Northeast rust belt needs new lease on life

Editor's note: Without warning, Hegang, a little-known border city in Heilongjiang province, has become a catchword on social media for its low housing price - a 70-square-meter apartment costs about 20,000 yuan ($2,982), which is not enough to buy half a square meter of housing in the center of big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. China Daily reporter Li Yang comments:

Most people know Hegang as a coal city from their geography textbook at middle school. In the planned economy era, from the 1950s to 1980s, the city, like many other cities rich in natural resources, was a synonym for stable jobs and predictable life - the government took care of almost all aspects of State-owned enterprise employees' lives, from the cradle to the grave. That Hegang's urbanization rate is nearly 85 percent, markedly higher than the national average of 58 percent, stems from the high proportion of former SOE employees in its population.

But after the depletion of the coal in the late 1990s, the city that had prospered since 1917 when its first coal mine opened was put on a seemingly irreversible declining trend, as it could not find new viable industries to sustain its economy. Hegang's gross domestic product is now only 1 percent that of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, though its area is seven times larger than the latter.