Hegang’s startling social-media fame reveals that Chinese society is a system under terrible pressure
have long shaped Hegang, a city in China’s far north. Once, coal and other minerals made Hegang a pillar of socialist industry. When the richest seams were declared exhausted, just over a decade ago, the central government closed many mines and put its faith in green infrastructure. Shanty-towns of soot-blackened miners’ huts were demolished and replaced with brightly painted apartment blocks, marching to the horizon beside new city parks. A high-speed rail line opened last December.
This backwater of 790,000 people near the Russian border has now become an online byword for a place where strivers—as well as have-nots and misfits—can turn modest savings into a home. True, many give up and leave within months, often as winter temperatures plunge to -20°C. Others visit only briefly to decorate apartments bought online, before returning to lives in a factory dormitory as migrant workers in a giant eastern city.
Still, this small city is a good place to observe a large trend. China faces a cost-of-living crisis. Between 1998 and 2021 urban Chinese homes became four times less affordable, as judged by the ratio of average housing prices to median disposable incomes. Today a flat in Beijing measuring 100 square metres costs, on average, 6.3m yuan, or about a million dollars. That is 34 times the average annual salary in China’s capital.
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