IT DOES NOT sound like an easy place to live.
Scorched cars litter a desolate landscape.
The city's factories are struggling; workers are being laid off in droves.
Worst of all, a serial killer is sowing terror.
"Moses on the Plain", a novella of 2016 by Shuang Xuetao,
offers an unsparing portrait of life in China's industrial north-east in the 1990s.
It inspired a film adaptation in 2021 and a television series in 2023.
(It has also been translated into English in a collection called "Rouge Street".)
In its various formats, the story is part of a phenomenon called the "Dongbei renaissance".
Dongbei is a collective term for China's rust belt: the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning.
The region, once known in the West as Manchuria, has become a byword for urban decay.
Yet precisely because of that, it is pushing to the forefront of Chinese popular culture.
The provinces were once the country's main manufacturing hub.
In the 1950s a third of China's biggest industrial projects originated there;
workers enjoyed job security and good wages.
But in the 1980s economic reforms broke the region's monopoly on production;
state-run outfits downsized to make way for private firms.
Mass redundancies followed in the 1990s.
In 2001 8.3% of the north-east's labour force was unemployed.
Many Dongbei storytellers witnessed these ruptures firsthand.