Barbecued Euphoria in Shenzhen

Mark Ndesandjo, Barack Obama’s half-brother, is a talented guy. After graduating from Stanford and Brown, he moved to Shenzhen, where he gives piano lessons to orphans. Just the other day, he released his first novel — inspired partly by his troubled relationship with his father — and he’s now working on an autobiography.

But out of all of his achievements, the one that pleases me most is the success of Cabin BBQ, the chain of laid-back outdoor barbecue restaurants Ndesandjo started with Chinese partners in 2003. The original Cabin BBQ sits in a restaurant hub not far from Xiangmihu metro station in Shenzhen, four stops away from the Lok Ma Chau border crossing with Hong Kong. There are now ten branches across China, the farthest of which is in Yinchuan, Ningxia.

For anyone used to dining in Hong Kong, where the air conditioning is always on full blast and the lack of space forces elbows onto your dinner plate, Cabin BBQ is a relief. Somehow, despite being just 35 kilometres from the skyscrapers of Central, Shenzhen, with its mild air and abundance of palm trees, always feels more tropical. This is a smoky, outdoor dining paradise where street vendors sell coconuts next to the parking lot and people wander in to eat lots of meat and drink copious amounts of beer until the darkest hours of the night.

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Shenzhen Overpass

Hong Kong businesspeople and pro-Beijing politicians like to daydream about the day when Shenzhen and Hong Kong will be completely integrated, the border between them either gone or reduced to an anachronistic formality. For now, though, the two cities remain strikingly different despite their proximity and shared history. Shenzhen is brash, devious and seedy, but also vast and monumental, often aloof from its surroundings. Whereas Hong Kong has a well-entrenched local identity, Shenzhen is a seething melting pot of new migrants from throughout the country, making it in some ways the ur-city of modern China.

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Urban Village, Shenzhen Style

The rapid urbanization of Shenzhen since 1980 has generated a contemporary landscape dotted with a series of urban villages, enclaves of buzzing urbanity and street life situated on land owned by Shenzhen’s original rural residents. These areas house much of Shenzhen’s floating population of workers from across China.

The local farmers or fishers who are now the village landlords have usually completely re-arranged their village space, which is increasingly hemmed in by commercial or residential high-rise projects. Shenzhen’s urban villages are typically a fabric of tightly packed ten to fifteen storey walk-up apartment buildings, with ground floor commercial, arranged around a very permeable street grid, punctuated with the odd public space or market. There are usually some fairly spacious main streets, but most of the buildings are accessed through a warren of alleys and pathways, most less than two metres wide, that wind their way between the buildings. Amazingly, there’s still some commercial activity within the maze—such as informal bicycle repair shops or very small canteens.

While they have struggled with a poor reputation in Shenzhen, and in other Chinese cities in which the phenomenon occurs, urban villages are starting to be perceived as islands of vitality, street life, and holdouts of traditional culture in the sea of modernity that is Shenzhen. One village in Shenzhen’s Futian district, Shuiwei, is even being targeted for tourism, while many others are falling under the scope of the somewhat ominous-sounding Urban Village Renovation Project.

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The Industrial City Time-Warp: Shenzhen

The Hua Qiang Bei skyline at dusk from the 20th floor of the Sichuan hotel, looking west. The tall building to the left is the 2nd highest in Shenzhen (for now) and was the site of the first electronics factory to be converted into a market, and subsequently an office tower. Its main tenant, SEG, is one of the biggest players in the neighbourhood.

When North Americans think of deindustrialization and China, we’re usually pretty quick to conclude that, since our cities have so little industry left, and so much of what we buy comes with a “made in China” sticker on it, then the new industrial zones, like Shenzhen, in the Pearl River Delta, must be chock full of factories working around the clock. But deindustrialization’s running strong in China, too, in cities that were first industrialized just a few decades ago. Like a time warp, Shenzhen and other places have sped through an industrial cycle that took more than a century to complete in Europe and North America.

The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was China’s first experiment of the type, decreed by Deng Xiaoping in 1980. The former collection of sleepy fishing and farming villages, just north of Hong Kong’s New Territories hit a population of 1 million in 1991, and now counts 14 million. The role played by the city of Shenzhen, which was in the mid 1980s the focus of enormous investments in manufacturing (most of which were made by Hong Kong entrepreneurs, as that city shed its secondary industry), has shifted towards services and distribution. Shenzhen’s now a sprawling complex of offices, shopping, and apartments, punctuated by a series of “high-high-high-end” (to quote some planners) shopping malls and increasingly gigantic central business districts, with nary a factory in sight. So what happened to the industrial areas?

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