Shenzhen: China on the Move
Any observer of modern China would need to understand the metamorphosis of Shenzhen—the People’s Republic’s first and most successful Special Economic Zone (SEZ) located immediately north of Hong Kong. During the Mao era (1949-1976), the geographic equivalent of the Shenzhen SEZ today was known as Bao’an County, a poor and volatile border town. In December 1978, the Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, officially began to direct the country towards adoption of market principles and entry into the world economy. Shenzhen’s marginal position during the Mao era and its lack of socialist legacies such as state-owned industries made it an ideal “experimental field” to test out market-oriented policies before they were introduced into the core of the planned economy. The speed of the city’s development was so astonishing to the general population awakening from the Cultural Revolution that the expression “Shenzhen speed” became an everyday term for efficiency. Today, Shenzhen, often called “the Silicon Valley of the East,” is the home of Huawei, Tencent and DJI, China’s flagship technology firms.
The most widely circulated narrative about Shenzhen’s development highlights how political decisions by top leaders ultimately transformed over three decades a “fishing village” into the foremost frontier in China’s economic reform. My project aims to reconstruct the development of Shenzhen from the 1960s to the 2010s by emphasizing the trans-local, trans-regional and transnational flow of people, ideas, commodities, capital and technology to, from and through this “laboratory” city or the “Chinese Silicon Valley.” It will build a new narrative from the ground up of China’s metamorphosis from the late 20th century to the 21st century with a focus on movement and mobility. Currently, I am researching on two cases of mass migration: The first is the exodus of people from or through the territorial precursor of Shenzhen, Bao’an County, between the early 1960s and late 1970s; the second is the influx of the construction soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army Engineering Corps, who took charge of the city’s initial infrastructure building.