“Natural” Disasters and Reliefs : Eco-Ethnic Politics in Alai’s Epic of Ji Village

This essay discusses Volume Two of Alai’s The Epic of Ji Village, Celestial Fire, which depicts one major natural disaster—a wildfire—that hits the village during the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent relief efforts. We examine the ways in which the natural disaster is woven into the texture of social organisms, appropriated by political powers, and maneuvered for the building of a modern Chinese nation. By investigating how the wildfire, as both a natural and social event, changes the landscape and the communal structure of Ji Village, and how the state-orchestrated relief efforts fail to lead to salvation, we intend to demonstrate the complicatedness of what we would call the “eco-ethnic politics” in socialist China, or politics of ethnic, national, and class relations mediated through ecological changes and reshaping of nature. Nature is an eco-ideological tapestry, into which gender, ethnic, and class politics are intricately interwoven.