The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City
Juan Du
Harvard University Press: 2020
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Chinese cities are mostly marked by a uniformity and unity of purpose more commonly associated with army barracks. Living spaces are designed to minimise community mingling, and every city is cut through with avenues wide enough to accommodate four tanks abreast. These heroic spaces dwarf street life, which gets relegated to back alleys that are constantly besieged by new urban renovation plans.

In its first decade and a half as a major player in the ‘Factory for the World’, Shenzhen was no exception to this imposed dreariness. Political authorities threw up factory compounds with concrete dormitories on the sparsely populated marshland abutting Hong Kong to contain a planned export-processing base. They wanted the new city sealed off from the rest of the mainland so as not to pollute innocent Chinese minds with foreign ideas. Sterile and pointedly dull, Shenzhen was a place where low-wage migrant workers would spend eighty hours a week making widgets for the export market, sleep in dormitories, earn cash wages and go back home when they were no longer needed. Until 2006, passports for foreigners or special permits for Chinese were required even to enter the Special Economic Zone (SEZ), then the densest portion of the city.

• Tags: Anne Stevenson-Yang, China, Issue 20, Juan Du, Shenzhen