Young People Left Behind in China’s Snowbound Rust Belt

If you pose your subject in front of a large format camera, you need to tell them to sit or stand still and not to move any muscle. Have them look far away or stare blankly at the camera, and do not smile. Voila! Loneliness captured. I don't trust looking at photographs anymore. These images are pretty and colorful to look at but lacking connection, substance, spirit and soul. I am positive if the photographer had pointed his camera at the places where these young people hangout and having fun, it would be telling a totally different story. This group of people judging by the way they dress and their attitudes on display, have the means to have some serious fun.

Wonderful photography. As a young man, I was a student in China in the late 80s, in Shanghai - I recognise things have changed, but somehow they seem the same, the young people here still so full of hope for something better, yet still walled in. There is a yearning here that has been part off the China condition for so many years - I hope I live long enough do see real change. Thank you for publishing these photos , they deserve to be seen and can help the world understand a China which gets little coverage elsewhere.

The photos look to show that the only economic opportunities for these young people is to expose themselves to live-streaming. I’m not sure if it’s due to this specific segments of young adults who are more receptive themselves to a photographers taking pics of them, or not. Surely there has to be more to the economy in the northeast China than this, is that now!? I this agree with another forum comment about the distrust of these photos, primarily out of the photographer’s own alienation/isolation, or it’s simply out of the “sampling bias”. These former boomtowns are not unlike those in US that were ertswhike steel mills or auto boomtowns. Northeast China has once been and still is big on heavy manufacturing. If China rapid rise in the past three decades mirrors the manufacturing rise and fall of US, then we pretty much knows what the fate (demise) is going to be for them in the next decade, given how closely China’s patterns mapped ours, albeit in rapid-fire speed.

The world is shrinking and young people, around the world, are not liking what they see... China is growing old before it can grow rich India is growing deeper in debt The United States is no longer united Brazil has grown darker Europe is leaderless with a rudderless Germany while Great Britain implodes

Thank you for the photo essay ! I feel a disorienting juxtaposition of sadness along with high spirited style - already a far cry from the uniformity of blue Mao jackets decades ago. The role of the internet, specifically live-streaming, in reducing isolation, is somewhat unexpected - definitely not the traditional Chinese averse to exhibitionism ! How unlike the brief time I visited what was former East Germany shortly after the Wall fell, Socialist-style buildings almost empty of people, in shades of grey, devoid of colors.

These young people may have a sense of isolation, but they certainly do not lack personality. I see colorful, fashionable attire and a sense of personal style in these young people. Mr. Chen should perhaps look at photos from just 30-40 years ago, when nearly everyone wore a Mao suit every day. My first visit to China was in 1988, six months before the massacre at Tiananmen Square, which of course gets nary a mention these days. We arrived in Xian, the old capital. The streets were crowded, but nearly silent, because everyone was on bicycles. There was no color in anything--those Mao suits were either a drab blue or a drab brown. The buildings were a drab grey, the color of unfinished concrete. Life itself was drab. Certainly no one would have seen the point of putting "colorful fake trees" on a frozen river. Back then Chinese people as a whole had a sense of isolation simply because they knew they were so far behind the rest of the world, or "primitive" as they called it. How things have changed.

I've always been fascinated by Harbin, home to many Jews fleeing East from Russia. A colleague, many years ago, was sent there to open a confectionery plant, part of a planned expansion of a US-based consumer products giant. He never had difficulty recruiting employees since the plant was heated...but he didn't have the heart to evict them and their families who began to take refuge there during the worst of winter.

When industry deserted Ohio and Pennsylvania and our own Northeast during the final days of U.S. industrialization in the mid 20th century, when the manufacturers fled to China, it is unfortunate that U.S. citizens did not have live-streaming or block-chain crunching to ease the pain.

Somehow I just "don't trust" these photos, and find them full of artifice and vaguely dishonest. I wonder how representative these young people are of their peers...and to what extent they are really projections of the photographer's own admitted alienation and loneliness.

Poor Manchuria, (Heilongjiang), so fated to blossom, die, blossom once more, die...and now? Manchuria: land of the Manchus, Siberian Asians who ruled China as the Qing/Manchu dynasty for 250 years, ending in the 1912 Revolution. Manchuria, property of the dynasty, was opened to settlement by decaying Manchu power. Both Chinese and Russians flooded in. Or, so went the Russian version I learned. My Russian family came in about 1900. They were associated with the Trans-Siberian RR, the route of which passed across northern Manchuria. Harbin was the headquarters of the Manchurian section of track. My father was born there in 1911. Warlord Chang Tso-lin (Zhang Zuolin) ruled during the 1920s. The Japanese invaded in 1931, the beginning of the Pacific conflict of WWII. Through these decades, Manchuria blossomed, as it did again in the years before these pictures. And, as "follower countries" tend to, it picked up a lot of technology in advance of the established industrial states. Eg, my uncle said that when the US got direct-distance-dialing in the 50s, he smirked that Harbin had it in the 1930s. The Red Army came in 1945, very different Russians from us Tsarists. As they left, the Soviets gave Manchuria, and a lot of weapons, to Mao, a huge Red boost in the Chinese Civil War. The Cultural Revolution drove out the Russians of mixed race, the last of us. Maoists dynamited our Cathedral. They kept our Ice Festival, which has become quite a "Chinese" spectacle.