Stories about the Dongbei rust belt are resonant in China

IT DOES NOT sound like an easy place to live. Scorched cars litter a desolate landscape. The city’s factories are struggling; workers are being laid off in droves. Worst of all, a serial killer is sowing terror.“Moses on the Plain”, a novella of 2016 by Shuang Xuetao, offers an unsparing portrait of life in China’s industrial north-east in the 1990s. It inspired a film adaptation in 2021 and a television series in 2023. (It has also been translated into English in a collection called “Rouge Street”.) In its various formats, the story is part of a phenomenon called the “Dongbeirenaissance”. Dongbeiis a collective term for China’s rust belt: the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. The region, once known in the West as Manchuria, has become a byword for urban decay. Yet precisely because of that, it is pushing to the forefront of Chinese popular culture.