By pursuing a Ph.D. in the East Asian Studies program at UA, I hope to use psychoanalytic, sociological, and anthropologic approaches to explore the domain “between two deaths” of villages and dig into the relationship between media, peasants, and farmland. I am interested in Chinese rural cinema, not only realist films set in rural areas and landscapes but, more broadly, films in a contemporary context that contain “rurality.” Cinema is the most capitalistic medium, and the countryside and peasants are the entirety of what makes Chinese Chinese. Using Chinese rural cinema—both as object and as metaphor—a historical lens of clarity through which to examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between state power, the individual subjectivity of peasants, and the collision of ideologies, I want to explore if China’s class nature has changed since Mao’s death in 1976 and the role of media in shaping politics and forming knowledge.