The Myth of Shangri-La and Its Counter-discourses: (Anti-)Utopian Representations of China’s Southwest Frontier in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In the early twenty-first century, the southwest frontier, especially the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, has been imagined as a particular utopian space, or “Shangri-La,” in China’s popular culture, but there are also literary works and films that debunk this conception. This paper is a study of these different discourses. I argue that the utopian and anti-utopian representations of China’s Southwest in these works are socially and intellectually significant. The myth of Shangri-La promises a fantasized utopian solution to social problems and a miraculous cure for personal afflictions. In contrast, Ge Fei’s End of Spring in Jiangnan ( Chun jin Jiangnan, 2011) and Ning Ken’s Sky·Tibet ( Tian·Zang, 2010) debunk the myth of Shangri-La as a utopian solution and cure. In this way, these two novels retain their critical stance toward China’s history and reality. Meanwhile, some anti-Shangri-La works can be more ambivalent: Zhu Wen’s South of the Clouds ( Yun de nanfang, 2004) and Han Han’s The Continent ( Houhui wuqi, 2014) appear to challenge the utopian construction to form their social criticism in the beginning, only to compromise this criticism in the end as they affirm the existence of utopia either in the rural Southwest or in urban China. All these utopian and anti-utopian elements make the southwest frontier a site of contestation and contradiction.