Bones of Industry: Discover Shenyang’s Favorite Street Snack

Sun Jiahui (孙佳慧)

A simple Dongbei dish symbolizes the rise, fall, and reinvention of a once-flourishing industrial heartland

For a city built on heavy industry, Shenyang’s most famous dish is surprisingly frugal. Jijia, little more than fried or roasted leftover bones and scraps from a chicken carcass, is the pride of the city, despite competition from other traditional dishes like barbecued meat, deep-fried pork, and various stews .

In 2021, when China was under strict Covid-19 controls, jijia even gained national attention. The humble cuisine featured prominently in the travel records of an infected man in Shenyang, the provincial capital of Liaoning—he had visited three different jijia (鸡架, literally “chicken frame”) restaurants in just three days.

Jijia and the city blew up on social media. On Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like platform, a flood of over 80,000 comments under the hashtag “Shenyang jijia ” discussed why this brittle, handheld snack of mostly bones was so attractive. Taiwan writer Liao Xinzhong asked the question on behalf of many netizens: “How delicious, exactly, is jijia ? Does every Covid patient in Shenyang have jijia on their travel record?”

Famous Shenyang actor Lin Gengxin soon contributed a widely praised answer: The soul of jijia isn’t its meat but lies in the process of ‘ suole ’—a local dialect term meaning to suck on food to absorb all the flavor.

But jijia , like any good culinary cultural icon, is about much more than its taste or even the way it is eaten. The snack is not an ancient classic—it only became popular in the 1990s, when Dongbei (a collective name for China’s northeastern Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces) experienced economic and social dislocation as state-owned enterprises closed , forcing millions of blue-collar workers into unemployment.

Once the technological and industrial hub of New China after 1949, Dongbei was forced to reinvent itself. As unemployment rose, wages fell, and households pinched their pennies, leftover chicken bones became a common cheap eat.

Somehow its popularity stuck, despite a return to more stable times (though Dongbei still lags behind the most developed eastern coastal provinces in China by most economic measures).

Despite the warlord Cao Cao (曹操) of the Three Kingdoms period (220 – 280) commenting ambivalently that jijia was “tasteless if eaten, but a pity to throw away,” there are now over 1,000 registered catering companies in Shenyang with “ jijia ” in their name, according to Qichacha, a business inquiry platform. According to Taste Humanity at Night , a documentary aired in 2019, Shenyang residents consume nearly half of all China’s jijia .

In the 1980s, “People began to eat jijia because it’s cheaper than chicken meat” says Wang Jue, a 35-year-old Shenyang local who works for a technology company. “When people used to be rich, they didn’t eat it.”

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Shenyang was the most developed city in Dongbei and the site of almost three-quarters of the country’s heavy industry. Those glory days saw most working in state-owned factories doing “iron rice bowl” jobs that promised employment for life. During decades when food could be scarce elsewhere in the country, Shenyang cuisine was often described with a common Chinese saying: “Alcohol in big bowls, meat in big pieces.”

Yet according to a report by the state-media outlet Lifetimes, 71 percent of jijia is bones, 6 percent is skin, and less than 22 percent is meat. On average, one jijia —that is, the carcass of one chicken—comprises less than 100 grams of meat.

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