Dongbei (东北) in Environmental History: Reimagining China’s Industrial Modernity
Dramatic revolutionary propaganda posters feature heavily in the historical record as a distinctly Chinese form of socialist realism and modernity. Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the artistic messaging of the posters has charted the nation’s own modern development. Yet a series of posters from the 1970s and early 1980s promoting environmentalism perhaps remain comparatively overlooked. Long before Xi Jinping-era slogans, such as ‘綠水青山就是金山银山’ (loosely translating to ‘green water and green mountain is gold mountain and silver mountain’), dotting rural China today, these posters suggest that China’s leadership was already grappling with the environmental consequences of rapid industrialisation under ‘Reform and Opening-Up’.
Such concerns did not emerge in a vacuum. They reflected a far longer history in which China's natural environment has functioned not merely as the backdrop to economic development, but as one of its principal architects. No region better illustrates this reciprocal relationship than Dongbei (东北, literally translating to the ‘northeast’).
To understand Dongbei solely through the lens of industrial production, however, is to overlook the environmental conditions that made these transformations possible. The region’s distinctive geography did not simply facilitate extraction; it shaped state-building projects, settlement patterns, ethnic relations, and competing ideas of progress itself. As environmental historians increasingly argue, landscapes are active historical agents rather than passive settings for human activity. Dongbei therefore serves as one of China’s most enduring environmental imaginaries; as a landscape through which changing relationships between nature, empire, industry, and nationhood can be traced across modern Chinese history.
Colonial Ecologies: Imperial Japan and the Making of an Industrial Frontier
Dongbei’s environmental, political, and cultural significance long predates both Japanese colonialism and socialist industrialisation. The ‘New Qing History’ school of historiographical thought emerged in the 1990s to argue that the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912) should be understood as a multi-ethnic Inner Asian Empire, whose rulers consciously preserved their Manchu identity rather than becoming fully ‘Sinicised’. Historian Pamela Kyle Crossley points out that the ‘Manchu’ ethnic identity was itself invented (combining Jurchen, Mongol, and Han groups) to create a cohesive, loyal service elite.
Whilst the loaded term ‘Manchuria’ gradually emerged within the discourse of Imperial Japan (and its so-called ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’), the region witnessed “one of the largest population movements in human history”. For most of the Qing period, Manchu rulers strictly prohibited Han Chinese settlement in Dongbei to preserve local cultural practices, including fishing and hunting. In response to growing Japanese and Russian incursions, ‘Crashing the Guandong’ (or 闯关东) refers to an estimated 25.4 million people who migrated to the Dongbei region between 1892 and 1942.
Although Russia’s ‘Amur Annexation’ in the 1850s shrank the physical boundaries of China’s northeastern frontier, the Qing Dynasty’s legalisation of immigration to Dongbei nevertheless led to an agricultural boom. In the early 20th century, grain output grew faster (84.6%) than cultivated land area (67%), and per capita grain output rose from 490kg in 1915 to 684kg in 1930.
Japanese colonialism, however, was the culprit of Dongbei’s fundamental transformation into an extraction landscape. As dynastic China crumbled, the ‘South Manchuria Railway’ was built at the tail end of the 19th century and swiftly became a symbol of contest over control of modern China’s resources and identity. Its construction motivated the anti-Western 1899 Boxer Rebellion, and was the site of the infamous 1931 false-flag ‘Shenyang Incident’ (also known as the ‘Mukden Incident’), which precipitated the Japanese invasion of Dongbei and a full-scale war of aggression against China that lasted until 1945.
The establishment of so-called ‘Manchukuo’ (a loose homophone of 满族国 used by the Japanese as the name of their puppet state in Dongbei) in 1932 led to a further wave of immigration, with 300,000 Japanese people moving to Dongbei. Historian Marius B. Jansen described the region as “Japan’s only frontier” that was to be exploited through industrialisation, migration, and investment, and which could also be used as a physical buffer against Russia.
Militarists turned to the creation of a ‘planned economy’ and the import of zaibatsu-style monopolies to fuel Japan’s expansionism across Asia. Agricultural exports, such as soya (75% of the world’s crops were grown in Dongbei by 1936), exploded, while the development of heavy industry, including setting up Nissan headquarters in Changchun (then Manchukuo’s capital), amplified environmental extraction. The ‘Manchuria Industrial Development Corporation’ was established in 1937 as a conglomerate commanding strategic industry, including the Showa Steel Works (cover picture) and the South Manchuria Railway Company, known as Mantetsu and referred to as Japan’s ‘East India Company in China’.
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 ‘Frontier Thesis’ argued that the westward settlement of the rugged American frontier was the defining force in creating American democracy, identity, and exceptionalism. In a similar vein, from 1905 onwards Japanese leadership fantasised that ‘Manchukuo’ would salvage the burgeoning empire from economic decline and cultural extinction. Overtones of racial harmony and agrarian ideology, embedded within Japan’s agricultural emigration drive, “informed emigration propaganda, influenced government policy, and shaped imperial imagery”. Although Japan’s grand colonial project of ‘Manchukuo’ quickly unravelled with the end of World War II, this colonial legacy shaped the institutional and environmental infrastructure the PRC later inherited.
Socialist Modernity: Dongbei as the Cradle of New China
Paradoxically, however, the slow economic decline of Dongbei had already begun. By 1917, the effects of ecological imperialism, including deforestation, draining of marshlands, and the burning of Mongol grasslands, were visible. Japanese settler colonialism, through land reclamation and industrial capitalism, led to the cultivation of soybean monocultures that caused soils to undergo an “anthropogenic process so intensive that it altered their geological composition”.
In November 1935, a mysterious illness, labelled as ‘Keshan Disease’, killed 128 of 130 people exhibiting symptoms in the remote county of Keshan (克山县) in Heilongjiang Province. Decades later, Chinese doctors discovered that selenium deficiency from soil depletion during Japanese rule caused the outbreak. Rejecting the artificial dichotomy between humans and nature, historian Sakura Christmas explains that the nomadic borderland of Oirat Mongols evolved “into an agrarian heartland on colonised bodies”.
By 1947, Dongbei had already developed into China’s industrial heartland, producing 66% of cement, 78.2% of electricity, 87.7% of raw iron, and 93% of steel. When Chairman Mao launched China’s first Five-Year Plan in 1953, Dongbei received the largest proportion of funds and was also the site of major Soviet-supported heavy industry (as part of the wider ‘156 projects’ sponsored by the Soviet Union to kickstart China’s industrial transition). Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, became known as the “cradle of China's automotive industry”, as ‘First Automotive Works’ produced China’s first domestically produced automobile (the now iconic Hongqi) in 1958 with Soviet assistance. The region was at the centre of the Communist leadership’s pivot away from peasant revolution towards industrial modernity.
The state-owned enterprise (SOE) ‘Anshan Iron and Steel Works’ (commonly shortened to ‘鞍钢’ or ‘Angang’), originally built by the Manchukuo-era Showa Steel Works, was Dongbei’s most significant industrial site. That remained true until the discovery of the Daqing Oil Field in 1959. Found just four days before the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the PRC, the oil field’s name translates into ‘great celebration’. Daqing was the “largest oil deposit ever discovered in China” and quickly epitomised New China’s socialist modernity. Within four years, Daqing accounted for almost three quarters of China’s crude oil production and became the nation’s most profitable SOE for the next three decades.
The industrial subjugation of nature would birth a new chapter for Dongbei as an environmental imaginary. Environmental historian Richard White critiques the myth of pristine nature and the role of frontiersmen in the U.S. He describes “first white men”, such as Daniel Boone’s late 18th-century conquest of Kentucky, as the defining feature of a peculiar form of American conservationism and nationalism.
Maoist China’s quest for energy independence soon yielded its own semi-mythological pioneer. Wang Jinxi (王进喜), whose crew drilled the first oil well in Daqing, would become popularised as a model worker and was emblematic of a patriotic, exemplary Marxist ‘Daqing Spirit’ (‘大庆精神’). Wang, later remembered as ‘Iron Man’, and his No. 1205 drilling team were lavished with a definitively socialist style of industrial heroic iconography. Unlike the westward expeditions of the U.S.’ so-called ‘first white men’, Dongbei’s environmental landscapes became framed not as ‘wilderness’, but as the repository of the national infrastructure necessary for a modern and self-sufficient China.
China's Rust Belt: From the Last Bastion of the Planned Economy to the Dongbei Renaissance
Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Opening-Up’ (‘改革开放’) of the late 1970s marked a decisive turning point for Dongbei. Market-oriented policies ushered in a period of economic decline. Privatisation instigated huge redundancies within SOEs and a brain drain from China’s northeastern region as migrants moved south towards ascendant cities – often the now renowned ‘Special Economic Zones’– along China’s coast.
In Shenyang alone, over 1 million SOE employees were laid off between 1998 and 2001 amidst xiagang (下岗, literally meaning ‘to step down’) waves of mass unemployment. Figures from the Statistical Bureau of China show that Liaoning Province’s GDP per capita fell from 4th in 1990 to 19th by 2023, while Heilongjiang’s provincial ranking collapsed from 8th to 30th, making it the second-poorest provincial region in mainland China. This ‘Northeast Phenomenon’ (东北现象) describes how the region was the first to enter the planned economy and the last to exit it.
Abandoned factories, polluted land, and shrinking towns signified that Dongbei’s golden era was over. Nearly a century of uncontained extraction left Dongbei with some of China’s most polluted rivers, contaminated industrial sites, and extensive soil degradation. The 2005 Songhua River chemical spill, triggered by an explosion at a petrochemical plant in Jilin Province that released roughly 100 tonnes of benzene compounds, exposed the environmental vulnerabilities inherited from the region’s industrial past. Exhausted coalfields around Fuxin and Fushun suffered land subsidence, while air pollution continued to affect public health long after many factories had closed.
If socialist industrialisation had once celebrated New China’s conquest of nature, the Reform period revealed the enduring ecological costs of that ambition. Dongbei had become not only China’s rust belt, but also one of its most visible environmental sacrifice zones. The landscape itself became symbolic of China’s uneven transition towards capitalism.
In Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East, Victoria Donovan shows how the landscapes of the Donbas (itself an abbreviation of the ‘Donets Coal Basin’) were transformed by centuries of extraction, while challenging Soviet narratives that celebrated the region as the heroic heart of socialist industrial modernity. She argues that imperial and Stalinist projects treated the now war-torn region as a resource frontier, producing powerful environmental imaginaries of industrial progress that obscured ecological damage, cultural erasure, and the experiences of local communities.
Donovan nevertheless observes that younger generations increasingly seek to reclaim the Donbas beyond narratives of ongoing war and heavy industry, rediscovering local histories through literature, photography, digital archives and cultural activism.
Following Premier Wen Jiabao-era efforts to economically ‘Revive the Northeast’ (‘振兴东北‘), a comparable cultural ‘Dongbei Renaissance’ (or ‘东北文艺复兴’; a term coined by rapper and Dongbei native, Gem) has emerged more recently. Writers including Ban Yu (班宇), Shuang Xuetao (双雪涛), and Zheng Zhi (郑执) have transformed abandoned factories, declining SOEs, and shrinking cities into landscapes of memory rather than failure. Films, such as The Piano in a Factory (钢的琴), similarly portray industrial ruins with nostalgia rather than triumphalism. Dongbei cultural practices, including its distinctive comedy, dialect, and street barbecues, have similarly gained traction across social media. Rather than grappling with the seemingly inevitable disappearance of Dongbei’s industrial identity, this cultural renaissance has allowed younger generations to reimagine and negotiate the region’s environmental and historical legacy through new forms of storytelling.
Where Nature Meets Nation: Dongbei as a Mirror of Modern China
Celebrated as the cradle of socialist industrialisation, lamented as China’s rust belt, and increasingly rediscovered through literature and popular culture, Dongbei has continually occupied a unique place within China’s national imagination. Across successive political regimes, its forests, coalfields, rivers and mineral wealth have been repeatedly reimagined as the material foundations upon which competing visions of Chinese modernity could be built.
Understanding Dongbei as an environmental imaginary therefore reveals a broader truth about modern China itself: the country’s developmental trajectory has been continually shaped by attempts to reconfigure the relationship between nature and modernity. As contemporary China seeks to reconcile economic growth with ecological civilisation (‘生态文明’), Dongbei remains both a reminder of industrialisation’s environmental costs and a testament to the enduring power of landscapes to embody competing visions of the nation’s past, present and future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeremy Azzopardi is a Beijing-born and raised Maltese national pursuing a BA in History & Politics at the University of Oxford. His interests include contemporary China, climate politics, and the European Union. A graduate and scholarship awardee of the Western Academy of Beijing, he is an accomplished youth leader winning a national debate championship in China, presenting at several TEDxYouth conferences, and serving as the chief elected representative for student groups in both the United Kingdom and China. He is quadrilingual with fluency in English, Maltese and Mandarin, and is currently developing his proficiency in Cantonese.
This article was edited by Natalia Azorova and Kai Momejo.
Featured Image: Postcard of Showa Steel Works, Anshan, Manchukuo / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International / Free for use
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