Why China’s rust belt region has an outsized influence on Chinese culture

0:00Everyone wants to know if AI is conscious, but consciousness is really hard to define. It's the experience we're having right now. What it is like to eat chocolate or to look at the blue sky. So how do we know who or what is conscious? Check out the new ways scientists are finding to measure the elusive phenomenon on Shortwave. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Today on State of the World, why China's Rust Belt region has an outsized influence on Chinese culture.

0:34You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. China's northeast region borders Russian Siberia and North Korea. It's a cold, vast area known for its gritty industrial history. But now the northeast is also the source of some of the country's most popular music, literature, comedy, and culture. And it's come to represent both nostalgia for China's past and apprehension for the country's economic future. NPR's Emily Fang tells us why this region of China has so much cultural influence. China's northeast, or Dongbei as it's called in Mandarin, looms large in the Chinese cultural imagination.

1:22Immortalized by documentaries like This one, from 2002, called West of the Tracks, about Dongbei. It's full of scenes of coal-lugging trains, smokestacks, and smelting factories. Dongbei was glorified as China's rust belt, producing model factory workers and war heroes, lauded for holding off advancing American-led forces during the Korean War. But the region has fallen on harder times, says Tony Howe, a U.S.-based translator of Dongbei literature, whose family lived in Dongbei during its boom years, the 70s and 80s. Back then, people working for state factories were able to work for a decent amount and also get a comfortable living situation.

2:04But starting in the late 1990s, he says tens of millions of state factory workers were laid off. Good education, good health care, and all of that collapsed. Dongbei shrunk in population as people moved away. Property prices in places cratered. But over the last decade, its creative influence has only grown, with a large number of popular rappers like this one named Dongbaoshi,

2:33as well as prominent writers and filmmakers hailing from Dongbei. Dongbaoshi went on a talk show called The Roast in 2018 and half-jokingly dubbed this phenomenon

2:47The Dongbei Renaissance, a topic now studied by academics both in and out of China and which has inspired podcasts and themed comedy clubs.

3:01Dongbei was the engine of modern China, says Dongbei native Chen Dong. Chen is one of the founders of a fan club in the Dongbei city of Shenyang, which gets together to study this slapstick television show called Ma Da Shui.

3:18A cult classic of the 2000s whose bumbling Dongbei, Bumpkin and the big city character struck a chord in a China that was then urbanizing. And the show's main actor Zhao Benshan has been a household name in China since the 90s because of his distinctive earthy Dongbei accent.

3:38Zhao launched jokes that probed at rural-urban divides and referenced stereotypes of Dongbei people as brash and direct. There's a lot of comedy writers and sketch comedy people that come out of Dongbei. That's Jesse Appel. He's an American comedian and a longtime student of Chinese comedy. And he says many Chinese comedians have been inspired by Dongbei's saucy comedy styles, all delivered in the Dongbei dialect, which adds a blustery, sometimes corn-liquor-infused touch. There's a bunch of Dongbei video sketch channels on social media where there'll be just this girl and she looks cute, but then she'll take some sort of bottle and smash it against a second bottle and open both of them and swirl it around and chug the whole bottle.

4:20But the Dongbei aesthetic can also be dark. A whole genre of true crime Dongbei noir has blossomed, tapping into the region's reputation for corruption and violent crime.

4:35As epitomized by this TV show, The Long Season, a 1990s period drama about a gruesome dismemberment at a state steel factory.

4:49It is one of the most watched shows in the last three years in China, and based off a short story by one of the most famous Dongbei writers, Ban Yu. Researcher Shi Qi Lin specializes in Dongbei literature at Cornell University, and she studies Banu's writings and many others. She detects not just nostalgia, but a shift in recent years to using Dongbei films and stories as a way to make sense of the future. I actually always say Dongbei is the future of the world, and people are really catching up on this consciousness. What happened in the 90s Dongbei is what's happening in the current moment for a lot of Chinese workers, American workers with mass layoffs going on, right, like the kind of economic prosperity and stability that they projected was no longer there.

5:36But another Dongbei writer, Shuang Shuetao, tells NPR there's also magic to be found in the region. He's one of China's most translated writers, and in his dreamy, sometimes surreal stories, many of which take place in Dongbei, he says,

5:59He writes about individuals who achieve impossible things despite the circumstances they have been dealt.

6:09And his message is that any person, including those in Dongbei, can find the will to change their lives. Emily Feng, NPR News.

6:21That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. This season on Planet Money Summer School, we go to China, one of the world's biggest economies. And what we learned is... Americans are crazy. Chinese are crazy. These are two countries full of these crazy hustlers. The U.S. and China are more alike than you might think. On Planet Money Summer School, a strange lesson about success, how to handle the downsides of progress. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Terry Gross. When I was celebrating my 50th anniversary hosting Fresh Air, I asked my guest, Roastmaster General Jeff Ross, to roast me.

7:02Terry Gross, a barely living legend.

7:09Still at it. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.