As a young woman in one of China’s most economically stagnant cities, Ma Yingge has adopted what she calls a “Buddhist” attitude. The word she uses, foxi, literally means Buddhist, but has recently been embraced by young people to express a “generalised attitude of apathy toward career, society and even themselves”, according to China’s (disapproving) state media.
Ma explains that the expression means “not forcing anything”. “My character is like that,” she says. “I don’t set my goals too high. That would be tiring.”
The attitude is a helpful one in China’s north-east, also known as Manchuria, a region of 100 million people that is squeezed between North Korea, Inner Mongolia, Russia and Japan.
While China enjoys a reputation for world-beating economic growth, Ma’s home city, Qiqihar, and dozens of others like it in the north-east have seen growth slow to a trickle and in a few cases experienced outright recession.
The downturn is more painful as the north-east was the country’s wealthiest area from the 1950s to the 1970s. China’s then-leader Mao Zedong channelled resources into a programme of rapid industrialisation that built on a legacy of factories left behind by the Japanese empire, which had annexed the region in the 1930s.
From the early 2000s, nationwide infrastructure and property investment allowed heavy industry to expand and produced strong growth, a process intensified by a massive government stimulus following the global financial crisis in 2008.
But by 2015 even official statistics — widely thought to exaggerate the country’s performance — showed growth below 5 per cent in the north-east. One of the region’s three provinces experienced a 1 per cent contraction, virtually unheard of in contemporary China.
The problems afflicting the region — unproductive companies, weakening consumer demand and overinvestment in heavy industry — reflect challenges China will face more broadly as it attempts to make the transition from middle-income to developed-country status.
Corruption is another issue. The ties between officials and state-run companies which emerged in the planned-economy era mean the north-east enjoys an almost unparalleled reputation for graft, deterring private investment.
Qiqihar in turn is a microcosm of the region’s shifting fortunes. It was given its melodious name by one of the nomadic groups that accounted for most of the north-east’s sparse population until the 19th century, when tens of millions migrated from poverty-stricken areas elsewhere in China, attracted by fertile soil and burgeoning industries. Now, though, the direction of travel has reversed.
The city was hit hard in the regional downturn, its economic growth rate falling to 2 per cent a year from 2013 to 2017, barely above inflation (and compared to a national average of 7 per cent). That has prompted an exodus of young people. Like many north-easterners, they are now found across China working in service jobs such as food delivery. Since 2014, Qiqihar’s population has dropped from 5.5 million to 5.3 million.
“Most of my classmates have left to look for higher incomes. Many won’t return,” says Ma, who works as a nurse. We are sitting in a Qiqihar restaurant, chatting over a plate of juicy grilled pork — typical warming fare in a place where winter temperatures are often around -20C.
Despite the received wisdom about China’s inexorable urbanisation, the country now has more than 900 cities that are shrinking like Qiqihar, most of them in the north-east.