UC Davis

In the 1990s, China’s northeast, including Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, the bastion of state-owned heavy industry, underwent a massive state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform engineered by Deng Xiaoping, as part of the “Reform and Opening-up Policy,” resulting in some 30 million blue-collar workers being laid off. Twenty years after the throes of the reform, the Northeast, once among the most modernized and urbanized regions of the country, has effectively become China’s “Rust Belt.” To date, little work has thoroughly examined the spatial aspect of the reform in this region in literature and film. This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary inquiry into how space, power, and identity intersect to reconfigure China’s post-reform cityscapes and urban subjects. I’m particularly interested in the contradictory visions between urban planners and artistic and cultural representations of China’s northeast.In this dissertation, I examine how cultural productions – from official discourses to independent/underground artistic productions, from serious literature to popular culture (although such dichotomy may require further deliberation) – reflect, reimagine, and produce space. Building upon theories of critical geography and literary cartography, this dissertation views space not as a monolithic and static container of historical events, but as plural, complex, and dynamic – to quote Doreen Massey – “stories-so-far.” I argue that some works of literature and film from the Rust Belt can be used as cognitive and affective maps that help one navigate both the ideological reorientation and the uncanny landscapes of China’s post-reform cities, a collage of heterogenous spaces; while others reject any imagined sense of spatiotemporal unity as well as provide poignant critiques of discourses of linearized history and spatial evenness of China’s economic reform. I also argue that the spatial transformations in contemporary Chinese cities are not mere results of the economic reform, rather, the latter is by nature a spatial configuration.