Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building
Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building
by Kwai-Cheung Lo
University of Michigan Press, 2025
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-472-07727-4
Paper: 978-0-472-05727-6
eISBN: 978-0-472-90488-4 (OA)
About the Book
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.
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.
About the Author
Kwai-Cheung Lo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Reviews
"An ambitious, timely, and erudite treatment—the first of its kind in English, and the first unbiased one in any language—of a major corpus of Sinophone films, usually referred to as Ethnic Minorities Cinema."— Yomi Braester, University of Washington
"Lo successfully historicizes shifting strategies throughout China’s history of ethnic-themed films to constitute a unified Chinese identity. This book includes a wealth of information on ethnic minority films and is a bold intervention in the fields of Chinese Cinema Studies, Chinese Studies, and Chinese Ethnic Minority Studies."— Robin Visser, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
"Kwai-Cheong Lo's masterwork analytically deconstructs cinema's bifurcated function in fabricating and subverting Asian ethnic identities within China's nation-state edifice, leveraging cinematicity, ecological politics, and montage to elucidate subversion amid hegemony, furnishing sophisticated perspectives on Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs, and Hui as vital actors..."— Vishal Singh Bhadauriya, Asian Ethnicity
Tags
China Understandings Today, China, Media Studies, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
Label: The Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS)
License: CC BY-NC
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