Zhenhui Yan completed her thesis in the Department of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

• 1 Introduction: Ethnic minority children’s allegorical functions, identity construction, and geographies in postsocialist Chinese cinema 2 Children, nature, and animals: Dai children’s adventure in a forest 3 Natural landscapes as musical spaces: Uyghur children’s yearnings in a national narrative 4 Beijing and rural Guizhou in focalisations: Miao children’s relationships with the nation-state and ethnic tradition 5 Cinematic space in a relational construction: Heroes and a reconstruction of ethnic relationships through children’s interethnic interactions 6 Grasslands as transitional spaces of play: Mongol children’s reimagination of the world 7 A young lama as Sun Wukong: Contradictions and flexibility in a contemporary Tibetan child’s identity construction 8 Conclusion: Some observations about the images of ethnic minority children in postsocialist Chinese cinema