For a long time during Shuang Xuetao’s early teenage years, he wondered what hidden disaster had befallen his family. His parents, proud workers at a tractor factory in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, stopped going to work, and the family moved into an empty factory storage room to save money on rent. But they rarely talked about what had happened, and Mr. Shuang worried that some special shame had struck his family alone. The region had been China’s industrial heartland, but suddenly millions of laborers were left unemployed. Even today, the region, sometimes called China’s Rust Belt, has not fully recovered.

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Persons: Shuang Xuetao’s Locations: Shenyang, China