EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Wherever you live, you have seen things made in Shenzhen, China. T-shirts and Cabbage Patch dolls in the 1980s; TV sets and electronic watches in the 1990s; iPhones in the 2000s; the WeChat app, BYD electric cars, DJI drones, and Huawei cellphones and 5G networks of today. This southern Chinese city has created an adaptive, evolving economic institution that has enabled the global circulation of locally produced commodities and technologies, empowered rapid urban expansion, propelled China’s transformation, and significantly influenced the development of the world economy in the past four decades. My second book, Made in Shenzhen,  tells that story.

Located immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China’s first and most successful special economic zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of “reform and opening” Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) adoption of market principles and its entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. Acclaimed as the “Silicon Valley of the East,” Shenzhen has produced some of China’s most dynamic and internationally competitive technology firms, such as Huawei and Tencent,  in the past two decades.

The official account of Shenzhen’s growth centers on how political decisions by top leaders in Beijing decisively transformed an impoverished border town into a modern metropolis. My book project reveals the more complicated story behind this linear official narrative. It presents a simultaneously global and local history of Shenzhen, situated in the context of structural shifts in the international economy in the 1970s—characterized by the neoliberal revolution and the rise of the “Asian Tigers”—and grounded in the everyday conflicts, compromises, and collaborations that occur between state agents and private entrepreneurs within this exceptional economic space.