Our country’s writers and artists should become the prophets, pathfinders, and heralds of the mood of the age

—Xi Jinping

What do you do when the sirens signalling shift change start going silent? When the slow, ominous creep of rust starts eating giant, abandoned factories? When the sky is clearer because the chimneys have no fire, but your fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts are out of jobs? When the promise of tomorrow stands belied? If you are an 80s kid from China’s northeast—the Dongbei region—you could pour your angst into art. You could be the cultural zeitgeist that has gripped China since the 2010s.

In what is known as the “Dongbei Renaissance”,  writers, artists, singers, and stand-up comics from China’s northeast have taken over the imagination of the people. They are the children of the rust belt—the three northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang—once the site of magnificent state-owned heavy industries, full of Communist promise, the fabled “eldest son of the People’s Republic of China”.

In the 80s, Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms came head to head with towering testimonies of the Chinese command and control economy, the steel, coal, oil and other connected heavy industries of the Dongbei region. There was a shift to light industries and private capital based primarily in the great port cities of the south, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and others. The state-owned enterprises of Dongbei, fattened on state patronage, hulking and slow, and secure in their preeminence couldn’t compete with the onslaught of the new capitalist way. It is estimated that 25 to 70 million workers lost jobs in this policy and market-led transition, at least a quarter from Dongbei alone. Even now laid off workers gather around town squares with their bicycles and scooters carrying placards that advertise their skills as plumbers, electricians, painters, and other odd jobs that are a heritage of their skills acquired on the shopfloor.

China’s northeast (Dongbei means east-north, the region is also known as Manchuria) has historically been unique. Bordering Korea, Russia and Mongolia, Dongbei has its own direct dialect, and a rugged, mineral-rich landscape forged by the spirit of its harsh winters. Between 1932-1945, the Manchukuo period, while nominally free, it was under Japanese occupation. The Japanese writ was enforced with extreme savagery, with mass public executions and rapes as its defining features. Japan’s dreaded Unit 731 or the Manchu detachment was carrying out human experiments to develop chemical and biological weapons. Operating out of Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, Unit 731 is estimated to have caused the deaths of 300,000 people. Japanese rule, while brutal, laid down the roots of the industrialisation of the Dongbei region, from steel to coal.  At one point Manchuria’s industrial production was greater than Japan’s.

During the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, much of the machinery and equipment was dismantled and taken away to Russia. Under Mao Zedong’s communist rule, Dongbei was given pride of place, and was the centre point of the First Five Year Plan of 1953.

In 1954, when Jawaharlal Nehru visited Anshan to tour the Anshan Iron and Steel Works, he was “very impressed” by the “giant metallurgical complex of some forty plants which are the pride of the people of China”, historian Koji Hirata, quotes a Times of India report in his significant book, Making Mao’s Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism published in 2024.

For the children of Dongbei’s workers, witnessing the mass layoffs of their fathers, and the gradual dying of their factory towns left behind an inner turmoil that found an outlet in art and literature. These were considered “iron rice bowl jobs”, guaranteed for life and entire families and generations were employed in the same factories.

The Dongbei Renaissance, a term credited to the rapper GEM, who hails from the northeast, has produced genre and genre-defying works in literature, music, film and stand-up. At its heart is urban decay and loss, its geographical setting, and plays on dialect and style. Its stories, often dark, violent, layered with humour and irreverence, are about people who haven’t amounted to much, who have a sense of failure attached to their being. The finest examples, some now translated in English too, come from the famous three of Dongbei literature—Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu and  Yang Zhihan. The “New Worker Literature”, similar to Dongbei writing in many respects, is also having its moment in China, where auto-fiction accounts by factory workers, nannies and janitors among others, are hugely popular.

The 2023 hit noir show, ​​The Long Season, with a great original soundtrack, set in Hualin in the northeast, has the deindustrialisation of Dongbei as the major theme.

What makes Dongbei literature unique? Wu Qi, the Beijing-based journalist and literary figure, in an interview published in Granta’s superb special China issue, says, “I think the most important thing about them [Dongbei writers], probably, is that they write about the real social environment. And people are now desperate for stories that feel like their own. We need stories that describe what the feeling of actually living here in twenty-first century China is like.”

The Dongbei provinces were some of China’s richest even into the early 90s, but are now among the poorest in the country.  In the battle between China’s planned socialist economy and Socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Dongbei people lost, but their stories are the ones that resonate across China.