Terra-Developmentalism

Across newspaper stories, documentaries, and fiction films in early socialist China, women had an indispensable presence in the PRC’s geological exploration. This article examines how cinema constructs women’s roles in geological work and reveals a more complex engagement with “terra-developmentalism,” the mutating connotation of earthbound development, and the emergence of a masculinist-nationalistic framing of geological exploration in the first half of the twentieth-century. I argue that women’s appearances in geological films were less about challenging the patriarchal and ideological nature embedded within geological science. Instead, the cinematic portrayal of women geologists as imperfect and amateur technical subjects opens the possibility of redefining what constitutes “development” and of translating an embodied, gendered experience of how state developmental visions unfold on the ground. I analyze how the Chinese state perceived geology as a socialist developmental ideal that was anti-imperialist, nationalist, and, most importantly, gendered, through a close examination of the first socialist state documentary on geo-exploration, Treasure Seekers in the Mountains (Shen Shan Tan Bao, 1955). I then compare two fiction films made by the socialist female director Dong Kena, The Song of Baoshan (Baoshan Zhi Ge, 1958) and Small Grass Grows on the Kunlun Mountains (Kunlun Shan Shang Yi Ke Cao, 1962). I present how women who devote their lives to geological work negotiate top-down state developmentalist ideologies on screen as well as Dong’s struggles as a woman filmmaker. Throughout the article, I weave in reflections on the mediated profile of China’s most renowned female geologist, Chi Jishang, and on how her scientific practices off screen resonate with those of women geologists on socialist screens

Amateur · Connotation · Ideology · Movie theater · Newspaper · State (computer science) · Vision · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Geography and Geographical Thought