Abstract
In the 1990s, China’s northeast including Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces, the bastion of state-owned heavy industry, underwent a massive state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform engineered by Deng Xiaoping as part of the “Reform and Opening-up Policy,” which resulted in large-scale SOE bankruptcies and some 30 million blue-collar workers being laid off. 20 years after the reform, China’s northeast, once among the most urbanized regions in the country, has effectively become China’s “Rust Belt.” This article examines the cinematic representations of China’s Rust Belt, specifically in China’s northeast, arguing that cinema plays a crucial role in both capturing and interrogating the emergence of new urban spaces and urban subjects amidst the spatial and ideological reorientations of the reform era. It also investigates the ways in which cinematic representations, through a shifting “system of symbols,” mediate the contradictions in the production of urban spaces, cultural norms, and social identities.
About the author
Dorothee Xiaolong Hou, PhD, is a scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and visual culture. Her current research interest is in the literary and cinematic representations of urban spaces in China’s Rust Belt. Currently a ASIANetwork-Luce Foundation postdoctoral teaching fellow at Moravian University, she’s working on her first monograph, tentatively titled Remaking China’s Rust Belt: Literature, Film, and Urban Culture of China’s Post-Reform Northeast.
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