Song Singing and listening, as the most popular cultural consumption and art activity that transcends the social class, became an urban social custom in the Song dynasty (960−1279). Based on historical records and descriptions in the song lyrics, this talk will restore the singing scene in Song dynasty cities represented by Bianjing and Lin’an, and reconstruct its popularity in the court, government offices, restaurants, markets, literati’s elegant gatherings, and households. It will analyze the singing forms, procedure as well as rules of performance, and the relationship among song lyricists, singers, and the audience. By discussing the text selection and transmission in the performance of song lyrics, I will further examine the cultural significance of this social custom.

In 2003, Chinese independent filmmaker Wang Bing came out with West of the Tracks, a documentary shot over two years that detailed the lives of the last workers in Shenyang’s declining Tiexi district, where numerous enterprises of heavy industry had concentrated during the socialist era (1949-1978). The film became an instant classic among documentary critics and lovers, for it captured a way of life on the verge of disappearance.

When one thinks about Harbin—also a former industrial powerhouse in northeastern China—which representation, visual or textual, is comparable to Wang’s film in capturing the city’s challenging transformation from an industrial city into a postindustrial one? Whose pen or camera has recorded ordinary workers’ anxieties and anger in the face of deindustrialization and market reforms? Who has given a voice to their despair and hope?

In this talk, I observe that Harbin’s local cultural elites have generally missed the opportunity to capture the working class’s anxieties and pains as the city underwent deindustrialization. Overlooking the city’s socialist industrial legacy, their writings have conspicuously focused on resuscitating a more distant past—Harbin’s history as a cosmopolitan international city during the early twentieth century. A selection of publications exemplifying what is known as “Old Harbin nostalgia” will be analyzed, especially essays by Acheng (Wang Acheng).

Mirroring Harbin writers’ marginalization of the city’s socialist industrial legacy is the lack of concerted effort in Harbin to preserve the architectural heritage of socialist industrial enterprises. To date Harbin has not established a significant museum of industrial heritage to bolster its memory as an industrial city, unlike Shenyang. Since the 1990s, Harbin’s place branding discourse has relied almost exclusively on its colonial legacy and its geographical location as the northernmost Chinese city. The divergence between Harbin and Shenyang alerts us to the heterogeneity of rustbelt cities and points to the complexity of negotiating socialist industrial heritage in postsocialist societies.