Dissertation: The Making of the Chinese Rust Belt: Life, Work, and Social Change in Northeast China, 1950s-2010s

Committee: Andrew Abbott (co-chair), Dingxin Zhao (co-chair), Gary Herrigel (political science) 

My dissertation addresses an exceptional case in the "China Miracle." Against the background of China's successful economic development, Northeast China – the former socialist heartland – has become the epitome of the Chinese "rust belt." While China boasted a miraculous economic growth rate, Northeast China did not grow as fast as other regions. It has even shown signs of economic decline. The massive factory closures of the late 1990s, and the later difficulties in economic revitalization, have earned the region the nickname "the Chinese rust belt." External investors are reluctant to invest in the region, thus the popular saying has emerged "investment should not cross Shanhaiguan," meaning it should not enter the region. 

I raise the puzzle: (1) why did Northeast China not experience a successful market transformation like other regions in China, but instead witnessed stagnant economic performance and the formation of a conservative political and economic ethos? (2) why and how did market reform translate the past communist economic ethos in the former socialist industrial heartland into the current culture in the Chinese "rust belt"? To disentangle this process, I consulted governmental and factory archives and local newspapers, collected regional socioeconomic statistics, and conducted over 100 life history interviews with former socialist workers, as well as informant interviews with local officials and scholars. 

Challenging the conventional wisdom that China is benefitting overall from the global transfer of manufacturing jobs, my dissertation pinpoints the parallel formation of the "rust belt" phenomenon in China and the United States. I emphasize the decisive role of the sizable post-war baby boom generation (born 1950s-1960s) in shaping the region's political-economic transformation and socio-cultural change. My dissertation puts forward a generational encoding perspective to understand Northeast China's (Dongbei) transformation and theorizes generation as a socio-historical structure. I argue that this generation's disrupted life course and their cumulative experience in the industrial heartland during China's socialist industrialization and market reform bred fatalism, demoralization, disbelief in business activities, mistrust of institutions and rules, and cynicism toward the state. This engendered a "rust belt" culture.

To expand the overarching argument a bit, the generational perspective is first about demography and is related to the social ecology of the place. A hidden phenomenon behind China's socialist industrialization and planned economy was the recursive but suppressed employment crises in resource-controlled cities. Such crises were the consequences of limited resources in the planned economy and a rapidly expanding population after a baby boom in the 1950s and 1960s. The Chinese state delayed such employment crises by transferring the urban population to the countryside through political movements such as the sent-down movements. The sent-down movement was called to a stop after Mao's death and made employment arrangements an acute crisis facing the state.

As one of the places that experienced the large urban baby boom, Dongbei was most struck by the impending employment crises. With the pressure to maintain stability and prevent social unrest, the local industrial work-units (hereafter danwei) absorbed this youthful bulge into their organizations by employing a succession policy, the expansion of technical school enrollment, and the establishment of factory-affiliated collective enterprises. After incorporation into the danweis, the early boom of the state-owned enterprises prevented individuals from starting entrepreneurship activities in the nascent market sphere, and instead made them commit to the socialist institutionalized life course, shaping their morality and skill set. However, the unfortunate coupling of a large working-age population with capital-intensive factories was only made possible because it was based on the socialist allocation of scarce resources in society. The economic reforms and the emerging private economy challenged the resource allocation, forcing such an unfortunate coupling to decouple.

This decoupling process was uncertain and unplanned, generating confusion and institutional mazes among the baby boom generation employed in the state sector. Such confusion delayed the generation’s exit from the state sector in the 1990s. The radical reform of the state sector at the turn of the century cut this generations' ties to state institutions. After leaving the work unit, the frustrating experiences found when searching for new employment instilled fatalistic, defeated, and demoralized outlooks. Such experiences made them even more reliant on personal connections and less inclined to believe in self-made market actors. Compared with other fast-growing regions, the mismatch between the baby boom generation's responses and chief momentum for market growth made the region miss the window of opportunity for rampant growth. The reshaped economic structure and culture led to the aspirational young generation's departure, making the local age structure even older and burdening local economies.

My dissertation develops an innovative methodology of generational research that combines life history interviews, comparative historical analysis, ethnography, and demographic examination. It interrogates the dynamic relationship between human lives, social structure, state policies, and capitalist reconfiguration in a populous country that experienced a turbulent twentieth century. With real human actors and their lives at the center of inquiry, it transcends the narrow focus on the developmental state, abstract markets, and global forces in the existing literature on development. It also transcends the nation-based studies and reveals the hidden common thread of generational dynamics behind global change.