Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building
External Review of Whole Manuscript
Abstract
Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building investigates the relationship between cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities and China’s nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the current authoritarian regime in the twenty-first century. Kwai-Cheung Lo argues that the glossy, but superficial, cinematic depictions of non-Han ethnic minorities manufactured and manipulated by state authorities have deeply penetrated the Chinese public’s conception of what an ideal multiethnic nation should be like as well as what it means to be Chinese under political unification.
Lo understands these representations of ethnic minorities as part of a larger ecosystem and the cultures, values, and life practices of non-Han ethnic minorities as closely entwined with environmental issues and politics. This intertwining, Lo argues, suggests a crisis in “objectification and identification” of both people and the environment, that plays out in cinema featuring ethnic minorities. Lo traces these depictions of Chinese ethnic minority groups in films created by both Han-majority and non-Han filmmakers, examining how these representations became a site in which state authorities, Han and non-Han communities, and foreign agencies compete and interact under the larger context of building and imagining the Chinese nation-state.
Keywords
China, ethnic minority cinema, nation-state building, ecosystem, ecological politics, cinematicity, ethnic gesture, Republican China, socialist China, musical, revolutionary voice, heterotopia, utopia, Chinggis Khan, Mongol, Islam, Uyghur, surveillance, biopolitics, Tibet cinema, Pema Tseden, Zhang Lu, cultural ecology, transnational filmmakingDOI
10.3998/mpub.14415745ISBN
9780472077274, 9780472057276, 9780472904884Publisher
University of Michigan PressPublisher website
https://www.press.umich.edu/Publication date and place
2025Series
China Understandings Today,Classification
Society and culture: general
Media studies