Chen and Guo on Young People Returning to Dongbei

Chen Yang and Guo Wanying, "Young People Returning to Dongbei"[1]
​
Introduction and Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The text translated here is a straightforward piece of journalism discussing the relatively rare phenomenon of young people in their 20s and 30s from Dongbei, who are returning to their native region to settle down after living and working in other parts of China.  A little bit of context may be necessary. 

Dongbei refers to the three northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, formerly known as Manchuria.  The region was once China’s industrial heartland, due in part to natural resources and particularly to Japanese investments in the region when Manchuria was a sphere of Japanese interest in the early 20th century, and a Japanese colony (or the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo) between 1934 and 1945.  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Dongbei produced much of the iron and steel necessary to build China’s basic infrastructure, but the region has since fallen on hard times, following much the same course as “rust belts” elsewhere in the industrialized world.  Compared to vibrant areas like greater Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, Dongbei is now something of a backwater.
 
For this reason, ambitious young people from Dongbei tend to go to school and/or look for jobs in top-tier cities outside of the northeastern region.  One of the striking things about this text is that it shows how easy this has become over the course of the past few decades.  The Party-State once controlled Chinese society through internal passports, job allocations, and the rationing of essential goods.  Although vestiges of such controls still exist, this text illustrates how little they matter to people born since the 1980s. 

Younger generations move where they want to, find jobs, set up businesses, buy houses, rent houses…There is of course paperwork to navigate and hassles to circumvent (which could surely be the subject for another magazine story), but for young people with skills and ambition, China is more or less wide open, and the barriers to advancement are the stiff competition of other ambitious young people, not the government bureaucracy.  It is surely meaningful that the word “work unit 单位,” until quite recently the most important word in the world of work in China, does not appear a single time in this story.
 
The point of the text, however, is not to celebrate freedom of movement and entrepreneurship, but instead to follow the stories of people who decide to return from Guangzhou or Shanghai to Dongbei, either for family reasons or because they are sick and tired of the rat race.  Here, the emphasis is not on success or overtime but rather frustration and lack of opportunity.  The two case studies investigated in the story wind up making the transition back to Dongbei work for them, but not without compromise and a certain lowering of expectations and standards.  This is the way that some Chinese young people are dealing with the stress of success, but it is clear that, at least for those returning to Dongbei, going home is not an easy solution, even if they see it as a step forward and not a step back.
 
Translation        
 
Returning Home
 
On March 5th, I traveled through Anshan city, Liaoning Province, in a car with Guangdong license plates. The driver was Hui Xiaoming. Last June, his family of three moved back from Guangzhou to their hometown, Anshan, to settle down. Before that, he had lived and worked in Guangzhou for 13 years.
 
In recent years, the population has been declining in China’s three northeastern provinces. According to data released by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2016, Dongbei had a net out-migration of some 240,000 people between 2010 and 2015. In 2019, according to the “Statistical Report on National Economic and Social Development” released by the region, the natural population growth rates of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces were -0.80 per thousand, -0.85 per thousand and -1.01 per thousand, respectively, far below the 3.34 per thousand in mainland China, and the permanent resident population of the three provinces declined by 427,300 in one year.
 
Thus in a certain sense, Hui Xiaoming's choice can be seen as "going against the tide."
 
Hui Xiaoming was born in 1982 and grew up in Anshan. His grandfather participated in the design and construction of Anshan's landmark "Rainbow Bridge." Before taking the college entrance examination, Hui Xiaoming’s plans were already to leave Dongbei.  At the time, Anshan's economy was already relatively backward, so most of my schoolmates wanted to go to Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta, or the Pearl River Delta, and stay there after graduation."
  
After earning his bachelor's degree in Nanchang, Jiangxi, Hui Xiaoming was admitted to a graduate program at a university in Guangzhou. Before going to Guangzhou, he felt that he was "a man of few ideas," but the three years of graduate school "greatly changed how I saw the world."  Beginning around 2007, e-commerce in Guangzhou developed rapidly, and several students in the same major as Xiaoming started their own business while still in school. One was doing foreign trade on eBay and making millions a year even before graduating. This southern city full of unexpected opportunities had a subtle influence on Hui Xiaoming.
  
After graduation, Hui got a job with a state-run enterprise in Guangzhou. Since work was not too busy, he explored a series of side businesses, running a Taobao[2] store, selling machine parts, children's clothing, even making handmade soap...... He saw himself as a man of action. Once he had a good idea, he would start from scratch and run with it.
  
Hui once earned 300,000 RMB (4650 US$) in one month by selling homemade soap. To fill the orders, he and his wife worked at their jobs during the day and then stayed up all night, catching up on sleep on the way to work. Hustling this way, by 2015 Hui Xiaoming had purchased two apartments in Guangzhou, including one in a core location with access to excellent public schools, thus readily achieving his initial goal of having a Guangdong permanent residency, a Guangdong car and a Guangdong house. Their plan at the time was to buy another apartment in the future and bring their parents from Anshan to Guangzhou after they retired.
  
However, Hui Xiaoming's "second hometown," full of vitality and opportunities, was not his parents’ idea of the ideal place to grow old peacefully.  In addition to feelings of loneliness and the different food, his parents could never adapt to Guangzhou’s humid climate. 
  
Hui Xiaoming first thought about returning to his hometown in 2013. That year, after his son was born, his parents came to Guangzhou to help take care of the baby, at which point his mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Worried about affecting the young couple's work lives, she chose to hide the diagnosis, and found an excuse to go back to their hometown.  She did not tell her son about it until after her operation. Hui Xiaoming blamed himself very much for what had happened. At that time, the couple's career had not yet taken off, and he began to wonder whether it was worth it, given that he and his wife were running around in circles, and they had dragged his parents from Dongbei to Guangzhou way only to suffer on their account. 
  
But as his mother recovered and the couple's career began to improve, the idea of returning home was put on hold.  But in 2018, what started out as a “pleasant surprise,” ended up in a real scare.[3]
  
That year, without advance notice, Hui Xiaoming's family returned to Anshan, hoping to surprise his parents-in-law. However, they discovered that his father-in-law was bed-ridden because of chronic back problems.  He was to be operated on in a few days. Just like Hui Xiaoming’s mother, his father-in-law had intended to keep everything secret. Over these same two years, Hui Xiaoming's father was also losing weight due to diabetes.
  
Though the old folks never complained, seeing their parents' health deteriorate as they aged, the couple began to seriously consider the possibility of returning to their hometown.
  
Going back would mean giving up a fairly high income. However, the couple had accumulated a lot of entrepreneurial resources and experience while doing their side businesses in Guangzhou. They agreed that "as long as you are capable, you can succeed anywhere.” But what really worried them was their child’s education. At the time, Hui Xiaoming's son was studying in a well-known primary school in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou. If they went back to Anshan, they would not move again before the child’s college entrance examination, which is tantamount to giving up a first-class education in a first-tier city.
  
In order to multiply future possibilities for their son, they decided to keep the two houses in Guangzhou and continue to pay off the loans. "This is the most precious gift we can give him. When he grows up, if he is wants to work in a first-tier city, he will already have a leg up. If he wants to stay in Dongbei and sell the houses, then his life will be better there."
  
Having decided to return home, the couple began to make preparations. In 2018, Hui Xiaoming quit his job and got another one in a state enterprise in Dalian, a larger city in Dongbei, hoping to get a taste of the pace of work and life. The other part was financial preparation. "We don't want to have to look for a job with a company when we go back to Northeast China. If we can't find a suitable business opportunity right away, we need to figure out how long we can survive financially, including the mortgage and other living expenses."
  
At the end of June 2020, Hui Xiaoming and his family officially bid farewell to Guangzhou. The day before leaving, Hui rode his rented bike and revisited his daily routine: the Taikoo Hui mall, Zhengjia Square, the gym, the gate of his old workplace...His final destination was the home he had already rented to someone else.
 
Graduating
 
In 2019, after working in Shanghai for more than six years, 30-year-old Huang Ling also chose to return to her hometown.
  
Huang Ling is a native of Yilan, Heilongjiang Province. Yilan is located in the south central part of Heilongjiang Province, a county belonging to Harbin City. After graduating from Heilongjiang University in 2011, majoring in software engineering, Huang hadn't been able to find a job she wanted. She worked for a time in a bank outsourcing call center recommended by the school, and later worked for an IT company as a front-end developer. "When we graduated, there were very few IT-related jobs in Harbin. Even 3,000 RMB a month (465 US$) was considered a high salary. Some of my classmates only got 800 RMB a month (125 US$) in their first jobs, so they couldn't support themselves at all."
 
Unlike Huang, who graduated and stayed in Heilongjiang, one of her classmates went to Shanghai. When they talked about work, her classmate would mention the projects she was working on. At school, Huang Ling thought that her ability as a software engineer was on a par with that of this classmate, but after only two years, the gap between their vision and skills had grown obvious. For Huang, this was a wake-up call:  "If I stay in Harbin, neither my salary nor my skills will improve."
  
In 2013, with a bit more than 10,000 RMB (465 US$) provided by her family, Huang went to Shanghai to join her classmate. While looking for a job, she interviewed during the day and then went back and studied until late at night.  "After sitting for hours, my back was so stiff that I could not take off my clothes, so I had to squat down and ask my friend to help me pull my top off.”
  
After two months of hard work, Huang finally found a job as an educational software developer with a monthly salary of 3,000 RMB (465 US$), and officially launched her Shanghai journey. Over the next six years, Huang changed jobs three times, her salary increased tenfold, and her anxiety grew apace.
  
"Shanghai is a city where people who are better than you also work harder than you do." In the past six years, Huang's weight has increased from a bit more than 130 pounds to more than 170 pounds. "Most of the time, I just eat to relieve the stress. I can eat hotpot or barbecue all by myself, and sweets are my drug."
  
In 2017, Huang joined her fourth company in Shanghai. Before taking up her new job, her annual physical revealed high levels of aminotransferase, and her doctor warned her not to stay up so late. Huang Ling took medicine for a time before getting back to normal. She had changed jobs because her previous position demanded too much overtime, but unexpectedly, a new Chief Technology Officer arrived from a well-known IT company and became her boss, and after that overtime became a “political necessity.”  Huang Ling has seen Shanghai at all hours of the night and early morning.  At her next year’s physical, Huang Ling's transaminase was high once again.
  
In fact, the second year after she left home, Huang Ling began to feel homesick. Whenever she heard Dongbei dialect on the bus or the subway, or when anything about Dongbei came up in her friend groups, she always felt very nostalgic.  Before, although her heart had occasionally been tempted, her passion to stay and fight always prevailed. But a year and more of high intensity overtime nearly broke her heart strings.  One day in 2019, Huang Ling was on her way home at 6 in the morning after working all night, and she decided to put an end to this lifestyle:  "I just wanted to go home and take a long break."
  
In late April 2019, she handed in her letter of resignation. Over the course of the following month, she visited all the places she had wanted to see but had not done so for lack of time, and slowly came to appreciate the city for the first time. But resigning didn't help her sleep. She felt like she was in a negative pressure chamber, and her anxiety was still pervasive. "In Shanghai, if you don't work hard, you will be eliminated. When you get used to life at the pace, rest does not bring you relaxation, but rather insecurity."
 
A month after she quit, she called her father, crying and saying she wanted to go home. During her time in Shanghai, she had rarely showed this side to her family. "My father said that your eyes have been opened and you have worked hard, so you won't regret your decision in the future. Now you can go wherever you want to. I burst into tears." The next day, Huang Ling booked a flight home.
  
She crammed six years of life in Shanghai into a suitcase. The technology books she had bought over the years were the hardest things to give up. She wrapped them in a big bundle and left them with the grandmother of a downstairs neighbor, as if she were packing up and sending off an old period of struggle. "It’s like I had graduated from a university called ‘Shanghai.’ If I can’t get used to being at home, I’ll just come back to school," Huang Ling decided, hoping to set aside her attachment to the city.
  
The night before leaving Shanghai, Huang Ling couldn’t sleep. Her mind spun like in a movie, and she could not sort out her feelings. On the plane home the next day, she quickly fell asleep. When she woke up, she was no longer stressed.
 
Hometown
 
According to the Chinese lunar calendar, March 5th marks the “Awakening of Insects.”[4] Hui Xiaoming told me that this was the first spring he had spent in Anshan since he went away to study.
  
At 8:53 a.m., it was minus 1 degree Celsius outside. I looked toward the northwest out of the French windows from my room in a high-rise hotel in Anshan, at the intersection of Shuangshan Road and Shengli North Road. It was going to rain, and all of “steel city” was enveloped in a haze of pale earthy yellow. Less than a kilometer away was the main plant of Anshan Iron and Steel, known as the country’s "eldest son of the iron and steel industry," which spread over more than 20 square kilometers. More than two dozen chimneys, large and small, stood like nails, a dozen of them billowing white smoke from tops shaped like beer bottles. White "clouds" drifted toward the southwest, coming together to form something that looked vaguely like a "city in the sky."
 
For a first-time visitor to Anshan, the view was spectacular, and the heyday of the city’s age of industry seemed just like yesterday.
  
Anshan, founded in 1937, is a city built on steel. The antecedents of Anshan Iron and Steel go back to 1909. At that time, after Japan took over the South Manchurian Railway from Russia, authorities secretly began looking for mineral deposits and found more than ten deposits of iron ore in the Anshan area, so they started mining and built factories to smelt steel. According to the History of Anshan Iron and Steel, the Showa Steel Institute set up by the Japanese in Anshan in 1943 produced 843,000 tons of steel and 1.3 million tons of pig iron annually, while China's output of these two items at the time was 922,000 tons and 1,801,000 tons respectively.
  
In 1948, the entire Northeast was liberated. In the same year, repair of the badly damaged Anshan Iron and Steel Works began, and by 1949, production had basically resumed. In 1952, the central government made the decision to "focus national efforts on building up Anshan Iron and Steel first.”  In 1953, the First Five-Year Plan, which centered on socialist industrialization, was put into effect. During this period, there were 37 key reconstruction and expansion projects involving Anshan Iron and Steel, accounting for nearly one fourth of the total number of key projects in the entire country.
 
In 1958, Liaoning's total output value ranked first in the country. More than 60 years later, the economic position of the three Northeastern provinces in the national context has declined significantly.  In 2019, Liaoning's total output value accounted for 2.51% of the country's total, and in 2020, it was 2.47%. From a global perspective, the decline of the region’s economy is not unique, and the same story occurred in America's "rust belt." Li Jiaju, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that the rise and fall of a region depends on whether its economy and society can achieve a kind of positive interaction and follow the development trends of the external macro economy.
 
On March 5, Premier Li Keqiang pointed out in his government work report opening the 2021 “two sessions”[5] that "new breakthroughs should be made in the revitalization of Northeast China" during the period 14th Five-Year Plan.
 
It was still cold in Anshan in early March.  Hui Xiaoming was driving in the Tiedong District. The north wind was cold and the road was covered with smoke-like frost. After many years living in Guangzhou, Hui Xiaoming had lost his Dongbei accent, but once he starting talking to local people, it came back immediately.
 
If you turn left off of Shuangshan Road and take Jianguo Avenue, on the west side of the road is the Anshan Iron and Steel Factory, and on the east side is a large cluster of low-rise apartment buildings for workers, only four to six stories high, most of which were built in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. If you go through the Wuyi overpass, and continue along Jianguo Avenue, to your immediate left there is an old building, which opened in 1995. Hui Xiaoming's impression is that it was once the tallest building in Anshan. The faded red characters for "World Hotel" appear at the top of the 28-story building, which also has a circular revolving roof restaurant.
 
The earliest revolving restaurant in China was located in the International Trade Tower in Shenzhen, where Deng Xiaoping gave the speech in 1992 that ushered in the second wave of reform and opening. More than 20 years later, both remain landmarks, and Shenzhen’s revolving restaurant is still welcoming guests, while Anshan’s World Hotel has gone out of business.
 
Hui Xiaoming went away to university in 2001 and subsequently spent less and less time in Anshan. Compared with first-tier cities, he finds the pace of development in Anshan much slower. "Some places are almost the same as when I left, and some are even worse."
 
When they moved back to Anshan, Hui Xiaoming’s family rented an apartment in the high-tech zone. In Anshan, more and more young people choose to live in the high-tech district rather than in the Tiedong or Tiexi district, which are closer to the steel mills. One reason is that most of the residences are in newly developed buildings that offer a good living environment. A second reason is that they are a bit further from Anshan Iron and Steel, so the air quality is better.  According to data from Anjuke,[6] in March 2021, the average listed prices of second-hand houses in Tiedong district and Tiexi district were 4,874 RMB/square meter and 3,655 RMB/square meter respectively, while the prices of second-hand houses in high-tech zones were mostly between 6,000 and 8,000 RMB/square meter.
 
Having gotten their finances in order, the couple had a lot of leisure time at the beginning of their return to Anshan. Their lives followed a very different pattern than in Guangzhou. "I usually go to my parents' house on weekends, my grandparents' house on Fridays, and my wife’s grandparents' house on Saturdays. When I’m shopping, if I find some good pork, I will buy a little more and give it to my parents; if my parents find some good fruit and vegetables, they will also buy some for us." These small but warm moments are something that Hui Xiaoming could never have imagined in Guangzhou.
 
Once, he posted a video comparing his experience of seeing a dentist in Anshan with going to the dentist in Guangzhou. He said that the treatment offered by for 10 RMB by the dentist in his hometown was no worse than that offered by specialized clinic in Guangzhou for which he had paid 200 RMB, and the service was even better. After he posted it, messages flooded in, and some netizens were suspicious. At first, he replied, "No, we weren’t friends with the dentist, we just made an appointment on the cell like always,” and "No, we didn’t give them any extra money,” but then he stopped bothering with it.
 
Three months later, Hui Xiaoming began to feel "leisured out." "After I came back, I wasn’t thinking about very much, and I got a little lazy." But after a rough calculation of his monthly expenses, he realized that leisure was not an option. "Not counting the rent we are earning, the two houses in Guangzhou still have a monthly mortgage of 4,000 RMB (625 US$), plus the monthly rent of 2,500 RMB (390 US$) for the apartment in Anshan, private school tuition of 1,000 RMB (155 US$), 1,000 RMB for tutoring, 3,000 RMB (470 US$) for living expenses, car maintenance, insurance, fuel, and other expenses, so monthly expenses come to at least 14,500 RMB (2260 US$). If you don’t think about it you’re fine, but once you do, it’s scary."
 
After evaluating several entrepreneurial possibilities, Hui Xiaoming and his wife decided to open a bakery together, specializing in homemade European bread, mostly sold online. Hui Xiaoming's wife loves baking. When they were in Guangzhou, one of their friends was selling a low-sugar, low-oil bread online, mainly to people who were working out or trying to lose weight, and the business covered the entire Pearl River Delta region. Based on his friend's business model, Hui Xiaoming also considered a similar niche positioning. The simple market research they did online suggested there was no local competitor.
 
By the middle of March, Hui Xiaoming had already rented a shop, and he and his wife went to Dalian to a baking school for a systematic education in the skills they needed to have.  The shop will open in April when the business license and operating permit are approved.
  
The couple are prepared to invest a considerable amount of money, but because they do not know the size of the local market, Hui Xiaoming hesitates to imagine their profitability. "In addition to making sure the ingredients are good and healthy, we will simply try to keep costs down. No matter what happens, we will keep at it for at least a year."
 
The Life I Want
 
Like Hui Xiaoming, Huang Ling also enjoyed a period of leisure after returning home. "I get up at five or six in the morning and go to bed at eight or nine at night. I eat three regular meals every day. I feel better, and it seems like the sky is bluer and the air is fresher." Occasionally, when she visit relatives, someone will "ask about her future," but her parents always comfort her, saying "You don’t owe them anything, so why worry about it?"
 
Two months after returning home, Huang began preparing for the civil service exam. In her hometown, the prevailing thinking is that "no matter how much money you make, if your job is not secure [lit., an “iron rice bowl,” i.e., the permanent jobs allocated by the old Chinese system], it is still useless."  After two or three months of studying for the exam, she gave up trying to get into the national system. This change came from an experience in a government office. Huang and her sister had gone to get a certificate for something, and noticed that the workers had to ask several “managers” before they could approve the request. Having lived in Shanghai for a long time, Huang has gotten used to a much less hierarchical style. "If I wind up in a place where I can’t decide things on my own I won’t be able to take it."
 
Instead of taking the civil service exam, Huang Ling tried to find another job in Yilan. In the county town, the oil pump nozzle factory that was extremely grand in her childhood has long been abandoned, and the compound is overgrown with weeds. There are few high tech jobs 开发岗, and most of the advertisements available are for waiters, who "make about 2000 RMB (310 US$) a month and get two days off.” 
  
After more than six years away, Huang Ling could see that progress has been made in terms of urban infrastructure, but the city still feels more empty than before. Few of her classmates stayed at Yilan to work. Except at Spring Festival, most of the time the only people around are old people and children.
 
The same is true of Huang Ling’s family. She is the fourth of five children. Before she returned home, only one sister worked in the county town. The others were scattered across the country, leaving the children in their hometown to go to school. Huang Ling's parents take care of their grandson, who is in primary school in the county town, and only come back to the village at harvest or planting time. Huang explains that "there is no school in the village now, and even the schools in the town have very few students. Sometimes there are more teachers than students. The parents are willing to buy a house in the county town for their children's education. If things work out where the parents are working, then the children will go live with them."
  
With nothing to do, Huang opened an online shop selling specialty products like mushrooms and honey. But the epidemic broke out and the government tightened controls, so she had to close down her business. She began to feel anxious. After returning home, Huang's friends in Shanghai had occasionally passed on some "private work" to her, but the novelty of being surrounded by old people and children gradually wore off, replaced by an increasingly intense sense of distance and confusion.
  
"I didn’t like being in Shanghai, but I don’t like it at home either." At one point, she thought seriously about going back to Shanghai, but after thinking things through, in September 2020, she packed her suitcase and went to Harbin, a city she had not visited for a long time.
 
Huang Ling wanted to find a job in high-tech or management.  Searching online and through friends’ recommendations, she found several possibilities, but was continually disappointed. “What they are looking for in Harbin are salespeople, and there are relatively few bigger and recognized IT companies.  Some of the companies that are recruiting either pay very low wages or do not contribute to your pension fund, and benefits are very low.  If the monthly salary is 6000 RMB (935 US$), there is a probation period of three months where they only pay 80% of that.” Because she had some savings and was confident in her own skills, Huang Ling was still optimistic. "If Harbin doesn't work out, there are still Shenyang and Beijing," Huang Ling thought.
 
At the end of September, Huang Ling finally found her dream job in Changchun. It was a private IT company headquartered in Beijing. It is a standard, well-run company, with a monthly salary of more than 10,000 RMB (1560 UD$), with full benefits and pension, and it works on projects for the provincial government. A friend of Huang’s at the Beijing headquarters told her about it. "I was in Harbin at that time, so I would surely have missed the job in Changchun," Huang said, feeling herself lucky.
 
In mid-October, Huang Ling came to Changchun for the first time. The moment she boarded the subway, it was as if she could hear her own heart beat. "I felt nervous and excited. I felt that I had finally found the life I wanted," she said. She rented a 14-square-meter apartment in Nanguan District, Changchun, for 1,400 RMB (220 US$) a month, and that's how she started a new chapter in her life.
 
In the company, Huang Ling became the "big sister" because of her solid skills. Most of her colleagues in the department were born between 1986 and 1994, about the same time as her. But there was only one other person who had gone away to work and then come back. This male colleague, who used to work in Beijing, returned to Dongbei mainly because of housing prices: "Even with my parents' savings, I could not afford to buy an apartment and couldn’t see a future." Huang Ling felt the same way. She had earned 30,000 RMB (4680 US$) a month in Shanghai but even if she starved herself for three months she could only have afforded one square meter.
 
Compared to the intensity of her job in Shanghai, life in the new company was "almost stress-free." Because the projects are long-term, even if Huang Ling does work sometimes overtime, it rarely goes past 9:30 at night. The company is not quite as good as the one in Shanghai, in terms of project management. "In the Shanghai company, we kept a close watch on the entire production process, but here, every time I check to see if we are up to spec, I find lots of problems that I need to get my colleagues to fix, otherwise it won’t work when it’s put into operation." Fortunately, the company's internal communications are relatively smooth, and Huang Ling is able to work on process improvement.
 
By March 2021, Huang Ling had been working in Changchun for half a year. She feels she is gradually achieving an ideal life balance. "Compared with Shanghai, here is more like a life, and compared with Yilan, this job allows me to fulfill myself more." She doesn't think returning to Dongbei means prioritizing an easy life over working hard to make progress. Shanghai left its mark on her. "Sometimes after work, I go learn some cutting-edge technology. If I don't have access to new things, I tend to get anxious. People with good skills not only can be recognized by the leaders, but also have the opportunity to cash in."
 
Although Huang Ling has started to plan to buy a house in Changchun, she occasionally thinks about different possibilities for the future. "If I could go back to June 2019, I would not hang around at home for so long. I would probably go to Beijing. Changchun is a good place to live, but when you have children, you still have to think about the quality of education."
 
But this worry won't affect her life trajectory for now, "at least not until I get a boyfriend." Huang Ling is now 31 years old and single. Young people who did not leave Dongbei are mostly married at this age.
 
Huang's recent prospects have been three or four years younger than she is. She is not worried about the age issue, but none of the dates led to anything long term. Her parents think she is too picky and advise her to settle down with somebody solid, even if it’s a compromise. Huang Ling doesn’t agree.
 
There was one young man who liked Huang Ling a lot, and both sets of parents were satisfied, but after a few dates, she decided not to go forward. "He bought an apartment in Harbin and earns 3,000 RMB (470 US$) a month, and saves a little every month. But if we have children, it clearly won't be enough." Huang has always been a "very self-motivated person" who cannot accept that her partner is ready to settle for so little at a young age.
 
If she does not meet someone right now, she's fine with being alone. "If you care about what people around you think, that can be a big problem," she says.
 
Growing and Keeping Watch
 
On the question of "whether to return home from a first-tier city," Hui Xiaoming's advice is, "You need to have a really good reason to go back, so that no matter what difficulties you run into, you will never regret your decision. For example, nothing is more important to us than filial piety. If you don’t have a similar motivation, over time, you may waver."
 
Compared with the annual net outflow of hundreds of thousands of people from the three northeastern provinces, people like Hui Xiaoming and Huang Ling who are going against the current are few and far between. 
 
In Dongbei, you don’t need to read the news or scientific research to see that people are leaving.  The signs of change are right in front of you. On the bulletin board of an Anshan Iron and Steel apartment building in Lishan district, next to a number of colorful local advertisements, are several job offers printed on white paper.  The one on top is from an apartment building in Shenzhen, and it says: "Large number of apartment cleaners (15 in total) are needed, looking for women under 50 years old...salary 6,000 to 10,000 RMB (935 to 1560 US$) per month." One corner of the offer had been torn off, revealing another offer from another Shenzhen company behind it.
 
In Huang’s eyes, the biggest problems are the lack of job opportunities and the low wages." Otherwise, who wouldn't want to be closer to their parents? Who wants to leave their children behind?" 
 
Notes

[1] 陈洋 and 郭婉盈, “回流东北的年轻人,” published online on March 30, 2021.
 
[2] Translator’s note: Taobao is China's popular online retail platform with nearly 500 million registered users

[3] Translator’s note:  In Chinese, “pleasant surprise” is 惊喜, literally a “frightened” or “startled” “happiness.”  So this is a pun in Chinese that does not quite work in English.

[4] Translator’s note:  The “awakening of insects,” is the third of the 24 traditional Chinese solar terms, part of the original lunar calendar.

[5] Translator’s note:  the “two sessions,” held annually in the Spring, are the National People’s Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

[6] Translator’s note:  Anjuke 安居客is a real estate information service platform in China, which was formally established in 2007.