Guldana Salimjan reviews “To the Wonder,” the Chinese TV drama that has taken audiences by storm.
For
every square kilometer, there wasn’t even an average of one person:
this is the reason I don’t always have to feel lonely. It’s the opposite
situation, when there are lots of people, that causes the loneliness to
set in. It’s when I’m among the throngs of people at the local singing
gatherings that the loneliness becomes almost unbearable.
—Li Juan, “Suddenly Coming into My Own” (trans. Kyle Shernuk, 2017)
WRITER LI JUAN’S essay collection My Altay (2010) has won accolades for its unique, down-to-earth writing style that depicts mundane yet curious aspects of everyday life in Altay, a region in the northern reaches of Xinjiang (administratively known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in Northwestern China) that borders Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Unlike some other parts of Xinjiang in which Uyghurs are the biggest group of non-Han residents, this is largely a Kazakh area. In one of her writings, Li reflects on her struggle to communicate with native Kazakhs and her sense of insignificance amid the vast grasslands. This is because Li, whose parents are from Sichuan province, grew up as a Han settler in a town run by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). The XPCC is an economic and paramilitary organization controlled by the Chinese party-state that dominates large portions of Xinjiang’s economy and has long served as a vector of state power and conduit for Han migration to the region, whose autonomy is only titular. Li’s self-reflexivity, however, never extends to understanding her own Han privilege as benefiting from XPCC and Chinese state policies in Xinjiang. For my people, Kazakhs, however, this place has been a battleground of their continued struggle for existence on their own terms in an increasingly Han-dominated world. Since the 1950s, Kazakhs have been minoritized by the Chinese government at the national level while locally inundated by unceasing waves of Han settlement—their nomadic lifeways threatened by the agricultural and industrial expansions of the XPCC ever since.
Black critics like James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates in the United States have illuminated how the attitude of “white innocence”—white Americans denying and forgetting the systemic racism in their nation’s history—is an indication of white power and privilege; there is something similar at play in Li’s work that is worth examining: “Han innocence” and the cultural products that uphold it. I have in mind a prevailing attitude in Chinese culture and mediascapes that denies and disregards the existence of racism and colonialism in China’s history, directed toward Kazakhs and Uyghurs and many others, from Tibetans and Mongols to southwestern groups such as the Miao and Yi peoples. This attitude portrays Han people as members of a minority and victims of non-Han peoples on China’s frontiers. In a common trope in these narratives, Han settlers “find themselves” and gain elevated awareness and embrace a moral stance of “harmonious coexistence” with the nature and people of these frontier regions, despite the historical and ongoing tensions.
Li’s work has found new life in the digital era of soft propaganda in China. Recently, a state-funded TV show titled To the Wonder (2024), based on My Altay and directed by Congcong Teng, stayed at the top of China’s most-watched lists for weeks and was even short-listed to compete at the Cannes International Series Festival in April this year. In this story set in the early 2000s, a young Han woman named Li Wenxiu (a stand-in for Li Juan, played by Yiran Zhou) leaves the cutthroat city life in Xinjiang’s capital city of Ürümchi and stumbles to learn her way around the pastoral region of Altay, where her mother owns a small shop among Kazakh herders. Across eight episodes, Wenxiu comes to know various Kazakh characters in the village, witnessing their family dramas and their arduous pastoral migration. Wenxiu even sparks a romantic relationship with a Kazakh man named Batay (Yu Shi). In the beginning, Wenxiu’s faux pas and ignorance of Kazakh culture serve as comic relief. As the show progresses, she learns to appreciate the traditional lifeways, care, and trust of the Kazakh community. She also begins to critically reflect on the correlation between material wealth and the good life—the ideology behind the Chinese government’s agenda of economic development—when she says, “Actually, having a good life doesn’t require having a lot of money.” If Wenxiu embodies an “innocent” Han rediscovery of authenticity and ethical living embodied in the cultural Other and native ecologies, male Han characters in the show are presented as just a few bad apples—embodiments of the Chinese extractive capitalism ruining grassland environments. The show ends with a tender, warm scene of Wenxiu and Batay’s reunion after several years apart, against the backdrop of their Han and Kazakh families happily enjoying Chinese Spring Festival fireworks and dumplings together.
To the Wonder is certainly more sophisticated than previous generations of “ethnic films” made in China. There is a certain effort to highlight Kazakh life, music, language, and women’s experiences in patriarchal family and society, and it even includes a subtle, emotive critique of Chinese development. Nonetheless, when put in the larger context of the Chinese government’s ongoing mass internment and surveillance of Muslims—many Kazakhs among them—and promotion of interethnic marriage in Xinjiang, To the Wonder channels a deceiving message that Han settlement and extraction of Xinjiang have been an innocent mistake and that now is the time to move past that “history” and on to a new chapter of Han and non-Han coexistence. This Han innocence continues to legitimize Han occupation and its violent history in Xinjiang. It is upheld by two myths in the show: the first is its assumption that traditional lifeways will inevitably disappear on the path to modernity; the second is that intimacy is a product of an encounter (however asymmetrical) between Han and non-Han societies. As a result, we see Han people, such as Wenxiu and state cultural producers, lament the changes of the Kazakh homelands but bear no burden or guilt and then simultaneously romanticize interethnic relations as if they were a love affair between equal partners.
The Myth of the Inevitable
Batay’s father, Sultan (Alimjan Tursenbek), serves as an important narrative device, symbolizing Kazakhs as traditional, stubborn, and stuck in time—which is also an enduring stereotype of minoritized peoples in China. Sultan is a lone “traditionalist” that people fear and avoid, for his gun, his stern masculine demeanor, his authoritarian paternalism toward women and children, and his disdain toward Batay and Wenxiu’s romance. Rumor even has it that he killed a man once, adding more savageness to his image. When Sultan insists on taking his ancestors’ migration route where wolves are active, the village Chinese Communist Party official cites China’s Wildlife Protection Law and repeatedly asks Sultan to submit his hunting rifle to the government. Sultan vehemently refuses and argues that he needs it for self-protection and, moreover, that his family has taken this migration route for generations. Sultan is irritated by Batay’s long hair and curses him for being disrespectful. He demands that Batay inherit the family’s livestock and pasture, but Batay refuses—he has his own plan to be a trainer in the horse-racing business. Sultan tries to hold on to the tradition of keeping his widowed daughter-in-law’s children under his patrilineal household when she remarries, despite the view of women in the community that children should follow their mothers. At this moment, Wenxiu openly scolds Sultan: “But tradition is not unchangeable!” Wenxiu’s mother chastises her, knowing better their position as outsiders in the Kazakh community.
In the end, Sultan submits, finally letting out a sigh in the last episode to Batay, saying, “The lifestyles I like are disappearing one by one. Can’t keep my falcon anymore, can’t hunt anymore. Everyone migrates by state highways and motor vehicles. You don’t want to herd, either. Does this world have to develop this way? I am confused.” Despite the apparent sympathy toward Sultan, the show also presents these fading traditions and authority figures as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of development, and without a culprit. It is suggesting that the nomadic morality and respectability that Sultan upholds are incompatible with the postsocialist neoliberalism and state feminism that the Chinese state “brings” to the Kazakhs.
During the socialist period (1949–76), decades of Chinese development on the grasslands disrupted the centuries-old migration routes used by nomadic Kazakh herders. The Kazakh social structure, organized around patriarchal orders and prestige, was denounced as feudal and backward by Han communist cadres. In the postsocialist market reform period starting in 1978, Han settlement, farming, and mining encroached into traditional grazing pastures, leading to grassland degradation. From the 2000s onwards, the state issued hunting and grazing bans in the name of “ecological conservation,” further pressuring Kazakhs to abandon their traditional ways of life. Since 2009, the state’s “nomad sedentarization” program has been implemented in Xinjiang, pushing more Kazakhs to permanently settle down. Sultan’s “stubborn” clinging to traditions (whether they relate to pastoral routes, guns, land, property, or family integrity) is his act of resistance against losing more to the so-called “development.” In another Chinese propaganda film, Fade Away Pastoral (2018), a Kazakh elder is presented as a traditionalist who initially resists change but eventually welcomes the government’s efforts to move him into resettlement housing. Similar to Li Juan, the filmmakers later said that they were motivated to document the Kazakh pastoral culture before it disappeared, and that they were impressed by Kazakh folk wisdom and ecological knowledge. At the same time, the film still peddles the official narrative that the state’s nomadic sedentarization policy is equivalent to bringing modernity to Kazakhs. In both To the Wonder and Fade Away Pastoral, the Han retreat to the background and present themselves as both the minority and the developmental savior.
The devastating irony is that these productions have been released at a time when the state is actively converting grazing lands into large-scale ecotourism sites, operating internment camps, and engaging in the cultural erasure of Indigenous non-Han peoples. By framing these changes as the inevitable and necessary consequences of progress and modernization, these productions obscure the systemic processes of resource extraction and land expropriation that are being carried out to establish a Han-dominant society in the region. This framing perpetuates the notion that China has never engaged in colonialism and that the Han Chinese presence in the region is a benevolent, necessary force for progress. The patronizing treatment of Sultan resembles the classic colonial trope of the “Vanishing Indian” in North America, which mourns the doom of Native Americans, believing that their culture and society would inevitably be overwhelmed and disappear—but that no individuals or states were actually responsible for this disappearance.
Intimacy as Cultural Encounter?
To the Wonder strategically uses its central relationship, the romance between a Han woman and a Kazakh man, to convey that love can transcend boundaries and overcome differences. However, this portrayal seems fantastical when the harsh reality is that ethnic relations in Xinjiang are now shrouded in terror, coercion, and state-promoted intermarriage. By featuring a Han woman and a Kazakh man, the series subverts the more common narrative of Han penetration into Xinjiang wherein Han men are the primary agents of colonization. The gender flip further obscures the real-life sexual violence and coercion faced by Uyghur and other minority women.
Contrary to the transcendental free love between Han and non-Han portrayed in To the Wonder, interethnic intimacy in Xinjiang is embedded in an asymmetrical power hierarchy and shaped by colonial micropolitics that disrupt the social reproduction of Uyghur and Kazakh language, culture, and communities. Under Xi Jinping, “ethnic mingling” is now one of the guiding principles of ethnic work, which emphasizes residential integration, joint schooling, and increased interethnic migration and mobility. In recent years, party leaders in Tibet and Xinjiang have promoted interethnic marriage as a method to achieve the political goal of “ethnic unity” and “stability maintenance”. Especially since 2017, when the reeducation camps disappeared many men, the state has forced interethnic marriage on many non-Han women.
The myth of intimacy as a natural process and cultural encounter is integral to the official state narrative that portrays China’s expansion as a continuous, peaceful, unchanging Confucian civilization, obscuring the historical reality of the violent annexation of Tibet and Xinjiang. As a result, appropriating non-Han culture has little to zero repercussion in China, as non-Han culture is simply redefined as a constituent part of Chinese culture and civilization and thereby imitable by all. In the show, the “Kazakh” man Batay speaks fluent Chinese and broken Kazakh. The actor Yu Shi (who also claims to have a Mongolian name) is not Kazakh and not from Altay. Since the show was released, Yu Shi has become a heartthrob among Chinese audiences for his manliness and skillful horseback riding and archery. He spent six months learning Kazakh, practicing riding horses, and herding sheep with local Kazakhs and has since joked that he has become a “child of Altay.” Kazakh images, culture, and history are for Chinese artists to pick and choose from freely, while Han-ness maintains the dominant norm, in a similar way that the practice of “playing Indian” has been crucial to the creation of whiteness and American national identity, as Philip Deloria illuminated.
The Power of Han Innocence
Tourism in Altay has boomed thanks to the show. Hotel and flight bookings have doubled as affluent Han urbanites flock there for healing in nature. On social media platforms, netizens have commented that the show “alleviated [their] spiritual exhaustion” and that it has “reminded us that actually life can slow down.” In my own research, I have seen how Kazakh and Uyghur land is converted into ecotourism sites, parking lots, or coffee shops (for example, see bloggers’ travel journal entries like this one featuring Sayram Lake in Börtala, which was converted from grazing land to an ecotourism site in 2013), while land activists are arrested and beaten to the point of disability, disappeared for standing up for their rights to land, or forced into exile. Those living in forced diaspora are unable to return and claim their property or reunite with their families and communities behind the Sino-Kazakhstan border. I, too, must listen from afar as the show broadcasts the beautiful sounds of Kazakh, my mother tongue, while I witness the places of my childhood transformed into the setting for a Han love story and landscape porn.
The portrayal of Han innocence in cultural products like To the Wonder serves to reinforce and justify the real-world dominance and control that the Han Chinese majority exerts over the lives of Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and other non-Han peoples, which impacts both their material conditions and their spiritual well-being. As Vernadette Vicuña Gonzales observes in Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawaiʻi and the Philippines (2013), “tourism is more than ‘just’ a consumer practice: its most enabling conditions—that of mobility and modernity—are guaranteed by, at the very least, a racialized and gendered idea of security.” Likewise in Xinjiang, gendered, sexualized, and racialized work (whether it’s cultural production or tourism) involved in sustaining a sense of Han innocence is crucial for the unencumbered and smooth accumulation of capital gained from possessing Kazakh and Uyghur land.
Ta-Nehisi Coates explains how literary works, public monuments, and eventually movies reinforced the pernicious myth of white supremacy and innocence in the long aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. “[T]he lie of innocence,” he writes, “is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories.” Like Coates’s American dream based on white innocence, the current Chinese dream is based on a myth of Han innocence, conjured up by historians, fortified by the state’s propaganda offices, and gilded by the romantic literature of young pioneers like Li Juan. The recent popularity of To the Wonder is a testament to the power of the dream of Han innocence. In China, the series has succeeded in presenting Xinjiang as an adventure land for Han urbanites, a way to return to nature and maybe fall in love without having to worry about going native—after all, the natives will inevitably fade away.
LARB Contributor
Guldana Salimjan is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University. Her work focuses on settler colonialism, environmental justice, and gendered memories. Her current book project examines the history of dispossession in Altay and Tarbagatai Kazakh regions of China from 1949 to today, and Kazakh voices of belonging, remembrance, and survival.