08/10/2026
New Article: Dongbei (ไธๅ) in Environmental History: Reimagining China's Industrial Modernity by Jeremy Azzopardi
Dongbei ไธๅ (China's Northeast) has long occupied a unique place within Chinaโs national imagination. Celebrated as the cradle of socialist industrialisation, lamented as Chinaโs rust belt, and increasingly rediscovered through popular culture, the region has continually embodied competing visions of Chinese modernity. Rich in forests, fertile soils, coal, and mineral wealth, Dongbei became an enduring environmental imaginary: a frontier through which changing relationships between nature, empire, industry, and nationhood have been constructed and contested.
From the late Qing Dynasty, to Japanese-controlled โManchukuoโ, to Maoist China, successive regimes transformed Dongbei into an extraction landscape. Colonial railways, industrial agriculture, and heavy industry laid the material foundations of the Peopleโs Republic, but โReform and Opening-Upโ exposed the deep ecological costs of this industrial inheritance. As factories closed and industrial cities shrank, polluted rivers, exhausted coalfields, and degraded soils transformed Dongbei from the heroic heartland of socialist modernity into one of Chinaโs most visible environmental sacrifice zones.
But will Dongbei face the same seemingly irreversible economic fate as the American Midwestโs โRust Beltโ or the war-torn Donbas of eastern Ukraine? The rise of a โDongbei Renaissanceโ suggests otherwise. Younger generations are reclaiming abandoned factories and industrial ruins as landscapes of memory rather than failure. More than a story of regional decline, Dongbei offers a lens on Chinaโs broader developmental trajectory. As Dongbeiโs environmental imaginary is being rewritten once again, the region symbolises how Chinaโs national identity has been continually reshaped through an evolving relationship between nature and modernity.
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