Population Is a Problem | A 24-Year-Old in Benxi, in Her Own Words: "Basically, Nobody Even Considers Coming Back"

Losing its young people has become the common problem of small Northeastern cities like Benxi.

Liu Yuan is 24. Two years ago, after graduating from Shenyang Normal University, she went home to Benxi, Liaoning, to work as a civil servant.

That was when she began to notice that of the roughly 200 people she had shared a classroom with between primary school and high school, perhaps only twenty or thirty were still in Benxi. She had not planned to stay either; chance brought her back.

"Deep down I just felt I should be working somewhere else, that I shouldn't come back," Liu Yuan said.

Benxi's people are leaving Benxi, and among the young, "anyone who could go, went." The city's registered population fell from 1.571 million in 2000 to 1.499 million in 2016. Between 2010 and 2016, the number of residents aged 18 to 35 dropped from 362,000 to 309,000 — the sharpest fall of any age group.

The city sits in central Liaoning, about 70 kilometers from the provincial capital, Shenyang. It is shrinking.

Before 1945, the Japanese, drawn by the coal and iron here, set up the Benxihu Coal and Iron Company. After 1949, as China built up heavy industry, that company was reorganized into the Benxi Steel Group, and Benxi Steel became the city's mainstay for the next 70 years.

After reform and opening up, the Northeast's state-owned enterprise model could not compete in the market; many firms struggled and then went bankrupt, and Benxi was no exception. China's growth slowed this year on top of that, and demand for steel fell. As Benxi Steel's earnings slid, it cut wages and laid off workers to save itself, which made the local economy worse.

In 2015, Benxi's fiscal revenue was 5.35 billion yuan, down nearly 60% from the year before. Only 16.3 billion yuan in transfers from the provincial and central governments balanced the books and kept local healthcare, schools and other public services running. In 2013, disposable income per person in Benxi was about 22,500 yuan, eighth among Liaoning's 14 cities.

Everyone living here feels the squeeze. Ms. Wang works the floor of a sporting goods shop on Yongfeng Commercial Street, Benxi's busiest shopping strip. Business gets harder every year. "A few years ago you could open a shop and clear 200,000 yuan a year. Now it's about 100,000."

Tang Lin runs a skewer-hotpot restaurant with her family. Benxi had never had skewer hotpot before, so business is decent, but the restaurant trade overall has slumped badly. She pointed at a storefront across the street: "Half a year, and that place only just found someone to take it over."

Even real estate, supposedly a pillar industry, is flat. Zhang Xin, an agent, closes one or two apartments a month at best, and the commission barely covers the office rent. The economy has been bad these past two years, he says — a phrase almost every person in Benxi has ready.

Benxi can no longer hold this many people. Figures from the Benxi Employment Service Bureau show local labor supply outstripping demand. In the third quarter of 2016, job openings were down 52% from a year earlier and job seekers down 43%. "Steel and mining firms did essentially no hiring this year; among real estate, equipment manufacturing and pharmaceutical firms, only some large companies hired, and only now and then."

All of it settles into what Liu Yuan calls the reflex to leave Benxi. "People coming back to Benxi — I can picture that. If a lot of them came back, I'd actually be surprised," she said. "Basically, in people's minds, coming back is not something they'd want."

Benxi is only the Northeast in miniature. In 2010, across five cities in Jilin Province including Changchun and Jilin City, net out-migration rates for college graduates aged 24 to 34 ran from about 6% at the low end to 26% at the high end. In 2017, Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang together lost 370,700 people — the only three provincial-level regions in the country whose populations shrank.

Back in Benxi, Liu Yuan's life is easy. Work starts at 8:30 and ends at 5. What she does with her free time is "very dull" — "eating, movies, shopping, walking around, looking at the sights."

She does go back and forth about it. Sometimes she envies the classmates grinding it out in Beijing and thinks that "while you're young you really should give it a go." If she wanted to leave, her parents would back her. But more often she finds life in Benxi good enough: when she is ill, family looks after her. She is close to her grandfather, and staying near him makes her happy.

Liu Yuan told us how she ended up back in Benxi, what her life is like now, and what became of the classmates who left. Here is that conversation, in her own words:

The Reflex

Counting everyone from childhood on that I'm still in touch with, it's easily 100 people. From primary school, out of those seventy-odd kids I'm in touch with maybe three to five, and not one of the ones I know has come back. One girl hasn't graduated yet; the rest are in Shenyang and Dalian, and two very pretty ones became flight attendants, in Beijing.

From high school — the people I know, my own class, that is — six or seven are still in Benxi. I can still reach about 40 of them. Basically the whole class was under 50 people, and fewer than 10 stayed in Benxi. That's the ratio.

If you ask when I realized nobody had stayed, it was after I graduated and came back to work. People coming back to Benxi, I can picture that. If a lot of them came back, I'd actually be surprised.

I've only been out two years; plenty of my classmates are still in grad school and some haven't started working. Of the ones who have, from what I see on WeChat Moments, not many have come back — and the ones who do come back, I pretty much run into all of them.

Benxi has only one second-tier college, and even that one was upgraded from something lower. So everyone leaves for college, and most stay wherever they studied. Say you go to college in Dalian — you stay in Dalian. The ones who study in Shenyang basically all stay in Shenyang.

Deep down I felt I should work somewhere else, be independent out there. Not come back. Even if I hadn't found a job, even if I was still out there looking, I wanted to go and try.

Where that reflex comes from, I don't know. Not many people came back when I was little either, including in my own family. There are four or five of us cousins in my generation, and only my younger sister and I are still in Benxi.

My oldest cousin works in Benxi now, but her husband is from Shenyang, so the two of them live there — she doesn't really count as being in Benxi anymore. She was always a top student. She entered some competition and got bonus points on her score, 20 points or something. Everyone in the family took it for granted that she'd end up in Beijing. She had the ability and the brains, so we all thought it was a terrible waste when she came back.

My mom is the one who feels sorry about it: my cousin, a top student in Beijing — how could she come back and be a civil servant? My uncle and aunt don't think it's a waste; only my mom does. It's the ordinary reaction: such a good school, why come back to our little city to work? She brings it up constantly, and still likes to, whenever it crosses her mind.

I think it's a shame too. The way we all see it, someone from a school that good shouldn't have come back.

Because we're a small city — fifth-, sixth-tier — everyone wants their kid in a big city, Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou, making a go of it there. I remember in high school hearing, wow, he's making several thousand a month in Shanghai, even ten thousand, and thinking that sounded good. Ten thousand-something in Shanghai isn't actually much, but here, where we earn three or four thousand a month, ten thousand-something sounded like a fortune. So of course we figured you'd do far better in a big city. Our parents thought the same: they raised us at great cost, so we had to go out, make something of ourselves, and only then come home.

Our high school teachers said it too. They didn't want us going to college in Shenyang, because from Shenyang it's too easy to come back — it's too close. Go to Beijing, they said; go far, and maybe you won't come back. Basically, in people's minds, coming back is not something they'd want.

Shenyang, Dalian

Buying an apartment in Shenyang isn't much of a burden, life there is good, it covers your normal needs, it broadens you a bit, and it's close to home. I think Shenyang and Dalian are a good choice. If I were living away, I'd end up in Shenyang or Dalian too, because leaving the province has almost never crossed my mind. I hadn't wanted to come home — but I'd never thought about leaving Liaoning either, so I'd have ended up in Shenyang or Dalian anyway.

When I applied to college I had my heart set on Dalian. In the end all my friends went to Dalian and I was the only one who went to Shenyang — the parallel-admissions system just placed me there.

All my friends went to college in Dalian; a few of us were especially close. One boy is in Dalian. He actually scored well but had no confidence in himself and applied badly. There's a thing going around at ordinary colleges like ours now: you pay a fee, come learn Java or whatever software from us, and once you've learned it we'll place you in a job for free — jobs paying eight thousand a month, or at least several thousand. He signed up, and he really did learn a lot. He's just started at a company in Dalian.

There's another one who's terrific — he can talk to older people and people his own age alike, lively without being irritating, very good with people. He went on to grad school, and his department ranks among the best in the country. The field is genuinely hot right now, with a wide range of jobs. He's still studying, graduating next year. He could have gone straight to work after college but didn't; now he's thinking about whether to do a PhD.

Police, Banks, Civil Service

Then there's one more — he went to the police academy in Dalian and is a police officer now.

The police recruit from the academies strictly by rank order. The one at the top picks first — say, Heping District in Shenyang — and then that post is gone.

Among the people I know who stayed, there must be a dozen or so police officers, mostly men, because they went to schools like the China Criminal Police University and the Dalian Police Academy. Boys are all interested in police work, and a lot of people from our school took the police exams. Maybe it's that the Dalian academy and the China Criminal Police University are close by, with the police university in Beijing for the better students — partly the distance, partly just wanting to be a cop. I know of eight or nine from our school.

Those classmates all became police; they had to, or they'd be throwing the whole major away. More of them chose to come back, because Shenyang or Dalian is no better than home. If you're sitting the civil service exam anyway, I figure another city beats home in nothing but how developed it is — and apart from the material side there's no real difference; the total spending works out about the same. You make a thousand-odd more, but then you're paying rent and everything else. A civil servant in Benxi can actually put something aside.

And the police really do earn well now. Their pay keeps going up. It doesn't show for them yet, because they don't have the rank component. Inspectors, the various police ranks — each step up pays more. (Editor's note: In 2015 the central government issued the Framework Opinions on Several Major Issues in Comprehensively Deepening Public Security Reform, which set out that the people's police should live "better than local government staff, slightly worse than the military." Rank pay ranges from 2,250 yuan down to 560 yuan depending on rank.)

Apart from the police, I'm the only civil servant who stayed; two or three others are in banks. The rest are said to have no jobs, but I've never actually seen one of them sitting idle at home. Anyone who wants work still has to go elsewhere to find it — you can't find it in Benxi.

Work really is hard to come by here. There are hardly any companies. Honestly, in Benxi today, apart from the civil service and banking and insurance — the state-owned places you can test into through proper channels — the employment rate isn't high.

In Shenyang or anywhere else, even some logistics outfit would at least hire an accountant or something. Here in Benxi there are almost no young accountants; they're nearly all veterans of about 50. Accountants my age, or even thirty, thirty-four, thirty-five, are rare.

Take my younger sister — there is genuinely no job in Benxi that suits her. Her mother is thinking she might go into business for herself eventually, but there's no plan yet.

Other work really is hard to find here. There aren't many companies, so there's barely anywhere to send a resume. Shenyang and Shanghai have private firms, foreign firms, state firms; Benxi has Benxi Steel and that's it. Has Benxi Steel hired at all these past few years? Nobody even knows through what channels. Its earnings aren't good either. When it does hire, it's for the trades on our side — driving heavy trucks, making steel — and rarely college graduates for professional roles.

Drifting in Beijing

I have a few classmates drifting in Beijing — three that I know of.

One of them does self-media now, running her own WeChat account. The other two are always posting photography things; I don't really understand it. An ad agency? Something else? From their Moments, my guess is ad agencies.

When I look at my classmates in Beijing I could almost cry — the places they live are so small. Sometimes the photos they post make them look happy. Sometimes what they post is hard to read; it really is exhausting.

One girl wrote a piece a while back — she just wanted to give it a try. There was a stretch when she had no job in Beijing, and from her WeChat posts her parents and relatives all concluded she was doing terribly. She posted a picture of noodles boiled in plain water, and everyone thought, that's it, the poor kid can't even afford a meal. She was only making zhajiang noodles. She wasn't anywhere near as broke as we imagined, and she was perfectly happy.

I'm an easygoing person, I go with what comes. But a while back I told my mom I wanted to go out too. She asked why. I said I wanted to taste that kind of life — working overtime until you're wrecked and not even getting dinner. My mom just couldn't follow that.

Now and then I really do think it sounds good. It isn't that I dislike this city; it's that I think you should push yourself while you're young. I can already see my whole future. Our work is busy enough, but I keep thinking that when I'm old I'll just be drinking tea, and it would be a shame never to have pushed at all — I don't want to look back and regret it. But striving costs too much. If jobs get scarcer later, I might not even land a job like this one, and I can't bring myself to give it up.

Then I think it over again and it just sounds too tiring, because my health isn't good. My mom has work, and she makes my lunch before she goes. That's warm, that. When she's out I lie around at home; luckily we have a dog, and it checks on me. If I were lying there completely alone, I think I'd feel worse. Home is genuinely good. Every so often I feel it would be a shame never to have fought for anything — I do think about it now and then. Last month I thought about it a lot, and suddenly wondered whether I ought to be pushing myself.

The Exam

When I took the civil service exam, it wasn't because it fit my major. I was planning to test for Shenyang — I really hadn't thought about coming back.

For my major, only two places were recruiting that year, and neither restricted the major, so enormous numbers of people applied, several hundred at least. You usually register in the last few days, so you can see how many have signed up already. Both of those posts took one person each, and two or three hundred had applied.

Then I looked at the Benxi post and saw it took two people with only a few dozen applicants. It looked far less competitive, so I applied.

By then it was the first term of my senior year. Campus recruiting had already started and I skipped it. I applied to two banks and got through at one, and at the interview I hadn't slept properly and didn't really know what I was doing. It was too early in the morning, I'd barely gotten up, and I didn't particularly want that bank anyway, so I didn't make it.

I sat there thinking, and I said to my dad: Dad, I really have no goals. Those people on Weibo they call salted fish, that's me. I'm the kind who only studies hard when there's no way out. Give me any fallback at all and I won't try my hardest. My dad said, then take the civil service exam. He knew his daughter found studying a real slog, and that grad school might lead nowhere anyway, so we might as well get into the working world early.

If I'd failed the civil service exam, I'd have missed every other chance at a job too. In the world around me, my classmates did grad school, banks or the civil service and nothing else. Those were the only things in my head. I didn't even know you could send a resume to a company. I had no notion of it, no idea where people even saw those postings. That's what it was like.

So I prepared for the exam. It was at the end of November and I only started after National Day. Preparing meant signing up for a crash course, seven days of cramming that ended the day before the test. My score was mediocre, really — only 120. I thought it was finished; I was about to buy the books for the provincial exam, hadn't bought them yet, and then the next day the notice said I'd made the interview cut. Another cram course, and in the end I got through.

Before all that I genuinely had no intention of coming back to Benxi. I thought working away from home was what growing up meant, having a job, earning more out there. Even now that I've stayed I sometimes think about going. Then I decide this is fine, actually. But my mom still thinks that if a chance comes and I really want to go, I should try it.

Bustle

It isn't that Benxi is bad. It just isn't as good as elsewhere.

The capital, Shanghai, the big cities — obviously the jobs are there and the chances to move up are better. When we went to Beijing for training, the instructors were only clerk-grade officials in Beijing, but the way they lectured, the depth of what they knew, they really were better. For a small clerk like me, the prospects there would clearly be better.

The first time I went to Shanghai I was too young. It felt wonderful — so bustling, so big. Coming out at night, everything was lit up. When I went back in high school, it no longer felt especially bright or especially big. But Shanghai really is something; the buildings are so tall. You'll never see buildings that tall in Benxi. Shenyang doesn't build them that tall either. I liked it — all that bustle.

Ask me about Beijing and I can't tell you a thing. In high school the school organized one trip there, the dean leading us, with students from Tsinghua as our guides. Last year a training program took me to Beijing again, out by the airport on the Sixth Ring Road. Nobody would go into the city with me and I didn't dare go alone, so I never went.

I have no real impression of Beijing left. I never saw the bustling parts, so I don't know how bustling it is. I watched the flag-raising and thought that was wonderful. But I think Beijing is fine. Big and good, all high-rises. Some people like mountains and rivers and scenery; I like high-rises.

In high school I was sure Beijing and Shanghai must be enormous and full of life. They'd have everything — anything you could imagine, they'd have it. I felt that if you couldn't find something in Beijing or Shanghai, you couldn't find it anywhere. It seemed pretty great.

If nothing else, in Beijing and Shanghai you see plenty of foreigners. You see them in Shenyang too, because of the exchange programs. In Benxi you hardly ever do, right? There must be more new things out there than here. It's the feeling of a small-town person wanting into the city.

I still thought foreigners were strange when I saw them in college; after enough of them I got used to it. And of course foreigners aren't going to visit a small city like Benxi — go to some old town and you'll see plenty of foreign tourists. Around here there's just very little that's new.

In high school I took a trip to Guilin. I went to the scenic areas, and one night I stayed in the city itself. It felt like a lively place, because people in the south stay up late — everything was still blazing with light at that hour, and I liked it. Later, in Shenyang, I found it was the same there.

When I first started college in Shenyang, the area around campus was pretty run-down. By the time I graduated they'd built it up nicely. When I arrived, apart from a few streets — Zhongjie, Taiyuan Street — the rest felt about like home. The lively parts are very lively; the parts that aren't are just like home. That's how it felt.

I think our city is missing a lively district, and I find that strange, because every other city in Liaoning has one, at the very least a Wanda Plaza holding things up, with a bit of something around it. Benxi — I don't know whether it's the lack of a Wanda or something else — feels like it hasn't moved in twenty years, in ten years. It's always been like this. At first it seemed big, but now that it's always the same it feels too... why isn't there one lively spot?

Every city should have at least one place with some bustle to it, that feels like a city center. Benxi doesn't.

Leaving

We used to hold high school reunions. Not anymore. Even our class monitor can't get back. We met up twice during college, over winter and summer breaks. Right — only at New Year, when everyone comes home. Now there's no chance for it.

It's like this: you're from a small place, you get into college, you leave. Are you coming back? Aim higher and you go. One step up, I'll take Shenyang or Dalian. Another step, somewhere better; another, and I'll go abroad.

At first it was just wanting to get into college — Benxi has a real study culture. First, if I didn't get in, the shame would be too much; second, I wanted a good school. Back then it wasn't about escaping this place; it was just wanting a good school. But once you're out, you see it's better than Benxi and you want to stay. And by then you know the city.

Shenyang has the facilities, and the job market is better, and I feel it's close to home. The way I see it, if I wanted to stay and work in Shenyang, whatever you want to eat, you can have — any cuisine, anything to do, tennis, golf, almost anything you can think of is there.

Honestly, I still feel like I'm a student. If I'm not home by nine at night, my dad calls: come back now. I don't feel like my own person.

I've never thought about leaving Liaoning. I'm not even especially attached to home, but my grandmother died while I was sitting the gaokao, and my grandfather has always been so good to me. He's getting on, and we're close, so I want to be nearby — and there's less pressure here. In college I thought Shenyang was fine too and planned to stay, which would have made getting home easy, but in the end I didn't. Now I see my grandfather every day, and that makes me happy.

(At the interviewees' request, Liu Yuan, Tang Lin and Zhang Xin are pseudonyms.)

Cover image from: The Looming Storm

In-article photographs taken by our reporter in Benxi.