Li Xueqin, a stand-up comedian, has built her career with Dongbeihua's dialect humor and witty comments on gender and regional inequality. Screenshot from Youtube Watch Together channel. Fair use.

In the past two decades, the rapid development of Chinese social media, in particular video streaming platforms such as Bilibili, has enhanced the popularization of stand-up comedy. This genre features a performer on stage telling jokes to a crowd and often challenges hegemonic discourse through satire.

Since Chinese President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, censorship has tightened in China, and critical commentaries and political satires have vanished on television and online. Instead, stand-up comedians have turned to the country’s diverse and rich cultural resources, particularly dialect humour, to develop their jokes. Against this backdrop, Dongbeihua, or Northeastern Mandarin, has emerged as the official tongue of Chinese standup comedy.

Dialect humour of Dongbeihua

Dongbeihua is considered a subgroup of Mandarin varieties spoken in Northeastern Chinese provinces, including Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang and some parts of inner Mongolian. The total number of speakers in China is about 100 million. As Dongbeihua bares similarities with Beijingese, which is the phonological basis of standard Chinese (Putonghua / Mandarin) spoken in both mainland China and Taiwan, most Chinese people, to a large extent, can understand Dongbeihua but may struggle to make sense of many expressions, which can lead to humorous wordplay. For example, as explained in a report in the state-owned China Daily, the word 貓 / māo, which means cat in standard Chinese, can be used as a verb in Dongbeihua. 

放假我哪都不去，就猫家里。(Fàngjià wǒ nǎr dōu bù qù, jiù māo jiālǐ.)

I'm not going anywhere for the holiday, just catting at home.

Its most frequently used verb is 整 / zhěng, which can mean “make”, “get”, “do”, “being fooled”, and more. And its most frequently used adverb is 賊啦 / zéilā. A word-by-word translation of the term in standard Chinese is “thief-ly”, but it is used to mean “very” and “super” and can describe almost anything. The most popular term is hūyou / 忽悠, which means “cheat”, “fool”, “dupe”, or “flatter” and can be turned into a noun; while these words don't make sense in the context of standard Chinese, they have become common expressions in daily conversation all across the country.

Although unique expressions can also be found in other Chinese languages, such as Cantonese, Sichuanese, and Fujianese, Dongbeihua has a comparative advantage in the national Chinese comedy market thanks to its phonetic similarity to Mandarin.

Another reason Dongbeihua is associated with standup comedy is due to stereotypes of Dongbei people, who are generalized as being very straightforward, unsophisticated, carefree, enthusiastic, but quarrelsome. A viral song, “東北人都是活雷鋒” (Dongbei people are all living Lei Feng) in the early 2000s helped spread these stereotypes of Dongbei people, and their unique language across the country:

The song tells the story of a Dongbei man helping an injured person in a car crash. The two later went to a restaurant together, and as the Dongbei man got drunk, he began speaking in Dongbeihua about Dongbei cuisine and calling Dongbei people the epitome of “Lei Feng” — a propaganda icon constructed in the early 1960s to propagate the virtue of sacrifice and selflessness. However, the myth of Lei Feng became a joke in the early 2000s, a period when the country enjoyed a liberal economic and political atmosphere. 

The first wave of Dongbei comedy

Dongbeihua comedy first came into the national spotlight in the 1990s at the annual Spring Festival Gala shown on Chinese Central Television. The comedian Zhao Benshan is from Tieling, Liaoning province. His performance depicts northeastern China as a rural area where people are uneducated, simple-minded and straightforward, as exemplified in the rural setup of his performance in the 2005 Spring Gala below.

While these depictions may be problematic or offensive, some of the myths around Domgbei are rooted in the region's historical context.

The three provinces in northeast China (Manchuria) were the very first industrialized regions in China due to Japanese colonialization (1932–1945). Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 after the Mukden Incident and established a puppet government, Manchukuo, with the last Chinese Emperor, Puyi, as the constitutional monarch. The region, equipped with a forced labour system, was used by the Japanese army as a militarized heavy industrial site and a yielding ground for crops to support the expansion of the Japanese Empire in Asia. 

The region remained the heart of China’s heavy industry after the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949. Workers from state-owned enterprises were depicted as hardworking national heroes through communist propaganda during Mao's era (1949–1976). However, since the mid-1990s, economic liberalization and privatization of state-owned enterprises have resulted in the massive layoff of state workers, who were forced to Xiahai (下海), which means shifting their career path into running small businesses or accepting exploitative labour terms under the privatized enterprises. Many — particularly women workers — were left unemployed.

Many Dongbei people, thus, do not find Zhao’s dialect-based jokes and regional stereotypes humorous, as being the laughable Lei Feng is a bitter mockery of Dongbei's glorious past and difficult current circumstances. 

Dongbei renaissance

Then, a cultural movement known as Dongbei Renaissance was coined by a rapper, Gem, in 2017 after he released a song, “Wild Wolf Disco”, which is a mixture of Cantopop and Dongbeihua rap that draws on strong nostalgic sentiment about nightlife in both Hong Kong and Dongbei cities. 

Ironically, the Renaissance is made possible by the population outflow from the Dongbei region to southern cities. In 2000, the net outflow was less than half a million. Ten years later, it was more than two million. Most of those who have left are highly educated young people who saw limited job prospects in the declining northeastern region.

Currently, the most well-known figures of the Dongbei Renaissance are Shuang Xuetao, Zheng Zhi and Ban Yu, three young novelists who grew up in Dongbei in the 1990s. They witnessed the decay of their home cities and left the region to pursue a better education and career. They used their perspectives as children of state workers to share stories of their hometowns, wherein many strongly believed in socialist values but suffered in silence as capitalist practices became the new social norm and left their towns behind. 

These nostalgic stories were depicted in recent years through award-winning films like “Black Coal, Thin Ice” (2014), directed by Diao Yinnan, “The Shadow Play” (2018), directed by Lou Ye, and the popular drama series “The Long Season” (2023).

The Dongbei cultural movement in the field of standup comedy seems to have attempted to transform the old-style dialect humour based on regional stereotypes into dark humour and social commentary that mock the outdated stereotypes and assumptions about Dongbei people.

The most successful comedian is Li Xueqin, who was born and grew up in Tieling, Liaoning. Her dark humour about her hometown and satirical commentary on the superior mentality of Beijingers in her stand-up comedy debut in a 2020 standup competition has won national recognition. The comedian is also acclaimed for her witty gender and social critique in an unfriendly environment devoid of free speech.

Here is a partial transcript of her performance about Beijing and Tieling in the 2020 standup comedy competition:

其实今年我真的离开北京回铁岭了。很多人知道了之后特别地惊讶，跟你们差不多那个表情，就仿佛这个事不是我从北京回到了铁岭，是我本来马上就跟吴亦凡结婚了，突然决定跟王建国私奔。那追着撵着就问我呀：离开了北京 你不遗憾吗？说得像我曾经得到过北京一样；对北京来说，我连个备胎都不是，我为它奋斗，为它攒钱，为它付出青春。我走的时候 我还跟它说：再见了。它也说：你谁呀？我回铁岭，居然还有人嘲笑我，你回去干哈呀？铁岭连个地铁都没有。你说一个破地铁 有什么好自豪的呀？北京好，大环线，上下班，左一圈 右一圈，日复一日 圈复一圈，宇宙都有尽头，北京地铁没有，太厉害了！更过分的是，还有一群人，我在北京的时候，他说：北京不好，压力大。我离开北京了，又说：北京多好， 机会多。我就感觉就这些人，他们活着，唯一的目的就是告诉我，生而为人，你很遗憾。 很多人吧，都觉得只有在北京才能实现他们的梦想。今天我就冒昧地问一下，你们的梦想是举办奥运会吗？反正我的梦想铁岭就能实现，我就想要锅包肉，熏鸡架，铁锅炖大鹅。 所以 所以 你们真的不用再为我 感到遗憾了

This year, I left Beijing and went back to Tieling. A lot of people were shocked when they found out, almost the same expression as yours as if it wasn't that I had returned to Tieling from Beijing. Tt was as if I was about to get married to Wu Yifan [a famous actor] but suddenly decided to elope with Wang Jianguo [another comedian in the same competition].

They chased after me and asked me, ‘Aren't you sorry to leave Beijing?’ As if I had been accepted or loved by Beijing. To Beijing, I'm not even a spare tyre. I fought for it, contributed cash, and paid my youth for it. When I left, I even bid farewell to it. Then it replied: ‘Who are you?’ I went back to Tieling, and people laughed at me, ‘What are you doing back there? Tieling doesn't even have a subway!’ What's there to be proud of about a broken subway? Beijing is good, the big subway loop to and from work on a circular line on the left and another circular line on the right, day after day, circle after circle. The universe has an end, Beijing subway does not. How awesome!

What's more, there is a group of people, when I was in Beijing, they said: ‘Beijing is not good, the pressure is too huge.’ When I left Beijing, they said, ‘Beijing is so good; there are so many opportunities.’ My feeling is that these people's only purpose in life is to tell me that you should be regretful for being born as a human being. Many people believe that they can only realize their dreams in Beijing. Please pardon me for asking today: ‘Is your dream to host the Olympics?’ Anyway, my dream can be realized in Tieling. I just want fried pork, smoked whole chicken, and goose stewed in an iron pot. So, you guys really don't have to feel sorry for me anymore.

Here is the full performance: