SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
China's northeast region borders Russia, 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 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 Feng brings us this story.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: China's northeast - or Dongbei as it's called in Mandarin - looms large in the Chinese cultural imagination...
(SOUNDBITE OF TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWING)
FENG: ...Immortalized 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 Hao, a U.S.-based translater of Dongbei literature, whose family lived in Dongbei during its boom years, the '70s and '80s.
TONY HAO: Back then, people working for state factories were able to, like, work for a decent amount and also get a comfortable living situation.
FENG: But starting in the late 1990s, he says tens of millions of state factory workers were laid off.
HAO: Good education, good healthcare, and then all of that collapsed.
FENG: 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 Dong Baoshi...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WILD WOLF DISCO")
DONG BAOSHI: (Rapping in non-English language).
FENG: ...As well as prominent writers and filmmakers hailing from Dongbei. Dong Baoshi went on a talk show called the "Roast" in 2018 and half-jokingly dubbed this phenomenon...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ROAST")
BAOSHI: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: ...The Dongbei Renaissance, a topic now studied by academics both in and out of China and which has inspired podcasts and themed comedy clubs.
CHEN DONG: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: Dongbei 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 Dashuai"...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MA DASHUAI")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
FENG: ...A cult classic in 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MA DASHUAI")
ZHAO BENSHAN: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
(LAUGHTER)
FENG: Zhao launched jokes that probed at rural urban divides and referenced stereotypes of Dongbei people as brash and direct.
JESSE APPELL: There's a lot of comedy writers and sketch comedy people that come out of Dongbei.
FENG: That's Jesse Appell. 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.
APPELL: Yeah. There's a bunch of, like, Dongbei video-sketch channels on, like, social media, where there'll be just this girl, and she looks cute, but then she'll take some sort of, like, bottle and smash it against a second bottle and open both of them and swirl it around and, like, chug the whole bottle.
FENG: But 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...
(SOUNDBITE OF DING KE'S "INFINITE DAYS OF WHITENESS")
FENG: ...As epitomized by this TV show, "The Long Season," a 1990s period drama about a gruesome dismemberment at a state steel factory.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LONG SEASON")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character, speaking Mandarin).
FENG: It 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 Shiqi Lin specializes in Dongbei literature at Cornell University, and she studies Ban Yu'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.
SHIQI LIN: 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 where, like, the kind of economic prosperity and stability that they projected was no longer there.
FENG: But another Dongbei writer, Shuang Xuetao, 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...
SHUANG XUETAO: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: He writes about individuals who achieve impossible things despite the circumstances they have been dealt.
XUETAO: (Speaking Mandarin).
FENG: And his message is that any person, including those in Dongbei, can find the will to change their lives.
Emily Feng, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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