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Ronghui Chen

Red-crowned cranes are painted in a mural in Fularji’s train station. The city is known as home to the cranes, a symbol of luck and longevity in Chinese culture.

Ai Ling, a 19-year-old athlete in Longjing, China says, “I’m a volleyball player at my university, and I don’t want to leave my hometown.”

Lin Zi, 14, sits in a café where internet celebrities live stream performances online in Fularji. After dropping out of school, he began performing online and gained almost a million fans. “My parents abandoned me, and I make money by doing drag shows on a live streaming app,” he says.

Yuting, 10, stands on the bank of the Hun River with a bouquet of artificial flowers for decorating ice sculptures, Fushun.

Two junior high school students smoke outside their school in Fularji, Heilongjiang province. Fularji once had a college specialising in heavy machinery, but the school moved to Qinhuangdao, Hebei province, which is closer to Beijing, in the 1990s further limiting opportunities for the city’s young people.

A traditional Chinese dragon boat sits in the frozen Yichun river in Yichun, Heilongjiang province. Yichun was once known as China’s forestry capital, but decades of over-logging put the city on China’s first “resource-exhausted cities” list, published in 2008. A countrywide logging ban further accelerated Yichun’s economic downturn. Today, its government hopes to use tourism to boost the economy.

Five Korean children pray in a local church in Longjing, Jilin province, China in 2017. Bordering North Korea, Longjing is home to a large ethnic Korean community.

A ferry on the Bai River in Fularji was remodelled into a restaurant after it was no longer in use, but the restaurant soon went out of business.

A hotel on the border of North Korea comes with telescopes to observe life to the south in Longjing.