From Andrew Batson's blog:
China’s northeastern rust belt, dominated by state industry and comparatively isolated from global trade, has been in relative economic decline for decades. Hardly any younger friends who had grown up in the Northeast still lived there. But a few years ago, after the industrial recession of 2014-15, a lot of anecdotal information suggested that decline had entered a new and more aggressive phase.
Stories about empty neighborhoods and abandoned schools were more widespread. Local journalists documented shrinking cities throughout the Northeast. Some cities indeed reported declining population numbers, but others just stopped publishing population figures altogether. I wrote a blog post entitled “China’s Northeastern Rust Belt is headed for demographic crisis” in 2016. Yet the official population figures from those years did not really show a crisis: the population of the three Northeastern provinces–Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang–declined by only 1.1 million people from 2010 to 2019. That’s still a pretty poor showing for a period when the population of the nation as a whole was still growing, but not a massive change in the trend.
The 2020 population census has revealed, however, that those numbers were completely wrong. According to the results, the three northeastern provinces have actually seen their combined population decline by 11 million people, or roughly 10%, since the 2010 census. The chart below shows the difference between the population numbers that have been published annually for the previous decade, and the trend implied by the 2020 census. The dotted lines are a simple linear extrapolations between the 2010 and 2020 census data points, so they assume the population decline began in 2010. If instead more of the population decline happened after 2014-15, which seems plausible, then the downward slope of the lines would be even steeper. In either case, population trends have clearly changed dramatically over the past decade.
....MUCH MORE
"China’s ailing rust belt struggles to shake off reliance on state support"
I admit it, I have a weird fascination with the city of Harbin.
Partly, it's because Harbin is the largest cold city in the world.
Note—Moscow is more populous and has been colder but Harbin on average is the place to go if you want to freeze with 10 million other folks in January.....MUCH MORE
