Siyu Tang

SIYU TANG, then a graduate student at University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, was granted funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Utopia of Indolence: Urban-Urban Mobility into China’s Rust Belt,” supervised by Dr. Dace Dzenovska. This dissertation investigates the apartment-buying ventures in Hegang, China’s “city with the cheapest housing price” at the post-Mao rust belt, pursued by precarious rural migrants laboring in China’s top-tier cities. Although Hegang has been experiencing drastic post-industrial economic and population decline since the 1990s, it witnessed an unexpected “revival” since 2018, when a surge of young people living in China’s urban hubs started purchasing its apartments priced at as low as 20,000 RMB. The apartment buying in the rust belt is often justified with feeling of “disillusionment” about upward mobility in the urban milieu expressed by the young rural migrants, and their wish to adopt an indolent lifestyle and simply “rest” in the post-industrial city. However, because of the lack of working opportunities and offline social infrastructure, the apartment purchased in Hegang is rarely lived as “home” in its normative sense. Therefore, at a historical juncture when China’s economy started to stall after decades of spectacular growth, and a real estate bubble is at the brink of bursting, the project asks questions about how home is imagined and inhabited for a large precarious population in China who was never included in the country’s property accumulation and urban homeowning regime.