Geographies of the ethnic minority children in Chinese cinema (1990s and 2000s): rurality, ethnicity and nationalism

Abstract

The subject of ethnic minority children and childhoods has attracted Chinese filmmakers over the past three decades, yet relevant research is rare. The thesis draws on theories in cinematic landscape and children’s geographies to explore how ethnic minority childhood experience is constructed cinematically. What in particular is made of rurality versus urban living, how are such geographies imagined, and how do these vistas and landscapes facilitate the understanding of the children’s identities and reflect certain ideological agendas of filmmakers in the context of a Han-dominated multi-ethnic nation during its rapid social-political transformations in the 1990s and 2000s? In individual chapters, various theoretical approaches are also deployed, such as the idea of natural space in a musical, a rural idyllic childhood, focalisation in film narrative, relational construction of space, transitional space of play and media’s impact on identity construction.

The thesis concludes that, in different historical periods, the ethnic minority children’s connections with rural space carry different connotations. In the early 1990s, they aspire for the more ‘advanced’ urban space dominated by Han Chinese as a route to better education and upward mobility. In the 2000s, they are returned to rurality, admired for maintaining a harmonious relationship with nature, land and community. The children are also positioned by films in different relationships with ethnic traditions, either forced into creative reimagination of the world by appropriating diverse cultural resources or existing in harmony with their local heritage as imagined by Han nostalgia. In these (Han) narratives, the children adhere to traditional practices and rural spaces, immune to impacts of modernisation. Conversely, in a film directed by a filmmaker of their own ethnicity, the complexity of identity construction in the child protagonist is revealed complete with contradictions and flexibility. Finally, despite convenience, the children are used to embody multi-ethnic unity with surprising nuances. In the 1990s, their aspiration for urban space serves the discourse of development and nationhood. But, in the context of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, their temporary location in the city deconstructs nationalism due to the special circumstances of left-behind children and enforced displacement of ethnic minorities away from their homelands.