Northeast China’s Rust Belt Politics: A New Governing Challenge for the Party-State in a Post-Industrial Era?

Abstract

Policy inertia and mass protests have been part of politics in northeast China for decades. Chinese scholars and policymakers have partly attributed these phenomena to a region-specific ideological resistance based on nostalgia for the former Maoist political economy which obstructs implementation of market-oriented economic policies. However, these phenomena can also be explained as political consequences of the northeast China’s status as a deindustrialising regional economy. This article will create an analytical framework for understanding the political consequences of regional deindustrialisation and apply it to the case of northeast China. It argues that because of China’s authoritarian regime, political expression occurs through local party-state resistance to central government economic policy change and ‘social disturbances’ like worker protests, where in other regional rust belts in democratic regimes, these same sentiments can be expressed though electoral politics.