Through the Lens: Change and Choice in Herders’ Lives

Through the lens, we see how those occupying different roles within a sprawling meat supply chain respond to this disruption. It comes as a shock that frozen beef and mutton shipped from the far side of the world can sell for less than what local herders offer. Inside the film, viewers hear various attempts to make sense of the situation. Some argue that the ‘grain-fed’ label on imported meat signals superior quality. Others point to the lack of regulation in local processing, contrasting it with the transparent grading standards of overseas suppliers and praising their ‘proper production lines’. These competing narratives collide, laying bare the friction and dissonance beneath a rapidly shifting reality.

The influx has triggered a cascade of ripple effects. As buyers gravitate towards cheaper imported options, the market price for domestic beef and mutton continues to slide. Herding, once a self-sufficient traditional livelihood, is now swept into an increasingly intricate meat supply chain. Herders have shifted from being autonomous producers to passive participants in an industrial system. This dilemma is voiced by a livestock buyer named Mana in the documentary: ‘If we sell, the price doesn’t cover costs; if we don’t sell, the pasture won’t sustain them.’

Beneath this phenomenon lies a tangle of complex realities. The modernisation of pastoral life in recent years has steadily increased herders’ reliance on cash for everyday expenses, making them more dependent on selling their own livestock. As import prices suppress the local market, domestic beef and mutton lose value. To maintain a viable income, herders are forced to keep larger herds and flocks, placing immense strain on grazing lands. Many resort to renting other people’s pastures or purchasing commercial fodder to stay afloat, only to sink deeper into mounting debt.

The documentary also sheds light on a striking paradox as Tibetan herders become entangled in the wider meat trade. Traditionally, herders would graze their own stock, slaughter what they needed for household consumption, and sell the surplus for cash. Yet Tibetan Buddhist teachings emphasise a strict prohibition against taking life. Over time, this fostered a distinct division of labour in the market: the roles of slaughterer and butcher fell predominantly to Hui Muslims. The result is a rather surreal dynamic in the pastoral regions: herders, unwilling to slaughter their own animals, sell them to Hui buyers, exchange the livestock for cash, and then head to the market to purchase meat—sometimes even buying the very imported cuts that undercut them.

This shift has also drawn traditional grazing practices closer to industrialised meat production, birthing a dedicated fattening sector. Fattening merchants purchase livestock from herders and confine them in intensive feeding operations, where they are fed grain-heavy diets over a short period to rapidly increase their weight before being sent to market for profit.

Under this trend, it becomes increasingly difficult for consumers to distinguish whether locally sourced meat comes from traditionally grazed animals or has passed through industrial fattening operations. This shift in rearing practices has a direct impact on the quality of domestic beef and mutton, as well as consumers’ willingness to buy local.

Beneath all these layered complexities, it is the fleeting moments in the documentary that truly resonate. We see a young herder deftly swing a lasso to rope in a yak. As the livestock buyer prepares to load the animals, the herder points out a pair of ewes, noting they are twins, his voice heavy with reluctance. After the sale is complete, he remarks, ‘If we could afford it, we’d never part with them. We can’t bear to see them go; in the end, they’ve been like good friends to us for years.’ Years of shared grazing and daily routines forge a profound bond between herder and animal. To the herder, each beast is an individual with its own distinct character; to the buyer, and within the cold machinery of the meat supply chain, they are nothing more than cuts waiting on a butcher’s block.

These details offer a glimpse into the traditional pastoral way of life, which remains, for now, unassimilated by modern commercial logic. A young Tibetan herder can find himself torn between economic necessity and genuine affection for his animals. It is not uncommon for herders to visit a monastery after a sale, lighting butter lamps and sponsoring monastic prayers on behalf of the livestock they were forced to sell.

Long before being swept into the modern meat supply chain, herders certainly traded livestock for income to sustain their livelihoods. Yet that exchange was never purely transactional. Modern market logic, by contrast, reduces everything to mere commodity value. Under its relentless pressure, the relationship between herder and animal is steadily eroding. The unadorned, deeply rooted affection that herders feel for their own stock—so vividly captured on screen—is becoming increasingly impractical, and all too rare.

III. The Nostalgia of Nomadic Descendants

The short film *There is a Sea on the Grassland* presents a vignette of a Mongolian boy, now settled in the city, returning to his pastoral home for a few days. Through a child’s perspective, the film captures everything that is both familiar and foreign in the herding region: textbooks in Mongolian script that he cannot read, a few companions playing across a vast, snow-dusted steppe, and adults at the dinner table discussing falling livestock prices. At the end, the boy, who is about to return to Shanghai, dyes the family’s flock blue so they look like an ocean, keeping company with his friends who stay behind in the pastures.

The family depicted in the film stands as a microcosm of several generations of Mongolians transitioning from pastoral lands to the city. The story draws from director Tong Cheng’s own upbringing; he spent his childhood schooling in the city, returning to his family’s pastoral home during winter and summer holidays. His ancestral home is the 57th Military Horse Farm in Holingol, a semi-agricultural, semi-pastoral region where Mongolian and Han Chinese communities live side by side. There, herders were drawn into modernisation at an earlier stage. From the 1990s onwards, many young people from pastoral areas began migrating to towns for work, finding employment in Holingol’s coal plants.

Growing up, Tong Cheng frequently moved between the city and the pastures, which made him particularly attuned to the lived experiences of those caught between these two starkly different worlds. He deliberately distilled this transformation into the language patterns of three Mongolian generations: the grandparents, rooted in pastoral life, speak Mongolian; they cannot converse in Mandarin but comprehend it. The parents fluidly switch between Mongolian and Chinese. By the grandchildren’s generation, they understand Mongolian but no longer speak it. This creates a peculiar yet entirely coherent scene in the film: communication unfolds across two completely separate languages, with the grandchild speaking Mandarin to his grandparents, who reply in Mongolian.

The boy’s braid in the film functions as another vital symbol. Mongolian boys traditionally wear a single plait at the back of the head, which is cut off upon turning thirteen. Tong Cheng deliberately included this detail: to him, it represents the boy’s last remaining marker of Mongolian heritage as part of a new generation. Yet, when the braid is cut at thirteen, that final thread linking him to his “Mongolian” identity is also severed.

An a cappella song at the story’s close (drawn from the widely sung Mongolian classic *The Grasslands of My Father, The Rivers of My Mother*) echoes the sense of loss felt by the new generation of Mongolians: “Though I can no longer speak in my mother tongue, please accept my sorrow and my joy. I, too, am a child of the plateau. Deep within my heart lies a song, a song that holds the grasslands of my father and the rivers of my mother…”

In his narrative, pastoral life recedes from a direct, embodied experience into something more atmospheric and steeped in nostalgia. Compared with herding communities in Tibet, Inner Mongolia’s herders were drawn into urbanisation earlier. How do those caught between the two lifestyles of city and pasture come to terms with, adapt to, or reshape their external environment? Do they remain in the pastures or move into towns? These dilemmas confront contemporary herders in their daily lives, and will remain a recurring focus in Tong Cheng’s future filmmaking.

Tong Cheng told me that whether in the city or the pastures, people adjust to their immediate surroundings to better adapt to their present circumstances. The movement of herders from the steppe to the city is, in his view, another form of adaptation: “People change themselves through their environment,” he said, adding that some “will nomadise into a soil and culture that better suits them.”

However, I remain somewhat sceptical of framing the migration from pasture to city as another kind of “nomadism”. Is it truly nomadism, or merely yet another unoriginal echo of rural urbanisation caught in a massive tide of development? Or perhaps a commercial appropriation of “nomadic” culture in contemporary marketing? In what sense can the genuine “nomadic spirit” transcend the context of traditional pastoral life and accompany people’s embodied experiences into a more contemporary existence?

Through these films, we glimpse the transformations and dilemmas confronting traditional pastoral communities today. Within these frames, the sweeping arc of social change gives way to fragile, easily overlooked emotions that are magnified and laid bare. It is precisely these feelings that form the deep fabric of traditional nomadic culture.

Beyond these three films, the nomadic film festival showcases several other shorts set against the backdrop of nomadic life. In *Ama*, director Suolang Quzhen turns the camera on her own mother, capturing the bodily experiences of a traditional woman from the pastoral regions. *Hanggai* follows a herder displaced by external forces, wandering the fringes of a traditional grazing area. *The Silent Xianda Han* draws on the oral accounts of elderly Oroqen elders to recreate the internal rhythm of the Oroqen people’s former forest-hunting existence. Together, these images act as a prism, refracting the multifaceted perspectives of life in the pastoral lands.

There remains vast narrative room to explore nomadic culture and the pastoral regions of various lands, tracing the emotions that underpin these lived realities. Within the storytelling space of film, the complexities and uncertainties of reality are gently embraced and softly held aloft. Perhaps this is the true purpose of the medium.

Edited by: Xiao Dan