the risk—as he remarks, it is his “duty to take risk. This notion of taking risk is part of show business.” He believes that by making this film he fulfils his responsibility of providing a movie theater audience with something that they do not usually see in everyday life. To provide this unusual thing is “dangerous,” as he puts it (Wang 2015). That is to say, Annaud regards his role as an eco-­film director not only as that of a mediator between human eyes/“I”s and natural objects, but also as an adventurer into the mystery of nature and the enterprise of representing it. His lens, therefore, serves as the exploring eye of humans, representing a human desire and ability to penetrate into the unknown nature and to represent the unrepresentable. This task is, of course, risky, but the risk does not simply lie in

Transcendence and transgression   161 the technical adventure of representing nature, or in the business opportunities that come naturally in film industry, but more importantly in the ethics of eco-­ filming per se. Further, Annaud is said to have used a “naturalist” style in making Wolf Totem—naturalist, as the cinematographer Dreujou and Annaud explain, mainly in the sense that they follow nature in filmmaking. For instance, they took advantage of natural light in shooting natural scenes, and they followed the natural cycle of the grassland and the natural growth of the wolf cub in portraying both. These moves, they believe, are in sync with their environment-­ friendly practices during their filmmaking, which, although costly, make them “naturalists.” This special sense of naturalism, moreover, is enriched by their use of real wolves, ethnic actors, onsite shooting, realist performance, etc., which aims to avoid aestheticizing their cinematic representation. Naturalism, interestingly, is here taken as both an artistic and a behavioral style, both informing each other. However respectable with regard to ecology this naturalist idea is, it is, however, also critically performative. In order to come up with a “natural” and “authentic” representation, wild wolves are trained into answerable actors and spontaneous scenes are carefully orchestrated. Representation of wild nature, ironically, relies on a domestication of it—in effect, a naturalist representation is essentially ideological. This paradox arguably is not unique to Wolf Totem, but, to a great degree, is also true with eco-­filmmaking in general. To many, eco-­filmmaking is such an enterprise that it takes a human mastery of nature in order to obtain its effective representation. This process involves crossing of multiple borders and the fusion of disparate horizons, which can be constructive, productive, and transcending, while at the same time it bears the risk of being manipulative, destructive, and transgressive.

Coda In Wolf Totem, there is a scene in which Chen Zhen, heartbroken, sees wolves being slaughtered by modern weaponry and human guile, and almost driven to extinction as a result. In utter despair, he hopes that the survivors of the massacre will run across the national border to Outer Mongolia, where they will remain safe and free. A similar scene takes place when Yang Ke sees swans shot by Bao Shungui and prays in tears that they fly over the national border to the then Soviet Union, where they are loved and appreciated. In both scenes, intriguingly, national borders, instead of being a hindrance to the trend of transregionalization of environmental movements, serve as a final resort for environmental victims seeking protection. This reassertion of borders alerts us, symbolically, to a key issue in ecoliterature and ecocinema today, an issue that is so easily drowned out amid the loud calls for border-­crossing—that is, the dialectics of transcendence and transgression.14 In this chapter, I have tried to parse the many physical, political, and cultural transgressions embedded in apparently transcending moves, and have attempted

162   Haomin Gong to bring to light ideologies in the narrative, production, and consumption of Wolf Totem as a work of world ecoliterature and ecocinema. Admittedly, this trans-­ border approach to reading and watching Wolf Totem in a transnational perspective is much inspired by the latest trend in world ecocriticism, and is in accordance with global environmental movements. Productive as this approach is, one should, Wolf Totem reminds us, simultaneously also be very careful about crossing borders, be the borders ones between species, between humans and nature, between ethnicities, nations, or cultures. While a fusion of horizons is instrumental to developing an ethically ecological view, this process of border-­ crossing, if not constructively maneuvered, bears many risks: transcending ideals can turn transgressive; love and sympathy become destructive; and nature universalized is displaced. As many among us would agree, nature is never neutral (Choy 2009).

Notes   1 Heise (2012, 404–5) believes that three tasks need to be accomplished in order to build an “Environmental World Literature:” first, to disclose the literary and aesthetic merits of the works that have been known for their environmental ideas; second, to trace “environmental concerns in works of world literature that for the most part do not engage with nature directly, but presuppose certain views of the natural even as they focus on issues of selfhood, sovereignty, or nationality;” and third, to explore texts that “tend to address humans’ relation to nature quite explicitly, but not specifically in the environmentalist sense of human threats to landscapes and other species.”   2 These novels are: Mayra Montero’s Tú, la oscuridad (In the Palm of Darkness, 1995), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), and Indra Shiha’s Animal’s People (2007).   3 Gadamer (1997, 302) writes, Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential part of the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon.” The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point … A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have an horizon” means not being limited to what is nearby, but to being able to see beyond it … [W]orking out of the hermeneutical situation means the achievement of the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.   4 In this chapter I focus on both the book and the film versions of Wolf Totem and read them in close reference to each other. This is because I believe the ecological and political significance of them cannot be adequately fleshed out unless we explore the intertextuality of both versions.   5 The epigraphs give the novel a historical (thus non-­fictional) flavor, which is enormously augmented by the extraordinarily long coda entitled, “Rational Exploration: A Lecture and Dialogue Regarding the Wolf Totem.” In this coda, combing through Chinese history, Jiang Rong singles out the moments of wolf worshipping so as to prove his “theory” of invigorating the Chinese nation by replacing the emasculated, agrarian culture symbolized by the Dragon Totem, with the empowered, nomadic

Transcendence and transgression   163 culture epitomized in the Wolf Totem. This notoriously didactic final chapter echoes the epigraphs and expounds in a manner of political science the critical “wolf moments” in Chinese history in great detail. This “rational” lecture, as its title indicates, obviously aims to justify the author’s idiosyncratic advocacy of the wolf totem by resorting to the “authority” of science. However, this lecture is integrated rather smoothly into the story, or the “post”-­story to be more specific, in the form of Chen Zhen and Yang Ke’s reflective argument on the way to their revisiting the Olonbulag 30  years after they had left the grassland. That is to say, it is simultaneously separated from and integrated into the storytelling, and forms an intriguing relationship with the story proper. Interestingly, both the epigraphs and the lecture are left out of the English translation by Howard Goldblatt. Not surprisingly, Jiang Rong’s theory invokes questions and challenges from readers and researchers. Some even question the authenticity of his semi-­autobiographical narrative. For discussion of Goldblatt’s translation, see Michaela Kabat (2008). For challenges to the novel, see, for example, Long Xingjian (2007).   6 The name “Erlang” is quite explicitly symbolic of a hybrid power. Erlang is thus named because Chen Zhen and his fellow “educated youths” from Beijing find it looking very similar to the well-­known three-­eyed Demon Erlang (二郎神), a legendary figure featured in classical Chinese mythology, particularly made known by the classical novel Journey to the West. However, this name also implies a strong sense of hybridity: “Er” in Erlang means two, double, and duality; and “lang” is a homophone of both male youth (郎) as in Demon Erlang and wolf (狼).   7 Domesticating a Mongolian wolf does not seem as formidable as Jiang Rong describes in the book, although it is by no means an easy task. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s film is only possible because of a successful domestication and training of a herd of wolves. This will be further discussed in what follows.   8 Thornber’s (2012, 312) discussion is based on the novel, but her arguments apply perfectly to the film as well, because the ecoambiguities she identifies in the novel also constitute the main contradictions and tensions of the film. She identifies three major ecoambiguities in Wolf Totem: The first stems primarily from (perceived) necessity; 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. In contrast, the second ambiguity arises partially from (perceived) need but largely from the compulsion for self-­ aggrandizement. The Han Chinese think that radically reshaping the grasslands will allow for the most efficient use of Inner Mongolian territory. On the other hand, their behaviors are depicted as regularly and unnecessarily bordering on the extreme; rather than attempt to live in harmony with the land, they are obsessed with completely overturning its existing social and biological environments. The third ambiguity derives mainly from willful compulsion; the novel depicts Han Chinese as aware that overpopulation is a significant problem, yet as excessively driven to procreate.   9 Goldblatt’s translation skips this comparison. 10 In the expanded version of this review, Choy (2019, 135) characterizes Wolf Totem as a work of “ecological fascism” and “totalitarian environmentalism,” and further associates this militarist spirit with the ongoing expansionist Belt and Road Initiative proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping. 11 The crew adopted eco-­friendly methods in their production, such as using labor power and horse-­drawn carts instead of motor vehicles as much as possible. 12 Some finds it disappointing that the film avoids the provocative political issues. This view speaks of the global logic of the particular. See Lee (2015).

164   Haomin Gong 13 In contrast to the successful visualization of wolves, that of swans in this film, in my view, is much less impressive. Although a powerful filming of the storyline of swans can undoubtedly strengthen the portrayal of wolves, training swans to perform, however, is technically much more difficult to accomplish. Thus the less remarkable visualization of swans in the film. 14 Li Xiaojiang (2018, 412) writes: “In the trend of global Westernization, the state has become the national culture, 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).” I thank Howard Choy for alerting me to Li’s work.

References Adamson, Joni, and Scott Slovic. 2009. “The Shoulders We Stand On: An Introduction to Ethnicity and Ecocriticism.” MELUS: Multi-­Ethnic Literature of the United States 34 (2): 5–24. Chen Hong. 2016. “Further Questions About the Ecological Themes of Wolf Totem.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23 (4): 755–69. Choy, Howard Y. F. 2009. “Review of Wolf Totem.” MCLC Resource Center. http://u.osu. edu/​mclc/book-­reviews/wolf-­totem/. Choy, Howard Y. F. 2019. “Expansionist Ethnic Ecology: On Reading Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem.” In Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene: Image, Music and Text in the Age of Climate Change, edited by Kwai-­Cheung Lo and Jessica Yeung, 131–49. Singapore: Springer. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gadamer, Hans Georg. 1997. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd and revised edn. New York: Continuum. Heise, Ursula K. 2012. “World Literature and the Environment.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir. 404–12. London: Routledge. Jiang Rong. 2008. Wolf Totem. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. New York: Penguin. Jiang Rong. 2004. Langtuteng (Wolf Totem). Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe. Kabat, Michaela. 2008. “Beijing Bookworm International Literary Festival–Howard Goldblatt and Wolf Totem,” March 13, 2008. www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2008/03/13/ beijing-­bookworm-­international-­literary-­festival-­howard-­goldblatt-­and-­wolf-­totem (accessed May 1, 2019). Lee, Haiyan. 2014. The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lee, Maggie. 2015. “Berlin Film Review: ‘Wolf Totem’ ”. Variety. February 10, 2015. https://variety.com/2015/film/reviews/berlin-­film-­review-­wolf-­totem-­1201428207/ (accessed May 1, 2019). Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Li Xiaojiang. 2018. Wolf Totem and the Post-­Mao Utopian: A Chinese Perspective on Contemporary Western Scholarship. Trans. Edward Mansfield Gunn, Jr. Leiden: Brill. Long Xingjian. 2007. Langtuteng pipan (Criticisms of Wolf Totem). Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe.

Transcendence and transgression   165 Sahlins, Marshall David. 1976. The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thornber, Karen Laura. 2012. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wang Dawei, dir. 2015. Langzong (Wolf Trace), documentary.

8 Fabulating animals–​ human affinity Towards an ethics of care in Monster Hunt and Mermaid Fiona Yuk-­wa Law While a lot of discussion has been going on about the definition, aesthetics, discursive structure, and cognitive receptions of what we now call ecocinema, or “cinema with an ecological consciousness” (Lu 2009, 2) within the politics and poetics of independent filmmaking, my focus is put on Chinese popular cinema by conducting a close-­reading of the two highest-­grossing blockbuster films at the time of writing this article, namely Monster Hunt/捉妖記 (directed by Raman Hui/許誠毅, 2015) and Mermaid/美人魚 (directed by Stephen Chow/ 周星馳, 2016).1 My aim is to explore the potential susceptibility of cinematic representations of human–nonhuman stories, and how this representation works or does not work in “retraining of perceptions” (Lu 2009, 109)—the fundamental job of ecocinema according to Scott MacDonald (2004). Since the emergence of ecocriticism and its extension to ecocinema in the past two decades, ecocinema studies have been concerned with finding alternatives— alternative representational strategies to illuminate the relationship between human and nonhuman, alternative ways to perceive beyond our ideological assumptions about the cinematic form in portraying nature, and alternative aesthetics to address the nonhuman aspects of the Anthropocene in order to initiate action of change, etc. All these attempts to search for, define, and interrogate the alternatives have the shared objectives of raising ecological awareness, to re-­think human responsibility of what humans do to the environment, and to consciously contemplate the ethics of making choices about what and how to live with nature, and, more importantly, the precarious processes and consequences of all these human actions. Such a call for awareness could be explained by the general use of the prefix “eco-­” in conceptualizing ecology, ecocriticism, and ecocinema. As “eco-­” comes from the Greek word oikos, which refers to the multilayered meanings related to family, home, and household,2 the study of ecocinema and ecocriticism includes an underlying re-­examination of what home means culturally and naturally in literature and films. By regarding and respecting nonhumans (the physical environment and other species) as constituents of our home, ecocriticism and ecocinema reconsider and question the ideological assumptions that have created the anthropocentric blindness towards care for others. This also illuminates what Joseph Meeker calls a “crisis of consciousness” (Meeker 1997, 6) when people

Fabulating animals–human affinity   167 begin to recognize that “many important models of reality inherited from the human past are inadequate, irrelevant, or destructive when applied to present circumstances.” Therefore, the attempts to seek alternatives express an intensifying concern to care for the physical environment and its nonhuman inhabitants because of a growing self-­awareness of how humans bring negative impacts to their surroundings. Developed from the broad, inclusive, and interdisciplinary “scholarly perspective” and “academic ‘movement’ ” (Slovic 2000, 160) of ecocriticism, ecocinema studies somehow goes beyond the humble notions of studying, exploring, and making critical analysis of the poetics and politics of filmmaking, film aesthetics, and film reception, but beginning to investigate the possibility of how the cinematic medium might initiate social changes concerning human impacts on ecological systems, nonhuman species, and the physical environment. To contextualize ecocinema in Chinese film culture, this emerging field of film study calls for alarm regarding the side effects of the Chinese modernity project with respect to “domination over nature” (Lu 2009, 12). On one hand, the modernity project has been one reason for the global challenge to environmental protection; on the other hand, China is facing a precarious wildlife crisis that demands global attention. Since its reform era in 1978, the abuse of and assault on wildlife have reached an “unprecedented level” (Li 2013, 317–18) on the Chinese mainland, with its increasing obsession with growth and modern production technology. By looking at the spirituality of cinematic form and constantly drawing new interpretive strategies, Sheldon Lu proposes that Chinese ecocinema reminds us of an ethical aspiration to “redeem the fallen world of ruins and eco-­ catastrophes and re-­enchant the imperiled planet” (Lu 2009, 14). Humanity’s attempt to command nature and history must be questioned and problematized in order to make sense of the global environmental crisis. The dialectics of thought and action, conscientious self-­reflection and understanding of others, the veiling and unveiling of truths, and ethical understanding of nature and nonhuman species have coincided nicely with the ways Chinese filmmakers express their concerns with various ecological crises in light of China’s accelerated industrialization and urbanization. Interestingly, if not coincidentally, Monster Hunt and Mermaid are both Hong Kong–PRC co-­productions directed by Hong Kong filmmakers—Hollywood returnee Raman Hui from DreamWorks Studio, and legendary local comedian Stephen Chow. This production background addresses the global-­ local-­transnational nexus required to understand Chinese ecocinema. While both directors have been renowned for creating mainstream popular films that can be happily consumed by mass audiences of the global and the local, their recent pictures also demonstrate the ecological sensibility through the narrative frameworks of how two groups of fantastical creatures are in danger because of human greed under the Chinese context. More specifically, I read Monster Hunt as an allegory of contemporary interspecies companionship and its related issues, such as the meat-­eating dilemma and captivity, while Mermaid is an

168   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law allegory of how the recent infrastructural developments in Hong Kong and China have precariously threatened the natural environment, including marine life. By conducting an allegorical reading of these two films, I am trying to see whether or not, or to what extent, popular cinema can play an important role in making comments on and initiating critiques over the ideological structure that form these films. Despite its ideological contradictions, emphasis on consumerism, and fetishism of emotions, I argue that popular cinema, with its kitschy qualities, may exert ideological critiques as effectively as the aesthetically moralistic and tasteful eco-­art films—if there is such a categorization. My discussion will also draw on the feminist ethics of care theories to examine how the ecofeminist perspective could be useful as a critical tool in understanding popular ecocinema. Before the discussion about the two films, I want to bring in Tuan Yi-­fu’s insightful statement about the misleading kinship between human and nonhuman animals in the practice of animal companionship. In his study of the problematic relationship between dominance and affection in the cultural making of pet animals, Tuan states, “[d]omestication means domination: the two words have the same root sense of mastery over another being—of bringing it into one’s house or domain” (Tuan 1984, 99). Instead of providing a remedy or solution to this untenable inter-­species affinity, he further argues that affection is not the opposite of dominance; rather it is dominance’s anodyne—it is dominance with a human face. Dominance may be cruel and exploitative, with no hint of affection in it. What it produces is the victim. On the other hand, dominance may be combined with affection, and what it produces is the pet. (Tuan 1984, 1–2) Written more than 30 years ago, Tuan’s Dominance and Affection: the Making of Pets is still striking as it crudely reveals the oft-­neglected power relationship between humans and companion animals as a mixed combination of the freedom–dominance binary, affection, and cultural imaginary. I began to contemplate, critically, not only on what is happening to my relationship with my feline housemates, but also how my academic training in film and cultural studies informs, facilitates, and hinders our understanding of the ethical relationship between humans and other sentient animals, as well as the contradictions that exist between cultural texts and the world around us. Tuan’s critique of pet keeping as a problematic cultural and social practice does not simply question and unsettle human affection to other species, his writing significantly reminds us of the precariousness of affect if we do not consider the ethics of care. This means that, in addition to rethinking the importance of care and advocating a caring attitude to “particular others” (Held 2006, 12), one also needs to carefully consider the ethics of this caring attitude. On the other hand, the emergence of ecocinema studies aptly addresses this critical interrogation by acknowledging the interconnections between cinema’s

Fabulating animals–human affinity   169 ecological dimensions, their implications, and the world that exists beyond human controls. Ecocinema studies’ interest and its concerns with the “ecology of connections” (Rust and Monani 2013, 1) have imposed an important highlight on the critical inquiry about interspecies ethical relationships by providing a new direction of bridging the human and nonhuman worlds through the cinematic form. This objective also echoes Donna Haraway’s notion of “becoming with” the companion species by eliminating various binaries in “the midst of webbed existences” (Haraway 2008, 72). More importantly, Haraway reinforces the affective response of pleasure and joy in this process when she introduces the various case studies in When Species Meet. I would add that the transgressive, provocative, engaging and sometimes distancing pleasure of cinematic experience provides the best opportunity to experience and rethink this cognitive and affective bridging with the nonhuman other. The virtually formed yet authentically felt cinematic experience prepares for and fosters an ecological consciousness to come. Such recognition of the bridge, the web, or bonding between human and nonhumans is helpful to promote a better and more urgent ecological sensibility by foregrounding the limitations of the anthropocentric point of view and inviting alternative approaches to see, feel, and think what we usually do not. The theoretical framework of intersectionality in ecofeminism provides a critical intervention to prompt such border-­crossing connectivity. Following Karen Warren’s definition of ecofeminism as a position that “there are important connections—historical, experiential, symbolic, theoretical—between the domination of women and the domination of nature” (Warren 1990, 126), Adams and Gruen summarize that the core project of ecofeminism is aimed at “analysing mutually reinforcing logics of domination and drawing connections between practical implications of power relations” (Adams and Gruen 2014, 7). In particular, ecofeminism develops the feminist ethics of care as a major critical lens by following Carol Gilligan’s proposal of “a morality of responsibility” in contrast to the dominant, masculinist conception of “morality of rights” (Gilligan 2003, 19). This feminist care approach is useful in critical animal studies as it offers a more “flexible, situational, and particularized ethics” (Donovan and Adams 2007, 2) in recognizing the importance of each individual animal and developing a comprehensive analysis of his/her situation. By developing a situated understanding of the individual suffering animal, it also means “attention to the political and economic systems that are causing the suffering” (Donovan and Adams 2007, 3). This insistence, or attentiveness, in addressing the “causal systems” and “political analysis of the reasons” (Donovan and Adams 2007, 3) of animal abuse offers a conceptual bridging to the animal rights position by stressing the differences, instead of similarities, between humans and nonhuman animals. In the following, I will attempt to adopt this ethics of care theoretical framework to conduct a critical reading of Monster Hunt and Mermaid by looking at how this attentiveness to individual animals, the human–animal differences, and the causal system of animal suffering is addressed in the popular discourse of kitschy aesthetics.

170  Fiona Yuk-­wa Law

Interrogating ecological correctness—eco-­kitsch and/as eco-­aesthetics When Walter Benjamin (1992) insightfully announced the decay of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, signaled by the emergence of photography and cinema, the questions of reproducibility, authenticity, the cult, and habitual distraction are actually the defining principles of these modern mediums. Although Benjamin has not used the word “kitsch” here, the way he defines the new forms of art has combined with the general assumptions about kitsch, which is a word that has become widely used since the 1930s when referring to the irreconcilability of avant-­garde and its opposites (namely the cheap, the lowly, the vulgar, utilitarian objects, and so on). In his conceptualization of the kitsch, Matei Calinescu states that the kitsch’s “aesthetics of deception and self-­deception,” its natures of “imitation, forgery, counterfeit,” and “promise of an easy ‘catharsis’ ” suggest that it is technologically and aesthetically “one of the most typical products of modernity” (Calinescu 1987, 226–9). Despite Benjamin and Calinescu’s recognition of kitsch’s ontological relation to modernity and its critical possibility, other critics, such as Clement Greenberg, maintain that kitsch is an “inferior art” (Greenberg 1999, 135) with its lack of ingenuity and inspiration. The kitsch’s inferior status is due to the fact that, being a “product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses,” kitsch “established what is called universal literacy” by welcoming and cultivating an insensitivity to “genuine culture” (Greenberg 1989, 9–10). While the notions of “genuine” culture and aesthetic hierarchy are always at stake, such studies of the kitsch in connection to the rise of the modern, and the way critics use kitsch to describe the opposite of the artistic in negative terms point to the assumption of the lack of intellectual qualities in producing, consuming, and circulating the so-­called kitschy objects. As Menninghaus summarizes, [k]itsch offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation. It usually presents no difficulties in interpretation and has absolutely nothing to do with an aesthetics of negativity. It is unadulterated beauty, a simple invitation to wallow in sentiment … (Menninghaus 2009, 41) The kitschy features of consumerist objects and modern lifestyle seem to invite and celebrate a conforming, feel-­good attitude to modern urban life by neglecting the critical ability of the human agent, but such assumptions about the kitsch are also based on a presumed unbridgeability of emotion and intellectual thinking. In the context of ecocriticism, this aperture between feeling and thought is foregrounded as an important issue in understanding the relationship between human and nonhumans. The critical framework of animal studies has often been separated between the utilitarian rights advocates (such as Peter Singer and Tom

Fabulating animals–human affinity  171 Regan) whose argument weighs on a rationalist discourse of justice and equality, and the ecofeminist care ethicists (such as Carol Adams, Josephine Donovan, Lori Gruen, etc.) who stress the importance of emotions and affective bridging in order to erase the anthropocentric bias. In ecocinema studies, the line of separation seems to be drawn between the mindful and the mindless—films that invite the viewers to gain ecological consciousness and films that do not. Intellectual thinking and awareness of ecological crisis is often triggered by eco­cinema to feel for/as nonhuman and re-­think human responsibility in environmental crisis. The development of technology in traditional filmmaking further accelerates the speed in creating “cinematic experiences of being immersed within the natural world” (MacDonald 2013, 19). In doing so, MacDonald suggests that the alternative aesthetic of slow images, durational shots, and the like nurtures audiences’ patience and mindfulness, which as a result would retrain our perceptions about the natural environment and bring about changes. This aesthetics of patience, or what David Ingram calls “an eco-­aesthetics of slow cinema” (Ingram 2013, 45), is definitely essential in establishing and enlightening ecological awareness, but we must also bear in mind that audiences of these eco­ cinematic works are usually self-­selected—that means they may have already been aware of, or have been prepared to embrace, the importance of ecological issues before their engaging in cinematic experience. In this case, ecocinema in the form of alternative cinemas may not always successfully advocate its missions because prior training is needed before the “retraining” takes place. This argument also brings up the ongoing debate about the critical hierarchy that separates and evaluates independent arthouse filmmaking and mainstream commercial ones. In the midst of such debates, I agree with Ingram’s proposal for a pluralistic eco-­aesthetics instead of holding the critical opposition between eco-­art films and eco-­popular films. In fact, the two (or perhaps more) ecocinematic aesthetics are but different sides of the same coin, and I would like to focus on the notion of eco-­kitsch in order to put forward a critical reading of Monster Hunt and Mermaid, and see how popular cinema, in particular the comic genre, articulates environmental subject matters in a way that appeals to a general audience. In comparing the different modes of eco-­ethics in tragedy and comedy, Joseph Meeker suggests that comedy is actually “a contribution to survival, and a habit that promotes health” because the comic mode is not only a “search for joy” but also “a way of life that seeks congruence with whatever dynamics are at work” (Meeker 1997, 9–11). The comic attitude of restoring balance from disruption and threats parallels the mechanism of ecology, which respects and maintains systems and relationships between organisms and environment. This also corresponds to Mikhail Bakhtin’s cosmic view in analyzing the cultural meanings of the carnivalesque. According to Bakhtin, carnivalesque elements such as folk humor, parody, laughter, festivities, and the comic spectacles do not only invite temporary liberation from the established order; they create a “free, familiar contact zone” in which “truly human relations” (Bakhtin 1984, 10) are exercised and experienced in the carnival spirit. This liberating power of the carnivalesque in making interpersonal connection is also a universalizing energy to

172  Fiona Yuk-­wa Law create an ecological web of relations if one extends this carnivalesque worldview as a comic/cosmic mode of survival. In light of the connection between ecology and comedy, therefore, ecocinema in the comic form is believed to take on this task of initiating an optimistic drive to seek remedy for human destruction and restore ecological balance through a humble reflection on human existence. The comic is also one of the defining features of the kitsch. Similar to the way kitsch is generally understood as consumerist trash, eco-­kitsch or popular films that address environmental subject matters would be easily dismissed as entertaining pastimes under the subgenres of disaster films, sci-­fi thrillers, comedy, or horror films that construct an apocalyptic, dystopic world with environmental hazards or threats imposed by nonhuman species. This prophetic vision of humanity’s future—either it is hyperbolized as its doom or carnivalized as hilarity—triggers the emotional responses of fear, sadness, and laughter. Contrary to the slow cinema that encourages a deferral of emotional response, and different from conventional tragedy that aims at ultimate spiritual catharsis, eco-­kitsch generates a roller-­coaster emotional cycle by drawing on familiar traits and tropes in popular culture. In his thorough account of the critical potentiality of the kitsch in nature writing, Timothy Morton proposes the term “critical kitsch” by stating that “[f]or kitsch to be critical, it would have to remain kitsch. … Its sentimental qualities would have to persist, along with its objectal properties” (Morton 2007, 155). By keeping “unashamed about its status as a mass-­produced commodity,” by acknowledging its “anaesthetic (unaesthetic) property,” by maintaining its qualities of abjection, excessiveness, and plasticized ambience, the kitsch subverts aesthetic propriety by “compelling our awareness of perception” (Morton 2007, 158–9). In this progressive view, ecocinema (including eco-­kitsch) is capable of invoking the pulsing underside of representations of nature. Instead of making beautiful, sophisticated images of nature, the critical kitsch in its radical sense “exploits dualism” (Morton 2007, 160) of self and other, resulting in a self-­reflexive opening to ecological awareness in an unorthodox approach. Keeping in mind the above views of the critical potentiality of the eco-­kitsch, we also need to consider its shaky, slimy characteristics as a product that facilitates escapism and fantasy. No doubt, the popular appeal of commercial cinema can attract audiences’ interests in exploring the subject of animal welfare and pedagogically informing those who have never thought of ecological issues with intellectual and emotional enlightenment. The explicit subject matters, like the violent and arbitrary construction of the us–them binary, destruction of the natural environment, and the exploitative human greed in both Monster Hunt and Mermaid, are useful to help audiences identify and re-­think ecological crises with self-­reflection. However, the representational strategies of popular cinema might also further sustain the problematic affinity as the spectacular images and funny narratives might desist and defer any in-­depth contemplation of the same ecological issues. The distractive power of popular cinema is often seen as the magical attraction to audiences who seek to escape from, instead of engaging in,

Fabulating animals–human affinity   173 the real problematic world. Features of popular representation, such as images of cuteness, subversive violence, and sentimental narrative, are Janus-­faced ­elements—they could be both hindrances and accelerators to advocate changes in animal rights and welfare movements by evoking emotions. Both Monster Hunt and Mermaid adopt such representational strategies, and their resulting effects exemplify this paradoxical logic of popular cinema. Their box office success is not surprising due to their time of release, as both films were released during the peak seasons of cinema-­going in mainland China: Monster Hunt was released in July 2015, during the summer holidays of most school children and teenagers; Mermaid was released in January 2016, during the golden period of Chinese New Year. Beyond the festive pleasures induced by the cute and the cruel, how do the pleasant or grotesque elements turn themselves over to induce conscious awareness of environmental crises and animal welfare? How does the kitschy propose and undermine the ethics of care through the emotional responses generated by its ideological ambiguity? How should we regard the limitations of ecocinema by including popular cinema, which may ideologically contradict the objectives of ecocinema per se? Is it possible to transform the pleasure-­seeking audience into a caring agent through an identification with the kitschy other?

Beyond the pleasure principles: the cute, the cruel, and the critical kitsch In face of the fracturable animal–human relationship in the urban environments of display, domestication, or industrial production, such as farm factories, households, zoos, pet shops, laboratories, etc., I have argued elsewhere that this flickering affinity is most often sustained by, and created as a result of, the interpretive gap between popular representations and the actual experience of interspecies encounter. Such problematic emotional attachment to the nonhumans can be explained by the thin line that separates the cute and the cruel—both of which are often regarded as kitschy elements in popular representations that attract most audience. Despite their comic representations of the nonhuman creatures and carnivalesque plots as features of eco-­kitsch films, Monster Hunt and Mermaid provide different approaches to investigate ecological issues by questioning their own defining features as profit-­making cultural products. At the same time, this eco-­critical attitude is especially useful in understanding how the advocacy of the caring agent could be another critical aperture that adds complexity to the ethics of care when gender politics, inter-­species entanglements, and political allegory about modernity are at play with one another through the seemingly distinguished but interconnected manifestations of the cute and the cruel. These two Chinese blockbusters use the kitschy trait of fantastical creatures to allegorize the ecological crisis resulting from the human interests of economic progress and urban development. The appearance and bodily action of the radish-­like monster, Wuba, in Monster Hunt resemble those of companion animals whose survival either depends on human support or they are rendered

174   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law invisible in the urban environment. The merpeople in Mermaid remind us of the endangered marine species under the threat of ever-­expanding human progress in the name of economic development. In the two films, both types of creatures have adopted anthropomorphic features and human-­related personality traits to invite audience identification of their situations. Since both creatures are non-­ existent in reality, their anthropomorphic, semi-­human forms therefore conveniently welcome allegorical readings from pluralistic perspectives—audiences may easily identify with the human protagonists, the fantastical creatures, or both, while gaining an ecocritical awareness. Although one may easily criticize that anthropomorphism reduces and simplifies our understanding of other species by assimilating and personifying their nonhuman qualities, such representational strategy can be used as a critical tool to exert allegorical reading as well. I would also argue in the following that these kitschy creatures do not only help the audiences become caring agents, they also engage in and expose the double logic of popular cinema. My following reading of the two films therefore serves as a reminder of how the kitschy comic ambivalence can be progressively interrogated as the critical kitsch in the pursuit of ecocritical awareness, and how the ethics of care is proposed to be a tactic of fabulating animals–human affinity.

The cute Monster Hunt—animals–human affinity sans affect The clash between human–nonhuman binary worlds is not a new plot device for cinematic fantasies. One of the most popular cinematic depictions of human– nonhuman conflict in the Chinese cultural context is Ching Siu-­tung/程小東’s A Chinese Ghost Story/倩女幽魂 (1987), in which the nonhumans (the female ghost, the tree demon, and the like) are being pursued and hunted by the Taoist priest Yin Chik-­ha/燕赤霞 (acted by Wu Ma/午馬), who believes that nonhuman creatures should not exist in the human-­dominated world. While Ching’s ghostly romance is loosely adapted from Pu Songling/蒲松齡’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio/聊齋誌異, in which the curious tales of the nonhuman beings have been generally read as political allegory and social critiques of the Qing period, Raman Hui’s journey of a monster hunt is visually inspired by the imaginary creatures from Classic of Mountains and Seas/山海經, an ancient book that chronicles fantastical creatures from diverse geo-­ethnographic origins in distant mythical China. Similar to A Chinese Ghost Story, with the conventional depiction of the irreconcilable human–nonhuman worlds, Monster Hunt explicitly exhibits a fanciful representation of an imaginary Anthropocene by narrating how the monsters have been historically expelled to the remote mountains and banished by human dominance after major warfare between the two species. Set against the monopolization of human and marginalization of monsters as a “historical” fact, Monster Hunt assumes an anthropocentric worldview as normative. The essentialized binary ideological division of “us versus them” results in brutal extermination of the monsters by professional monster hunters, who are authorized by the human emperor to maintain “order.” However, instead of showing

Fabulating animals–human affinity  175 such unjustified human–nonhuman binary as the problem of conflicts, the film opens with civil war among the monsters as the context of the chaos that takes place in the story. Overall, humans do not seem to be related to the internal conflicts among the monsters, and the monster hunters’ quest for the monsters is triggered by the “bad” monster who disguises himself with a human appearance. It is revealed later that the captured monsters can be sold as valuable banquet ingredients. Here, human greed and economic interest become both the tool of the “bad” monster to eliminate enemies, as well as the prime factor that causes the mass escape of the monsters from their secluded village. Thematically, the way Monster Hunt embraces the universal value of cultural diversity and feeling for others is rather ambivalent. Visually, the CGI rendition of the monsters embodies the kitschy, the cute, and the grotesque as an echoing proof of their indefinite meanings. Both the thematic and visual traits are highlighted by Raman Hui, who states that this film aims at advocating the messages of “acceptance” and “understand[ing] differences, to see the world through others’ eyes and to foster more understanding between people and groups” (Won 2015). Although these are common subject matters in Hollywood cinema, there is an implicit ideological contradiction from the narrative that goes exactly against this message of good will. The inherent ecological (in)correctness is most noticeably shown in the use of “it” in the English subtitles. As Gruen reminds us, that pronoun use is an important issue in animal studies (Gruen 2011, xvi). The moving from the use of “it,” which refers to inanimate objects, to “he” or “she,” is an important linguistic gesture to acknowledge individual agency, subjectivity, and personhood of the nonhuman species as equal to that of human beings. The use of “it” in addressing individual monsters in this film, however, betrays the film’s conscious address to an ecological awakening or the respect to individual differences, even though Hui’s intended messages work well with an overt awareness of ecological correctness through the reversal of gender roles on the narrative level. The film subverts patriarchal values in a lightweight manner by portraying the male human protagonist Song Tianyin/宋天蔭 (acted by Jing Boran/井柏然) as a limp, timid, and domesticating village mayor who takes care of the villagers by mending their clothes, doing laundry, and preparing dinner. His maternal qualities are further exaggerated by his impregnation of the monster fetus by accident, when Wuba’s biological mother is killed. Before the monster queen dies, she passes the fetus to Tianyin. The laboring process is comic and carnivalesque in a Bakhtinian manner, and his maternal love for baby Wuba is expressed by his pre-­labor depression and worries about naming him. While the “father” is portrayed as a caring, attentive person, Wuba’s “mother” Huo Xiaolan/霍小嵐 (acted by Bai Baihe/白百何) seems to be the patriarchal counterpart, instead of a feminist. Being a low-­rank monster hunter, Xiaolan is a utilitarian who simply sees Wuba as a valuable entity at the beginning, and her sense of maternity is only later triggered by Tianyan’s caring for Wuba during the journey. In fact, unlike the Taoist priest in A Chinese Ghost Story and other monster slayers, who regard killing the monstrous creatures a knightly act of eliminating evil, the monster hunters in this film are mainly defined by their

176   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law e­ conomic interests. They kill monsters as a way of making a living because they know that captured monsters can be sold to restaurants at a high price. Hui has also explained in a number of interviews that he wanted to create cinematic monsters for a Chinese audience after all the years he worked at DreamWorks (Cain 2015; Lee 2015; Ma 2016; Wolf 2016). With his previous experience of working in Hollywood animation studio, it is not hard to find that Monster Hunt is a hybridized cinematic representation that combines the narrative structure of Hollywood animations and visual resemblance to Japanese cartoon characters with a remote Chinese touch. Following these global popular animations, Wuba and his monster villagers are not only anthropomorphized creatures of plants and animals, but also cultural hybrids that appear like the offsprings of Shrek and Pokémon. At the same time, the complex cultural meanings of yao (妖, monster, spirits of animals, plants, or objects, or evil with an implication of having a female origin) have not been tackled in depth; even the Chinese film title uses this character to suggest a specific connotation of the nonhuman in the Chinese cultural context. This omission could be explained in two ways. First, the film’s narrative seems to suggest that these monsters or yao have not originated or transformed from humans, as yao generally does in Chinese tradition, so that the story could be more conveniently read as that of an interspecies encounter. Second, the humanized, de-­gendered, infantile, and pet-­like features of Wuba are foregrounded and replace the threatening qualities of traditional yao in order to make the interspecies story more relevant to the pet-­keeping experience of contemporary viewers. This allegorical reading is especially relevant to mainland audiences, as pet-­keeping has been a growing social phenomenon in China in recent years. From the birth of Wuba through the male human body of Tianyin, his upbringing and “education” by human foster parents (Tianyin and Xiaolan), to his being abandoned and sold by his “parents” to the restaurant as food, the film could be read as a bizarre allegory of human–animal companionship through its upsetting of gender norms and established bonding. Wuba’s CGI-­animated infantile feature is the hybrid of a human baby and companion species (such as cats or dogs)— both of which magnify the visualization of cuteness and assumed vulnerability. His cute appearance, untamable behavior, and affective dependence on human care divert and confirm his otherness from an anthropocentric perspective. However, the cuteness of nonhuman animals is often a self-­deception imposed by the human believers of absolute innocence, purity, obedience, and eternal infancy performed by nonhuman others (Law 2016, 152). In other words, seeing cuteness in others produces social engagement and care only in an indirect sense. Here we must differentiate how this cultural imagery of the cute-­response could work differently from the feminist ethics of care. Feminist care ethicists such as Carol Gilligan, Fiona Robinson, Joan Tronto, Nel Nodding, and Virginia Held propose that the ethics of care invites openness to others through mutual interdependence and a practice of attentiveness, responsiveness, and mutual recognition. This advocacy of situated understanding and compassion can be seen as a critical response to the masculinist language of justice ethics promoted by utilitarian and

Fabulating animals–human affinity  177 rights advocates such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan, who seem to dismiss the impact of affect and emotions in explaining the need to raise awareness of animal rights and welfare. I agree with the feminists and concur that the ethics of care informs us with the necessary aspects of cultivating altruistic emotions such as sympathy, compassion, human concerns, and friendship in personal, social, ecological, and political aspects. However, the caring attitude generated from the cute-­response is often unwarranted and deteriorates over time because this cuteness-­induced caring sentiment is based on a fantasy of infancy, which is actually power hierarchy in disguise. In reality, dispossession and abandonment of companion animals becomes an inevitable and ‘rational,’ if not rationalized, decision when these nonhuman companions ‘fail’ the human, such as disobedience to human commands, incoherent habits, illness or ageing (Law 2016, 150–2). In this film, the only reason for abandoning Wuba can be as simple and ridiculous as economic interest. This absence of compassion is not because of a lack of Chinese cultural tradition about respecting nature; it is a result of the “current ‘development first’ mind-­set that is behind the nation’s wildlife crisis” (Li 2013, 328). The exaggerated compulsion of the monster hunters to catch the monsters for the sake of profit-­making can therefore be read as an allegory of the absurd post-­ socialist capitalism through opportunistic transactions among individuals, who blindly ignore the suffering and wellbeing of the sentient others. The ancient cosmological and ethical concept of the harmonious balance between human and nature, or the “unity of Heaven and humanity” (tianren heyi 天人合一) (Lu 2009, 3) is utterly evaded in this mythical allegory about the competing tension within human–nonhuman affinity in contemporary China sans affect. The film mainly chronicles Tianjin and Xiaolan’s journey of bringing Wuba to Shuntian City for sale after Tianyin’s comic-­grotesque birth-­giving. During this journey, the two human protagonists have developed an affective connection to the infant monster, but that does not change their mind in abandoning their companion monster until their vague moral awakening at the meat market after they have already sold Wuba. The rest of the film then is devoted to rescuing Wuba from being killed and eaten. Here, not only is the creation of the un-­crossable boundary between monster and human worlds problematic, Tianyin’s inexplicable conformity to sell “his” monster baby to Heaven Restaurant is disturbing. His growing affection to Wuba is most noticeably shown by his struggle in labor, his desire to name the infant after birth, and his taking care of Wuba in illness. However, such affectionate bonding makes it very puzzling to understand his long journey to sell Wuba in Shuntian City with Xiaolan. Such a void, as Liu explains, is due to the fact that the ideology of “ren yao shu tu” (人妖殊途, the essentialized difference between human and monsters) is too deeply rooted and becomes unquestionably fixated as normalcy in human minds (Liu 2015). This also exposes the underlying cruelty and disturbing ideology in this fairy-­tale-­like animation, which demonstrates the human absurdity of not being able to sustain the ethics of care to others through a comic, kitschy way.

178   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law Although abandonment is somehow didactically criticized in Monster Hunt when Tianyin and Xiaolan finally feel regret at selling Wuba to the restaurant as a cooking ingredient for an exquisite banquet, their emotional enlightenment indicates the unrealized problem of anthropocentrism and speciesism. First of all, the psychological twist interestingly takes place in a meat market where different types of wildlife creatures, such as monkeys, squirrels, and dogs, are caged for sale (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). This ancient meat market in fact explicitly reminds us of the controversial dog meat markets in different regions in southern China, with the annual Yulin Dog Meat Festival being the most notorious. In China, the precarious status of companion animals is the result of the problematic animal-­related legislation that mainly concerns endangered species (Li 2006, 117). Common domestic species such as cats and dogs are therefore abandoned, stolen, and traded as meat source outside the protection of any laws. The unregulated continuance of abuse of these companion animals is most controversially revealed when many sellable animals in the Yulin Dog Festival and other meat markets are wearing collars—a visual indicator that they were ex-­companion animals who should be loved instead of eaten. In the film, while the vendors are yelling the different methods of cooking these animals in a matter-­of-­fact tone, Tianyin and Xiaolan are walking past them without showing any interest. But the magic occurs when they accidentally discover Wuba’s handkerchief in a pocket—a nicely crafted handkerchief with a childish cutout pattern of three human-­like figures, suggesting a family with a mother, a father, and the child (Figure 8.3). A flashback shows how Wuba expressed his sense of familial belonging with Tianyin and Xiaolan by making this simple handicraft. At first Tianyin and Xiaolan mistook Wuba’s tearing of the handkerchief as senseless destruction to the fabric, but now they realize that this nonhuman monstrous creature has adopted and even expressed the human value of family unity. Such realization converges with the sight of a vendor chopping a radish (Figure 8.4). As a result, they decide to return to Heaven Restaurant and save

Figure 8.1  The meat market. Source: Hui, Raman, director. Monster Hunt. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd., 2015.

Fabulating animals–human affinity  179

Figure 8.2  Puppies sold at the market. Source: Hui, Raman, director. Monster Hunt. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd., 2015.

Wuba from being slaughtered. One might identify with their rising awareness of the nonhuman as a sentient being, but this emotional identification is based on the fact that the monster must adopt human values so that humans can recognize his worth. Instead of realizing and accepting the inherent differences across species, this scene suggests the reverse—that in order to have humans and monsters living peacefully together, the monstrous other must be domesticated and converted to be moralistic beings in human terms. Another example of this problematic ideological contradiction comes from the scene when Wuba’s blood-­sucking instinct must be compromised. Like other monsters who can only survive in the disguise of human form and become vegetarians, Wuba has to “learn” to eat vegetables only. Again, the unequal status between humans and monsters is highlighted and sustained to make sure the world can be kept peaceful. This peaceful status means humans should protect

Figure 8.3  Flashback with Wuba and the handkerchief. Source: Hui, Raman, director. Monster Hunt. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd., 2015.

180   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law

Figure 8.4  Tianyin and Xiaolan change their minds. Source: Hui, Raman, director. Monster Hunt. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd., 2015.

themselves from being “harmed” by monsters through the process of colonizing them. Despite Wuba’s painful looking facial expression when swallowing nuts, the learning scene can also be read as Wuba’s sacrifice for the sake of human safety, which as a result induces human sympathy. This whole ignorance of diversity and negligence of differences reminds us of the dilemma faced by the human mutants in the X-­Men series—whether these extraordinary mutants should live in their unusual appearances and fantastic forms, or should they hide themselves and conform in the human world to guarantee their own safety. The answer of Monster Hunt is rather conformist—in the end, having killed the monster villain Ge Qian Hu/葛千戶 (acted by Wallace Chung/鍾漢良) who is disguised as a human aristocrat, Tianyin and Xiaolan continue their journey as monster hunters by claiming that they will thereafter kill “bad” monsters only. They are leaving Wuba behind, advising him to stay away from the human world with his fellow monster villagers because, as Tianyin explains, humans have not yet been able to accept monsters. After all the chaos and disputes, struggles and resistance, the closure of this film is an explicit ideological conformity with the monsters escaping from the mainstream. This is the exact opposite to Hui’s intended message of acceptance. Although one can argue that this ending suggests that monsters (or wildlife species) should be free from human captivity and return to nature, the conservationist claim of protecting and liberating the monsters does not evade the blatant upholding of human interest over that of the monsters. The closing scene, with Wuba practicing to eat nut and resisting himself from sucking blood from a rabbit, is a final confirmation of an anthropocentric worldview. Instead of the human protagonists, the anthropomorphized nonhuman species finally becomes the tragic eco-­hero who sacrifices instinctive nature with a cultured desire to blend in to human society. In doing so, he can manifest a peaceful world without his existence. The co-­inhabitance, mutual caring, and reciprocal trust between human and monsters belong to an ideal future that is yet to come.

Fabulating animals–human affinity   181

The cruel Mermaid—anthropomorphic amplification of pain Similar to Monster Hunt, Mermaid is a commercial comedy using CGI effects to re-­create fantastical species. While the monsters in Monster Hunt are hybrids of Chinese literature and global animations, the mermaid tribe (or merpeople) in Mermaid is another set of technological, intertextual hybrids blending the local and the global. Most popular representations of the mermaid story, such as the Disney series of The Little Mermaid, since 1989, are adaptations from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about how the young, beautiful mermaid loses her siren voice in exchange for a pair of human legs, so that she can reunite with her human prince charming. But in Stephen Chow’s version, Shan/珊珊 (acted by Jelly Lin/林允), the mermaid, does not intend to develop a romantic relationship with the “handsome” billionaire Lau Hin/劉軒 (acted by Deng Chao/鄧超) at the beginning. Instead, she and her marine tribe aim at killing this greedy prince charming who brutally destroys their natural habitat for the sake of maximizing profits. While this revenge plot with a seductive femme fatale reminds us of Wang Chia Chi/王佳芝 and her comrades in Ang Lee’s/李安’s or Eileen Chang’s/張愛玲’s Lust, Caution, such a parodic intertextual reference also disrupts the assumption about the mermaid’s tragic desire to become human in the original fairy-­tale. The theme of revenge therefore can be understood as that of “nature strikes back” in a kitschy, radical manner. Different from Monster Hunt’s resemblance to Disney’s nature-­related animations by mildly and ambivalently addressing ecological concerns about human– nonhuman affinity, Mermaid is even closer to Timothy Morton’s notion of critical eco-­kitsch or “radical ecological kitsch” (Morton 2007, 150) in teaching “important lessons about what is repressed” in the “conceptions of order and propriety” (Ingram 2013, 53). In other words, Mermaid does not only evoke emotions through its comic form; it provides a critical, self-­reflective statement about human destruction of nature for the sake of economic development. Although the film is commented upon with regard to its “kitschy charm of Ed Wood productions” (Lee 2016) from the cheap-­looking CGI-­rendered settings and the tacky appearances of the characters, the film’s kitschy qualities such as wordplay, vernacular jokes, visual gags, obscene references, and different kinds of grotesque and carnivalesque self-­referential elements as visual motifs and plot devices have been familiarly known as the trademarks of Stephen Chow’s nonsense comedies since the 1990s. One outstanding demonstration of this film as a critical eco-­ kitsch comes from the opening scene set in a “Museum of World Exotic Animals”—a grassroots museum of counterfeit animal specimens under a grand name. Kitschy curiosities are displayed as exotic, endangered animals, such as a dinosaur (acted by a dried gecko) (Figure  8.5a), a “genuine” Panthera Tigris Balica (acted by Lucky the dog) (Figure 8.5b), the Batman (a collage of objects such as a fake human anatomical model and two chicken wings) (Figure  8.5c), and the mermaid (a combination of a Barbie doll and a preserved fish tail) (Figure  8.5d); the museum owner even dresses himself as a living mermaid by putting on melting make-­up and a loose-­fit fishtail costume, and swims himself

182   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law

Figure 8.5 Kitschy oddities displayed in the “Museum of World Exotic Animals”: (a) the “dinosaur”; (b) the “genuine” Panthera Tigris Balica; (c) the “Batman”; (d) the “mermaid”; (e) the museum owner as a “mermaid.” Source: Chow, Stephen, director. Mermaid. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd, 2016.

Figure 8.5b Continued

under the bathtub (Figure 8.5e). These foolish displays, including the owner himself, fail to deceive the visitors, who constantly challenge the authenticity of these oddities and ask for a refund. One of them even laughs at this absurdity until collapsing with a heart attack. The senseless or nonsensical elements in this opening scene wield their critical potentiality beyond mere amusements. I would argue that all these kitschy-­comic elements are strategically used to enforce a critical ecological message, as well as an implied critique of China’s accelerated

Fabulating animals–human affinity   183

Figure 8.5c Continued

Figure 8.5d Continued

e­ conomic developments and its infrastructual projects in Hong Kong. The antagonism between human and nonhuman is also a multi-­ layered allegory that bespeaks environmental issues in both local and global perspectives. While the theme of human destruction of the natural environment is universally applicable in romantic eco-­comedies, this film contains a strong hint about the ecological crisis, particularly related to the current contradictions concerning the integration project between Hong Kong and mainland China. Although there is an absence of Hong Kong actors for major characters to initiate interpretation on local issues, the implied local reference can be derived  from the natural environment of Green Gulf (Qing Luo Wan/青羅灣)

184   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law

Figure 8.5e Continued

(Figure  8.6) as it is introduced from the auction scene at the beginning. In the film, to everyone’s surprise, Lau has somehow acquired an official permit to reclaim and develop this conservation zone by announcing that the protected dolphins that inhabit in the area are “moving home.” He is officially permitted to maximize profit and expand economic development as a private investor by openly forsaking the state policy of conservation. The Chinese name of Green Gulf and its geographical locale as a bay area is an immediate reminder of Sha

Figure 8.6  Reclamation plan at Green Gulf. Source: Chow, Stephen, director. Mermaid. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd, 2016.

Fabulating animals–human affinity   185 Lo Wan (Sha Luo Wan/沙螺灣), a similar-­looking bay area with traditional villages in the northwest Lantau Island in Hong Kong. In recent years, Sha Lo Wan has become the vulnerable frontline of mega-­construction projects such as the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge and the third runway at Hong Kong’s airport. In addition to the disappearance of the villages in Sha Lo Wan, these two construction projects are also bringing air pollution (Cheung 2014a) and a threat to the survival of China White Dolphins (see WWF website). Lau’s announcement about the dolphins’ “home moving” is a mockery of the local controversies about whether the China White Dolphins could temporarily move from their habitat until after the construction project of the third runaway is completed (Cheung 2014b, 2014c). While local green groups and conservationists question the ungrounded claim by the authority in Hong Kong that dolphins are temporarily moving away, Lau’s company in the film uses a sonar transmitter to exterminate marine creatures to explain why the dolphins are “willing” to move away. Stephen Chow’s cynical portrayal about the local environmental debates also points to the political fissure resulting from the lack of trust between the government and Hong Kong citizens, who are increasingly aware of the discursive trap manipulated by the local officials. Under this manmade ecological crisis, the merpeople can be read as the victims of development and expansion of economic interests. This fictional creature can also be understood as the metaphor of China White Dolphins in Hong Kong, whose endangered lives are pointing to the ecological crisis caused by infrastructual developments between Hong Kong and China. This local connotation is further implemented by the ambiguous legends of the mermaid-­like creature related to Hong Kong.3 All these intercultural, interhistorical, and intertexual accounts about the mermaids are further pluralized and carnivalized when the old mermaid tells her tribe about the generous help of “Mr. Zheng” in preventing the extinction of the merpeople tribe a long time ago. While narrating the story, she points to a painting that portrays a mermaid (herself or her ancestor) and the alleged Mr. Zheng. At the same time, the camera sweeps across the music record of another Mr. Zheng—cantopop singer-­actor Adam Cheng Siu-­chow/鄭少秋 who was famous in Hong Kong in the late 1970s. Again there can be multiple readings of this ambivalent Mr. Zheng—he could be a popular icon who suggests the cultural influence of Hong Kong to China since the reform era; he could also be a historical figure like explorer Zheng He/鄭和, who led multiple expeditions to the West, or maritime military leader Zheng Cheng Gong/鄭成功 who ended the Dutch colonization of Formosa and transformed the island into the later Taiwan. These possible identities of Mr. Zheng point to different cultural and political readings of Stephen Chow’s blockbuster by implying the trans-­ border, transnational, and local features of his film. All these alleged figures connote a global travel of ideas and encouragement of mutual influences across cultural, social, historical, and political borders by upholding the local bearing. The slippery reading of the critical kitsch is suggested everywhere in the film. It is even literally demonstrated in a later scene when Lau describes his captivity by the merpeople at the police station (Figure 8.7). After having successfully

186   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law escaped from the merpeople’s attack, Lau runs into the police station and reports this strange encounter. Effectuating a comic relief from the previous breathtaking action scene, the two skeptical policemen mock at Lau’s hectic description of the mermaid by drawing several absurd sketches of a half-­human–half-­fish creature in different combinations of upper and lower bodily parts of human and fish. While this scene is completely hilarious, it also reminds us of the slippery qualities of representations and the tricky process of perception, expression, and reception in signification. One might laugh at the lack of common sense in rendering a “correct” image of the mermaid, but the policemen’s skeptical attitude of not conforming to the assumed perception about a sexually appealing mermaid could be an inspiring reminder to audiences that they should not interpret the film with presumed common sense. Perhaps Chow’s renowned Mo Lei Tau or nonsense is an invitation to more serious meanings beneath the comic laugh. In this sense, this slimy mermaid romance-­comedy is actually a crafty lure to a cruel ecological allegory. If the cute-­response produces a sugar-­coated emotional bumper that encourages audiences to shy away from the discomfort of seeing the suffering of other species and suspends their care for others in Monster Hunt, the kitschy images in Mermaid might work in triggering a sense of urgency to care through the visual representation of cruelty. In Monster Hunt, the mildness of cute images easily diverts the negative emotion that results from the tragic genocide of the monsters. One might argue the cuddly images can compel people to action by exaggerating the vulnerable situations of the nonhuman species and inviting the viewers to identify with this sentimentalized situation. However, these images also hinder a deeper contemplation of the root of the problem as related to human greed, because the spectator is encouraged to simply feel good about

Figure 8.7  Drawing mermaids at the police station. Source: Chow, Stephen, director. Mermaid. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd, 2016.

Fabulating animals–human affinity   187 these images. This is arguably similar to seeing images of cruelty. Susan Sontag makes a stern critique on the spectator’s habitual response to images of atrocity, cruelty, and suffering, as she argues there is merely provocation instead of a moral charge attached to representations of cruelties, so that the spectator simply gets “satisfaction of being able to look at the images without flinching” (Sontag 2003, 41). This easy and pleasant consumption of cruel images without much thinking and acting is often fortified by popular representations, consumerist habits, and the new social media, as viewers can easily access and dispose of images of atrocity. One might fall into a similar habitual numbness when watching the establishing sequence of Mermaid, which juxtaposes images and footage of ecological disasters—such as air and water pollution resulting from industrial infrastructure, deforestation, a close-­up on toxic water, dolphin hunting, overfishing, and victimized birds with oil-­covered feathers—in the opening credits. At the end of this juxtaposition of visualized global ecological disasters the implantation is revealed of a destructive sonar transmitter into the ocean, that expels marine creatures. On the one hand, this opening credit sequence can be read as a self-­reflexive mockery. While global environmental disasters are becoming more serious as humans are producing more and more garbage and toxic materials, this film seems to demonstrate itself as one among such wastes by putting the production credits onto the visual images of environmental hazards. On the other hand, this montage attempts to hint to the viewers that they will not only be having fun with this comic fantasy. This use of low-­quality documentary footage as a visual tactic does not only establish the gap in visual quality between “serious” documentary and glossy-­looking popular cinema, it also diverts the pleasure-­seeking audience to the unpleasant reality, and prepares them to make the connection between the comic plot and the cruel reality of human destruction of nature. This half-­mocking-­half-­solemn opening sequence attempts to challenge audience’s visual habit without disappointing their consumerist habit. Audiences’ visual numbness is further mocked later when the Japanese staff at Lau’s company helps Lau’s business partner/girlfriend Ruo Lan/若蘭 (acted by Zhang Yuqi/張雨綺) to take pictures that include the murky blood of the goldfish killed by the sonar transmitter during a business presentation. The Japanese staff’s cute-­looking gesture and delightful face becomes a horrible reminder of the problematic visual pleasure in capturing and circulating images of suffering (Figure 8.8). Her “Japaneseness” is also stereotyped as the combination of the cute and the cruel. The series of actions, from posing, smiling, clicking the button on cell phone to take the pictures, to clicking another button for peer group circulation, alienate the viewer from the referent, namely the goldfish who has just been killed. This alienating process has also drawn the viewers closer into themselves instead of regarding the others who may be suffering or in need of help. Although this brief scene seems to be perverse and disgusting, it accurately articulates the visual habits of contemporary urbanites as problematic. Habitually, this thoughtless photo-­taking custom or “photographic seeing” (Sontag 2008 [1977], 97) forbids us to face the ecological

188   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law

Figure 8.8  Japanese staff take photographs with the goldfish killed by the sonar device. Source: Chow, Stephen, director. Mermaid. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd, 2016.

hazards caused by ourselves, because we are too busy taking pictures for ourselves instead of thinking of the association between our action and its effects on nature. Exposing this visual perversity, this film attempts to motivate people to change their indifferent attitudes towards their own destructive acts. Even though the motivation is as lousy and didactic as a romantic cliché, the film delivers an effort to raise the ecological awareness of the general public, who may not expect to learn such a message when they choose a Stephen Chow film for Chinese New Year festive cinema-­going. This shock effect is intentionally anticipated as part of Stephen Chow’s strategic marketing plan, which held back the casting and did not disclose the plot synopsis or film stills prior the film’s release. As in many romantic comedies, or perhaps it is the doomed fate of the mermaid ever since her fairytale ancestor, Shan finally falls in love with the greedy billionaire Lau Hin, who is attracted by the mermaid’s money-­resistant manner. Unlike Anderson’s mermaid, Shan does not attempt to change herself to fit into the lifestyle of the nouveau riche. Instead, she is stuck in the tug of war between love and responsibility. At first, Lau is affected by this mysterious young girl who cares for him in an intimate, scrupulous manner. The lure of the siren becomes a mutual attraction with a comic touch, when Shan invites Lau to join her having a chicken feast, enjoying the rides in the amusement park, and even singing together in public. At the same time, Shan and Lau begin to develop a caring attitude to each other, which often signals the starting point of a romantic relationship. Shan as the initial caring agent transmits her caring attitude to Lau by wiping his mouth and listening to his life story, thereby transforming Lau into a caring agent. Later, after knowing that Shan is a mermaid whose living environment has been destroyed by his investment plan, Lau

Fabulating animals–human affinity   189 i­nitiates himself to experience the sonar simulator—a device that literally kills the marine creatures instead of expelling them. Having experienced the unbearable pain induced by the sonar device, Lau decides to switch off the killing machine. This experience of situated understanding and learning to feel (instead of seeing) the pain of others is the critical moment of change in the plot. This scene does not only convert Lau from the villain to an eco-­hero but shows that it is possible for a greedy human to become a caring agent. But the film does not stop here. The happy ending of Shan and Lau swimming together with different marine creatures under a big blue ocean only comes after the climactic, extended sequence of the brutal massacre of the merpeople tribe. Having successfully located the merpeople at Green Gulf, Ruo Lan commands groups of armed troops to capture, snatch, and slaughter them. She is especially obsessed with killing Shan because of her speciesist jealousy. The killing sequence is extremely kitschy and exceedingly violent. The boats of troopers, the mass killing of merpeople by different weapons, and the bloody pool of water are visual reminders of the controversial dolphin killing process documented in Louie Psihoyos’ The Cove (2009), which is also referenced in another scene when Lau attempts to search for information about human destruction of nature on internet (Figure 8.9). The extreme sight of violence in this sequence is radically distancing from the comic effects created throughout the film. Shan’s struggle to escape from the pursuit is accidentally photographed by the cross-­dressed fake mermaid from the opening scene (Figure 8.10a). Shan, powerless, lies on the ground with injuries all over her body. Her head slightly raises and her eyes are gazing directly into the camera (Figure 8.10b). The visual composition of this photo

Figure 8.9 Lau watches scenes from The Cove when searching the internet for information. Source: Chow, Stephen, director. Mermaid. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd, 2016.

190  Fiona Yuk-­wa Law

Figure 8.10  The fake mermaid takes photo of the real-­life injured mermaid. Source: Chow, Stephen, director. Mermaid. Hong Kong: Edko Films Ltd, 2016.

is like wartime photojournalism and it serves the same function of exposing the effects of human violence. The contrast between extreme violence and grotesque humor has resulted in a kitschy critique of the nonsensical extermination of marine creatures by humans, as well as highlighting the necessity to embrace the ethics of care with nonhumans, as demonstrated at the end of the film. After all the brutal excitement and shock effects, the film’s closure is another contrast. Instead of returning to the comic, the film ends with a minimalist,

Fabulating animals–human affinity  191 serene, and nondramatic tone. Having survived the massacre, Lau and Shan live in retreat by the seaside. Lau becomes a philanthropist in supporting education related to marine conservation and research. Although he is enjoying a life of “happily ever after” with Shan on land, he denies any encounter with or knowledge of the mermaid species despite the fact that Shan’s photograph has been widely circulated. This ethical attitude of denial is an alternative measure to conserve the natural environment by maintaining an epistemological distance from it. Humans’ understanding of nature must be ethically considered and carefully handled in order to avoid excessive and destructive desire. In the end, Lau passes Shan’s ecological statement about the importance of fresh air and clean water to the young generation of marine conservationist, and the film finally ends with Lau and Shan swimming happily under the ocean. This welcoming and inconclusive closure reminds us of another scene at the beginning of the film: the old mermaid is giving a speech to the younger ones by narrating how humans have historically marginalized the merpeople tribe. She claims that the more advanced humans become, the crueler they are. Then she concludes that humans are evil. Interestingly, she attempts to continue this statement with the suggestion of an alternative opinion by beginning her next line with “But…”. While everyone, including the audiences, is expecting her to continue her speech, she falls asleep. The hopeful vision suggested by this “but” is put on hold, open to be filled in. Probably this “but” is also a reminder that we should not simply stop at our own conclusion without welcoming the possibility of imagining the otherwise. Just as Blum (1994, 175–6) states, that compassion is based on imaginative reconstruction by dwelling imaginatively on the condition of the other, and that expanding our powers of imagination would expand our capacity for compassion. Perhaps the possibility of ecocinema lies in this imaginative openness.

Towards an ethics of care in the kitschy ecocinematic experience The modern animal rights movement was born in the wake of social justice struggles for racial and gender equality in the 1970s. The vocabulary of justice, rights, and welfare has since then become the buzzwords for animal advocacy following Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1979) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). This also means that cruelty, exploitation, abuse, maltreatment, and violence have become the other side of the coin. Despite the obvious display of the kitschy, the comic, and the cute, cruelty is the underlying keyword in understanding these two entertaining films. From the above analysis, I have proposed that a critical reading of this kitschy rendition of cruelty exerts a new perspective in broadening the current discussion of ecocinema that concerns animals–human affinity. While Carol Adams claims that the harm to individual animal victims is not seen because he/she is “dematerialized” (Adams 2007 [1996], 217), “dismembered” (Adams 2010, 135), and devalued as meat and partial bodies, I argue that the cinematic form allows a process of (re)materialization of the victim’s sufferings through visual, aural, and affective embodiments.

192  Fiona Yuk-­wa Law In particular, the aesthetics of kitsch (if I may say so) offers such a critical grid by swaying away from the dominant ideological assumptions about an indifferent view of not caring about these everyday ecological atrocities. Monster Hunt and Mermaid do not only foreground this allegorized political stance through the power of the kitsch, they also show that the language of care ethics ought to include a critical position against the unjustifiable desire of economic developments as the cause of problem. The feminist ethics of care here is not only applicable to understanding gender politics by a possible revision, if not subversion, of conventional gender roles when all genders can become caring; it is intersected with a challenge to the anthropocentric human–animal relationship when this caring attitude is not just aimed at gaining romantic love or individual subjectivities, but also situating oneself across species and knowing beyond one’s comfort zone. Through the kitsch as a tactic of surprise, the double logic of popular cinema therefore offers an opportunity to welcome the audience as the active agent who is no longer simply satisfied by predictable entertainment, but also expecting something beyond mere pleasures by finding the message beneath the kitschy. From these two films, we learn that if we care about the nonhuman residents on planet earth, we must engage ourselves in becoming a caring agent despite the risk of being laughed at. In addition to rational thinking and utilitarian practices, we must also feel in a way that is beyond us, and address our limitations and vulnerability in doing so. The kitsch is a token of such human weakness and an invitation to ecocritical openness.

Notes 1 At the time of writing this chapter, Mermaid is the highest grossing Chinese film ever in the PRC, earning 3.39 billion RMB (China.org, 12 June 2016); Monster Hunt is the second highest despite accusations of a manipulated box office, earning nearly 2.44 billion RMB (South China Morning Post, 3 March 2016). 2 Although Aristotle’s use of oikos somehow connotes an anthropocentric perspective of seeing plants and animals as subordinate to human beings. 3 In addition to the multiple literary sources about the origins of the half-­fish-­half-­human creature from The Classics of Mountains and Seas to Guan Dong Xin Y/廣東新語, there have been folk legends about the occurrence of mermaid-­like creatures called Lo Ting/盧亭 in Southern China and Lantau Island of Hong Kong since the Ming Dynasty. The myth of this “Hong Kong mermaid” is also fictionally recorded in nineteenth-­century biologist Alfred Russel Wallace’s fictional book in Japanese director Iwaii Shunji’s novel Wōresu No Ningyo (Wallace and a Mermaid). While some critics have written on Lo Ting as the symbol of Hong Kong’s local identity through its ambivalent transmutation from the Chinese root, and therefore relating the mermaid to a cultural symbol of Hong Kong playfully created by Chow, I am here focusing on the ecological perspective in the film.

References Adams, Carol J. 2007 [1996]. “Caring About Suffering: A Feminist Exploration.” The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, 198–226. New York: Columbia University Press.

Fabulating animals–human affinity   193 Adams, Carol J. 2010. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-­Vegetarian Critical Theory. 20th Anniversary Edition. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Adams, Carol J. and Lori Gruen. 2014. “Groundwork.” Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, 7–36. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky, ­Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1992. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, edited by Hanna Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn, London: Fontana Press. Blum, Lawrence A. 1994. Moral Perception and Particularity. Cambridge, UK: ­Cambridge University Press. Cain, Rob. 2015. “An Interview with Raman Hui, Director of China’s Blockbuster Hit ‘Monster Hunt.’ ” Forbes, September 27, 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/​ 2015/09/27/​an-­interview-­with-­chinas-­monster-­hunt-­director-­raman-­hui (accessed December 12, 2015). Calinescu, Matei. 1987. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-­Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cheung, Chi-­fai. 2014a. “Green Group Questions Air Quality Projections for Proposed Third Runway.” South China Morning Post, July 11, 2014. www.scmp.com/news/ hong-­kong/article/1551406/green-­group-­questions-­air-­quality-­projections-­proposed-­ third-­runway (accessed March 3, 2016). Cheung, Chi-­fai. 2014b. “US Consultant Believes Dolphins will Return after Third Runway is Built.” South China Morning Post, June 28, 2014. www.scmp.com/news/ hong-­kong/article/1541987/us-­consultant-­believes-­dolphins-­will-­return-­after-­third-­ runway-­built (accessed March 3, 2016). Cheung, Chi-­fai. 2014c. “Airport’s Dolphin Experts Told ‘Show Evidence Development Won’t Drive Creatures Away.’ ” South China Morning Post, July 3, 2014. www.scmp. com/news/hong-­kong/article/1545116/airports-­dolphin-­experts-­told-­show-­us-­your-­ evidence (accessed March 3, 2016). “Chinese White Dolphin – Cumulative Impact” WWF, n.d. www.wwf.org.hk/en/reslib/ species/chiwhitedolphin/impact/ (accessed April 27, 2019). Chow, Stephen, director. 2016. Mermaid. Edko Films Ltd. Donovan, Josephine and Carol J. Adams. 2007. “Introduction.” The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, 1–20. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilligan, Carol. 2003. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1989 [1961]. “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch.” Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 3–21. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1999. Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gruen, Lori. 2011. Ethics and Animals: An Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Held, Virginia. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hui, Raman, director. Monster Hunt. Edko Films Ltd., 2015.

194   Fiona Yuk-­wa Law Ingram, David. 2014. “The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-­film Criticism.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 43–61. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Law, Fiona Yuk-­wa. 2016. “Pet-­Animals in the Concrete Jungle: Tales of Abandonment, Failures, and Sentimentality in San Hua and Twelve Nights.” Screening the Nonhuman: Representations of Animal Others in the Media, edited by Amber E. George and J.L. Schatz, 149–68. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lee, Edmund. 2015. “How Creative Mind Behind Shrek Finally made his Hong Kong Movie.” 48 Hours, July 16, 2015. www.scmp.com/magazines/48-­hours/article/​ 1839043/​how-­creative-­mind-­behind-­shrek-­brought-­characters-­back-­china (accessed April 25, 2016). Lee, Maggie. 2016. “Film Review: The Mermaid.” Variety, February 10, 2016. http:// variety.com/2016/film/asia/the-­mermaid-­review-­stephen-­chow-­1201701757 (accessed March 3, 2016). Li, Peter J. 2006. “The Evolving Animal Rights and Welfare Debate in China: Political and Social Impact Analysis.” Animals, Ethics and Trade: The Challenge of Animal Sentience, edited by Jacky Turner and Joyce D’Silva, 111–28. London: Earthscan. Li, Peter. 2013. “China’s Wildlife Crisis.” Ignoring Nature No More: the Case for Compassionate Conservation, edited by Marc Bekoff, 317–30. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Liu, Wei-­tong. 2015. “Xi Si Ji Kong De Zhu Yao Ji.” Teng Xun Da Jia, July 7, 2015. http://dajia.qq.com/blog/483030100911497.html (accessed July 8, 2015). Lu, Sheldon. 2009. “Introduction: Cinema, Ecology, Modernity.” Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi, 1–14. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Ma, Yue Lin. 2016. “Dong Hua Jie De Li An Zhuo Yao Ji Dao Yan Xu Cheng Yi: Ba Zi Ji De Gu Shi Shuo Hao.” Tian Xia Za Zhi [CommonWealth Magazine], April 23, 2016. www.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5075927 (accessed April 25, 2016). MacDonald, Scott. 2004. “Toward an Eco-­Cinema.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11 (2): 107–32. MacDonald, Scott. 2013. “The Ecocinema Experience.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 17–41. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Meeker, Joseph W. 1997. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic, third edition Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. Menninghaus, Winfried. 2009. “On the ‘Vital Significance’ of Kitsch: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of ‘Bad Taste.’ ” Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice, 39–57. Victoria, Australia: re.press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rust, Stephen and Salma Monani. 2013. “Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves – Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 1–13. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Slovic, Scott. 2000. “Ecocriticism: Containing Multitudes, Practising Doctrine.” The Green Studies Reader: from Romanticism to Ecocriticism, edited by Laurence Coupe, 160–2. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador. Sontag, Susan. 2008 [1977]. On Photography. New York: Penguin.

Fabulating animals–human affinity  195 “The Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge is a Dangerous Experiment on Chinese White Dolphins – Precautionary Measures are Urgently Needed.” WWF, May 20, 2009. www.wwf.org.hk/en/news/press_release/?1220/WWF-­T he-­H ong-­K ong-­Z huhai-­ Macao-­Bridge-­is-­a-­dangerous-­experiment-­on-­Chinese-­white-­dolphins-­precautionary-­ measures-­are-­urgently-­needed (accessed March 3, 2016). “Top 5 Biggest Movies at China’s Box Office” South China Morning Post, March 3, 2016. www.scmp.com/news/china/money-­wealth/article/1920090/top-­5-­biggest-­movies-​ chinas-­box-­office (accessed March 3, 2016). Tuan, Yi-­fu. 1984. Dominance and Affection: the Making of Pets. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Warren, Karen. 1990. “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism.” Environmental Ethics 12 (2): 125–46. Wolf, Jaime. 2016. “The Animator who Created ‘Monster Hunt.’ ” The New Yorker, January 22, 2016. www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-­desk/the-­animator-­who-­created-­ monster-­hunt (accessed February 2, 2016). Won, Ho-­jung. 2015. “HK Director’s ‘Monster Hunt’ breaks Chinese Box Office.” AsiaOne, November 14, 2015. http://news.asiaone.com/news/showbiz/hk-­directors-­monster-­hunt-­ breaks-­chinese-­box-­office#sthash.jdYsMJx4.dpuf (accessed April 14, 2016). Zhang, Rui. 2016. “ ‘The Mermaid’ Ends Theatre Run as Top Grossing Chinese Film.” China.org.cn, June 12, 2016. www.china.org.cn/arts/2016-­06/12/content_38649415. htm (accessed June 17, 2016).

Part IV

Landscape and nation

9 Sinification by greening Politics, nature, and ethnic borderlands in Maoist ecocinema Cheng Li

Prelude: ecocinema, Maoist China, and ethnic minority Chinese ecocinema as a new field has been emerging in both East Asian studies and ecocritical studies.1 However, most extant studies have focused exclusively on the post-­Mao era films and failed to notice that a wide range of the Mao-­era films also embrace ecological themes. Just note some Mao-­era ecocinema here: Old Soldier, New Story (Laobing xinzhuan, 1959) on wilderness transformation in Heilongjiang Province, Jiangnan in the North (Beiguo jiangnan, 1963) and Harvest (Fengshou, 1953) on irrigation in the northern part of China, The Pioneers (Chuangye, 1974) on oilfield construction in northeast China, Spring in the Desert (Shamo de chuntian, 1975) on the war against the desert in Inner Mongolia, Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song (Junken zhange, 1965) on Xinjiang’s wilderness transformation, The Song of Baoshan (Baoshan zhige, 1958) on the exploration of iron mines during the Great Leap Forward, and Daji and Her Father (Daji he tade fuqin, 1961) on Han Chinese’s construction of a dam in the ethnic Yi minority areas. It is notable that, well before the Chinese massive environmental concerns of the late 1990s, Mao’s turbulent China already produced such diverse cinematic representations regarding environmental issues. As J.R. McNeil (1998, 37) argues, “Chinese landscape was unusually dependent on demographical and political stability and unusually vulnerable to disruption by neglect.” Mao’s China was filled with political campaigns and social movements, some of which even explicitly targeted the non-­human world such as the “Four Pests Campaign” (1958–1962) aiming at eliminating rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows (later replaced by bed bugs). To mobilize the masses, literature, visual arts, and other cultural apparatus are employed by the authorities, among which films served as the most powerful agent. As a primary agent to activate mass movements, film and its mass circulation provide a refreshed visual culture and help to shape the masses’ environmental perceptions and practices, as Paula Willoquet-­Maricondi (2010, 8) suggests. Among the Mao-­era ecocinema that visualizes the relationship between humans and the nature, I am particularly drawn to those with a context of ethnic minorities.2 I believe that the understanding of ethnic minorities plays an important role in understanding China as a Han-­Chinese dominated nation-­state.3

200  Cheng Li Paul Clark has pointed out that “one of the most effective ways to make films with ‘Chinese’ style was to go to the most ‘foreign’ cultural areas in the nation” (Clark 1987, 101). Likewise, Dru C. Gladney (1995) contends that filmmakers have to come to the margins to show the heartfelt problems in China. The Chinese cinematic constructions of ethnic minorities are usually binary, with a clear notion of the “Other” in mind.4 Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar further argue that these binary cinematic representations can be better considered as “the syncretic and performative productions of the intersection of the self-­and-­Other model with other local discourses of cultural and ethnic difference” (Berry and Farquhar 2006, 191). Among those “local discourses of cultural and ethnic difference”, the vital aspect toward nature—the indigenous environmental notions held by ethnic minorities—cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, “the outcome of locating ‘national style’ in ethnic cultural practices was never a restoration of ‘minority’ cultures to a ‘majority’ status but always a legitimation of minority peoples as part of the ‘solidarity’ of the Chinese nation” (Zhang 1997, 79–80). As such, nature in ethnic borderlands becomes a contested arena for humans to project their influences either with nationalist discourse or indigenous discourse, and a lens for “the real human practices: relationship between men and men” (Williams 1980, 84). By redirecting the environmental concerns to the human world, I, in this chapter, propose a theory of “sinification by greening” and aim to answer the following questions: How is nature conceptualized in the Mao-­era films on ethnic minorities? How does greening the desert entangle with Han Chinese’s political/cultural march toward ethnic minority regions? How are centrifugal elements channeled into the centripetal rhetoric of environmental progress? What kind of rhetoric is employed by the Communists to mobilize the people, especially ethnic minorities, for the grand remaking nature projects? Situated in the intersection of ecocinema, ethnic studies, the history of Maoist China, and environmental history, this chapter will shed new light upon re-­examining the extant dialectics of greening and colonization.

Sinification by greening Trees are instrumental in political initiatives, especially nation-­building. Based on their positive connotations, trees are compelling cultural capital that could be manipulated and channeled into different ends. For example, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai heralded the Green Belt Movement against dictatorship in the 1980s by planting trees in Kenya. In India, the Chipko movement of the 1970s, aimed at protecting trees, has been viewed as a “women’s movement, a Ghandian initiative, a peasant insurrection, or a pro-­development protest” (Tsing 2005, 235).5 Also, in US history, national parks, partly resulting from the endeavor to protect trees, were accompanied by forced removals of the indigenous population.6 Geographer David Harvey contends that “All proposals concerning ‘the environment’ are necessarily and simultaneously proposals for social change [,] and … action upon them always entails the instantiation in

Sinification by greening  201 ‘nature’ of a certain regime of values” (Harvey 1996, 119).7 Indeed, the disparate and uncertain understandings of the meanings of trees trigger a potential for social change, which will be explored in this chapter. In western historical and literary tradition, colonization is in part driven by the exploitation of natural resources to satisfy the socioeconomic needs of various empires, usually labeled as “ecological imperialism.”8 For example, for early US settlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, clearing the land means neighborhood, production, and food, and it was deemed as the “natural” process for “improvement.” The British Empire’s colonization in India heralded by the British East India Company also caused severe deforestation. Tracing the imperial history, environmental historian Richard Grove documents the European settlers’ deforestation in the tropical colonies in the eighteenth century, suggesting that the humanization of landscape and extensive pastoral economies are responsible (Grove 1996, 17). Although European imperialism attracts most scholastic attention and has generated considerable scholarships, “Imperialism was not a specifically European process and it could be autonomous: in other words, it could be eastern and intramural” (Williams 1997, 170). In a similar manner to western powers, the newly established Communist regime in China also expanded or intensified its rule and sphere of influence to exotic regions and peoples during the destruction of indigenous lands and environments. Nonetheless, I want to intervene in this conventional narrative by pointing out that, unlike western modern empires’ deforesting colonies, Maoist China tried to green ethnic borderlands, to sinicize ethnic minorities.9 As Paula Willoquet-­Maricondi (2010, 7) argues, “any representation of the physical world and of our engagement with it, whether through words or images, is a ‘product’ with value edited.” The Maoist greening campaign in Chinese northwestern ethnic minorities regions is not a neutral initiative. Trees are not only a contested arena, but the nexus of Han Chinese and ethnic minorities as well. Heterogeneous approaches to accommodate the tough (mostly desert) natural environment inherited from ancestors among ethnic minority groups are now channeled into a uniform method—greening. Admittedly, greening the wilderness improves the productivity of the land, feeding more of the population, including the Han Chinese migrants, and facilitates the exploitation of oil and gas resources in coming days. An inconvenient truth, however, is that, underlining the homogeneous national greening campaign across different ethnic groups, the inherent and potential cultural conflicts between Han Chinese and indigenous population are downplayed and even eliminated. Meanwhile, planting trees in an inhospitable land does not only mirror divergent attitudes toward nature, but also suggests that land ownership is shifted to the “nation,” usually unconsciously.10 In fact, shortly after the founding of the PRC, the Chinese communists launched the land reform to bring the land, redistributed from landlords to households during the Chinese Civil War, back into the hands of the communist regime, as state-­owned land. The Han Chinese socialist universal reason to conquer the hostile world by planting trees is inevitably entangled with taming the “unfavorable” natural

202  Cheng Li environment and transforming the ethnic minorities’ indigenous environmental cultures and practices. As Anna Tsing argues, In the matrix of colonialism, universal reason became the mark of temporally dynamic and spatially expansive forms of knowledge and power. Universal reason, of course, was best articulated by the colonizers. In contrast, the colonized were characterized by particularistic cultures. (Tsing 2005, 9) Planting trees as a centripetal and progressive crusade is thus inherently oppressive and regressive through the dangerous liaison of greening and sinification, which is visualized in the feature film, Spring in the Desert (shamo de chuntian, 1975), and the documentary, Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song (junken zhan’ge, 1965).11 Spring in the Desert was shot by Changchun studio in 1975, one year before Mao’s death. It bears the imprint of the Cultural Revolution, such as emphasizing a central hero. When the desert approaches the grassland in Inner Mongolia, the pro-­Communist Mongolian female leader, Narenhua, clashes with the native leader, Damulin. Narenhua hopes to inhabit this area by planting trees against the overwhelming desert, while Damulin insists on the traditional nomadic lifestyle and asks his fellows to sell all the livestock and go hunting in the wilderness so as to get rid of the imminent famine. Narenhua is temporarily removed from her office once Damulin has persuaded higher authorities. After Narenhua’s constant endeavors, she later resumes her office, and, unexpectedly, Damulin turns out to be an anti-­revolutionary figure. Eventually, Narenhua’s crusade of greening the harsh environment starts. Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song is a documentary on Han Chinese’s grand greening projects of constructing and developing the backward Xinjiang. The documentary ostentatiously chronicles migrant Han Chinese’s great ambition in building dams and farms in the desert and barren land, leaving the local ethnic minorities in the margins. Based on the notion of “sinification by greening,” I thus propose three intertwined arguments. First, the success of the greening campaign is viewed as evidence of the communist’s superiority over its predecessors in mobilizing ethnic minorities to defeat the harsh natural environment. It is also legitimized by setting its goals to emancipate the oppressed class within ethnic minorities and to serve the socialist construction nationwide. Second, the greening campaign helps to establish the exotic communist rule in ethnic borderlands by degrading nomadic lifestyle, acculturating ethnic minorities in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang with new conceptions of nature, and finally driving them to pay homage, either consciously or subconsciously, to the newly established nation-­state rather than the divine nature as they traditionally do; in this sense, the physical nature and the ideological nature in ethnic borderlands are reshaped at the same time. Finally, during the Maoist greening campaign, the environmental discourse dovetails with socialist revolutionary discourse by elevating the productivity of the environment, and treating the physical environment that is unfit for agriculture

Sinification by greening   203 as a new enemy that need to be, and can be, defeated. In these ways, eco­cinema in Maoist China with a context of ethnic minorities becomes a perfect prism through which we can perceive the dangerous liaison of acculturation and environmental alteration in China that is distinct from the West, and identify certain patterns of politicized environmental discourse in China that still linger today.

Nomadic spring Tracing the history of the Mao era in regard to nature, environmental historian Robert Marks contends that Chinese Communists’ ideas on nature derive from “Marxism, the Chinese Communists’ own history, China’s imperial legacy, and Western science”, and “they shared the general modernist disposition that natural resources were to be used to support humans and society” (Marks 2012, 271). Mao’s war against nature is famous for its infamous campaign in the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961). This movement aimed to rapidly transform China from an agrarian economy into a communist society through rapid industrialization and collectivization. Mao saw steel production as the key pillars of economic development. To fuel the furnaces, the local environment was denuded of trees, and woods were taken from the doors and furniture of peasants’ houses.12 Somewhat ironically, Mao called for a campaign for “greening the motherland” (luhua zuguo) earlier on March 1956 when he addressed the youth. Later, in National Agricultural Development Outline from 1956 to 1967 (1956 nian dao 1967 nian quanguo nongye fazhan ganangyao), such an initiative was elaborated, aiming at significantly greening the whole nation in 12 years. It became a compulsory task to “plant trees by houses, roads, waters, and even around mines, dams, and railways. The state-­owned forest farms were established for various purposes, including against wind, sea, and sand” (China, National People’s Congress 1960). In the People’s Daily (renmin ribao), the advantages of greening the nation were meticulously documented. Planting trees could defend against the sand and protect arable land, elevating land productivity. Forestation was embedded in the guideline of “Take the grain as the key link, develop comprehensively” (yiliangweigang, quanmianfazhan). A utopian blueprint, including slogans such as “making the water of Yellow River to be transparent” (yaorang huanghe biancheng qingshui) and “covering the desert with green clothes” (yaogei shamo pishang luyi), was evoked. Tens of millions of young people were called to participate in the project.13 Despite criticism on accelerated deforestation in the early 1960s, surprisingly, according to forestry expert S.D. Richardson (1966), during the Great Leap Forward planting trees practices were not stopped. In 17 provinces, “seed centers” were established; centralized nurseries under the aegis of the State Forest Service were organized; legislation even required afforestation agencies to guarantee survival, and awarded certificates to those who had successful projects (Richardson 1966, 59). With hindsight, the “greening the motherland” campaign was indeed instrumental in stopping desertification. In 1976, the coverage of forest in China was claimed to be double that

204   Cheng Li of before 1949, and more than 170 towns were praised in the “greening the motherland” campaign (Figure 9.1).14 Notably, Mao’s “greening the motherland” campaign was particularly meaningful in the ethnic borderland in that, through the campaign, exotic ethnic minorities were shifted onto and then embedded in the historical trajectory of the Han Chinese and the socialist regime. Greening the nation is not only a means to shape the physical environment, but also an approach to establish, consolidate, and intensify the Han Chinese’s presence and control of ethnic borderlands as well. Spring in the Desert begins with a scenario of a sandstorm in the Inner ­Mongolia grassland where horses are galloping in multiple directions. A long shot reveals the boundless wilderness and the indigenous nomadic lifestyle (Figure 9.2). Suddenly, Narenhua, a Mongolian woman, who was saved by Han Chinese from the oppressive Mongolian herd owner when she was young, whips these wild horses.15 Interestingly, the salvation of Narenhua plays an important role in the film. Despite the conspicuous absence of Han Chinese characters in the film, Han Chinese ideology is actually displayed by Narenhua, a Mongolian woman. In this way, the conflict amongst the Mongolians regarding nature in the film reveals the underlying conflict between the Han Chinese and Mongolian ideologies on nature, to which I shall turn later.

Figure 9.1  Mao Zedong’s inscription: “Greening the Motherland” in 1956. Source: photos from China Pictorial in September, 1976.

Sinification by greening  205

Figure 9.2  The nomadic lifestyle. Source: Spring in the Desert.

Narenhua is not satisfied with Damulin, the local Mongolian leader, who asks the people to sell the livestock and go hunting outside of this region. ­Damulin thinks the only way to be rid of the sandstorm is to migrate. By contrast, a villager contends that “We are now members of People’s Commune (Renmin gongshe): we should fight against the natural disaster collectively, and we should not get away from the famine-­stricken area when we encounter a few difficulties.” This villager identifies a contrast between the challenging individualist nomadic lifestyle before the Maoist era and the joyful collectivist settled lifestyle in the Maoist era. Natural disasters now can be defeated by the leadership of a new organization—the People’s Commune. Later, Narenhua joins the discussion and argues against Damulin. She claims that “The desert could be managed well, as the mountain and water has already been managed well.”16 The desert, in this sense, is narrated as another non-­ agentic entity, like mountains and water, to be “managed” (zhili). In history, sand has different meanings for Han Chinese and Mongolians. For Mongolians, according to anthropologist Dee Mack Williams (2002, 192), “sand functions to preserve memories of traditional Mongolian culture and thereby sustain a collective identity,” while for the Han Chinese, the desert only means “primitive nature of the steppe land” and thus should be changed.17 Notwithstanding being a native Mongolian, Narenhua adopts Maoist ideology. Historically, in 1957, Mao delivered a famous speech on contradictions among people, calling people to “unite all ethnic groups to launch a new war—a war against nature” (Mao 1957). For Mao and his followers, Han and

206   Cheng Li

Figure 9.3  People admiring the apple from Chairman Mao. Source: Spring in the Desert.

all the ethnic minority groups should not beg favors from nature but command it. Mao’s centripetal effort to cope with nature in a uniformed manner arguably eliminates divergent perceptions of nature held by different ethnic groups, thus making the centripetal campaign inherently oppressive and conceptually centrifugal. Mao’s clout is immediate: Narenhua proudly claims that she has met Chairman Mao emancipating the oppressed people from the brutal landlords, and brought back a red apple from Chairman Mao. Narenhua contends that the best way to live up to Chairman Mao’s expectations is to transform the desert into an oasis where apples can grow. Hereby, Narenhua has combined two endeavors and tied them together—political revolution and environmental transformation. The desert represents the old-­fashioned society while the prospective oasis embodies the new Communist regime. In the film, Chairman Mao’s apple is circulated amongst the villagers (Figure 9.3). The medium shot, in which the smiling faces, staring eyes, and immensely enthusiastic mood can be perceived, deftly captures people’s acknowledgement of such associations. More importantly, the mixed appearance of different visual signifiers—costumes—of both smiling Han Chinese and Mongolians in camera panning and medium close-­up shots implicitly coalesces the ethnic Mongolian with Han Chinese seamlessly, blurring their disparate notions of the environment and different lifestyles. The clash of divergent perceptions of nature is reinforced when one villager clearly argues that “fleeing from the famine (Taohuang) cannot contribute to socialism” and the only way to achieve the socialist utopia is to confront the

Sinification by greening  207 harsh environment straight-­on. But for Damulin, fleeing from the famine is a better option. He argues that, “If small disaster comes, we should migrate to other pastures [Daochang]. If bigger disaster comes, we should move our homes [Banjia]”. Notably, migration to other pastures is not the same as fleeing from the famine. For Damulin, it represents a nomadic lifestyle with the historical and cultural imprint of the Mongolian ethnicity. To be sure, Damulin’s argument is far from groundless. According to anthropologist Dee Mack Williams (2002, 66), in stark opposition to traditional and contemporary Han perceptions, the pastoral Mongols have historically loved the open steppe and its spatial freedom. … For Mongols of northern China living beyond the Great Wall, enclosed land was sometimes treated as a despised symbol of the cultivating Han civilization. In this sense, Damulin alone represents a traditional spatial concept of the Mongolians whose perception of nature is characterized by mobility. Despite her own Mongolian ethnicity, Narenhua has a strong affiliation with the Communist Party and thus a completely different notion of the physical environment. She insists that, “If we want to make contribution to the country, we must control the desert,” after she has proudly claimed that she has learnt of other places’ successful experience in Beijing by planting trees. In fact, “The Marx-­Lenin-­Mao line of political philosophy viewed nomadic pastoralism as an evolutionary dead-­end standing in opposition to national progress, scientific rationalism, and economic development” (Dee Mack Williams 2002, 10). In this regard, planting trees is deemed as a national modernist pursuit, which expectedly excludes nomadic pastoralism as an approach to make a contribution to the country. In examining the herding history of Mongolians, however, anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath poignantly maintain that “… high mobile livestock herding is often the basis for the most efficient, wide-­ranging, well co-­ordinated and specialized production, and that it is compatible with technologically advanced and profit-­oriented economic activity” (Humphrey and Sneath 1999, 1).18 In this sense, the conflict between Narenhua and Damulin exemplifies the clash between the Communist ideology against nomadism and the traditional Mongolian concept of nature. Such tensions are deeply embedded throughout the film. Mao’s ideology to reshape the environment is projected more vividly later in the film. Narenhua quotes Mao’s General Line (Zongluxian) for socialist construction put forward in 1958: “Go all out, aim high, and achieve greater, faster, better and more economical results to build socialism [guzuganjin, lizhengshangyou, duokuaihaosheng jianshe shehuizhuyi].” Rather than passively flee to other places, Narenhua contends that taking action to reshape the hostile desert is the best option. Again, the desert is portrayed as an enemy of socialist modernity (Figure 9.4).

208   Cheng Li

Figure 9.4  Zooming-­out from Mongolian Civilians shaping the hostile environment. Source: Spring in the Desert.

When Narenhua mobilizes her people to control the desert, a close-­up shot of a red flag is particularly revealing (Figure 9.5). The first four characters on the red flag evoke a classical Chinese story—the foolish old man removes the mountains (Yugong yishan). It is the story of a ninety-­year-­old man who leads his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren to remove the mountains that obstruct their way in front of their house. The old man claims that the mountain will be finally removed in the future as long as his descendants continue the efforts. In 1945, Mao cites this story for his political pursuit, arguing that “Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism” (Mao 1945, 103). Mao used the mountain metaphor to refer to the human enemies, presupposing that that the mountains are real threats. Mao’s argument suggests that the Chinese Communist Party must erase the threats from both the physical environment and the human society. Such a thought is later confirmed towards the end of the film when the human enemies (represented by Damulin) are caught and the harsh desert is put under Mao’s followers’ control by planting trees. It should also be noted that the red flag is made up of eight big Han Chinese characters, which occupy a large portion of the flag, leaving small Mongolian characters at the margins.19 As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (2003, 7) rightly note, “Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ʻtruth’, ʻorder’, and ʻreality’ become established.” Han Chinese’s classical remaking nature fable, with Mongolian language on the flag, enables an implicit attempt

Sinification by greening  209

Figure 9.5  “Transform China in the Spirit of the Old Foolish Man”. Source: Spring in the Desert.

to export the Han Chinese perception of nature into Mongolian discourse. In addition, Narenhua’s speaking of Mandarin without any dialectal accent can also be interpreted as a good example of “self-­orientalism” as she embraces the Han Chinese ideology.20 As Xiaoning Lu argues, “[The use of Mandarin] aurally promotes the national unification; it also normalizes ethnic subjects into political subjects” (Lu 2014, 384). To put Lu’s argument one step further, using Mandarin in this film reconstructs the environmental subjects by reconfiguring them ethnically and politically. In Spring in the Desert, the indigenous Buddhist notion of nature also contrasts with the Communist greening campaign (Figure 9.6). The high angle and extreme long shot of the masses’ labor demonstrates the enthusiastic endeavors of the people. Also, deep focus is employed, demonstrating the broad scale of the environmental crusade (Figure 9.6). Nevertheless, Sangbu, a Buddhist kneeling on the ground, prays that everything on the desert is the Buddha’s holy plan and he feels guilty about changing it as everything around here is sacred. According to Vesna Wallace, the Mongolian Buddhists have “a variety of popular folk beliefs, including the belief that unusually shaped rocks, stones, and trees or the trees belonging to shamanesses are sacred and therefore should not be touched or removed” (Wallace 2015, 223). Sangbu confesses that he has to do so because he is commanded by the leaders. More importantly, colorful images of the planting campaign in the daytime are followed by Sangbu’s confession at night with black and white images. The film implies that the Buddhist notion is backward and anachronistic.

210  Cheng Li

Figure 9.6  Collective efforts to plant trees in the desert. Source: Spring in the Desert.

Sangbu’s holy ritual is indicative of the Buddhist view of nature: preserving the virgin environment. If nature is changed, it might commit sacrilege to the holy region. Ethnographer Almaz Khan offers more insight into this. For the Han Chinese, the cultivation means “opening up wasteland,” while for Mongolians, it is called gajirqagalaqu, or “shattering the land” (Khan 1996, 128). Narenhua, who feels at ease opening up the wasteland, embodies the cultural hegemony of Han Chinese in Inner Mongolia. In the film, Sangbu’s Buddhist idea on the holy land is denigrated as superstition (mixin), and it is further labeled as anti-­ revolution, a crime that could lead to death penalties in the name of “dictatorship of the proletariat (wuchanjieji zhuanzheng)” in the Maoist era. Homi Bhabha (1994, 70) argues, “The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.” Bhabha’s elaboration on race is applicable to ethnic issues in China. After defaming ethnic minorities’ conceptions of nature, the pro-­Communist people justify their efforts to green the desert. The ignorance of indigenous tradition can also be perceived from the comments on the film. From the very limited resources in regard to the reception of the film, two Mongolian students, Lin Feng and Zhuletemu (1976), argue that the clash between Narenhua and Damulin in Spring in the Desert actually conveys the choices between socialism and capitalism. Damulin, who sells the livestock and hinders the tree planting campaign, is labeled as the representative of Liu Shaoqi, who was purged by Mao for embracing capitalism, characterized by

Sinification by greening  211 greedy individualism and privatization, in sharp contrast to socialism which emphasizes abolition of private property. To be sure, by emphasizing the ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism, the bond between ethnic minorities and Han Chinese is insidiously reconfigured, built, and strengthened, thereby blurring their divergent opinions in regard to the physical environment. Planting trees in the ethnic borderlands once again is portrayed as a progressive socialist enterprise without considering the Inner Mongolians’ tradition at all. The clash between Damulin and Narenhua finally reaches its climax when Damulin decides to stop Narenhua’s tree-­planting efforts. Damulin poisons the seedlings by adding noxious chemicals to the pesticides. Later, Damulin and the herd owner conspire to kill Narenhua when she crosses the bridge. After surviving the conspiracy, Narenhua reconsiders the difficulties she has run into with her fellow Mongolians. She concludes that a class struggle (jieji douzheng) should be invoked. Apparently, Narenhua epitomizes the Communist Party’s tactics in the borderland. The Communist Party consolidated its rule in ethnic areas largely by restructuring societies in terms of class struggle and replacing their communal ties, be they religious, familial, or any other forms of ethnic bonds. For Narenhua, it is the class enemies within the Mongolians that have stopped her from reshaping the desert. Anthropologist Emily Yeh aptly points out that ecological construction projects in western China [including Xinjiang and inner Mongolia] constitute a form of reterritorialization, categorizing different kinds of citizens as having different degrees of worth, with some considered to be aligned with the interests of the state at large, and others, seen as marginal to the broader Chinese public, who become the targets of intervention of ecological construction projects. (Yeh 2009, 893) Such intervention is dramatized at the end of the film where Damulin and ­Narenhua confront each other. Even though they both ride horses, the camera takes different angles to juxtapose their images. For Narenhua, the medium close­up and low angle shot highlights her image as a powerful leader (Figure  9.7), while for Damulin, the long shot belittles him (Figure 9.8).21 Notably, through the point-­of-­view shots, Narenhua’s personal standing posture is contrasted with Damulin riding on the horse, visualizing the two different lifestyles. Narenhua condemns Damulin who wants to return to a capitalist lifestyle by selling all the seedlings and going hunting. The clash between the two lifestyles can only be reconciled when Damulin is finally found to be a Kuomintang secret agent who intends to undermine the socialist greening campaign. Narenhua’s efforts to green the desert reflect the revolutionary logic. On the one hand, the greening campaign mobilizes Mongolians to work under Mao’s ideology that is actually dominated by the Han Chinese. The greening campaign in ethnic minority regions is not a neutral or positive initiative. Planting trees advocated enthusiastically by Narenhua shows the shift of land ownership from nomadic

212  Cheng Li

Figure 9.7  Pro-­communist Narenhua clashes with anti-­communist Damulin. Source: Spring in the Desert.

indigenous Inner Mongolians to Han Chinese (or pro-­Han Mongolian, that is ­Narenhua in the film). On the other hand, utilization of revolutionary discourse by constructing class enemies within ethnic minorities justifies the Communist efforts to transform the hostile nature and the associated indigenous nomadic lifestyle.

Figure 9.8  Pro-­communist Narenhua clashes with anti-­communist Damulin. Source: Spring in the Desert.

Sinification by greening   213

Maoist green march toward Xinjiang While Spring in the Desert vividly demonstrates Mao’s ambition to rule the frontier in Inner Mongolia through fierce conflict by planting trees, Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song attempts to present the communists’ greening efforts in Xinjiang, concealing Mao’s enthusiasm to control and consolidate the borderlands via seemingly plain but insidious narratives.22 The clash is more evident in the feature film, while in the documentary the conflict is insidiously poignant, especially due to the absence of such face-­to-­face conflict. At the beginning of the documentary, a voiceover which describes the charming environment is accompanied by a montage of wilderness: green pastures and alluring mountains, which are somewhat holy and sacred. Such beautiful images are contrasted by a phenomenon: “Even though Xinjiang is comprised of one sixth of Chinese territory, the population only makes up one percent of Chinese territory before liberation [by the Communist government] … Here the wilderness has been asleep for billions of years.” It seems that the vast wild land cannot wait to be developed, and due to the small population in Xinjiang, such a grand development project needs outsiders to help by bringing new leaderships and labor forces.23 A temporal and spatial framework is put forward. Temporally, the liberation serves as the dividing line between two phases: the wilderness is widespread before the liberation, so it is self-­evident that it should be exploited after liberation. Liberation, in this sense, is not only about native people who claimed to be oppressed by the Kuomintang regime, but includes undeveloped nature as well. In geographical terms, the contrast between the population and geographical area suggests that most of the region is left untouched by human activities. In fact, the indigenous people become “unimagined communities.” By developing Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined community, Rob Nixon has noted that If the idea of the modern nation-­state is sustained by producing imagined communities, it also involves actively producing unimagined communities. I refer here not to those communities that lie beyond the national boundaries but rather to those unimagined communities internal to the space of the nation-­state, communities whose vigorously unimagined condition becomes indispensable to maintaining a highly selective discourse of national development. (Nixon 2011, 150) In this regard, the imagination of the empty space and ethnic people plays a crucial role in establishing the “selective discourse” of Chinese national development. As a result, more and more people from other parts of China were mobilized to migrate to this region. Such ambition is accomplished by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Xinjiang shengchan jianshe bingtuan; XPCC). The previously untouched landscape is now shaped by human beings’ sophisticated design, with straight roads and trimmed trees (Figure 9.9). Liu Mogao, one of the staff

214   Cheng Li

Figure 9.9  High-­angle shot of the militarized and manufactured landscape. Source: Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song.

on the documentary, contends that they have purposely selected high and straight trees and used a long shot to portray the XPCC’s tremendous efforts in greening the frontier (Liu 1965, 60). Trees are not only objects, they are also the signs of XPCC’s triumph in the frontier. Historically, XPCC was founded in 1954 under the order of Mao Zedong, to “consolidate border defense, accelerate Xinjiang’s development, and reduce the economic burden on the local government and local people of all ethnic groups.” In 1954, General Wang Zhen who had reclaimed the harsh land in Nanniwan in Shaanxi Province in the early 1940s was ordered to reclaim the soil in Xinjiang in the Maoist era.24 Xinjiang was full of harsh land and infertile soil (Figure 9.10). Such a hostile environment, mostly desert, should be investigated and further greened by Mao’s followers. On January 1974, China Pictorial published an article on the management of Taklimakan desert in Xinjiang. The desert, which had killed many explorers, was called “horrible dead sea (kepa de siwang zhihai).” Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science came to explore the desert, hoping to provide scientific information for the Communist government about how to further grapple with the desert. A photograph visualizes the scientists marching into the desert with one holding a red flag against the yellow winding dune. Apart from the Han scientists called to the frontier, soldiers were also deployed. In the documentary, the narrator cited Chairman Mao’s words that “these people are disciplined fighters (Jiluxing de zhandoudui)” and should become “skillful construction and emergency response unit (Shulian de jianshe tujidui).” Mao concisely pointed out the dual identities of XPCC, whose members were simultaneously both soldiers and civilians. As soldiers, they have

Sinification by greening  215

Figure 9.10  The harsh desert. Source: Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song.

conquered the enemy—the Kuomintang—and should ensure the political stability in Xinjiang; as civilians, they should defeat the new enemy—the harsh physical environment, by the greening crusade. Such a dangerous liaison is far from metaphorical. On the one hand, by underlining the military tradition of these people, the harsh environment is portrayed not so much as a common entity as new enemies. In other words, the tension is established and elevated. On the other hand, by portraying the confrontation among the civilians rather than the large group military units, the potentially sharp conflicts between Han Chinese and the indigenous population are downplayed and even eliminated. To put it in another way, the tension is reduced. As a consequence, few would imagine that the Han Chinese are not the indigenous population in the hostile environment. In addition to the visual apparatus, the documentary evokes olfactory and tactile devices to depict the inhospitable environment. A subsequent close-­up shows land that is neither frosted nor snow-­bound, but saline-­alkali soil which is inimical. The acrid area is deemed as the opponent. Later, the narrator reads a poem written in the eighth century by Tang Dynasty poet Cen Shen (approx. 715–70): Look now. How swiftly the River Races down to the sea! – and the sand, up– From the desert, flies yellow into Heaven. This September night is blowing cold, In valleys we measure … broken boulders– That head long follow the wind into the sea. (Quoted in Ward 2007, 32)25

216   Cheng Li The first stanza illustrates the boundless desert with terrifying sand in the sky, and the second stanza describes the life-­threatening boulders. In the film, the presence of ferocious wolves reinforces the terror of the physical environment. By displaying the hostility of the physical environment, the camera and the voiceover in fact suggest the ecophobia deeply ingrained amongst the XPCC. Simon Estok argues that ecophobia is “an irrational and groundless fear or hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism” (Estok 2011, 4). Delineating the physical environment to be hostile via olfactory and tactile devices makes it justifiable to project hatred onto the wilderness. Such hatred, coupled with a historical hatred of the Kuomintang government before liberation, is transformed into an excuse to shape the physical environment by greening projects in the Maoist era. The campaign of transforming the physical environment legitimizes Mao’s socialist government, which is claimed to be better than the prior Kuomintang government. The Tarim River is compared with an unreined horse, as it changes its course randomly. The narrator says that the previous government is not able to tame the Tarim River while the communist government has brought about remarkable changes by cutting down dead trees to build new houses and transforming the dunes to arable land.26 The river is channeled into the desert area, and forests are now surrounding the arable land. The narrator labels the transformation as achievements of the “new society.” Consequently, Mao’s government, demonstrated by the greening campaign, is deemed more powerful and reliable than its predecessors. The documentary ends with a bird’s-­eye view of the greening crusade, accompanied by a song extoling Mao’s leadership and Mao’s followers (Figure 9.11). In fact, an inconvenient truth throughout the documentary is that the local ethnic people are always absent from the shots. Whenever they do appear on the screen, they usually mildly follow the practices of the Han ­Chinese. Environmental historian William Cronon, investigating American Indian history, argues succinctly that “The myth of the wilderness as ‘virgin’ uninhabited land had always been especially cruel” (Cronon 1996, 15). Although Cronon focuses on the history of the Native Americans, his argument is also applicable to ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Those unimagined ethnic minorities who have inhabited this area for generations can hardly retain their environmental perceptions and practices. By underlining the harsh environment, the documentary hardly attends to the historical presence of the native people in this region. This ignorance is a narrative strategy to justify the communist rule in the ethnic borderland by greening the wilderness. Remarkably, the reception of the film further reinforces such a notion. One viewer, Hu Bingzhong, argues that XPCC’s effort in agriculture and forestry is working for the collaborative progress in political, economic, and cultural terms for all ethnic minority members. Zhu Changlong, another viewer, cites the voiceover, saying that “the trees which are like their owners demonstrate solemn and mighty military appearance and brave combat gesture against the brutal sand.” The simile of the trees and their “owners” [zhuren] is far from metaphorical.

Sinification by greening  217

Figure 9.11  Bird’s-­eye view of Xinjiang. Source: Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song.

Once the trees are “owned” by Mao’s soldiers planting trees, the entire land is finally controlled by them.27 More importantly, when the viewer reconsiders the working experience in Xinjiang, the circulation and consumption of this concealed link by viewers establishes, legitimatizes, and consolidates the dangerous liaison of greening and sinification.

Conclusion Raymond Williams maintains that “[w]e need and are perhaps beginning to find different ideas, different feelings, if we are to know nature as varied and variable nature, as the changing conditions of the world” (Williams 1980, 85). Such a varied and variable nature in Chinese ethnic borderland is represented vividly through the camera when Mao launched the campaign of greening the nation. Trees are fertile cultural capital that could be reconfigured and further manipulated in the nation-­building. In this sense, trees are not only a contested arena, but the nexus of Han Chinese and ethnic minorities as well. In the homogeneous national greening campaign across different ethnic groups, the inherent and potential cultural/ political conflicts between Han Chinese and indigenous population are downplayed and even eliminated. Meanwhile, planting trees in an inhospitable land does not only mirror divergent attitudes toward nature, but also suggests that land ownership is shifted to the “nation,” usually unconsciously. As the films illustrate, planting trees as a centripetal and progressive crusade is inherently oppressive and regressive through the dangerous liaison of greening and sinification. Analyzing such a connection of greening and sinification through ecocinema anchored in environmental history, and Maoist politics, I refresh the conceptual

218   Cheng Li understandings, interpretations, and insights of colonization (sinification in this article) and environmental changes. Meanwhile, this renewed notion can be applicable to other times and space as well. Colonial enterprise might be accompanied by forestation in some ecologically hostile regions. In this regard, environmental humanities, together with Chinese studies, illustrate compelling conceptual possibilities for anthropogenic environmental alteration.

Acknowledgement This chapter was first composed at the University of Wisconsin-­Madison in 2014 and presented at the University of California-­Santa Barbara in 2015. My warmest thanks go to Nicole Huang for her encouragement of this project during her course on Maoist visual culture and support of my academic career. I further reframed the thesis after an inspirational discussion with Peter Perdue at Yale during campus visit in 2016. I am also grateful to Rob Nixon, Steve Ridgely, Judd Kinzley, Preeti Chopra, Paola Iovene, and Kyhl Lyndgaard for their informative suggestions. My sincere appreciation is also extended to Sheldon H. Lu, Haomin Gong, Song Hwee Lim, and two anonymous reviewers of Journal of Chinese Cinemas for their comments. Finally, thank you to Yanjun Liu for your affection, wit, and humor throughout my academic journey. Of course, all mistakes are mine.

Notes   1 In the volume, Chinese Ecocinema, a bold collective effort to orient the course of this nascent field, Sheldon H. Lu has categorized several prominent themes and subjects in Chinese ecocinema: (1) environmental degradation in modernization and industrialization; (2) urban planning, demolition, and relocation; (3) people with physical or mental disabilities; (4) non-­human animals and human beings; (5) communal mode of life distinct from the daily routines of civilized city folks; (6) a return to religious, holistic thinking and practice.   2 Paul Clark has categorized the ethnic films during the Mao era into three regional categories: the northwestern, the southwestern, and Tibetans. He points out that the northwestern ethnic monitories (Mongols, Uighurs, and Kazaks) films, distinct from the other two, are usually set in a harsh environment (Clark 1987, 101). Both Spring in the Desert and Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song directly address such environmental concerns. The former features Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, and the latter is about Uighurs in Xinjiang.   3 Han nationalism has dramatically influenced the historiography throughout the twentieth century. See Duara (1995).   4 With the Saidian notion of the “Other” in mind, many examples of “othering” can be found in Chinese films with a context of ethnic minorities; these cinematic representations cannot escape the Self-­and-­Other mode in an absolute sense.   5 For an insightful analysis of Wangari Maathai and her memoir, Unbowed, see Rob Nixon’s (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, especially chapter 4. For a depiction of Chipko movement, see Anna Tsing’s (2005) Friction, especially chapter 6.   6 For an insightful account of such history, see William Cronon’s oft-­cited article “The Trouble with Wilderness” (Cronon 1996). In Republican China, Chiang Kai-­shek, used trees to strengthen his political asset as Sun Yat-­sen’s successor during tree

Sinification by greening  219 planting ceremonies. For a concise overview on Republican China’s forestation history, especially on Fujian Province, see Songster (2003).   7 Shaul E. Cohen explores the values of trees in contemporary America, suggesting that planting trees has steered attention away from solving some underlying problems on environmental degradation. He incisively says that “planting trees, rather than truly connecting with nature, serves a mechanism for dominating nature” (Cohen 2004, 19). His focus in regard to planting trees is on the fundamental economic issues of environmental stewardship, while mine is more on the political aspect of the planting trees.   8 See Michael Williams (1997) for a comprehensive research of global deforestation. See also Alfred W. Crosby’s (2004) Ecological Imperialism and Richard Grove’s (1996) Green Imperialism.   9 I use the term “sinicize” here. As demonstrated later, however, the elements of politics and ethnicities surrounding environment narratives were deeply entangled during those greening campaigns in Maoist China. To some degree, to sinicize ethnic minorities was to revolutionize and modernize them given the fact that the Han Chinese people dominated the Communist regime and thought they themselves held all the truth of revolution and progress, and had a duty to save ethnic minorities from political, economic, and cultural backwardness. 10 In fact, the history of Zionist land appropriation is somewhat akin to the Chinese one. By planting trees in the desert, the Israelis actually control the land through planting and irrigation. Such idea could be confirmed in Israel’s own unilateral Proclamation of Independence, which declared, Pioneers … and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood. Likewise, the white settlers come to the American West, especially Arizona and ­California to irrigate the desert, which actually justifies the land appropriation and displacement of the indigenous population. See Reisner (1993). Special thanks to Rob Nixon for bringing this to my attention. 11 Most of Maoist ecocinema mentioned earlier represents a politicized environment and reflects how the environment shapes and is shaped by human beings. Notably, by underling the contact zone between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities, we could better understand how the power enfolds in the Maoist period. In this regard, the two films analyzed in this article illuminate both the physical environment, tinged with the political environment, in this period. 12 See Judith Shapiro (2001) and Frank Dikötter (2010). 13 See People’s Daily on February 17, 1956 and March 2, 1956 for details. 14 See China Pictorial on September 1976. 15 Such a plot can be found in many films on ethnic minorities during the Mao era. For instance, in Wuduojinhua (Five Golden Flowers, 1958), Bai people are represented as being “identical” with the Han in that both were oppressed by landlords and both must be united in order to overcome their class enemy. 16 All the translations from Chinese are mine, otherwise indicated. 17 Dee Mack Williams (2002) says that sand expresses freedom for Mongolians, and they show respect for the mobility of sand. 18 Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath wisely point out the previous conception of nomadic life patterns harming the physical environment is a myth when they do extensive field research in a wide range of areas. Such a myth “only appears strong at the extremes” (Humphrey and Sneath 1999, 277). In other words, the traditional notion only exists in a very small area.

220  Cheng Li 19 Thanks to Shuting Zhuang and Hongwei Zhang at the University of Chicago for helping me identify the Mongolian characters. 20 Benedict Anderson has argued that “imposed certain ‘standards’ ”, including a unified language, is instrumental in establishing the nation-­state (Anderson 1983, 81). A film on ethnic minorities without dialect or indigenous language, in this sense, contributes to the construction of Han Chinese nation-­state. 21 For a discussion on a protagonist’s (that is Narenhua here) offscreen gaze in Mao-­era film, see McGrath (2010). 22 In 2014, Chinese Central Television (CCTV) screened New Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song (Xin junken zhan’ge), a six-­episode documentary to glorify Han Chinese’s influence in Xinjiang. 23 For a historical account of Xinjiang’s rising, refer to Michael Dillon’s (2004) Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Far Northwest, especially chapter six on the Maoist era. 24 Millions of Han Chinese have come to settle in Xinjiang since then. Between 1949 and 2008, the proportion of Hans in Xinjiang rose dramatically from 6.7 percent (220,000) to 40 percent (8.4 million), and the peak of the migration was from 1960 to 1964 (China 2003). In fact, in Xinjiang, Han migration started from the Qing dynasty. By the end of the nineteenth century, Xinjiang became the first province to be incorporated into the administrative apparatus of China proper, while Han’s presence was enhanced dramatically. In the Republican era, according to historian Joseph W. Esherick, “Han migration and agricultural development of Mongolia and Xinjiang, which had begun in late Qing, should be encouraged, accelerated, and organized” (Esherick 2009, 248). 25 Cen Shen’s (ad 715–770) poem is taken from his “Farewell to a Galloping River Melody to General Feng Setting out on an Expedition to the West,” which depicts the harsh physical environment in the northwestern part of China in Tang Dynasty. Here, I refer to the English translation by Jean Elizabeth Ward (2007). 26 The role of water is vital for Han Chinese. Environmental historian David A. Pietz examines the Chinese North Plain, saying that “the broader history of water on the North China Plain is a story of accommodation between imperial patterns of water management and the forces of modernity” (Pietz 2015, 6). Such analysis is applicable to the Han Chinese impact on Xinjiang when the “new society,” as rhetoric for modernity, is employed. 27 Xiaoning Lu argues that “this film genre [ethnic minority film] elicits the spectator to use his intellectual capacity to overcome ethnic differences, to recognize himself as part of the extendable horizontal fraternity and to seek proletarian solidarity in the actual life” (Lu 2014, 386). Hu (1965) and Zhu’s (1965) responses aptly fit into such narrative as they, as Mongolian students, seek ethnic solidarity and class fraternity. Similarly, Dru C. Gladney also contends that these films modernize and civilize the minorities and the public at large “who learn to distinguish between permittivity and modernity by viewing the ‘plight’ of the minorities” (Gladney 1995, 89).

References Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 2003. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-­colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Berry, Chris and Mary Ann Farquhar. 2006. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press. China Pictorial. 人民画报.

Sinification by greening  221 China. National People’s Congress. 1960. National Agricultural Development Outline from 1956–1967 [1956 年到 1967 年全国农业发展纲要]. Beijing: National People’s Congress. China. 2003. “Foundation, Development and Role of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps [新疆生产建设兵团的建立、发展和作用].” May 26, 2003. Clark, Paul. 1987. Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Shaul E. 2004. Planting Nature: Trees and the Manipulation of Environmental Stewardship in America. Berkley: University of California Press. Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1 (1): 7–28. Reprint Of Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, 1995. Crosby, Alfred. 2004. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dikötter, Frank. 2010. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962. New York: Bloomsbury. Dillon, Michael. 2004. Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Far Northwest. New York: Routledge. Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Esherick, Joseph W. 2009. “How the Qing Became China.” Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World, edited by Joseph W. Esherick, Hasan Kayali, and Eric Van Young. 229–59. New York: Lexington Books. Estok, Simon C. 2011. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. New York: Palgrave. Gladney, Dru C. 1995. “Tian Zhuangzhuang, The ‘Fifth Generation’ and ‘Minorities Films’ in China.” Public Culture 8 (1): 161–75. Gladney, Dru C. 2004. Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grove, Richard. 1996. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Hu, Bingzhong [胡禀中]. 1965. “Grand and Magnificent Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song [气势磅礴的《军垦战歌》电影艺术].” Film Art [电影艺术] 9 (6): 61–2. Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Khan, Almaz. 1996. “Who Are the Mongols? State, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Representation in the People’s Republic of China.” Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, edited by Melissa Brown, 125–59. Berkeley: University of California. Lin, Feng, and Zhuletemu [林峰 朱勒特木]. 1976. “Spring Belongs to Those Fighting Bravely [春天属于敢斗争的人].” People’s Film [人民电影] 1 (2): 25–6. Liu, Mogao [刘莫皋]. 1965. “The Story of Shooting Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song [《军垦战歌》拍摄纪事].” Film Art [电影艺术] 9 (6): 58–60. Lu, Sheldon H. 2009. “Introduction.” Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi, 1–14. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lu, Xiaoning. 2014. “The Politics of Recognition and Constructing Socialist Subjectivity: reexamining the national minority film (1949–1966).” Journal of Contemporary China 23 (86): 372–86.

222  Cheng Li Mao, Zedong. 1945. “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” Marxist Org. June 11, 1945. Mao, Zedong. 1957. “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People.” Marxist Org. February 27 1957. Marks, Robert B. 2012. China: Its Environment and History. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. McNeill, J.R. 1998. “China’s Environmental History in World Perspective.” Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, edited by Mark Elvin and Liu Ts’ui-­jung, 31–52. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McGrath, Jason, 2010. “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema.” The Opera Quarterly 26 (2–3): 343–76. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pietz, David. 2015. The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Reisner, Marc. 1993. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New York: Penguin. Richardson, S.D. 1966. Forestry in Communist China. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Shapiro, Judith. 2001. Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Songster, E. Elena. 2003. “Cultivating the Nation in Fujian’s Forests: Forest Policies and Afforestation Efforts in China, 1911–1937.” Environmental History 8 (3): 452–73. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wallace, Vesna A. 2015. “Buddhist Sacred Mountains, Auspicious Landscapes, and Their Agency.” Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society, edited by Vesna A. Wallace, 221–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ward, Jean Elizabeth. 2007. Chinese Memories. Google Books. Williams, Dee Mack. 2002. Beyond Great Walls: Environment, Identity, and Development on the Chinese Grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Williams, Michael. 1997. “Ecology Imperialism and Deforestation.” Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, edited by Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, 169–84. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Williams, Raymond. 1980. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. New York: Verso. Willoquet-­Maricondi, Paula. 2010. “Introduction.” Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, edited by Paula Willoquet-­Maricondi, 1–24. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Yeh, Emily T. 2009. “Greening Western China: A Critical View.” Geoforum 40 (5): 884–94. Zhang, Yingjin. 1997. “From ‘Minority Film’ to ‘Minority Discourse’: Questions of Nationhood and Ethnicity in Chinese Cinema.” Cinema Journal 36 (3): 73–90. Zhu, Changlong [褚长龙]. 1965. “Reflection of Watching Army’s Reclamation and Battle Son [看影片《军垦战歌》的感想].” Film Art [电影艺术] 9 (6): 63.

10 No Man’s Land Eco-­Western in contemporary Chinese cinema Kun Qian

Can ecocinema and the Western work together in one film? What does it mean to be an eco-­Western? These two modes of production seem to base on opposite assumptions: while ecocinema questions the anthropocentric view and advocates “practices that are ecospherically sustainable and environmentally just” (Willoquet-­Maricondi 2010, 5), the Western assumes limitless natural resources and emphasizes humans’ agency in advancing civilization. While ecocinema urges people to revisit and scrutinize what constitutes “development” and “progress” with its ecocritical perspective on modernity’s exploitation of nature, the Western is basically about humans’ drive toward modernity and conquest of nature. Moreover, while ecocinema fits well with the environmental crisis plaguing China today, the Western as a genre seems hard to define in China. Since the Western genre is unique to the imagination and construction of the American identity, which seems largely opposite to Chinese historical experience, scholars have mostly denied its existence in Chinese film. Yet, with the release of Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land (Wu ren qu, 無人區) in 2013, we see the possibility of combining ecocinema with the Western. In fact, as I will argue below, it is the ecocritical edge of ecocinema showing the transformation of landscape that makes the ­Chinese Western possible, thus the appearance of the eco-­Western. It has always been a controversial topic to define a Western in Chinese cinema. Although critics have recognized the employment of iconic elements of the Western in Chinese films, they usually take the selective borrowing as a convenient choice that, combined with Chinese martial arts traditions, works to create a hybrid form extending Chinese values and aesthetics. For example, John Woo’s widely celebrated action films are seen as drawing influences from a variety of genres, including the Western, to create the “transnational action” that enhances a Chinese hero with traditional moral traits (Ciecko 1997, 222; 227–8). Yet, despite the surface incompatibility and ideological resistance to the Western, in recent years, the use of elements of the Western in Chinese films has become increasingly pronounced. Especially with the success of Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land, which was publicized as a Western and commonly recognized as such, it is undeniable that the Western as an independent film

224   Kun Qian genre has gradually taken hold in Chinese cinematic space. There is certainly a desire on the filmmaker’s part to engage the Western, to recontextualize the genre to fit Chinese social conditions, and a corresponding expectation among viewers that they will welcome such an aesthetic experiment. The belated emergence/recognition of the Western bespeaks a great deal about Chinese cinema, for in retrospect some other films could be characterized as Westerns as well. For example, film critic Tony Rayns regarded He Ping’s Swordsman in Double Flag Town (Shuang qi zhen dao ke, 雙旗鎮刀客 1991) as the first Western film in Chinese cinema.1 Yet, at the time of its release, the mainland audience mostly considered it a martial arts movie, with Baidu baike, the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia, still labeling it so.2 Why does the Chinese audience accept No Man’s Land as a Western yet reject films such as Swordsman? What narrative or cinematic strategies does No Man’s Land deploy to distinguish itself from earlier films? Or, alternatively, from Swordsman to No Man’s Land, what transpired to foster the “maturation” of the Western genre? What are the politics behind this genre naming/labeling practice? I suggest that the answer resides in whether the presentation of landscape corresponds with that in classical Westerns and whether nature is portrayed in a way devoid of Chinese culture. Only when nature appears as a de-­culturalized landscape that bears contemporary consciousness to converse with that in classical Westerns is it possible for the Western genre to be transplanted in China. In the case of No Man’s Land, it is the de-­culturalized landscape combined with an ecological concern reflecting on the process of modernization, the latter a built-­in theme in Westerns, that makes this film a recognizable Western, or more accurately, post-­Western. In other words, No Man’s Land achieves two things: first, it presents a Chinese west rid of Chinese characters to differentiate it from earlier films; second, it creates an eco-­space to reflect on the questions of territory, morality, modernization, and globalization to negotiate a place for the emergence of the Western.

The ‘west’ in crisis—the eco-­hostile frontier in Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land In discussing Westerns, several key phrases unavoidably arise: geographic frontier, national origin, and generic origin; briefly, the specific configuration of time and space embedded in this genre. This special chronotope in turn poses crucial questions: can a film still be a Western when it is removed from its American, colonial, racial context? Can it still be a Western if it is not taking place in the west? Scholars have answered such questions with concepts such as neo-­Western, post-­Western, and Spaghetti Western to capture the genre’s renewability and transferability.3 Apparently the nineteenth-­century American West has been reduced to a reference point, an abstract notion that can travel across time and space, imbued with transcultural and transnational sensibility. The re-­emergence of the Western in other parts of the world has everything to do with its immediate social context, in dialogue with the classical Western yet

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema  225 conveying something parodic, subversive, and constitutive. More often than not, the Western or its elements appear transformed and reconfigured, reflecting a desire to mimic or revive, to blend or bend genres (Higgins, Keresztesi, and Oscherwitz 2015, 1). In the Chinese context, the emergence of the Western in recent years is inseparable from the commercial drive and the convergence of global culture. In particular, the ecological crisis that has plagued the Chinese west in transnational transactions redirects people’s attention to the western region, which in turn becomes a site for questioning the assumptions of modernity, national boundary, and anthropocentric development. Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land is a perfect example. A long overdue oater-­cum-­road thriller, for which the audience had waited for four years, No Man’s Land kept its promise of quality when it was finally released in 2013, with a box office grossing US$42.6 million in the domestic market. Despite its multiple revisions due to censorship, the film still exhibits immense bleakness in defiance of what the government has called for—“positive energy” (zheng nengliang). A nod to the Coen brother’s jet-­black humor and twisty plotting, the film is replete with ‘white-­knuckle suspense and mean action sequences’ (Lee 2015) creating a ‘no man’s land’ where law, order, and humanity leave few traces. The story takes place in a remote northwestern desert area. Everything starts from a lawsuit over the death of a police officer who, on his way to arrest a poacher, is hit by a truck driven by the poacher’s partner, Laoda. The poacher flees the scene with their catch, a near-­extinct falcon that they intend to sell on the black market for one million yuan, while Laoda is taken into custody by the police. This is when the big-­city lawyer Pan Xiao is summoned to defend Laoda. Arguing that the police officer died of a car accident due to his own excessive drinking, Pan wins the case and Laoda is released. Eager to wrap up his business in this barren land, Pan coerces Laoda into giving him Laoda’s late wife’s red Mustang as collateral for deferred payment before he hits the road for a long journey back to the city. What follows is a series of aleatory and planned encounters after Pan inadvertently drives into the 500 km of no man’s land with no idea what awaits him. With ill-­intentioned road races, failed attempts of murder, a hit-­and-­run escape, extortion and kidnapping, the constant unfolding of criminal intents puts Pan on the same level as the poacher, the murderer Lao Da, and other repugnant characters, including two nasty truck drivers, an extortionist couple running a shanty stop, and a lying prostitute. In the interwoven games of chase-­ and-­run in which Pan needs not only to run away from his pursuers, but also from his own conscience, everybody is driven by animal instincts, revealing few traces of redeeming qualities. In fact, it is shown that in this lifeless desert, Pan has increasingly lost his big-­city yuppie bearing, his civilized façade gradually ripped off just as his expensive business suit is soiled and torn, giving way to the undisguised urge for survival. Needless to say, the film is about law, morality, contract, trust, and social transaction. In the barren desert where law has no impact, morality is also missing;

226   Kun Qian where a contract is made without trust in anyone or anything, social transactions are violent and detrimental to all involved. The latter can be discerned in the agreement between Laoda and Pan and in the aborted transaction between Laoda and the buyer of the falcon. Unlike classical Chinese novels that tend to romanticize outlaws through the portrayal of brotherhood and their righteousness toward each other, so that they set up an alternative world in mockery of official social order and an inadequate legal system, No Man’s Land presents a nihilistic world replete with repugnant characters beyond redemption. The raw wildness of this uncivilized world is visually achieved by the presentation of the landscape. The landscape in the film embodies crude animal instincts, bearing no trace of law or morality. It not only serves as a passive background, but as W. J. T Mitchell (1994, 1) points out, also functions as a verb, acting upon the strangers and destabilizing their identity. As soon as the lone outsider Pan enters this vast barrenness he starts exposing his selfish nature. In a sense, it is the landscape that rips off Pan’s Yuppie façade, revealing his self-­serving life philosophy. There is a long tradition in Chinese culture that employs landscape as a backdrop to express/cultivate one’s mind. In traditional Chinese landscape painting, artists adopted a non-­perspective technique to create an unrealistic space that often belittles human beings in the space, which represents the ‘emptiness’ in Daoism, manifesting harmony with nature. In this kind of painting, although landscape is not visually anthropocentric, it is nevertheless artificially structured, imagined and conceptualized, and therefore presents a calculated cultural space. As Karatani Kojin (1993) observed, it is an internalized space where an individual interiority or subjectivity emerges. Moreover, under the influence of Confucianism, this interiority exhibits the concept of ‘Tian Ren he yi’ where Heaven and Humanity become one. The empty space is therefore first and foremost moral, as Heaven is the ultimate moral authority in Chinese culture endowed with the power of rewarding and punishing human beings. It is through the unity of nature, man, and morality that the subject achieves tranquility and transcendence. Owing to the tradition of landscape painting, some early Chinese films also use landscape and natural scenery as an integral device to construct the protagonist’s subjectivity. One example could be Fei Mu’s 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun) in which the female lead Yuwen, a love-­stricken housewife, is repeatedly shown walking on the city walls to unleash her desolation and confusion. Critics have pointed out that this film is saturated with classical lyricism that incorporates poetic imagery and tropes to express boudoir longing and lament (Shi, quoted in Daruvala 2007, 175). Yet as Susan Daruvala (2007, 185) observed, Fei Mu was a poet director deeply influenced by Confucian morality. The extramarital passion in the film, instead of creating misery, nevertheless brings “awakening, new life, and new hope to all protagonists.” I would add that apart from poetic lyricism, the film also employs landscape painting, as manifested most frequently in the panning

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema  227 shots of the city wall, noted by Hao Dazheng (1994). The horizontal line of the ruined wall, the massive empty space, and the characters’ relatively small torsos exhibit subjective meditation, revelation, and transcendence, which in the end means to embrace the “nature” of things following Confucian morality. Indeed, the recurring image of the landscape first gives Yuwen tranquility, then passion and conflict, and later enlightenment. In this sense, the landscape has been an intrinsic part of her emotional and intellectual journey, a moral agent for her subjective construction. On a different level, the landscape and the film could serve as a national allegory for the repair of the national psyche in postwar China. In a different mode, landscape also plays an indispensable role in Chinese martial arts films. Yet in the martial arts tradition, the landscapes of rivers, lakes, mountains, and deserts that form a Jianghu (river and lake) world, are also always cultural and moral. Petrus Liu argues that Chinese martial arts novels create a public sphere unconnected with the sovereign power of the state, in which the human subject is presented as a stateless “ethical alterity, constituted by and dependent on its responsibilities to other human beings” (Liu 2011, 6). The Jianghu world is thus a cultural sphere containing its own ethical codes independent of the state. Needless to say, the Jianghu world is also an eco-­ friendly space, nurturing life and cultivating a utopia in contrast to the harsh, stringent state power. In contrast to the eco-­nourishing “cultural” landscape discussed above, the desert landscape in No Man’s Land is rather de-­culturalized, de-­humanized, free of moral or civilizational encoding. Worse still, it is an eco-­hostile space that puts everyone in it, animals or humans alike, in danger. To some extent, the film cites the familiar landscape yet defamiliarizes it, abstracts it, reflecting the spiritual void and empty interiority in contemporary China. Meanwhile, it naturalizes the west as an uncivilized place that draws out the worst of human beings.

The Chinese ‘west’: a shifting cinematic geography No Man’s Land was shot in the Hami region of Xinjiang province, and the “west” it creates significantly differs from any other “west” in Chinese literature and cinema. As an imaginary and political space, the “west” has long been configured as a setting for literary and political engagement. Chinese critics usually assert that instead of the Western, there are “western literature” (xibu wenxue) and “western film” (xibu dianying) in China set in the Chinese west, often referring to the areas west of Shaanxi province, including Shaanxi and other, ethnic minority autonomous regions. The term “xibu dianying” (western film) became widely used after 1984 (Zhang 2012, 64), when Zhong Dianfei encouraged filmmakers to “face the northwest and explore new style Westerns” (Zhong 1984). Yet the so-­called “xibu dianying” or “xibu wenxue” can be traced back to earlier times. In these works, the west is often essentialized as bearing some unique sociopolitical character, and therefore usually

228   Kun Qian serves as a regional/national allegory. A different portrayal of the west reflects the shifting political/ideological significance. During the Maoist period, many films were shot in the western minority areas. Yet these films were all endowed with a didactic function to show the superiority of communist ideology and the unity of the Han and minority people. The landscape of the ethnic frontiers was often romanticized and exoticized to showcase the diversity of Chinese culture and the necessity for continuing the Han civilizational project. Films such as People on the Grassland (Caoyuan shang de renmen, 1953), Children of the Miao Ethnicity (Miao Jia ernü, 1958), Five Golden Flowers (Wu duo jinhua, 1959), Serfs (Nongnu, 1963), A Shi Ma (1964), and The Guest from the Ice Mountain (Bingshan shang de laike, 1963) all highlight the geopolitical, cultural difference of the minority regions. Yet because the producers mostly focused on the delivery of political messages and the construction of the dramatic plots, these films often fail to sufficiently portray the minorities’ real living state, their modes of thinking, and their cultural psychology. As Zhang Ali (2012, 64) pointed out, the minority landscape was mostly used as an accessory background to extend the homogeneous political agenda. For example, the 1963 film Bingshan shang de laike (The Guest from the Ice Mountain) romanticizes the Xinjiang Uyghur region as an exotic, beautiful place where revolutionary heroes emerge out of the antagonistic political complexity beneath the peaceful surface of the locality. A drama of anti-­espionage that interweaves a love story into the ideological conflict between the Communists and the Nationalists, the film naturalizes the Uyghur minority as part of China and legitimizes Communist rule through reuniting the lovers who were separated under the old regime. The west, in this case, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is portrayed as the last stop of revolution where conniving enemies infiltrate the minority population in order to separate them from the government. The elimination of such enemies therefore effectively incorporates the minority west into the national geography and announces the eventual completeness of the revolution. The colorful portrayal of the west, then, only contributes to the internal diversity of the nation and its ultimate unity. The romanticism and heroism prevalent in the western films during the Maoist years later gave way to the root-­searching culturalism in the 1980s. Mostly produced in the Xi’an Film Studio, these western films launched the careers of the fifth generation filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, or conversely, these directors constructed the ‘west’—represented by the yellow earth in the Shaanxi area—as the quintessential bearer of traditional Chinese culture (Li 2015). In a not-­too-­subtle defiance of the revolutionary discourse, these films, including Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige 1984), Old Well (Wu Tianming 1987), Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou 1987), and King of Children (Chen Kaige 1987), create a rural “west” almost free of modern industrial influence and deeply trenched in traditional philosophy and aesthetics. Among them, Yellow Earth is representative in presenting an alternative history, an ultra-­stable structure of Chinese society later reinforced in the TV documentary

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema  229 River Elegy (He Shang, 1988). A radical departure from the socialist realism that declares the conquest of nature and the intimate relationship between the Party and the people, the film shows instead a more intimate relationship between the people and nature (Chow 1995). Critics have observed that the landscape in the film takes features from traditional landscape painting and manifests a Daoist aesthetic (Berry and Farquhar 1994). This resorting to tradition exhibits a sense of dialectical return to the historical origin and makes the film a national allegory wherein nature is already culturalized and landscape serves as an agent (de)legitimizing the political culture. As Stephanie Donald (1997, 100) points out, “landscape provides not just a backdrop for the drama of history, but becomes part of a process of rewriting, or reinscribing, history.” The politicized, culturalized, and aestheticized landscape continued to shape and renew people’s imagination of the Chinese west, whether as the origin of agrarian Chinese civilization, or the cradle of Mao’s Communist revolution, or the intersection between the Han Chinese and the ethnic minorities. The multifaceted roles of the west in Chinese history are most explicitly articulated in Gao Jianqun’s novel The Last Xiongnu (Zuihou yige Xiongnu, 1993). In this new historical novel, Gao attempts to address what he called “the grand cultural phenomenon of Shaanbei” (shan bei da wenhua xianxiang). Focusing on the intermingled lives of several families, especially the Yang family residing in Wuerpu, a village with a history that can be traced back to the Han Dynasty (202 bc–ad 220) and a foundational family of a Xiongnu husband and a Han wife, Gao attributes the seemingly contradictory characteristics of the village folks to their hybrid, multi-­ethnic ancestry. Because of their mixed ancestors, Gao observes, some descendants inherited the Han tradition, loving to live a sedentary life attached to their land, while others take after their nomadic ancestor, forever longing to roam about the world and seek freedom. This is why this origin of the agrarian Chinese civilization became the cultural margin of Confucianism and the cradle of rebels. Peasant rebellions abounded in this region throughout imperial history and, in the modern era, Mao also found a base in this region to intensify his revolution. The rebellious Mao entered Shaanbei, the narrator states, “like a dragon submerging in his old ocean” or “a tiger returning to the forest,” maturing quickly as a national leader (Gao 1993, 275). From the origin of civilization to the margin of Confucian culture, then to the revolutionary center, the narrator believes that the Shaanbei Plateau has constantly energized and rejuvenated the static Chinese culture and prevented it from declining. Deconstructing the homogeneous Chinese culture and Confucian tradition, this novel in effect creates a centrifugal national character embedded in the Shaanbei Plateau. In Gao’s words: The ambitious author wanted to write a chronicle for the 20th century, so he chose the Shaanbei Plateau, the desolate village, the listless small town, the dusty spiral road, and the splendid city of Fushi, as the stage on which his characters could perform. He chose the phenomenon of the grand Shaanbei culture, which is deeply ingrained in every granule of the yellow earth and

230   Kun Qian still prevalent in modern times like a “living fossil,” to provide the poetic atmosphere and the aesthetic background for the characters’ activity. (Gao 1993, 293) The statement that “every granule is ingrained with culture” perfectly characterizes the way the Chinese “west” is imagined and represented in modern Chinese literature and film. Whether as an assimilated minority Other embodying ideological conflict, or as an overly-­cultivated land bearing thousands of years of agrarian tradition, or as a composite site of both nomadic and sedentary traits that characterize the Chinese civilization, the west has always been automatically incorporated into the national geography and imagined in relation to the political/cultural center. The tendency to present the west as a cultural land carrying pre-­existing national character, I believe, poses the ultimate obstacle to produce Western genre films comparable to American westerns. It is in this sense that No Man’s Land is groundbreaking in Chinese cinema—it succeeds in producing two things: the de-­politicized and de-­culturalized landscape and a cinematic context resonating with the audience.

Desertification of the heart: ecological and moral crisis The desert landscape in No Man’s Land exhibits no traces of civilization except for a well-­built highway running through it that suggests modernization. Unlike the landscape in The Guest from the Ice Mountain where all visual elements exhibit minority ethnicity, or in Yellow Earth wherein every inch of the earth screams the resilience of traditional Han culture, the empty shots in No Man’s Land uncover a barren frontier, contaminated by the worst animal rivalry that is distinctively uninviting. The characters and their vehicles are often placed far in the middle distance or background, dwarfed by immense vistas and geologic structures that obliterate individuality. If we say that the landscape in Yellow Earth manifests at once the culturalization of nature and the naturalization of that culture, the desert landscape in No Man’s Land seems to offer a glimpse of nature after culturalization and naturalization, in Joel Snyder’s words, “something like a ‘freak’ show of unnatural forms that are at the same time entirely natural—to be addressed as geologic monstrosities and grotesqueries” (Snyder 1994, 196). The monstrosity of the desert seduces everyone into its deep bosom and peels off their civilizational makeup. As the girl’s voiceover articulates at the end, in the desert nobody has ever taken her as a human, and she has not taken herself as a human, either. Although her escape and transformation imply some sense of redemption, which some film critics take as a jarring end, resulting from censorship that calls for positive energy (Lee, Maggie 2015), the “no man’s land” left behind still remains a grotesque animal kingdom untouched by law or humanity. This de-­natured nature, once again, naturalizes the western desert area as forbidding and monstrous, which, as insiders point out, does not represent reality. Observers have commented that although pieces of “no man’s land” indeed exist

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema   231 in Xinjiang, they are not threatening. In fact, most of those areas are popular tourist sites that invite adventurous activities such as car racing and motorcycle racing.4 To be sure, the film is in every sense a metaphor of contemporary ­Chinese society run by materialism and nihilism. Joining the fast train of global capitalism, China has in recent years turned into a “no man’s land” where materially driven parties unabashedly enact their desire of “primitive accumulation of capital.” The law is always late and inadequate to capture the constantly emerging problems, and people see each other as strangers without trust. Bound by a contractual relationship dictated by the logic of the market, people make every social transaction a business deal. Just as Pan manipulates law at the cost of justice, the boundary between legal and illegal is blurred. The profound moral crisis is thus accompanied with legal crisis, trust crisis, and environmental crisis, and perhaps, most importantly, ecological crisis. In fact, in this film, the moral crisis is equivalent to ecological crisis, or put otherwise, the ecological crisis is manifested through moral crisis. This double crisis calls for what William Gibson (2004, 7) defines as eco-­justice: “the term eco-­justice retains the ancient claim upon human moral agents to build and nurture responsible, equitable, compassionate relationships among humans in the social order. And it incorporates the realization that has come like a revelation to our own time, that human society cannot flourish unless natural systems flourish too.” The interdependent relationship between ecological wholeness and socioeconomic justice manifests its worst scenario in this film: once a place is made uninhabitable for animals or other forms of life, it is almost certain that it is uninhabitable for humans as well. Not only are humans portrayed as animals, but the world they create/live in is also depicted as a dystopian space extinguishing life. This ecological consciousness is introduced through the animal imagery. Since the beginning of the film, the narrator (Pan’s voiceover) has told the audience “this is a story about animals.” With a quasi-­evolutionary account of human society originating from monkeys, the voiceover continues: One of my high school teachers always liked to talk about things through ancient monkeys. He said that two monkeys, in order not to be eaten by tigers, decided to cooperate. While one climbed up the tree to steal peaches, the other stayed on the ground to look out for him. The one in the tree had to save half of the food for the lookout, and the security monkey could not leave his post. This agreement requires that the monkeys should not only think about themselves. Later the two monkeys became a group of monkeys, which in turn became human society. However, today’s story starts from this bird. During this voiceover narration, the camera has lingered on the vast desert, empty shots showcasing the barrenness of the land. Then, a few alternate close-­ups fixate on a nameless bird and a falcon, showing the latter flying down a rock to seize the former, followed by a shot in which the poacher ensnares the falcon with its

232   Kun Qian bloody prey still in its grasp. The poacher collects his game and walks to his truck in satisfaction, only to be startled by a cold gun barrel stuck in his lower back—a police officer has been waiting for him. An image of the dead bird on the ground makes it explicit that, at this point, the poacher has become the police officer’s prey. We later know that just when the police officer drives on the highway with the poacher in his custody, Laoda shows up and runs over the police car with his giant truck, which causes the police officer to be killed. A vivid animation of the Chinese proverb “Tanglang bu chan, huangque zai hou” (A mantis stalks the cicada without knowing an oriole is waiting behind it), this sequence of predator– prey interplay, together with the voiceover, successfully establishes the connection between humans and animals and at the same time blurs their boundaries. The quasi-­evolutionary story in the voiceover reminds one of what Andrew Jones called “the developmental fairy tale” that has informed the Chinese experience of modernity (Jones 2011). Tracing evolutionary thinking in modern Chinese culture, Jones delineates the way Chinese intellectuals, especially Lu Xun, used tropes of animals to advance the discourse of developmentalism for nation building. Yet, unlike the anthropocentrism embedded in evolutionism, the voiceover blurs the boundary between animals and humans, recalling Marx’s comment on Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Marx observed that, in Hegel’s Phenomenology, “bourgeois society figures as a ‘spiritual animal kingdom,’ while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as bourgeois society” (quotes in Jones 2011, 6). From the perspective of morality and sociality, the evolution from monkeys to human beings does not follow a linear, progressive path; rather, humans can regress back to animals in terms of moral failure. In this animal kingdom where humans are not superior to animals, life can be determined by a price tag. The precious falcon is worth a million Yuan on the international black market, the poacher tells Pan, thus many people need to die to get it smuggled abroad. In contrast, Pan’s life is worth less than a red Mustang when Laoda decides to kill him. The interrelated animal realm and human realm is most visually exemplified in the scene at the shanty stop where Pan witnesses animal meat hanging up, and hallucinates about being part of it under the owner’s scary chopper. The near-­extinct falcon is an indicator of the deteriorating ecological system, in which humans not only hunt other species for profit, but also compete with each other for limited resources. The desert, then, not only serves as a natural background for the base instinct, but also symbolizes the “desertification” of a moral system, the failure of state management. In his discussion on the ecocinema of Maoist era, Cheng Li argues that the Chinese state legitimized its policies of Sinicizing ethnic minorities through “greening” the landscape. The greening campaign in the 1960s established the exotic communist rule and combined the environmental discourse with the revolutionary discourse at the ethnic minority borderlands (Li 2017, 46). If “greening” marks the distinctive effort of Chinese modernization at the ethnic frontiers, then the desert scene undoes that effort. The de-­politicization and desertification of the landscape in No Man’s Land testifies to the failure of the Maoist greening campaign and the bankruptcy of state management.

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema   233 This failure, according to Haiyan Lee (2014, 2), has roots in both the Chinese Confucian tradition of kinship sociality and the modern state management of stranger sociality. Lee observed that traditional China is a low trust society, with trust being defined as “predicated on the ontological freedom of the other and exists in the open spaces beyond institutionally prescribed and enforced role performances” (Lee 2014, 5). For its stress on the centrality of kinship and territorial ties, the traditional Chinese “moral landscape seems starkly demarcated into the cozy oases of kinship sociality and the barren deserts of stranger sociality” (Lee 2014, 5). On the other hand, in modern times, the antagonism toward foreigners and social class discourse both regard strangers as enemies and enemies as strangers; the modern state therefore fails to create a healthy stranger sociality. Even the ultimate moral paragon, the selfless model soldier Lei Feng, who dedicated his life to helping strangers and was promoted by Mao as the bearer of “Lei Feng Spirit,” bespeaks the failure of the state management of stranger sociality. Because the Party looms too large in Lei Feng’s duties and obligations, the Lei Feng-­style good deed lacks the moral autonomy and spontaneity within the party of two. It is an institutionalized ritual that ascribes moral agency not to Lei Feng, the good Samaritan, but to Party leadership and Mao Zedong’s thoughts. Moreover, the construction of the People as a homogeneous community admitted no internal division, thus no possibility of a civil society in which individuals function as autonomous, responsible moral agents capable of trusting strangers (Lee 2014, 23). As a result, in the unprecedented geographic mobility of post-­socialist society, in the absence of kinship and state-­sanctioned morality, little trust has existed between strangers. Hence moral crisis ensued. It is in this respect that No Man’s Land creates a “west” as a “barren desert of stranger sociality.” The “stranger” not only includes chance encounters in an alien land, but also the “other” species such as the falcon with which one shares no empathy. By externalizing the barrenness of public morality, the landscape suggests continuity in the Chinese management of stranger sociality and discontinuity in representing the west. The west is a borderless frontier, emptied of previous cultural inscriptions yet immensely indicative of the contemporary ­Chinese social context. Moreover, the environmental crisis carries the audience’s gaze to the ecosphere. It thus carves out a space for post-­ national and post-­civilizational engagement with modernity and globalization. Indeed, it is the combination of ecocinema and the de-­culturalization of landscape that paves the way for a more generically coherent Western.

Post-­national eco-­Western: Chinese Western in the global context As discussed earlier, it has always been a controversy to define a Western in China, which has everything to do with the immediate social context. The emergence of the Western genre in China signals the recognition of a new era that casts its critical attention to the borderland, particularly the Chinese west. The

234   Kun Qian recent shift to the central and western regions from the east coast not only marks a new stage of economic development, but also directs popular imagination to the vast western area as the backdrop to deconstruct and reconstruct national history, geography, and spirit. This consciousness of a new era and a new west finds a comparable counterpart in classic American Westerns. Moreover, with the deepening of market economy and globalization, a shift has occurred from classifying films according to themes (zhu ti) toward the consumer-­driven genres (Berry 2016, 90). Meanwhile, the rise of Westerns in other countries also paves way for adopting this now global genre in China, and an informed audience is ready to welcome such a product of globalization. Thomas Schatz (2004, 695) once stated that the film genre exists as a tacit “contract” between filmmakers and audience, which requires the cultivation of a textual community that has been conventionalized. “The determining, identifying feature of a film genre is its cultural context, its community of interrelated character types whose attitudes, values, and actions flesh out dramatic conflicts inherent within that community” (Schatz 2004, 695). In addition to the conventionalized textual community, a viewing community needs to be cultivated as well in order to recognize the meaning. According to Schatz (2004, 695), A genre, then, represents a range of expressions for filmmakers and a range of experience for viewers. Both filmmakers and viewers are sensitive to a genre’s range of expression because of previous experiences with the genre that have coalesced into a system of value-­laden narrative conventions. In light of this statement, we can speculate that, in the early 1990s, Chinese audiences were not yet sensitive to the conventions of the Western and its relevance to Chinese society. So although the film Swordsman in Double-­Flag Town shares many features with classic Western, it did not resonate with the audience. Swordsman depicts an ahistorical desert space and an enclosed amoral world fraught with random violence and revenge, which was out of synch with the social context of the early 1990s. These features registered in the Chinese audience more as part of a mystified Jianghu world of martial arts and magic with which they were familiar from classical fiction and opera, a world that remained largely in the fantastic realm disconnected with reality. In other words, although Swordsman captures swordsmen on horseback fighting in the vast desert that resembles the American Western in form, it fails to construct a textual and a viewing community to identify issues of modernity, national territory, and man’s struggle to tame nature, etc., themes that are central to the Western genre. On the other hand, by 2013, both the director and the audience had sufficient exposure to the Western genre, and No Man’s Land is both semantically and syntactically more “coherent than the kitschy fusion of martial arts, noisy farce and Indiana Jones-­style clichés represented by past Chinese Westerns set in desert locations” (Lee 2015). Before the release of No Man’s Land, many films had helped establish an atmosphere for the more pronounced launch of the eco-­Western in Chinese

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema   235 cinema. For instance, Lu Chuan’s Kekexili: Moutain Patrol (2004) directs the audience’s attention to the life-­and-­death struggle between vigilante rangers and bands of poachers in the remote Tibetan region of Kekexili. As well as its environmentalist theme, it actually evokes the dramatic Western in several ways.5 Similarly, Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, A Gun, and A Noodle Shop (2009), Gao Qunshu’s Wind Blast (2010), and Liu Weiran’s Welcome to Shama Town (2010) are all set in northwestern mountain or desert locations. Although innately diverse in their content as well as form, these films nonetheless incurred discussions on their genre identification.6 Even though most viewers had not regarded the noisy generic pastiche as Western, the expectation for a Western was certainly on the horizon. On the other hand, away from the northwest, films shot on the other border areas also noticeably bear Western characteristics. Jiang Wen’s Let the Bullets Fly (2010), Yang Shupeng’s Eastern Bandits (a.k.a. An Inaccurate Memoir, 2012), Guan Hu’s The Chef, the Actor, the Scoundrel (2013), and Ning Hao’s Guns and Roses (2012) remind one of the Western’s significance in nation formation. On the surface, these films lack the typical cowboy spirit and invest too much in laughter and satire, yet they carry thematic affinity with Westerns on account of presenting a wild frontier where outlaws and ordinary people struggle to find order and meaning in life. Set in the remote southwest and northeast, at times when the Communist Party had not assumed leadership in nation building and when the Japanese occupied northeast China, these films create an imaginary and political space where the origin of the nation is re-­narrated and reconstructed. The frontier, the anti-­hero, ritualized violence, the encounter of civilization with the savage, and the showcase of the wild landscape, are qualities that mark the thematic and stylistic import of the classical Western. Just like classical American Westerns in which the particular complex of history, fantasy, and ideology clustered around the “frontier myth” is central to the formation of American national identity and national character (Langford 2005, 54), these quasi-­revolutionary films also probe into the national psyche to reimagine the origin of the revolution and the modern nation. Inheriting the legacy of some 1980s films that construct alternative history in national salvation, exemplified by Red Sorghum, these films continue to depict revolutionary heroes as bandits and ordinary men, instead of Communist cadres, rescuing the nation from landlord domination or foreign invasion. However, rather than converging at a serious national allegory, the revisiting of revolutionary and colonial history in these films is mostly presented in an absurd or comedic manner, evoking the frontier as a borderless land witnessing the transformation of ­Chinese society. These films not only ridicule the invading Japanese, the shrewd Republican bureaucrats, but also parody the ordinary townsmen, the bandits, the businessmen, and the revolutionaries. Nationalistic feelings lurk only in the background, either taken for granted as an empty gesture, or evoked ambivalently as a character’s questionable sentiment. The parody of the revolutionary history, needless to say, has to do with the post-­socialist materialism and nihilism. It seems that when old enemies become today’s friends, past landlords/

236   Kun Qian entrepreneurs are today’s patriotic businessmen, or, more precisely, when the ghosts of the national martyrs see the grand return of imperialists and capitalists that they had sacrificed their lives to eliminate, history appears as senseless stage performances, leaving unspeakable irony that can only be consumed through laughter. In this light, the border, the gunfights, and the associated ideological confusions are just empty signs, satisfying a popular thirst for historical satire and corresponding with a surge of Westerns in East Asian countries. Of course, owing to the seemingly generic “purity” of the Western, as Berry Langford (2005, 55) points out, Westerns are more formulaic and generically pure than other popular genres, these films may not be labeled as “Westerns.” Yet, their rediscovery of the frontier in chaotic historical times seems to correspond with the success of Westerns in other Asian countries, especially the ­Manchurian Western in South Korea. The popularity of Kim Jee-­woon’s The Good, the Bad, and the Weird (2008) not only suggests the successful revival of the Manchurian Western in Korea, but also directs the audience’s gaze to the almost forgotten location—Manchuria, or in Chinese terms, the northeast border. It is debatable whether Kim’s film alone inspired the production of the aforementioned films set in Manchuria, yet it is safe to say that the success of The Good, the Bad, and the Weird injected the possibility of the Western in Chinese directors’ consciousness. This transnational intertextuality helped prepare a context for Chinese filmmakers and audiences to anticipate the official inauguration of the Western in China. Yet rather than delineate a national border essential for the construction of a national identity, these films mostly portray a borderless frontier symptomatic of a post-­socialist imagination of Chinese society. Just as the international black market for falcons breaches national boundaries, Chinese westerns likewise reflect a transnational characteristic. From the geographic frontier to the ecological/moral frontier implied in No Man’s Land, Chinese Westerns exhibit a post-­national quality embedded in global capitalism and transnational circularity. In this sense, the eco-­Western as manifested in No Man’s Land provides a platform for Chinese filmmakers to engage domestic problems, while the domestic appropriation also expands the flexibility and longevity of the Western. It is, however, a sort of post-­Western, as suggested by Neil Campbell (2015, xv), one that “ ‘participates’ in many of the formal, thematic and tropic discourses of the classic, established American Western whilst ‘not belonging’ entirely within its borders or ideology.” Meanwhile, just as post-­war Westerns, for which Gilles Deleuze coined the term neo-­Westerns, deterritorialize a seemingly “already-­given” and unanimous sense of American identity and ideology presented in classic Hollywood Westerns, and post-­Westerns de-­center a global space for their resistance to simply endorsing and reproducing American imperial structure (Campbell 2015, xvi–xvii), the Chinese eco-­Western also decenters a national space. For its multiple engagements with the geopolitical as well as ecological/moral frontiers, the Chinese eco-­Western creates a “no man’s land” at odds with the

Eco-Western in contemporary Chinese cinema   237 “already-­given” Confucian culture and Communist national identity, continuing to show the Western as an entertaining and political genre capable of stretching open a new topography of the national-­regional-­global space.

Notes 1 Author’s conversation with Tony Rayns in Pittsburgh, 2013. 2 Online source, introduction to Swordsman in Double-­Flag Town. Baidu baike: http://baike.baidu.com/view/152102.htm (accessed September 21, 2015). 3 Neil Campbell uses the term “post-­Western” to characterize the contemporary Western films in his preface to Western in the Global South. 4 Online source: NPC shiwusuo, “Wu ren qu zhen xiang: xianshi li zhenyou wu ren qu” (The truth of no man’s land: there is indeed no man’s land in reality), http://j1.keji5.cn/v/c/e.html (accessed September 29, 2015). 5 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kekexili:_Mountain_Patrol. 6 See online discussion: http://yingpingren.baijia.baidu.com/article/42586; and www.douban.com/doulist/2071221/ (accessed September 21, 2015).

References Berry, Chris. 2016. “Pema Tseden and the Tibetan Road Movie: Space and Identity beyond the ‘Minority Nationality Film.’ ” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10 (2): 89–105. Berry, Chris, and Mary Ann Farquhar. 1994. “Post-­Socialist Strategies: An Analysis of Yellow Earth and The Black Cannon Incident.” In Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, edited by Linda Erlich and David Desser, 81–116. Austin: University of Texas Press. Campbell, Neil. 2015. “Coming Back to Bad it Up: The Posthumous and the Post-­ Western,” preface to Western of the Global South, edited by Mary Ellen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz. New York, London: Routledge. Ciecko, Anne T. 1997. “Transnational Action: John Woo, Hong Kong, Hollywood,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, edited by Sheldon Lu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Chow, Rey. 1995. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Colombia University Press. Daruvala, Susan. 2007. “The Aesthetics and Moral Politics in Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1 (3): 171–87. Donald, Stephanie. 1997. “Landscape and Agency: Yellow Earth and the Demon Lover.” Theory, Culture & Society 14 (1). London, Thousand Oaks, CA, and New Delhi: SAGE. Gao Jianqun. 1993. Zuihou yige Xiongnu (The last Xiongnu). Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe. Gibson, William E., ed. 2004. Eco-­justice: The Unfinished Journey. New York: SUNY Press. Hao Dazheng. 1994. “Chinese Visual Representation: Painting and Cinema.” In Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, edited by Linda Erlich and David Desser. Austin: University of Texas Press.

238   Kun Qian Higgins, Mary Ellen, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz. 2015. Introduction to Western in the Global South, edited by Mary Ellen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz. New York, London: Routledge. Jones, Andrew. 2011. Developmental Fairy Tale: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Karatani Kojin. 1993. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, translated by Brett de Bary. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Langford, Berry. 2005. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lee, Haiyan. 2014. Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Lee, Maggie. 2015. Film review. Variety. Online source: http://variety.com/2013/film/ global/no-­mans-­land-­review-­1200963050/ (accessed September 8, 2015). Li, Cheng. 2017. “Sinification by Greening: Politics, Nature, and Ethnic Borderlands in Maoist Ecocinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11 (1): 46–68. Li Xiaoli, “Meiguo xibu pian yu zhongguo xibu dianying de bijiao yanjiu” (A comparative study of the American Westerns and Chinese western films). Online source: www.china001.com/show_hdr.php?xname=PPDDMV0&dname=R83DK41&xpos=1 (accessed September 26, 2015). Liu, Petrus. 2011. Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Series. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Introduction to Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schatz, Thomas. 2004.”Film Genre and the Genre Film,” in Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shi Qi. 2007. “Linglong miaoqu de xianwai zhi yin—Xiao Cheng zhi Chun” (Exquisite, wonderfully evocative overtones: Spring in a Small Town). Quoted in Daruvala, The Aesthetics and Moral Politics in Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1 (3). Snyder, Joel. 1994. “Territorial Photography,” in Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Willoquet-­Maricondi, Paula, ed. 2010. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Zhang Ali. 2012. “Zhongguo xibu shaoshu minzu ticai dianying tanxi” (A Study on Western Minority Movies), Xibei Daxue Xuebao (Journal of Northwest University) 42 (4). Zhong Dianfei. 1984. “Mianxiang da xibei, kaituo xinxing de ‘xibupian’ ” (Face the northwest, explore new style Western), Dianying xin shidai (New age film), issue 5.

Index

abandonment 177–8 activist documentary 32, 34, 35, 42, 44, 136–7 Adams, Carol 171, 191 aesthetics 2–3, 9, 17–18, 23, 31, 32, 33, 40, 41, 42, 44, 122, 130, 137, 166–7, 169–71, 192, 223, 228 Ai Weiwei 104, 127–8 Albert certification 84 allegory 113, 167–8, 173–4, 176, 177, 183, 186, 227–9, 235 animal studies 136, 169, 170, 175; animal-as-capital 122; animal-as-garbage 122; animal cruelty 39, 122, 125–7, 129, 131, 136, 177, 186–7, 191; animal garbage 121, 124; animal rights 38, 39, 169, 173, 177, 191; animal welfare 130, 172–3; human–animal relationship 22, 122, 126, 169, 176, 192 animals: albatrosses 123; bears 123, 126, 128–32, 136–7; cat aunties (mao ayi) 127; cat- and dog-eating 126–7, 129, 137, 178; cat-trade 127; dolphins 184–5, 187, 189; horseshoe crabs (limulus polyphemus) 126, 132–6; moon bears (Asian black bear; Ursus thibetanus) 128–32, 134; plastic cows 122–5, 130–1, 137; swans 123, 154, 161, 164; wolves 23, 24, 141–64, 216 animation 22, 103, 108–9, 176, 177, 181, 232 Annaud, Jean-Jacques 23, 24, 157–61; Wolf Totem 23, 24, 141–64 antagonistic life 125 Anthropocene 23, 79, 87, 89, 136, 166, 174 anthropocentrism 2, 8–9, 14, 16, 18, 22, 24, 32–3, 38–40, 48, 59, 83, 85–6, 90–9,

136, 153, 155, 166, 169, 171, 174, 176, 178, 180, 192, 223, 225–6, 232 anthropomorphism 73, 94, 174, 176, 180–1 Anthroposemiotics 2 Anti-Dupont Movement 32, 33–8, 44 Army’s Reclamation and Battle Song 23, 24, 199, 202, 213–17, 218, 220 art film 23, 33, 40, 42, 168, 171 Asian Black Bear documentaries: Cages of Shame (Australia) 129–31; Moon Bear, The (China) 129, 131; Moon Bears: Journey to Freedom (Hong Kong) 129, 131; Moon Bears on Planet Earth (Italy) 130 Bakhtin, Mikhail 171, 175 Bauman, Zygmunt 122 Behemoth 87 Benjamin, Walter 170 Bennet, Jane 122, 125, 134 Beyond Beauty 31, 33, 42–4 biomedicine 121, 132, 136 biopolitics 2, 126, 127 biosemiotics 2 Blackfish 98 Bozak, Nadia 83, 84, 88, 89, 95, 126 Braidotti, Rosi 122, 124 Brereton, Pat 88 Buell, Lawrence 9, 16, 17, 32, 37 Calinescu, Matei 170 Callahan, William A. 52 capitalism: biocapitalism 126; neoliberal capitalism 124; productionconsumption-recycling chain 124; post-capitalist condition 124 captivity 167, 180, 185 carnivalesque 171–3, 175, 181

240   Index Chai Jing 24, 102–16; Under the Dome 24, 102–6 Chang, Yung 18; Up the Yangtze 18 Chiang Wei Liang 24, 67–81; Anchorage Prohibited 24, 67–81; Luzon 24, 67–8, 76–81 Children of Men 96 Chinese Ghost Story, A 174, 175 Chinese west 223–5, 227–29 Chinese-language cinema 6–7, 18 Choi Yuen village 51–2, 58–9, 61 Chow, Stephen 23, 166–7, 178–86, 188–90, 192; Mermaid 23–4, 166–7, 169, 171–4, 181, 186–7, 192 cinéma-vérité 23, 102 citizen intellectual 51–2 Classic of Mountains and Seas, The 132, 174 classical Hollywood films 89, 236 comedy 23, 171–5, 177, 181–2, 186–91 commercial cinema 42, 172 companion animals 126–7, 168, 173, 176–8 compassion 38–9, 67, 145–6, 176–7, 191, 231 contract 225–6, 231, 234 Coronation Street 84 Cove, The 121, 129, 131, 189 Cronon, William 216, 218 Cubitt, Sean 11, 13, 83 Cultural Revolution, the 23, 143, 146, 202 cute-response 176–7, 186 data server 83 De Luca, Tiago 89 deep ecology 9 Deleuze, Gilles 236 Derrida, Jacques 68–9, 76 desertification 142, 149, 203, 230, 232 developmentalism 232 Donovan, Josephine 169, 171 Duara, Prasenjit 2 Eastenders 84 ecocriticism: eco-action 16–17; eco-aesthetics 170–1; ecoambiguity 38, 41, 150; eco-art films 168, 171; eco-awareness 16–17; ecocosmopolitanism 38, 40, 55–7, 142; ecocritical turn 50, 52; ecofeminism 104, 168–9, 171; eco-justice 13, 16, 231; ecological consciousness 3, 9–10, 14, 33, 41, 93, 136, 166, 169, 171, 188,

223, 231; ecological crisis 67, 171, 173, 183, 185, 225, 231–2; ecologism 1, 8, 11, 13; ecosublime 42, 43; material ecocriticism 58, 125, 136 ecodocumentary 2, 4, 17–23, 24, 31–44, 105, 121, 123 eco-media 11 Eco-Western 223, 227, 233, 236 Eitzen, Dirk 123, 137; consequential authenticity 137 emotion 31, 40–2, 70–1, 89, 103–4, 168, 170, 171–3, 177–9, 181, 186 Environmental World Literature 15, 141, 143, 162 environmentalism 8–9, 34, 85, 91, 141, 163; environmental ethics 31–3, 37, 38, 39, 44; environmental justice 34 ethics of care 24, 166, 168–9, 173–4, 176–7, 190–2; caring agent 173–4, 188–9, 192; feminist (care) 168–9, 171, 176–7, 192 exchange value 155 extinction 50, 121, 142–3, 149, 161, 185 Fan Lixin 18; Last Train Home 18, 19 Filipino 76, 78, 79 film festivals 18, 24, 31, 40, 48–62, 68, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80; Food and Farming Film Festival 48, 50–1, 60–2 Forrest, Nicholas 94 Gabrys, Jennifer 83, 88 Gadamer, Hans Georg 142, 162; fusion of horizons 142–4, 152, 158–9, 162 Gaia hypothesis 9 garbage: animal-capital-garbage entanglement 123; garbage animal 123–4, 137 genre 2, 4, 25, 53, 71, 130, 136, 137, 171, 172, 220, 223–4, 225, 230, 233–6 Gilligan, Carol 169, 176 Great Leap Forward, the 199, 203 green public sphere 110, 112, 115 Green Team 32–5 Greenberg, Clement 170 grotesque 173, 175, 177, 181, 190, 230 Gruen, Lori 169, 171, 175 Guangdong 20, 21, 127 Guattari, Félix 24, 67, 71, 73, 75, 76, 79, 85–6, 88, 94, 98 guestworkers 75, 76 Guo Ke 127, 137; Three Flower or Tri-Flower 122, 127–8, 137

Index   241 Habermas, Jurgen 13, 55; communicative rationality 13 Haraway, Donna 169 Heise, Ursula 15–16, 25, 40, 55–7, 141–3 Herzog, Werner 84; Lessons of Darkness 84 Ho Chao-ti 18, 20; My Fancy High Heels 18, 20, 22, 121 Hong Kong 1, 4–6, 18–19, 24, 48–62, 74, 80, 167–8, 183, 185, 192 hope of resistance 125 hospitality 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 79, 80 Hui, Raman 166, 167, 174, 175, 180; Monster Hunt 24, 166, 167, 169, 171–80, 181, 186, 192 Hung Chun-hsiu 132, 137, 139; Lost Sea, The 123, 132–6, 137, 139 ideological contradiction 168, 175, 179 Inconvenient Truth, An 98, 113–14 indigenous documentary 32, 35, 37, 38 indigenous rights 36–8 infographic 102–3 interactive multimedia documentary 102 international reaction 113–15 intersectionality 169 interspecies 39, 122, 128, 167, 169, 173, 176; interspecies care 128 interview 7, 19, 32, 34, 36, 41, 58, 79, 103, 105, 106–7, 111, 114, 127, 129, 136, 157, 158, 176 investigative journalism 105–7 Iovino, Serenella 86, 134, 135 Jia Zhangke 11, 19, 20, 84; Smog Journeys 19; Still Life 19, 84, 87; Touch of Sin, A 20 Jorge, Nuno Baraddas 89 kitsch 168–75, 177, 181–2, 185–6, 189–92, 234; eco-kitsch 170–3, 181 Kracauer, Sigfried 122 land rights 32, 35, 36 landscape: as cultural space 226–9; deculturalized landscape 227; as internalized space 226 Laos 128 law 36, 110, 127, 130, 133, 225–6, 230–1 Leopold, Aldo 144; land ethics 9, 88, 144 Li Yang 84; Blind Shaft 84, 87 London smog, the 114 Lu Xuechang 126; Cala, My Dog 126–8 Lukács, Georg 21

MacDonald, Scott 3, 9, 10, 31, 71, 97, 166, 171 Marks, Laura 92, 94 martial arts tradition 223, 227, 234 Marx, Karl 21, 232; Marxism 55, 122, 155, 203, 207 Maxwell, Richard 83 Meeker, Joseph 166, 171 melancholy 122, 137 Midway Atoll 123 migration 24, 67, 73, 75, 79, 80, 145, 207, 220 Miller, Toby 83 Mini-Three Links, the 133 Monani, Salma 4, 48, 54, 57, 83, 169 morality 169, 224, 225–7, 232, 233; moral crisis 230–3 Morton, Timothy 9–10, 122–3, 172, 181 multiple documentary mode 103–10 National Bandits 32, 35–8 naturalism 161 nature’s resistance 125–6 netizen perception 111–13 networked circulation 110–15 Nimbus 33, 40–1 Ning Hao 25, 223–37; No Man’s Land 25, 223–37; Gun and Roses 235 Nixon, Rob 213 nonhuman 16, 24, 32–3, 35–6, 38–41, 43, 80, 86, 150, 152, 166–81, 183, 186, 190, 192 nuclear 37, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81 Nussbaum, Martha 127 observational documentary 89–90, 93, 96 O’Connor, Martin 125 official support and censorship, the 113–15 Oppermann, Serpil 15, 56, 86, 134, 135 organic communities 24, 48, 50, 52, 59 Parikka, Jussi 83 Parks, Lisa 83 pathos 103–5, 108, 122 personal and maternal voice 103–4 personhood 175 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) 131 plastic-o-cene 123 post-2008 period 49 post-human 3 post-nation 233, 236 Ramos-Martinez, Manuel 90, 94–5 redemption 24, 121–8, 131–2, 134, 137, 226, 230

242   Index Regan, Tom 39, 170–1, 177, 191 rival environmental ethics 32, 37, 38 Robinson, Jill 129, 131 Rust, Stephen 4, 11, 83, 169 Sangwoodgoon 24, 50–2, 55, 57–60, 62 Saving Private Ryan 96 Schatz, Thomas 234 Scranton, Deborah 84; War Tapes 84, 89 Sebeok, Thomas 2 short films 19, 24, 68, 73, 74, 78, 80, 130 Shukin, Nicole 122, 124, 125 Singapore 24, 73, 74, 75, 79 Singer, Peter 170–1, 177, 191 Sinophone 6–8, 41 slaughterhouse aesthetics 130 slow cinema 89, 99, 171, 172 Smith, Patrick Brian 87 Sontag, Susan 187 South Korea 53, 75, 128, 137, 236; Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the 133 speciesism 178, 189 Spring in the Desert 23, 24, 199, 202–12, 213, 218 Starosielski, Nicole 83, 84, 96, 99 Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio 174 stranger sociality 233 sustainable modernity 2 Swing 33, 38–40 tactic 125, 145, 159, 174, 187, 192, 211 Taiwan 1, 4–6, 18, 20, 23–4, 31–44, 55–6, 60–2, 67–81, 123, 132–5, 185; Kinmen (Quemoy) 132–5, 137; Taiwan Strait, the 132–3

TED Talk 102, 108, 114 Thornber, Karen Laura 3, 17, 38, 150, 151, 152, 163 Three Ecologies 24, 67, 73, 76, 85–7, 88, 98 Three Gorges Dam, the 18, 19 transregionalism 2–3, 141, 161 Vaughan, Hunter 84 Vietnam 24, 68, 69, 75, 123, 128–30; Tam Tao Bear Sanctuary, the 130 Vohra, Kunal 123–4, 137; Plastic Cow, The 122–5, 130–1, 137 Walker, Janet 83, 84, 96, 99 Wang Bing 24, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98; Tie xi qu 24, 83–100 Wang Jiuliang 18, 19–20, 123, 124, 137, 139; Beijing Besieged by Waste 18, 19–20, 123, 124, 137, 139; Plastic China 20 Warren, Karen 104, 169 Western 223; neo-Western 224, 236; post-Western 224, 236, 237 Williams, Raymond 2, 217 Yang, Ruby 18, 19; Warriors of Qiugang, The 18, 19 Yi-fu, Tuan 168 YouTube 12–13, 90, 114 Yulin Dog Festival 126, 178 Zdravic 97; Riverglass 97 Zhou Hao 20; Cotton 20 zoosemiotics 2 Zootherapy 128, 137Parchici lluptatinum