Abstract

Harnessing the newly acquired state capacity of a unified country and projecting itself as a proud member of the emerging socialist bloc, the early years of the People’s Republic of China witnessed an unprecedented production of representational materials showcasing “ethnic diversity.” Among these were fifty feature-length fiction films depicting the country’s major non-Han peoples. Previous scholarship conjectured that socialist China actively sought to affirm the nation’s diverse ethno-cultural identities. This state sponsored cultural production even led one scholar to characterize the early PRC as embodying “inclusionary nationalism.” This paper, focusing on ten socialist-era films made about Tibetans, challenges and refines this interpretation. It argues that the so-called inclusionary nationalism was predicated on the wholesale rejection of the Tibetans’ native culture and political structures as prerequisites for inclusion. The analysis reveals that the Maoist assault on Tibet’s Buddhist theocracy took a drastic departure from the expected trajectories of secularization and scientific revolution. Instead, Maoist cultural production adopted a bold strategy of portraying Mao as a rival to the Dalai Lama and presenting the Chinese military as a more righteous and efficacious “army of Bodhisattvas” than Tibet’s native clergy. The paper demonstrates how the Maoist cultural economy, in its fervent drive to advance the integrationist ambitions of a Han-centric state, appropriated the semantics of the Tibetan religious economy and sought to dismantle it by turning its own logic against it.