Abstract: The Making of the Chinese Rust Belt: Generation and Social Change in Northeast China, 1950s-2010s

Her dissertation project examines the entanglement of historical legacies, human lives, and global/national political economic transformations in northeast China, the once socialist heavy industrial heartland that is now the epitome of the Chinese “rustbelt." It focuses on generational experiences as a nexus between the country’s socialist past and capitalist/neoliberal present to illuminate the complexities of how historical legacies have interacted with globalization, shifting national policy priorities and local institutions, and been channeled these into the present market economy and non-socialist welfare system. Connecting generational experiences, population dynamics and macro-level political economic transformations, the project contributes to current literature in historical sociology, regional political economy and the relationship between population and economy.