Imagining the ‘Utopia of Homeownership’: Tracing the Online Virality of a Chinese Rust Belt City

‘I have saved up 50,000 yuan, planning to buy a house in Hegang. I will budget 30,000–40,000 yuan for the house itself, and the remaining 10,000 for living supplies.’ This post went viral on the Chinese online forum Baidu Tieba in May 2019, attracting more than 10,000 comments and extensive journalistic coverage (Longtoulaoda 2019). In the post, the author, Li Hai, documented each step of his journey, travelling 2,900 kilometres from Zhoushan in Zhejiang Province to Hegang in Heilongjiang Province, where he eventually purchased an apartment.

Upon arriving in Hegang, Li Hai immediately began searching for apartments with local real estate agents. On the eighth day, he bought a top-floor unit in a six-storey building, spending 58,000 yuan in total, including agency and ownership transfer fees:

The new home has furniture left by the previous owner … I spent 1,200 yuan on a new anti-theft security door, and 2,000 on heating and property management fees. That leaves me with 500, which is just enough to install the internet router. I’ll use Huabei [a mini-loan mobile app] for other expenses for now.

In subsequent posts, he shared photos of the living room, bedroom, the new security door, and the red booklet of the Certificate for the Ownership of Real Estate in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). ‘Chinese people have the strongest obsession with housing. So do I. I hope to have my own home, so that I can feel stable.’

Rebirth of a Rust Belt City

Hegang is a prefectural city in Heilongjiang Province, a region in northeast China historically known as Manchuria and today referred to as the ‘rust belt of China’ (Xie 2019), where industrial production flourished during the Mao Zedong era. Once driven by a resource-dependent economy based on its abundant coal reserves, Hegang’s mining industry contracted sharply around the turn of the millennium, as its coalmines were depleted after nearly a century of extraction. Combined with the broader geographical restructuring of post-Mao China, Hegang has experienced severe economic and demographic decline since the early 2000s, as most young, able-bodied residents migrated south in search of work in the booming eastern seaboard. In statistics from recent years, Hegang has consistently been ranked as the city with the lowest housing prices in China (Yicai 2020, 2022; Lin 2021).

Since about 2019, however, the post-industrial city of Hegang has experienced an unexpected ‘revival’ in both online and offline spheres, as a surge of young people living in China’s urban hubs began purchasing its cheap apartments. Most notably, the city near the China–Russia border went viral on social media when several homebuyers shared their journeys of buying property there. In these posts, authors portrayed their previous lives in China’s top-tier cities as marked by ‘wandering’ or ‘floating’, with ‘no way out’. For them, purchasing a cheap apartment in Hegang—often using their entire savings—was a way to end a life of relentless struggle and simply ‘rest’ in a stable place they could call ‘home’. As these posts gained widespread attention, the online public projected onto Hegang an imagined escape from urban precarity: a fantasy of indolent living in the rust belt. The city was soon dubbed a ‘heaven for lying flat’ (躺平天堂) and a ‘utopia for homeownership’ (买房乌托邦).

In this essay, by charting a series of online conversations about Hegang, I explore how collective fantasies of homeownership in the post-industrial city became ‘zones of encounter’ (Hillenbrand 2023), in which sociopolitically produced emotions such as anxiety and fear came into contact and intensified. My aim is twofold: first, to identify the political situatedness of Hegang’s virality beyond the oft-invoked economic explanations that reduce the phenomenon to housing affordability; and second, to examine how injuries inflicted by broader sociopolitical forces coalesce in the online sphere in a context where there is limited scope for political expression. If the dominant emotional tone of China’s public sphere is one of ‘overwhelming positivity’—epitomised by state-promoted campaigns of ‘happiness’ (幸福) and ‘positive energy’ (正能量)—its counter currents of negative affect may possess the potential to be both disruptive and generative (Richaud 2021).

Although since the founding of the PRC urban China has institutionally and economically marginalised a significant proportion of the ‘floating population’ without local hukou (household registration) (Chan 2009), the past decade has seen urban life become increasingly competitive—if not outright exclusionary—for both middle-class white-collar workers and lower-income migrant labourers. This trend is driven by a series of structural and institutional shifts (Chan et al. 2013; Wang and Ge 2020; Bram 2022; Liu and Chen 2025). Rather than merely an economic response to unaffordable urban housing, the visions projected onto Hegang by the online public constituted a potent cultural genre—one that resonated with and validated the distress of those trying to survive in a social environment in which formal employment, welfare, affordable housing, and channels for political expression are steadily diminishing.

This essay also draws on a broader PhD project based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Hegang. It should be noted that the imaginaries circulating online often diverge significantly from the lived experiences of those who have migrated to the city—an issue that lies beyond the scope of this piece. For now, let us return to Li Hai’s story.

A Life of Wandering

When Li Hai’s post began attracting numerous replies on the second day of his journey, some commentators expressed disbelief at the incredibly low price of the apartment, while others ridiculed his decision to move to a city suffering from dramatic population decline. Despite this disapproval, most readers marvelled at his decision to leave behind the life in a big city and move to Hegang.

At the same time, the post evoked a compelling public sentiment: a yearning to abandon the unending struggles of urban life, to quit entirely, and simply rest—or ‘lie flat’ (躺平). In his post, Li Hai described his life before buying the apartment as a state of ‘wandering’ (漂泊), marked by the feeling of ‘never being able to make it’ (混不出头的)—a sentiment with which many online readers empathised. ‘I am not married yet, nor have I ever had a girlfriend. When I was in my twenties, I felt a bit lonely living by myself, but over the years I’ve gotten used to it,’ Li Hai wrote. His decision to buy an apartment in the northeastern rust belt seemed like a resolution to his hardships: it signified both an acceptance that he could not attain the hegemonic ‘good life’ in China’s top-tier cities and a long-awaited opportunity to rest in a place he could finally call ‘home’. One commenter summarised:

The hardest thing in life is perhaps not being able to achieve something, nor being able to give it up. If you’ve accepted your circumstances and seen things clearly, you’ll live with ease and satisfaction. If I still can’t make it when I’m thirty, I’ll also get a house in Hegang … Maybe that kind of life can calm my restless heart again.

Although Li Hai’s autobiographical post may not be representative of all those who admired his decision, it voiced a gripping sense of unbelonging and disenfranchisement to which many could relate in their own struggles with precarity in China’s major cities. Born in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province, Li Hai received little care growing up, as his parents separated when he was young and started new families. Without access to higher education, he worked in low-paid jobs such as security guard, waiter, and firefighter. Later, in search of less physically demanding work, he obtained a seafarer’s certificate and took a job as a repairman on a cargo ship. The work was seasonal—only six months a year—and dreadfully lonely. Moreover, as the jobs were short-term and contract-based, Li Hai was excluded from social security and pension schemes, and lacked a stable cohort of colleagues (Longtoulaoda 2019; Li 2019).

The alienation he felt at work was compounded by the instability of his housing situation during the other half of the year spent on land. Renting an apartment was both economically burdensome due to high prices and deeply unstable; short-term leases were unviable, and landlords could evict him at will. Returning to his hometown was not an option either: not only had he long been estranged from his family, but also housing in Zhoushan was unaffordable (Li 2019).

In 2015, Li Hai came across a Baidu Tieba forum called ‘Nomads’ (流浪), where he found others in similar, or even more dire, life circumstances. Established about 2004, the forum had originally drawn young people romanticising about a life of wandering, but by the mid-2010s it had evolved into an online refuge for those forced into nomadism because they could no longer afford stable housing or earn a reliable income. By the late 2010s, the forum’s membership largely comprised rural migrants working in casualised factory jobs or other forms of day labour—a ‘surplus population’ that scholars have long identified as symptomatic of China’s post-reform rural–urban divide (see, for instance, Lee 1998; Solinger 1999; Yan 2008; Pun 2016).

Unlike earlier generations of migrant workers who toiled in the hope of upward mobility, members of the Nomads forum belonged to a burgeoning group of rural migrants who, fully aware of their permanent socioeconomic impasse, no longer believed in the hegemonic promise of progress. Instead, they chose to ‘work for one day and play for three’, picking up short-term jobs in factories, construction, or delivery work. The availability of such jobs expanded rapidly over the past decade, even as it further disenfranchised China’s surplus labour force (Tian and Lin 2019; Li 2022). With this way of working came extreme precarity: once the average of 150 yuan earned from a day’s factory work was gone, many were forced to sleep on train station benches, under bridges, or on the streets until the next job became available.

Given that shelter was one of the most urgent concerns among forum members, many posts shared information about obscure localities across China where one could buy ‘cabbage-price apartments’ (白菜价房). Having managed to save some money, Li Hai began actively participating in these discussions from 2017. During his six ‘unemployed’ months off-ship, he travelled to several of the places recommended by forum users to conduct ‘onsite investigations’ of housing. In early 2019, when news of Hegang’s 20,000-yuan apartments first circulated on Weibo, Li Hai set out on yet another journey in search of a home.

The Making of a Cultural Symbol

By being the first person to publicly document his journey into the northeastern rust belt and settling into his new apartment, Li Hai transformed Hegang from a place with astonishingly low housing prices into a plausible destination for others hoping to escape a life of wandering in search of an affordable, stable home. Following the popularity of his story, heated discussions about Hegang began circulating online from late 2019. A short documentary was even produced about Li Hai’s new life in Hegang (Jian 2019), which garnered 838,000 views and more than 8,000 comments on the video streaming platform Bilibili. On the Nomads forum, members responded to Li Hai’s viral post by reflecting on their own lives. One post, accompanied by a photo of the author’s sweat-covered face—likely taken on a construction site—read: ‘I am 32 years old, and I have finally evolved perfectly into someone who is abnormal in the eyes of others: no [stable] job, no wife or children, can’t drive, no savings’ (Ziyoububian 2024).

Others, determined to escape their dire circumstances, expressed a desire to follow in Li Hai’s footsteps and move to Hegang. A post titled ‘I Also Yearn for Poetry and Distant Places, and I Also Want to Wander Around’ (也向往诗和远方, 也想去流浪了) declared:

I came to this forum because of Li Hai, and I also want to buy an apartment in Hegang … Now in my thirties, I finally realise that it is difficult to change a person’s fate, and no matter how hard you try, it will be useless. (Xishecibei1987 2019)

Several others who had relocated to the rust belt city also began posting about their new lives—some gaining significant online attention. Posts that resonated most were those in which authors detailed their life trajectories before moving to Hegang, which often were marked by trauma related to family, work, or simply the exhausting effort of daily survival.

Screenshot from the documentary about Li Hai. PC: Jian (2019).

For instance, a young woman posted about a home in Hegang she purchased for only 15,000 yuan. In a series of posts, she recounted her complicated family history, marked by trauma inflicted by her abusive parents. Moving to Hegang, as she wrote, not only enabled her to escape familial trauma but also allowed her to find ‘peace and happiness’ in a home of her own (Bixia Changqing 2022). A few months after settling in Hegang, she even changed her name on her national ID card to legally distance herself from her family. ‘I live in a place 2,000 kilometres from where I was born, but this is my real home,’ she wrote (Bixia Changqing 2022). By assuming a new name in a place with no prior social or familial ties, Ling effectively experienced a second birth in the faraway northeast.

Posts like these helped construct an image of Hegang as a space of healing—a refuge where people could gain physical and emotional distance from the wounds of their previous lives. Hegang thus became not only a site for the imagination of homeownership but also a vessel for a phantasmic vision of escape, in which a life of ‘rest’ could be lived free from anxiety and fear. As one comment on the documentary on Li Hai observed: ‘I don’t know what I am searching for. The loneliness in a distant place is often the best protective shelter’ (我也不知道在寻找什么。远方的孤独有时是最好的保护壳).

It is no coincidence that Wei, an interlocutor whom I met in Hegang, described his journey to the northeastern city—and his decision to buy an apartment there—as a kind of ‘pilgrimage’ (朝圣) to a ‘holy place’ (神圣的地方) he had been following on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) for more than two years. While doing manual work in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces—a period he described as ‘painful’ (痛苦)—Wei found comfort in videos about Hegang. They gave him a sense of relief: not only did he feel reassured knowing there was a fallback option if he chose to quit the struggle, but he also saw his own suffering reflected in the comments and discussions beneath the videos. Among all the content he encountered, it was Li Hai’s post that inspired him most. When working as a cruise ship waiter, Wei deeply identified with the loneliness Li Hai had described in his own seafaring job.

Engendering Zones of Encounter

The rich connotations of ‘quitting’, ‘resting’, and ‘sheltering’ associated with life in Hegang invite closer attention to their political situatedness. As a cultural form gone viral, the imagery of Hegang legitimised and created space for the expression of fraught emotions generated by people’s sociopolitical context. In an environment where the state actively (re)shapes citizens’ emotional tone—particularly in online spaces—the conversations about Hegang constituted an online sphere in which dysphoric expressions could gather, linger, gain attention, and, in some cases, yield affective resonance (Richaud 2021: 910).

During my fieldwork in a real estate agency in Hegang, apartment sales agents often attributed the surge in their business to the ‘psychological effect’ (心理作用) afforded by the city’s cheap properties. Specifically, given that most buyers made their purchases online without ever visiting the city, agents explained that customers were drawn to Hegang as a psychological safety net. Simply knowing they could fall back on this option amid the instability of life in top-tier cities offered them comfort. As one journalist succinctly put it: ‘How much would it cost to see a therapist for a year? The concrete and steel in Hegang are far more solid than a therapist’s well-meaning advice’ (Niujiao 2022).

A widely shared post on the Q&A platform Zhihu in 2022 elaborated on the kinds of collective anxiety that Hegang’s online representation seemed to soothe:

If one day you cannot afford to repay your monthly mortgage instalments in the tens of thousands, or you’ve become completely hopeless about the several-million-yuan down payment, or you’re fed up with being a ‘puppet person’ [工具人] in a first-tier city, or the doors of the first- and second-tier cities have completely closed to you—at that point, I hope you don’t despair. Losing you is the city’s loss. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Remember: there is a small border town … She will always open her doors to you. She is Hegang. She does not require a master’s degree, nor a minimum period of social security enrolment, nor a place in a lottery queue [摇号排队], nor even a household registration [户口]. As long as you have a sleeper train ticket and 40,000 to 50,000 yuan in savings—or even just 10,000 to 20,000—you can become her owner.

… Maybe you still look down on the simplicity and plainness of Hegang, but I believe one day you’ll tire of endless competition. When you’re worn out, you must board the train to Hegang.

In this passage, Hegang is poetically imagined as a feminine figure—a caring, unpretentious maternal presence offering unconditional refuge to those worn down by debt, exclusion, and exhaustion. For those who are ‘fed up’, ‘tired’, and ‘desperate’, she becomes a last resort, a soft landing in contrast to the harsh demands of China’s major urban centres. The passage not only amplifies Hegang’s desirability but also lays bare the exclusionary mechanisms—such as hukou status, education level, and social security enrolment—that have rendered urban life increasingly unliveable for many. These structural barriers, which limit access to housing and social welfare, cultivate the desperation that makes Hegang appear as a sanctuary.

Writing on the marginalised aesthetic practices of China’s disenfranchised ‘underclass’, Margaret Hillenbrand (2023: 31–46) conceptualises such cultural forms as ‘zones of encounter’—spaces where individuals threatened by the looming spectre of slow death come into contact, ‘stumbling from the ledge into the zone below’. Unlike psychotherapeutic interventions that became popular in post-reform China—aimed at disciplining anxiety into managed calm—these aesthetic forms render distress strikingly visible, offering a stage upon which ‘stifled class tensions burst through’ (Hillenbrand 2023: 45–46). Within these zones, Hegang became both a testament to pervasive sociopolitical malaise and a potent symbol of public distress in a climate of economic decline, tightening political control, and diminishing prospects for social mobility.

As viral contact zones, online discussions of Hegang enabled the intersubjective sociability of negative feelings that might otherwise remain unspoken. They also gave shape to a collective imaginary of a restful life outside the imperatives of productivity. To identify with the desire to move to Hegang was to express what Richaud (2021: 910) calls a ‘dissonant but not oppositional’ dysphoria—an affective orientation in which emotions produced by injustice could circulate, resonate, and intensify. In this way, Hegang stood not just as a place on the map, but also as a cultural imaginary through which exhaustion, injury, and longing found articulation.

Aftermaths of Viral Contacts

By sketching Hegang’s online virality as a sociopolitical contact zone, my aim is not to portray a suppressed agency in a non-liberal context, but rather to make visible a different form of political voicing—one that is not necessarily legible within liberal-democratic frameworks. As Elysée Nouvet (2014: 98) writes, feeling pain and seeking relief speak ‘to power as it desires, and thus insists another better existence is possible’. By examining the gripping public desire to quit the precarious present and find rest in a rust belt city, I hope to shed light on the generative potential of these online encounter zones as spaces where situated experiences of pain, anger, anxiety, frustration, and disillusionment come into viral social contact.

Such zones may open space for transformative manoeuvres, or simply serve as fleeting sites for the normalisation of negative venting. They may be censored or subjected to other forms of online traffic control. Regardless of their fate, the vitality of these contact zones—their ability to amplify public imagination for a life otherwise—should not be taken for granted.

I close with another comment to the documentary on Li Hai: ‘I realised that society won’t give me [what I hoped for], and my lover won’t come, so I gave myself a home. A decent, comfortable home, where nobody will ever be able to abandon me again.’

Featured Image: The former site of Hegang’s Xingshan Coalmine, a state-owned enterprise that underwent ‘restructuring’ (重组) after declaring bankruptcy in 2003. The process involved a reshuffling of shareholding structures, state financial assistance, and mass layoffs. Photo by the author.

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