China's Got a Rust Belt Too, You Know

Reviving the steel and coal industries is central to US President Donald Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again.” But the decline of industrial heartlands is also a political challenge for the country that Trump blames most for the anguish of America’s Rust Belt.

Dongbei, a region comprising three provinces in northeastern China, was once the country’s industrial powerhouse. Its massive steel and manufacturing plants, built in part by Japanese occupiers in the years before World War Two, were the engine of the Maoist economy for decades.

But over the past 30 years, the region, home to more than 100 million people, has hit the skids. The export-oriented economic reforms of the 1980s shifted the government’s attention from Dongbei’s largely landlocked heavy industries to lighter manufacturing centers along the Chinese coast.

As a result, Dongbei’s contribution to GDP has fallen by half, to about 7 percent, since 1980, and there isn’t much relief in sight. Beijing’s massive new Belt and Road Initiative focuses primarily on transit corridors across the country’s Western provinces. And Dongbei’s neighbors — impoverished North Korea and the sparsely populated reaches of the Russian Far East and Mongolia — offer little economic prospect on their own.

Unlike Trump, who seeks to revive struggling private sector heavy industries, Chinese President Xi Jinping aims to move the economy away from state-owned heavy industry and towards state-backed high value manufacturing and tech.

But President Xi has his own Rust Belt challenge then: how to pull off that economic transition without upending economic and social stability in the historic, and symbolic, industrial heartland of China.

More from GZERO Media

A combination photo shows a person of interest in the fatal shooting of U.S. right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk during an event at Utah Valley University, in Orem, Utah, U.S. shown in security footage released by the Utah Department of Public Safety on September 11, 2025.
Utah Department of Public Safety/Handout via REUTERS
A drone view shows the scene where U.S. right-wing activist, commentator, Charlie Kirk, an ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, was fatally shot during an event at Utah Valley University, in Orem, Utah, U.S. September 11, 2025.
REUTERS/Cheney Orr

The assassination of 31-year old conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah yesterday threatened to plunge a deeply divided America further into a cycle of rising political violence.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro stands next to members of the armed forces, on the day he says that his country would deploy military, police and civilian defenses at 284 "battlefront" locations across the country, amid heightened tensions with the U.S., in La Guaira, Venezuela, September 11, 2025.
Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

284: Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has deployed military assets to 284 “battlefront” locations across the country, amid rising tensions with the US.

A member of Nepal army stands guard as people gather to observe rituals during the final day of Indra Jatra festival to worship Indra, Kumari and other deities and to mark the end of monsoon season.
REUTERS/Navesh Chitrakar

Nepal’s “Gen-Z” protest movement has looked to a different generation entirely with their pick for an interim leader. Protest leaders say they want the country’s retired chief justice, Sushila Karki, 73, to head a transitional government.