Cinematic Chorography: Remapping the Narrative Industrial Urbanscape of Northeast China During the Reform Period (2019)
The paper revisits the industrial urbanscape of Northeast China during the policy-driven reform of the state factories since the late 1990s. The disbanded ‘enterprise-orientated society’ and the retrenchment of millions of workers pushed the once rigid factory-centred social system to the edge of dismantlement. The bureaucratic reform of the industrial districts raises the critical issue of how the image of the city adjusts to its enormous change. Whilst the shift in the physical ‘hard’ urban fabric were easily visible, the ‘soft’ side of the city is absent from planning maps, statistics and propaganda.
Using the mapping notion of chorography as a foundation for qualitative regional representation, that leads us to combine identity and spatial narratives with the geographical information of a particular place, the paper introduces the concept of cinematic chorography as an alternative method for investigating the urbanscape through a layered analysis of the cinematic geographies. Seeing and remapping the descending industrial landscape and the stories of the lost working class remind us what has been left and forgotten in one of the many tremendous changes of China in its contemporary urbanisation.
