Nation is not natural. Nor is nature, as Timothy Morton (Ecology without Nature, 2009) and many others remind us. In this paper, I investigate the complex relationship between nation and nature featured in cinematic representations in socialist and postsocialist China. I am particularly interested in the role that ethnic minorities play in this relationship. Four major instances will be singled out for close examination: 1) from landscape to class struggle, 2) building a socialist laboring subject through interacting with nature; 3) entering explicitly environmental themes; and 4) new nationalist eco-ethnicity. Films to be studied include The Victory of Inner Mongolian People (1951), Daji and Her Fathers (1961), Gada Meiren (2002), and Wolf Totem (2015). By exploring the ways in which nature was (re)imagined and (re)configured in the process of Chinese nation-building, a process that particularly involves an ideologically-charged manipulation of ethnicity, I intend to map out an intricate trajectory in which ethnicity has shaped unique features of Chinese ecocinema.