东北衰退.docVIP

WOOLLEN car-seat covers come in handy during the freezing winters of north-eastern China, giving drivers a plush layer of extra warmth. But as temperatures have plunged over the past month, seat covers that used to fly off the shop shelves in cold weather have piled up. At the Wu’ai Market, a wholesale emporium in the city of Shenyang, Li Xiaoli surveys her showroom stacked high with covers of every description: thick and thin, red and white, patterned and plain. “It’s getting harder for people to earn money, so they are not spending as freely as before,” she says. Ms Li’s unsold seat-covers point to a deepening economic malaise in China’s north-east. Her woes stem from a slowdown in car sales that has been exacerbated by a property-market downturn, which has been weak nationwide but especially bad in the north-east. Home sales in Shenyang, the region’s biggest city, fell by 26% year-on-year in the first ten months of 2014. That, in turn, reflects a decline in heavy industry, the backbone of the economy. The north-east’s provinces—Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning—ranked in the bottom five of China’s 31 provinces for GDP growth in the first three quarters of 2014. Their growth of 6% was 1.4 percentage points less than the national rate. Worse, their industrial output rose just 0.5% year-on-year in October, far below the national average of 7.7% (see chart). It is a troubling regression for China’s old rustbelt, which is home to 110m people. Until recently the north-east appeared to be experiencing a renaissance after a difficult couple of decades. The question now is whether its lapse is a passing phase, as it makes the transition from being a base for heavy industry to a centre for modern manufacturing and entrepot for north-east Asian trade; or whether its problems are chronic, the legacy of a centrally planned past in which it remains partially trapped. Endowed with coal and oil, the north-east industrialised under Japanese military control in the 1930s