The Shenzhen Experiment

The Story of China's Instant City

Juan Du

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674242234
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

An award-winning Hong Kong–based architect with decades of experience designing buildings and planning cities in the People's Republic of China takes us to the Pearl River delta and into the heart of China's iconic Special Economic Zone, Shenzhen. Shenzhen is ground zero for the economic transformation China has seen in recent decades. In 1979, driven by China's widespread poverty, Deng Xiaoping supported a bold proposal to experiment with economic policies in a rural borderland next to Hong Kong. The site was designated as the City of Shenzhen and soon after became China's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Four decades later, Shenzhen is a megacity of twenty million, an internationally recognized digital technology hub, and the world's most successful economic zone. Some see it as a modern miracle city that seemingly came from nowhere, attributing its success solely to centralized planning and Shenzhen's proximity to Hong Kong. The Chinese government has built hundreds of new towns using the Shenzhen model, yet none has come close to replicating the city's level of economic success.But is it true that Shenzhen has no meaningful history? That the city was planned on a tabula rasa? That the region's rural past has had no significant impact on the urban present? Juan Du unravels the myth of Shenzhen and shows us how this world-famous "instant city" has a surprising history—filled with oyster fishermen, villages that remain encased within city blocks, a secret informal housing system—and how it has been catapulted to success as much by the ingenuity of its original farmers as by Beijing's policy makers. The Shenzhen Experiment is an important story for all rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nations around the world seeking to replicate China's economic success in the twenty-first century.

PART I

NATIONAL RELEVANCE

1.

SONG FOR “THE STORY OF SPRING”

An overpowering sense of curiosity compelled Jiang Kairu to go south. Leaving behind all that was familiar, he boarded the train for Shenzhen. It was the year 1992.

Leaving his home in rural Heilongjiang, more commonly referred to as the Great Northern Wilderness, Jiang Kairu traveled nearly four thousand kilometers from China’s northernmost province bordering Russia to the southernmost border subtropical region. For three days and nights, Jiang was confined to the cheapest compartment of a tightly packed train. Two decades later, the same train route would take less than twenty-four hours via China’s modern high-speed rail system; but, in the early 1990s, China’s national transportation infrastructure was far from developed and train carriages were notoriously crowded. While enduring the seventy-two-hour journey on a hard seat in the cramped compartment, Jiang listened to passengers’ chatter as pop songs broadcast from the train’s radio. He raked over burning questions about his destination. With cash hidden in a pocket within his undergarments, carefully sewn by his wife, Jiang was nervous and wary. He had had to borrow the travel fare of two thousand yuan, mostly through the generosity of family and friends. Having recently retired early, at the age of fifty-seven, from his post at a rural township cultural council, he had no official business in Shenzhen. Spending two thousand yuan on a personal trip was a rare extravagance, as it amounted to an entire year’s salary for a state employee. This appeared even more peculiar given that he was not visiting family or friends. Jiang just wanted to see Shenzhen with his own eyes.

Jiang Kairu had decided to make this trip only a few months earlier. While reading the People’s Daily in his small northern Chinese town, he was stunned by a special report titled “Eastern Wind Brings an Eyeful of Spring: A Documentary Report of Comrade Deng Xiaoping’s Tour of Shenzhen.” The report was full of sensational stories recounting Shenzhen and its transformation from a rural establishment into a miraculous new city: “Eight years ago, this was still a place with paddy fields, fish-ponds, small paths and low-rise houses. Today in 1992, this place is crisscrossed by wide roads, a block of high-rises towering into the sky and full of modernized flavor.… The National Trade Plaza building soars skyward. It is the pride of the Shenzhen people. Shenzhen’s builders have set a record, erecting ‘one floor every three days’—the symbol of Shenzhen Speed.”¹ The report’s sensational descriptions of Shenzhen contrasted starkly with Jiang’s day-to-day experience, or anyone else’s in China at the time.

This reported progress in Shenzhen was even more impressive than what Jiang Kairu had read just a year earlier in the widely distributed official report titled Shenzhen’s Mystery of the Sphinx.² Published in 1991, it detailed Shenzhen’s spirited establishment in 1979 and described its decade of instant success. Deng Xiaoping was prominently cited as spearheading the SEZ, and one of his instructions to local party leaders remains memorable: “Set up a special zone on your own! Slash a way out!”³ Deng’s rousing battle cry felt familiar to Jiang Kairu. He had signed up for army training at the age of fifteen and served in the Chinese army for seven years before being discharged to Heilongjiang. Jiang Kairu identified with Deng’s language and felt personally connected to China’s paramount leader, despite having seen him only in photographs.

Relayed by central and local news outlets throughout the country, reports about Shenzhen were read by most of China’s literate population. The shocking impact of Shenzhen’s urban image, with its fast-rising tall towers and busy wide boulevards, was pervasive in the tentative early years of China’s reforms. Written reports and televised images of the shiny new city ignited massive waves of southern migration. Attracted by the mythical pull of a land of opportunity, these urban migration movements, first triggered by Shenzhen, would come to define China at the turn of the twenty-first century. From the lowest ranks of the working class to the highest seats of administration, adventurous dreamers from every socioeconomic class had a part in building Shenzhen—it is the ultimate city of migration.

UNCERTAIN BEGINNINGS

Shenzhen’s magnetic pull was so powerful that it far exceeded all population growth expectations in the decades following its establishment. The city’s initial objectives were outlined in the March 1979 “Reply of the State Council on Establishing Shenzhen and Zhuhai Municipality in Guangdong Province,” which specified an urban population of one hundred thousand as a short-term target, and a projected population of two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand by the year 2000.⁴ However, the establishment of the Shenzhen special economic zone in August 1980 prompted publication of the “Shenzhen City Urban Construction Comprehensive Planning,” the city’s first official planning document, which revised the projected population by the year 2000 to upwards of five hundred thousand.⁵ The 1982 and 1986 Shenzhen Comprehensive Plans revised these figures once again, increasing the projected population to eight hundred thousand and 1.1 million, respectively. Despite these successive adjustments, the actual rate of growth far outpaced the projected increases. By the year 2000, Shenzhen’s population had already topped six million, or six times more than the most ambitious planned figures.⁶ The discrepancy between projected and actual numbers also meant that the planned provisions for urban infrastructure, including housing, transportation, and social services, were far below customary standards for the number of people. One could argue that the real mystery is how Shenzhen managed not only to avoid downfall but to continue growing into a metropolis of twenty million residents in the 2010s.

Contrary to popular narratives of Shenzhen’s top-down establishment and instant success, the reality of the city’s evolution is far more complex. Shenzhen’s early developmental history was fraught with political oppositions, policy uncertainties, economic setbacks, and vicious cultural criticism. Its development did not follow the central planning process directed by Beijing; rather, in a struggle to thrive, the city inadvertently challenged top-down policies and drastically altered centralized planning. Much of the city’s subsequent unexpected exponential growth was enabled through local initiatives, bottom-up ingenuities, and unanticipated or informal urban processes.

Mired in political controversies, economic challenges, and cultural clashes, Shenzhen strove merely to meet expectations and survive in its first decade. The earliest reports on Shenzhen were designed to portray a positive urban image in order to rebut pointed criticisms from some of the country’s top leaders. The writing of the 1991 book Shenzhen’s Mystery of the Sphinx was directed by Li Hao, Shenzhen’s mayor from 1985 to 1993, and completed by a team from the Shenzhen Department of Publicity, when the city was subject to tremendous pressure and skepticism expressed by influential members of the central government. Despite all efforts, criticisms of Shenzhen—and of China’s reform policies in general—reached such dramatic levels in 1991 that the eighty-seven-year-old Deng Xiaoping was compelled to emerge from the privacy of his retirement to make one of his last rounds of public appearances, in the still-fledgling special economic zones. Deng’s 1992 visit to Shenzhen, so charmingly portrayed in the “Eastern Wind Brings an Eyeful of Spring,” was actually intended to rally support for the city, and more importantly, to ensure that China’s national reforms were continued.

To counter the deep-rooted skepticism of powerful party leaders, narratives of Shenzhen’s early success depicted bustling urban scenes that attracted millions of ambitious individuals to drive the city’s development forward. The most visible and effective beacon of Shenzhen’s success was not its oft-quoted economic statistics, but the image of the city itself. Facilitated by rapid building and infrastructure construction, the mythic mirage city sprouted and flourished from mere rice fields. Reports such as Shenzhen’s Mystery and “Eastern Wind” are often credited for prompting mass migration to Shenzhen during the early 1990s. Having worked in rural Heilongjiang Province for thirty years, Jiang Kairu was inspired by the sensational image of the city described in the “Eastern Wind” report and compelled to embark on his long journey south to Shenzhen.

Jiang Kairu’s story epitomizes the magnetism of Shenzhen’s mythic narrative. Yet his story is also an exceptional one, as he would later become the lyricist of the hugely popular song “The Story of Spring,” which further mythicized Deng Xiaoping’s association with Shenzhen. The song captured a moment in Shenzhen’s history, consolidating both a nation’s hope and Deng’s identity as the creator of an instant city. On the cusp of monumental change, following decades of poverty and stagnation, the “spring” in the title and lyrics of the song symbolized personal and collective hopes for a new beginning. The popular song successfully cemented an urban image of Shenzhen as a land of opportunity and became one of the city’s most enduring mythmaking artifacts. Interweaving this mythic account of Shenzhen with an ode to Deng Xiaoping, the song served as the national anthem for China’s reforms throughout the 1990s.

Jiang Kairu had no inkling of what the future would bring as he alighted from the packed train carriage on May 13, 1992. Walking slowly away from the train station, he looked around and had a sinking feeling that he was not where he was supposed to be. Tired and groggy from his long journey, Jiang Kairu thought for a moment that he had missed the Shenzhen stop and somehow arrived in Hong Kong. Despite the reports he had read about Shenzhen’s urban construction, he was caught off guard by the wide boulevards and scores of shiny office towers. Although he had visited other Chinese cities before, he had seen sights like this only in Hong Kong. The single assurance that he had arrived at his destination was the bold sign above the train station: “Shen Zhen.” Jiang was doubly comforted by the fact that the sign reproduced Deng Xiaoping’s calligraphic inscription of the city’s name, made familiar around the country through newspaper reporting.

THE “SPECIAL” NATURE OF THE SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE

No sooner had he arrived in Shenzhen than Jiang resolved that he would stay. Like millions of others drawn to and curious about Shenzhen, he altered his initial plan to just briefly visit the city. However, unlike most other newly arrived migrants seeking work, Jiang was categorized as a “person of three withouts”: one who came without a stable job, without a permanent home address in the city, and most crucially, without an urban hukou, or household registration. The hukou system was established in 1958, when the National People’s Congress passed its “Regulations on Household Registration in the People’s Republic of China,” and still exists today (albeit in a more relaxed form). Every Chinese citizen is assigned a hukou tied to the lowest-level administrative unit—city, township, village, etc. Depending on its administrative location, a person’s hukou is further classified as “agricultural” (rural) or “non-agricultural” (urban). In principle, the hukou cannot be transferred from one location to another, and especially not from rural villages to urban centers. This system effectively controlled the internal movements of China’s vast population and facilitated the country’s planned economy, which rationalized and governed state spending on programs such as education, healthcare, housing, and employment. Migration between cities was even forbidden unless authorized by the government. Through its geographic regulations, this institutionally divisive system unintentionally segregated China’s population into two broad socioeconomic classes, with rural hukou holders benefiting from considerably fewer opportunities for upward economic or social mobility.

Those born to parents of rural hukou inherited this second-class citizen status, which restricted how and where they lived, worked, married, and were buried. Access to agricultural land was possible via the village collective, but the Communist state welfare benefits were not available. Prolonged presence in any city was illegal, and one risked being stopped by the police demanding to see identification papers. Until the early 2000s, those caught without the proper hukou were fined and sent to detention centers. A woman who was held in a migrant detention center in Beijing described her experience in 1995 as “hell on earth, much worse than normal prisons.… Considering all living conditions, including food, I say that is not a place for a human being.”⁷ If individuals were unable to provide papers within one month of their detention, they would be deported back to their place of hukou registration. Massive “clean-up campaigns” to round up millions of rural migrants for repatriation were carried out in most major Chinese cities, as recently as the 2000s.

Although the central government tightly controlled quotas for legalized migration through temporary residency registration, Shenzhen’s flourishing industries attracted a massive influx of people from all over China seeking work opportunities without formal registration. Since these enterprises and factories completely relied on rural workers as a source of cheap labor, both employees and employers took the risks of engaging in informal, and at times unlawful, practices. In order to grow, Shenzhen opened its doors to millions of rural migrants seeking opportunities that would have been impossible elsewhere in China. In addition, the Shenzhen government made considerable efforts to recruit skilled and educated personnel. Individual enterprises even awarded a head-hunting bonus to employees as a recruiting incentive.

In 1984, Shenzhen’s municipal government began issuing “Temporary Residence Certificates.” This made Shenzhen the first city in China to formally recognize the existence of a “floating population” and, most importantly, to offer legal status to the so-called migrant workers, officially authorizing them to live and work in the city. Over the next decade, this practice was replicated by other city governments in Guangdong Province and other urban centers in China. Shenzhen later initiated additional hukou refor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Myth of Shenzhen
• Part I: National Relevance
• Part II: Regional History
• Part III: City Construction
• Part IV: District Transformation
• Conclusion: City of Critical Experimentation
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Index