Northeast China in literature and film: Between suffering and salvation [Eye on Dongbei series]

The “northeast China (Dongbei 东北) renaissance” and “new Dongbei literature and art” refer to the phenomenal cross-media dissemination of contemporary Northeast narratives across literature, film, television drama and new media.

This remarkable literary and cultural trend reflects the complex and often painful history of northeast China, particularly the abrupt collapse of the old industrial base in the mid-1990s and the subsequent challenging revival. It is situated within a broader socio-political context spanning over a century, capturing the region’s transformation from a thriving industrial base and vast natural wilderness to a landscape characterised by economic decline and cultural resurgence.

Generations of authors and artists tease out the diverse and ongoing efforts to uncover the souls of the northeast, striving to recreate geographical landscapes, reconstruct moral and ethical frameworks, and seek humanistic redemption in a region shaped by flourishing and waning, and hardship and resilience. These Dongbei stories navigate between documentation and fiction, pathos and humour, suffering and dignity, and irreverence and chivalry.

At the forefront of this renaissance are three post-1980s writers — Shuang Xuetao (双雪涛), Ban Yu (班宇), and Zheng Zhi (郑执) — collectively known as the “three swordsmen of Tiexi district” (铁西三剑客).

Writing from the perspective of the “son generation”, these authors narrate stories of their parents and their own lives, reflecting on the abandoned factory zones and rusting industrial belts that once defined the region’s magnificence. Their works represent the material and emotional remnants of these places and spaces, chronicling the struggles of different generations seeking recognition, belonging, dignity and self-fulfillment.

Shuang Xuetao’s works, such as Moses on the Plain (《平原上的摩西》2015)，which was included in Jeremy Tiang (程异)’s 2022 English translation Rouge Street: Three Novellas by Shuang Xuetao, Walking out of the Coal Factory (《走出格勒》2015), Seesaw (《跷跷板》2016), and The North Has Vanished (《北方化为乌有》2017), among many others, capture the harsh, frigid and decaying urban milieu of Dongbei/Shenyang while portraying the protagonists’ dim, minimal, yet admirable efforts to struggle and fight against social and psychological turmoil.

His characters are often down-and-out wanderers, or marginalised and abandoned social outcasts. In Moses on the Plain, suspense becomes a central narrative technique and even an influential storytelling method, triggering later works such as Zhang Ji (张骥)’s film adaptation The Fire on the Plain (《平原上的火焰》2021), Zhang Dalei (张大磊)’s mini-series TV adaptation Why Try to Change Me Now (《平原上的摩西》2023), as well as Zheng Zhi’s Swallow Alive (《生吞》2017) and its television drama adaptation The Cowards (《胆小鬼》2022), and Xin Shuang (辛爽)’s phenomenal mini-series The Long Season (《漫长的季节》2023), created in collaboration with Yu Xiaoqian (于小千) and Ban Yu.

In these multimedia works, suspense serves not merely a narrative device but a method of probing deeper truths. It functions as a form of excavation, uncovering the nameless victims buried beneath the layers of history, and as a form of archaeology that connects the northeast’s Maoist past to the present.

The suspense storytelling reassembles the fragmented pieces of crime and history, weaving them into a coherent narrative that reflects the fates of different generations before and after the industrial collapse. Shuang’s portrayal of the northeast is dualistic: it is both a “plain” and a “wasteland”, showcasing the suffering while offering a sense of residual redemption that bridges the eras of Mao, Deng and the post-industrial era.

Ban Yu’s short story collections — Winter Swimming (《冬泳》2018), Carefree Wandering (《逍遥游》2020) and Slow Walking (《缓步》2022 ) — explore the northeast while transcending its regional specifics. His narratives address the injuries, oppression and pain endured by the local inhabitants in the wake of the old industrial base’s disintegration, while contemplating possibilities of resistance and salvation.

In Panjin Leopard (《盘锦豹子》) from Winter Swimming, the male protagonist Sun Xuting, a former worker at the Xinhua Printing Factory, faces a series of misfortunes, which culminates in a desperate act of resistance against debt collectors.

The narrative draws parallels between Sun and Lin Chong, a legendary obedient-to-outlaw from Water Margin（《水浒传》), portraying a tragic figure who finally rebels against unbearable oppression and injustice. The marks left by fire cupping on Sun’s body resemble leopard spots, symbolising the ongoing pain and struggle for cure, dignity and self-redemption.

Zheng Zhi’s novella The Fairy Syndromes (《仙症》2018 ), with its film adaptation The Hedgehog (《刺猬》2024), adds another layer to this narrative genealogy. The son-generation protagonist and narrator, who suffers from severe stuttering and depression, is cursed after eating hedgehog meat, and eventually cured through a series of adventures and shamanic rituals.

The story’s conclusion, set years later in foreign lands, reflects on the protagonist’s journey towards healing and salvation, though this redemption is not a complete recovery but rather a recognition of the residual revitalisation achieved after years of struggle.

Zheng’s work subtly echoes shamanic narratives like Chi Zijian (迟子建)’s The Last Quarter of the Moon (《额尔古纳河右岸 》2005) and Liu Qing (刘庆)’s Lipography (《唇典》2017), inviting intertextual comparisons with avant-garde films that explore themes of suffering, illness, healing and redemption.

Han Jie (韩杰)’s film Hello! Mr. Tree (《Hello! 树先生》2011), for example, continues Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯)’s exploration of the “drifter” figure, focusing on a laid-off character who suffers and survives a series of personal and professional setbacks in Dongbei’s bleak area, and exhibits hallucinating and shamanistic visions of social and psychological alienation and schizophrenia.

Similarly, Zheng’s elder protagonist Wang Zhantuan in The Fairy Syndromes suffers from industrial injury and mental deterioration, reflecting the broader historical, social and psychological traumas of the industrial past and contemporary challenges of economic reform and transformation.

Cai Chengjie (蔡成杰)’s film The Widowed Witch (《北方一片苍茫》2017) also explores the northeast’s shamanism, superstition and harsh reality. The film’s protagonist, a miserable rural widow, is mistakenly regarded as a reincarnated shaman capable of performing miracles. However, the film ultimately portrays her as a figure of incomplete and powerless redemption, highlighting the deep-rooted social and economic inequality and injustice that plague the region.

21st-century Dongbei literature is deeply interwoven with the films of post-Fifth Generation directors in mainland China. Together, these works create a complex and nuanced portrayal of the northeast.

Fruit Chan (陈果)’s Durian Durian (《榴莲飘飘》2001) captures the cold, snowy northeast and the hot, cramped spaces of Hong Kong, depicting lonely individuals and abandoned orphans caught between these environments, struggling to find a place to belong.

Wang Bing (王兵)’s West of the Tracks (《铁西区》2003) documents the decline of the industrial base, along with the loss of pride experienced by once-glorious factories and the working class. The rusting industrial zones, dim red-light districts and marginalised working-class groups affected by the economic reforms of the 1990s have become the silent majority, witnessing the era’s significant transformations through suffering.

At the end of Shuang Xuetao’s Moses on the Plain, young detective Zhuang Shu bypasses his gun and takes out a pack of Plain cigarettes. The girl’s portrait on the packaging, combined with memories of youth, is reminiscent of Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life (《三峡好人》2006), where miner Han Sanming holds a renminbi note imprinted with the image of Kuimen.

This scene metaphorically captures the displaced lower-class migrants travelling from the northwest/Shanxi to the south/Three Gorges Kuimen (Kui Gate), retracing their path to find lost loved ones. On the reverse side of the world depicted on the renminbi note, these drifting individuals strive to reconstruct their geography, friendships, personal histories and life’s order, rebuilding human relationships amid ruins.

Zhang Meng (张猛)’s The Piano in a Factory (《钢的琴》2010) highlights the plight caused by economic and state-owned enterprise reforms of the 1990s, which transformed Dongbei’s once-glorious heavy industrial base into a disaster zone, leading to widespread unemployment and hardship for the working class.

The laid-off, unemployed men and women strive to recall the past, reorganise their lives and seek hope beyond the confines of the system. The two giant smokestacks symbolise the joys and sorrows of those who have been marginalised, as well as the nostalgia and testimony that emerge from the post-industrial ruins. The pain and despair of the working class, their sense of being betrayed, and their emotional attachments — both material and psychological — await recognition and reflection.

Diao Yinan’s (刁亦男)’s Black Coal, Thin Ice (《白日焰火》2014) focuses on a bizarre dismemberment case in Dongbei’s cold borderlands. The dismembered body parts are transported via the railway network from the gloomy northeast to various stations. The resolution signifies the end of desire and a belated assertion of justice. Through a suspense narrative and film noir style, the film revisits themes of crime, desire and punishment in the rust belt.

Since the publication of Fairy Tales of the North Village (《北极村童话》1986), Chi Zijian, a prolific and distinguished writer, storyteller and chronicler, has spent nearly 40 years exploring the expansive terrain and profound complexities of northeast China. In Manchukuo (《伪满洲国》2004), she portrays chaotic timelines, multi-ethnic characters, coexisting deities and integrated Northeastern landscapes against a backdrop of war-torn memories.

The Last Quarter of the Moon (2005) narrates the “century of solitude” of the Evenki, a reindeer-herding people, blending shamanistic elegy with lyrical storytelling. It vividly depicts their struggles along the Argun River on the Sino-Russian border, where the Evenki worship shamanism, hunt, migrate and endure extreme cold, wild beasts, plagues, Japanese invasions, the Maoist years and the Reform era.

White Snow and Crow (《白雪乌鸦》2010) focuses on the Manchurian plague during the late Qing dynasty and physician Wu Liande (伍连德)’s legendary battle against the epidemic, searching for light amidst darkness. The novel garnered renewed attention during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Smoke and Fire Spreads (《烟火漫卷》2020) serves as a spiritual history and urban biography of Harbin, highlighting the hidden melancholy of everyday life and star-like moments of hope amidst suffering.

While some young writers, like the “three swordsmen of Tiexi district”, are “de-northeast-ing” their works to frame northeast issues as broader Chinese concerns, Chi Zijian remains deeply rooted in the region. Her latest collection, Northeast Stories (《东北故事集》2024), provides an emotional and encyclopedic mapping of Dongbei, aiming to “re-northeast-ise” local narratives within a global context.

Its representative short story The Sound of Drinking Soup (《喝汤的声音》2021) blends historical lament, cultural reflection, disabled characters, fragmented narratives, food and soundscape, and intergenerational memory, resonating with her earlier works such as Fog, Moon, and the Cattle Pen (《雾月牛栏》1996), The Last Quarter of the Moon, All the Nights in the World (《世界上所有的夜晚》2005), and Stewed Riding Boots (《炖马靴》2019 ). This approach enriches northeast history and geography, placing Dongbei stories within world literature.

Dongbei is more than just a geographical location; it is a rich cultural and artistic concept that transcends physical boundaries. Located beyond the Great Wall and outside of the Shanhai Pass, Dongbei invokes cross-border exchange and temporal-spatial interaction with greater China, East Asia and Eurasia.

The methods of imagining Dongbei demonstrate the searches for soul, hope and redemption through various routes and paths, involving landscape discovery, cross-regional writing, knowledge mapping, aesthetic positioning, memory patterns, narrative forms and multimedia presentations. 

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